streaming

Thursday Night Football is coming to Amazon Prime exclusively a year earlier than planned. This coming season will be the last under the league’s “tri-cast” model, which saw games carried across Fox, NFL Network and Amazon. Starting with the 2022 season, TNF will be exclusive to Amazon (with TV stations in the participating teams’ home markets airing those games as well). Amazon is paying more than $1 billion for the rights.

One month after the 2021 Major League Baseball regular season threw out its first pitch, virtual multichannel video programming distributors YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV and Fubo TV are still without Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional sports networks, now rebranded as Bally Sports Networks. Pricing appears to be the reason for the decision to do without the channels, and apparently there has been little movement on either side regarding negotiations.

Roku has followed through on its threat to remove streaming bundle YouTube TV from its platform, in a dispute it has characterized as more about principle than dollars. The streaming provider had warned on Monday that it would unplug YouTube TV unless the Google-owned streaming outlet agreed to certain curbs on search and data use. It charges that YouTube has leveraged Google’s massive resources to manipulate search results in a way that compromises Roku users’ experience and hoards sensitive customer data.

The Parents Television and Media Council has reached out to the top streaming platforms to talk about coming up with a “clear, uniform commitment to protecting children from age-inappropriate content.” PTC has changed the focus of its advocacy from content on broadcast (and cable) TV to streaming video, given the rise of those platforms, driven in part by the pandemic.

As NBCUniversal turns off the lights on its sports network, expect other Hollywood giants to cull their sprawling linear offerings as they prioritize billions of dollars toward direct-to-consumer platforms.

The fight between broadcasters (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and Locast is nearing its day in court, but the lawyers representing the broadcasters (plaintiffs) have filed a request for summary judgement with the U.S. District Court in New York as they do not believe, and provide reasoning, as to why Locast is not a nonprofit entity and therefore cannot rebroadcast their signals.

U.S. viewers will spend more on streaming video than pay TV for the first time in 2024, according to new research from Strategy Analytics. The company is releasing its latest U.S. Subscription TV Forecast, which projects that consumer spending on traditional pay TV services fell by 8% to $90.7 billion in 2020. It expects that number to decline further to $74.5 billion in 2023. At the same time, spending on subscription streaming services (including VOD and virtual MVPDs) rose by 34% to $39.5 billion in 2020 and will reach $76.3 billion in 2024, surpassing traditional pay TV.

Denney will start at NBCU next month. He will be based in New York and report to Gidon Katz, NBCU’s president of direct-to-consumer. In addition to Peacock, Denney will be responsible for product strategy for other customer-facing NBCUniversal digital platforms, including broadcast and cable entertainment apps, NBC Sports and reality-TV streaming service Hayu.

Since taking over as chief of NBCUniversal News Group last year, Cesar Conde has made it clear he wants the division to place a bigger bet on streaming. He has begun to put his stamp on the organization — which includes MSNBC, CNBC and NBC News — as he manages the news division during one of the busiest and most unpredictable periods for news in years. In addition to the streaming push, Conde has emphasized fiscal discipline, centralizing oversight of the news networks and cutting executive positions that each channel has had up to now, people familiar with the personnel changes say.

New episodes of Dale Play will be posted weekdays at 4 p.m. and will be available only on Roku, Apple TV, TelemundoLasVegas.com and the station’s app.

Simmering tensions between Roku and Google have erupted into a full-blown fight. On Monday, Roku began warning YouTube TV customers that Google’s internet pay-TV service may go dark on the Roku platform soon — alleging that Google in seeking anticompetitive terms.

Netflix had a big night at the Oscars, bringing home a total of seven total trophies — leading all studios — although the streamer failed to grab the prize in the best picture category and came up empty in the acting categories. Netflix had come into Sunday night with 36 nominations, far more than any other studio.

Cord cutting is expected to grow in 2021 and 2022, offset somewhat by growth of virtual multichannel video programming distributors, according to a new report from S&P Global. S&P said legacy MVPDs — cable, satellite and telco — will lose 8.2% of their subscribers in 2020 after losing 7.9% in 2019. In 2022, another 10.3% of subscribers are expected to cut the cord.

Licensing issues have gutted the soundtracks of many beloved series on streaming services, resulting in bewildering music cues and missing theme songs.

Disney Plus’ first and second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most viewed SVOD original series during the week of March 22-28. According to Nielsen, the first two episodes of the six part series garnered 628 million minutes of U.S. viewing.

Even in a TV landscape strewn with new streaming services, media is still all about the bundle. The rise of mighty new platforms bolstered with high-wattage content has been heralded as evidence of the great un-bundling in the pay TV sector, a trend that does not bode well for Hollywood’s balance sheets. But as the TV marketplace has expanded over the past year, most of the major players are focused on using their marquee content to assemble their own proprietary bundles.

Nielsen said it launched Nielsen Streaming Video Ratings, a syndicated service that measures total viewership and advanced audience demographic insights by streaming platforms along side traditional linear TV ratings. At launch the Streaming Video Ratings will cover 10 top streaming platforms plus seven categories of apps. Some are of the services being measured, subscription based, others are ad supported, network, social, gaming, MVPDs and vMVPDs.

HBO Max and HBO have reached 44.2 million U.S. subscribers, AT&T revealed in its first-quarter 2021 earnings report Thursday. That’s up from the 41 million combined subs the company reported at the end of 2020, a tally that beat the company’s initial projection by two years.

Sling TV, the Dish Network-owned OTT-TV service, is offering a deep one-month discount, along with access to its premium-level cloud DVR offering. Under a promotion announced Tuesday that’s a clear bid to attract new customers, Sling TV is offering the first month of service for $10 per month. It’s also including DVR Plus, a cloud DVR with 200 hours of storage that regularly sells for an additional $5 per month. The promo applies to both the Sling Orange and Sling Blue packages, which typically sell for $35 per month each. Sling TV is also bundling Orange and Blue together for $25 for the first month.

NFL Media and Hulu announced a new multi-year carriage agreement to bring the NFL Network and NFL RedZone to Hulu’s live TV subscription streaming service Hulu + Live TV. The NFL Network and NFL RedZone will be available to Hulu + Live TV subscribers by Aug. 1, just in time for the 2021 NFL season. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Netflix has been strengthening its controls on password-sharing, a shift that could reap billions in previously lost revenue, but the company acknowledges it is a delicate process. “We test many things but we would never roll something out that feels like turning the screws” on consumers, Co-CEO Reed Hastings said during the company’s first-quarter earnings interview. “It’s got to feel like it makes sense to consumers, that they understand it.”

The video streaming service added 4 million more worldwide subscribers from January through March, its smallest gain during that three-month period in four years. The performance reported Tuesday was about 2 million fewer subscribers than both management and analysts had predicted Netflix would add during the first quarter.

In addition to live channels that feature national news, superstar talent and marquee content partners, Local Now’s state-of-the-art streaming platform now also delivers original local news, weather and information, customized by market.

The deal includes the Japan launch of ViacomCBS’s kids streaming channel Nick+, as well as a dedicated Nickelodeon zone for merchandise sales on Rakuten’s flagship e-commerce platform.

While the streaming wars have added many competitive services to Netflix, the end result of media’s shift to streaming may cement Netflix as the center of household entertainment. Since the day Disney+ launched, Netflix shares have risen more than 87%. That dwarfs gains by every other media company during the same time period.