The 2025 Streaming Media All-Stars

After a 12-year hiatus, Streaming Media is bringing back the Streaming Media All-Stars for 2025 to pay tribute to a select group of key technology innovators who are driving and disrupting the streaming industry.

The State of OTT and CTV Monetization 2025

Conversation about monetization is so nuanced that after a decade of writing on this topic, I am still looking for meaning where there may be little to find. Essentially, what I've come to understand is that ad­vertising is like the stock market: Certain aspects of advertising deals are not transparent now and may never become fully transparent. What is clear, ac­cording to research from Statista, is that 64% of rev­enue growth in the U.S. in OTT is coming from ad­vertising.

Streaming Year in Review 2025: Online Video Is Now an Advertising-Led Business

Old Hollywood got Wall Street's memo: "Do whatever it takes to do what Netflix is do­ing." And finally, the studios have begun making money from streaming. With the exception of NBCUniversal, the biggest leg­acy media companies all reported a profit from their direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses in Q3 2024. They got there by variously writing down or shedding ca­ble assets, slashing jobs, hiking prices, policing pass­word-sharing, improving bundled offerings, and put­ting the full focus of their business strategy into online.

Buyers' Guide: Hardware Transcoders

Although software transcoding is accept­able for transcoding most VOD streams and even low-volume live programming, most high-volume live applications need hardware for efficient transcoding, both to save you money and to save the planet. This buyers' guide will cover: What hardware transcoders are, what you need to bring to the table to identify the best hardware transcoder, factors to consider when choosing one, choosing a hardware transcoder for cloud workflows, and choosing a hardware transcoder for on-prem workflows.

The State of the Video Codec Market 2025

HEVC rode the 4K/HDR wave to success, but AV1, VVC, and LCEVC lack an equivalent killer app. With CDNs racing to the bottom on pricing and new royalty pools threatening to increase costs, codec adoption is no longer just about technical merit—it's about survival. These are the issues I'll explore in this article.

The State of Live Sports Streaming 2025

The sports media sector continues to undergo rapid change, with streaming aggregators attempting to reconsolidate for greater ef­ficiency but still falling short of traditional broadcast models in reach and revenue.

Streamticker: The Biggest Streaming Mergers and Acquisitions of 2024

The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney's gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV. Here we'll review this and other done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

Removing the Friction of Content Discovery On CTV

Today's streaming providers deliver endless amounts of content, which can overwhelm viewers who are simply looking for something to watch. This article will explore how a range of content, media, and tech companies are addressing the challenges of content discovery and the strategies and emerging tech they're deploying in the ongoing efforts to reduce and eliminate the pain points that continue to plague the content discovery experience for CTV and OTT consumers.

The 2024 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards

The readers have spoken! We've counted all of the votes in the 2024 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards, and—drumroll, please—it is now my pleasure and sworn duty to present winners and runners-up in each of our 17 categories.

Q&A: Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft’s Worldwide Media and Entertainment Strategy Director, Talks Gen AI

In this expansive interview with Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft's worldwide media and entertainment strategy director, we discuss how Microsoft customers are leveraging generative AI in all stages of the streaming workflow and how they're using it in content delivery and to enhance user experiences in a range of use cases. Crownshaw also digs deep into how Microsoft is building asset management architecture and the critical role metadata plays in effective large-language models (LLMs), maximizing the value of available data.

The Generative AI Industrial Revolution

Generative AI may prove even more divisive to society than the Indus­trial Revolution. There are many questions well worth examining re­garding gen AI's impact on the streaming in­dustry, the media and entertainment world, and more. In this article, I'm going to focus on a few streaming use cases in the hope of pro­viding a broader perspective on the changes happening in our world now and those we can expect going forward.

Presenting the 2024 Streaming Media 100

Here we reveal the 2024 Streaming Media 100, our list of the top 100 companies in the streaming universe outside of Europe. This list complements the Streaming Media Europe 51, which recognizes Europe's key streaming innovators, exemplars, and disruptors.

Q&A: NBCUniversal SVP Monica Williams Talks Streaming the Olympics, Cross-Platform CX, and the Power of Metadata

In this wide-ranging interview with Monica Williams, NBCUniversal's SVP of digital products and operations for the company's content distribution business, we discuss how the proliferation of digital platforms across the OTT, CTV, and online ecosystems has brought new content distribution challenges, the boon of metadata for improving customer experiences, and the 17-day everything-must-go-perfectly marathon of distributing the Olympics.

Multicurrency, Personalization, and Consumer Privacy in the CTV Ecosystem

As CTV is pulling in more advertising dollars and viewers than ever before, it's crucial for advertisers to ensure that they are optimizing their reach with the best-targeted data to represent audiences and outcomes, all while respecting data privacy laws and individual rights. What are the most significant challenges surrounding data identity and the privacy economy in today's CTV advertising ecosystem? How can content owners and platform providers supply advertisers with the user data that will maximize growth without violating personal privacy or privacy laws? And how might the idea of "TV" itself be redefined in an era when multiscreen use beyond the living room is so prevalent?

AI and Streaming Media

This article explores the current state of AI in the streaming encoding, delivery, playback, and monetization ecosystems. By understanding the developments and considering key questions when evaluating AI-powered solutions, streaming professionals can make informed decisions about incorporating AI into their video processing pipelines and prepare for the future of AI-driven video technologies.

Pay TV Gets Serious About Free Streaming

When it comes to free streaming, U.S. growth has been fueled by pure players like Pluto TV and Tubi and connected TV platforms like Roku and Samsung looking to feed cord-shavers and cord-cutters in need of a linear viewing experience. These companies have had a head start and a clear path to test and learn for years. However, in the past 18 months, pay TV players have decided that they too have a role to play in free streaming.

Q&A: Wurl’s Ria Madrid Discusses BrandDiscovery's Groundbreaking Generative AI for CTV Ads

A Q&A with Ria Madrid of Wurl - she discusses BrandDiscovery, their new tech that makes it possible for marketers to precisely match CTV ads with the emotion and context of what viewers are watching to create positive attention, using Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. Partners like Media.Monks are already driving impressive results for their clients through Wurl's solution, which uses scene-level contextual targeting to help advertisers align the emotional sentiment of their campaign creatives with content closest to the ad break.

The Most Demanded FAST Genre in 2024: News

2024 is the ultimate election year. A total of 91 countries—including the U.S., the U.K., India, and 27 European Union nations—will hold elections. In this context, it's no surprise to witness platforms and news outlets finessing their FAST channel strategy. The BBC News FAST channel launch was perfectly timed in that regard. BBC News is now available as a FAST channel on platforms like Pluto TV, Samsung TV Plus, Xumo Play, VIZIO, and more.

All the News That’s Fit for FAST

News broadcasting is one of the most exciting and quickly growing areas for FAST development, highlighted by the recent announcement of the BBC/AMC 24-hour live FAST news channel. Other legacy media news broadcasters, such as Scripps, Sinclair, Hearst, and USA Today, have also entered the FAST news space, many of them with a focus on local content. What are some of the current trends and challenges for FAST news delivery? In this article, several leading industry commentators provide insight.

Review: JW Player

This review will highlight the JW Player online video platform and explore its on-demand streaming, captioning, web player capabilities, and other features. It will walk viewers through using the platform, including the core features like uploading videos, importing streams, and creating playlists in the Media Library and configuring the media player, as well as more advanced features. It will also discuss testing done using the platform.