Digital

Is it just a silly media-tech myth, or do recent OTT deals portend a major retrograde trend?

Frank Comerford, NBCU Owned Television Stations’ CRO and president of commercial operations, says its Post-In Flight deals are starting to take off and could eliminate much of the post-buy work for both the station group and ad agencies. He says Spot ON, NBCU’s OTT/CTV product, is also bolstering business development and making it easier to communicate with advertisers.

TV’s hottest properties this year may have little to do with the primetime lineup for which the medium is best known.

Advertisers are placing new emphasis on ad-supported streaming outlets like Walt Disney’s Hulu and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, while exploring opportunities with WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, Fox’s Tubi and ViacomCBS’s Pluto, according to four media buyers and three other executives familiar with the pace of the industry’s annual “upfront” negotiations, when Madison Avenue and U.S. media companies haggle over advertising inventory in the next programming cycle.

The administration said in a high-court filing Thursday that Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account with more than 85 million followers is his personal property and blocking people from it is akin to elected officials who refuse to allow their opponents’ yard signs on their front lawns.

The kind of programming offerings attendees get at the annual NAB Show will no longer be contained to a week in Las Vegas, as the organization has announced plans to launch NAB Amplify, a year-round digital platform designed to extend the impact of the NAB Show throughout the year.

The former Tegna executive will serve as the organization’s chief innovation officer starting Sept. 8.

Americans are spending an average of $1 billion a month more on video streaming since January, according to cloud video technology company Grabyo. Amid the pandemic, video streaming services have reached 72% penetration into American homes, up 13% since January.

News leaders from CNN, ABC News, E.W. Scripps, Gray Television and Yahoo Finance will explore the programming options enabled by the 2020 election at TVNewsCheck’s virtual event on Sept. 23. Register here.

Margaret Sullivan: “Some corrections are almost pointless, such as the one that prompted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to light into NBC on Wednesday morning. Her complaint identifies one of the problems with corrections by news organizations: They rarely — and maybe never — can undo the damage caused by the original error.”

After last month’s Facebook boycott, companies are demanding more control over how their ads appear online. And the tech companies seem to be listening.

On a daily basis, news reporters have to cultivate a successful social media presence where they are expected to publish meaningful content and engage with the audience. This often means having a digital-first storytelling plan in place that may not overlap with traditional news reporting. Here are some suggestions on how to improve social media presence.

An IPO using a special purpose acquisition company is reportedly one of the options being considered by the sports streaming service.

The streamer is testing out a new “Shuffle Play” button that allows viewers to watch TV and movie titles randomly selected by the streaming service. The button appears on the profiles page only on TV devices, including Roku.

ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV said it has added a dozen new channels and reconfigured its streaming lineup to make it easier for viewers to find what they want to watch. The new channels included Three’s Company, Johnny Carson TV, Dabl, The Rifleman, Demand Africa, Western TV, Classic TV Comedy, Classic TV Drama, Pluto TV Love Stories, Pluto TV Suspense and Pluto TV Fantastic.

After surging to new highs during the first quarter, video views of content watched on internet-connected devices soared to all-time highs during the second quarter of 2020, according to new estimates released this morning by Brightcove. North American video views expanded much faster than the rest of the world during the second quarter, as much of the U.S. enacted stay-at-home and social distancing rules.

The possible sale is the latest as the studio, led by CEO Bob Bakish, looks to unload non-core assets after Viacom and CBS merged.

Oracle, an enterprise software giant, is in talks to acquire social media company TikTok’s U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand assets, according to a person familiar with the matter. Oracle is working with a group of U.S. venture capital firms that already have a stake in TikTok, said the person.

Four cities in Indiana are suing Netflix and other video companies, claiming that online video providers and satellite TV operators should have to pay the same franchise fees that cable companies pay for using local rights of way.