Digital

Here are the complete videos of TVNewsCheck’s TV2025: Monetizing the Future conference, featuring a keynote interview with CBS Corp.’s top researcher Radha Subramanyam, the CEOs of E.W. Scripps, Sinclair, Graham Media and Allen Media and a Station Group of the Year interview with NBCU Stations’ chief Valari Staab.

With its TVision service, T-Mobile says it’s aiming to offer a simpler and and cheaper service for people dissatisfied with cable. It will cost $10 a month with live news, entertainment and sports channels. But it’s entering a crowded field. And most similar streaming services have found it difficult to sustain low prices over time.

NBCLX, the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations streaming news service aimed at Gen Z, will be offering election night coverage on its over-the-top, linear, digital, mobile and cable platforms. Coverage starts at 8 p.m. ET with storytellers embedded in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Washington.

The Lincoln Project is looking to beef up its media business after the election, sources say. The group recently signed with the United Talent Agency to help build out Lincoln Media and is weighing offers from different television studios, podcast networks and book publishers. Lincoln’s plan is part of the new trend of activists developing massive audiences for political influence that they are then able to spin into commercial media success.

Quibi is an anomaly, not the norm, according to new research published by Parks Associates.
The number of over-the-top video services in the U.S. has now reached nearly 300, with those platforms exiting the market actually declining.

Facebook on Monday announced the beta launch of cloud-streamed games on Facebook Gaming, along with cloud playable ads and several gaming and advertising partners. The social media site estimates that 380 million people, as of August 2020, play games monthly on its platform.

The Federal Trade Commission’s staff have made a recommendation to the agency’s commissioners on whether to file an antitrust complaint against Facebook, three people familiar with the agency’s probe said Thursday — a potential new milestone in Washington’s fight to rein in Silicon Valley. The FTC’s five commissioners met to discuss a potential case Thursday afternoon, though a final decision isn’t expected for several weeks.

Political advertisers are embracing connected TV ahead of the November election more than they did during previous election cycles, but the category still represents a fraction of the overall media spending pie — and exact spend levels in CTV are hard to calculate.

It may not be quite as momentous as taking home nine total Emmys, but Schitt’s Creek has another reason to celebrate. The lauded comedy series has broken into Nielsen’s list of top 10 most-streamed shows for the first time. For the week of Sept. 21, viewers watched the show for a total of 839 million total minutes, placing it fifth overall. Schitt’s Creek bursting into the rankings for that week in particular is hardly surprising, as it coincides with the show’s stunning Emmys sweep the weekend before.

Quibi expects to shut down “on or about Dec. 1,” according to a new post on the mobile video startup’s customer service page. The message gives subscribers an update on the future of the app following the Wednesday announcement that it would be ceasing operations after failing to gain traction with users.

Hulu says its live TV service will no longer carry the Fox regional sports networks now owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, effective Friday. In a post on its website, Hulu said it will “no longer have the rights” to distribute the channels. The move comes after the end of the baseball season and follows the networks being dropped Oct. 1 by YouTube TV, another virtual MVPD aimed at sports fans.

The technology comes amid industry fears that Nielsen’s fingerprint-based Dynamic Advertising Insertion technology, debuting in new TVs this quarter, will insert ads or measure content on Netflix, Hulu and others without permission.

Even as the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Google on Tuesday for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in search and search advertising, a growing number of legal experts and economists have started questioning whether traditional antitrust is up to the task of addressing the competitive concerns raised by today’s digital behemoths. Further help, they said, is needed.

The demise of Quibi, the short-form video service led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, will cause complications for a wide range of TV partners who supplied new and often innovative programming to the streaming upstart, which promised to deliver top-quality entertainment in episodes that would last ten minutes or less. CBS News, NBC News, the BBC, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Kevin Hart, Queen Latifah and Chrissy Teigen were among the popular actors and media entities that latched on to the venture.

The company said Wednesday that it would wind down its operations and plans to sell its assets. “Quibi is not succeeding,” its top executives, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, bluntly declared in a letter posted online. The video platform — designed for people who were out and about to watch on their phones — was one of a slew of new streaming services started to challenge Netflix over the past few years, most of which were part of much bigger tech and entertainment companies, like Apple and Disney.