streaming

News and sports programming are a significant factor in keeping consumers tethered to cable and satellite subscriptions in an era rife with cord-cutting, said Andy Forssell, general manager of HBO Max, while speaking Thursday at an investor conference hosted by Barclays. But the way those formats are presented will likely have to change for streaming viewers, he said.

Equipment manufacturers say newsrooms have been too slow to embrace a storycentric model of content creation, one far more in line with consumer habits than the old evening-newscast-as-endgame paradigm. Above, Sam Adams, the morning anchor for KHQ Spokane, is preparing clips for NonStop News, the station’s 24/7 streaming channel. He’s seated at the NonStop News Desk, which is where these clips are prepared. He can produce and present the clips in a very short amount of time. The lower TV in the distance is receiving NonStop News over-the-air on ch. 6.3.

Locast has expanded its free streaming service to the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area, delivering 40 local TV channels to the market’s nearly 3 million residents, which also includes Fayetteville, Chapel Hill and Rocky Mount. Raleigh is Locast’s 33rd market.

The final episode of Mare of Easttown limited series drew four million viewers over the holiday weekend across HBO and HBO Max, with nearly three million viewers Sunday night (all platforms), marking a series high for both linear and digital, according to HBO. The finale also set the record as the most watched episode of an original series on HBO Max during its first 24 hours of availability, besting the finales of recent hits The Undoing and The Flight Attendant over the same period of time.

Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb are, for many, a morning habit. NBC hopes the Today pair will soon become an afternoon or evening one for a different kind of viewer. Starting June 8, the duo will take the network’s nearly seven-decade-old Today show into new territory. The pair will add to their on-screen duties by anchoring a half-hour “highlights” recap meant to bring the most recent Today news to streaming audiences.

CNN’s plans for a new streaming service are coming into focus as the cable network’s parent company prepares to merge with Discovery Inc. The service, known internally by the working title CNN+, is slated to feature new shows from the network’s major anchors, including Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon, according to people familiar with the matter. Those shows would be separate from the programs hosted by Cooper and Lemon on CNN’s cable channel, some of the people said.

On Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET, when HBO’s highly anticipated Mare of Easttown season finale was to have started, social media erupted with reports that the cabler’s streaming service — which only days ago celebrated its first birthday — was down for many subscribers. Some users speculated that HBO Max could not handle the Kate Winslet-led murder mystery’s finale-night traffic.

Radha Subramanyham, chief research and analytics officer at CBS Corp., says AVOD and SVOD streaming options and linear TV can coexist without enmity. “It is our job to understand our customer base and move people seamlessly through our experiences,” she says. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

How big was Friends: The Reunion for HBO Max? Almost superhero-big, according to third-party data. Friends: The Reunion was watched by an estimated 29% of U.S. streaming households on May 27, the first day of its release, as measured by TVision, a connected-TV analytics provider. Viewers of the special on HBO Max were 55.4% female, and more than 50% were in the 35-54 demo. By comparison, DC’s Wonder Woman 1984 reached 32% of U.S. streaming households when it bowed on Christmas Day 2020 on HBO Max, per TVision.

Google didn’t provide a new subscriber total for YouTube TV in the first quarter but one analyst estimate suggests that it was the slowest period for the virtual MVPD in years. According to MoffettNathanson’s latest Cord Cutting Monitor, YouTube TV added 75,000 subscribers during the first quarter. It’s higher than the 43,000 net adds reported by fuboTV and much better than Hulu + Live TV’s 200,000 and Sling TV’s 100,000 net losses. But, according to the analyst firm’s chart tracking YouTube TV’s growth back to the first quarter of 2017, it’s the slowest growth quarter for the vMVPD since the third quarter of 2018.

The streamier is focused on engagement — and winning back former subscribers.

Julie McNamara, EVP and head of programming for Paramount+, is leaving after 15 years at CBS and ViacomCBS. One of the top programming executives at the combined company, McNamara has been overseeing the original content strategy for ViacomCBS’ streaming service. Tom Ryan, ViacomCBS’s president-CEO, streaming, just announced McNamara’s exit internally, and she also shared the news with her staff.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Miami federal court, contends that Netflix intentionally misled Dershowitz, one of the lawyers once representing Epstein, regarding his appearance in the series Filthy Rich. The suit also claims Netflix defamed him by falsely asserting that he had sex with one of Epstein’s many victims.

E.W. Scripps is moving from new-school distribution to old-school to expand the audience for its Newsy channel: On Oct. 1, the news offering that’s available today via OTT apps will go on the air in Scripps’ 41 broadcast markets, reaching some 80% of U.S. TV households. in a Zoom video interview, Scripps President-CEO Adam Symson explained what the Cincinnati company hopes to get out of OTA — and offered a few suggestions about how the industry could upgrade one of its oldest mediums.

Bob Bakish tells annual shareholder meeting “we have made tremendous progress,” adding that the firm was on track to exceed its targets for merger synergies.

The Denver-based start-up Frndly TV is already profitable from consumers seeking a cheaper, “family-friendly” alternative to cable.

The New York Times is looking into a potential acquisition of The Athletic, three sources familiar with the matter tell Axios. Sources say the Times approached The Athletic following a report about a potential deal between The Athletic and Axios in March.

The nation’s big media companies are on a new mission: finding ways to unite thousands of individual binge-watchers into a cohesive mass audience. To get more advertisers to move their dollars to streaming, the TV executives are working furiously to gather all the streaming fans for the same advertising experience. It’s not going to be easy.

Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity and The Ingraham Angle will be available the following day.

The nearly $9 billion deal would turn a film operation founded in the silent era into a streaming asset for the e-commerce giant.

The back and forth over a very new type of media shows just how quickly streaming video is hooking consumers who have a yen for high-quality dramas and comedies — and the advertisers who need to reach them to keep revenue flowing. “It’s the first time that we are in a marketplace where it’s being led by our streaming conversation, and not being led by our linear conversation,” says Rita Ferro, president of Disney’s advertising sales.

“Netflix won this several years ago, they’re the only ones who have the scale and momentum to keep making these somewhat lunatic investments in programming,” Diller, the chairman of IAC, said in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “You cannot compete with the momentum, the scale, no one will ever be able to do that.”

Video streaming is in an increasingly serious post-pandemic slump as far as original series hits … except for maybe Mare of Easttown on HBO Max, which Nielsen still refuses to measure.