Live Sports Streaming, TVXRAY, and the Qvest for Personalization

At NAB 2025 I set out in search of one irrefutable, real-world example of true sports streaming personalization, an innovative and unique experience that might present a mass-media live sporting event on my screen as it appears on no one else's. I found a contender at the Qvest Engage booth.

The Long and Short of It: Measuring YouTube on TV

As YouTube makes short-form viewing in­creasingly commonplace, measurable, and monetized on CTV, and other channels inevita­bly rush to adopt and repeat the formula, time will tell when "YouTube is the new television" gives way to "Television is the new YouTube."

In Defense of (Click to) Cancel Culture

For all its promise, and despite officially going into effect in mid-January, the Fededral Trade Commission's Click to Cancel rule for streamlining streaming and other cancellations remains largely in limbo, due in part to its all-deliberate-speed effective compliance date of May 14 and also because of legal and political challenges from the Chamber of Commerce and others.

IBC 2024: Better Content Curation Through Conversation with Imaginario AI

One AI-driven solution that stood out at IBC 2024 as particularly smart and creative comes from a London-based company called Imaginario AI. I met with CEO and Co-Founder Jose M. Puga and got an up-close look at a content indexing and curation tool that uses multimodal AI models to "make video content searchable like text." Imaginario AI made a big enough splash at IBC this year to take home 1st prize in the "Manage" category of the IABM's BaM awards.

Cue the Sunset: The Rise and Fall of Reality TV

Though Emily Nussbaum's Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV reads more like a biography than like an obituary, the book lands as reality TV appears to be shrinking along with the scripted side of the business. More than one pundit has proclaimed its demise at the hands of TikTok, the "now everyone grows up on video" platform that reality TV prefigured.

Data, Personalization, and Practical Magic

Discussions of data acquisition, application, and monetization that would have seemed like the most mind-blowing magic to denizens of other eras proved ever-present at Streaming Media NYC, the reimagined and rebooted Streaming Media event that made its raucously well-received return to Manhattan in May.

Post-Peak Performance in the M&E Universe

The recent Subscription Wars report commissioned by U.K.-based digital payments tech company Bango points to consumer dissatisfaction with the fractured state of subscription services in general and the increasing appeal of indirect subscription options and super-bundles of aggregated services sold through telcos like Optus in Australia. Perhaps it's another sign of less-than-inspiring times that the best thing consumers say streaming services can do for them is to stop standing out from the crowd and start disappearing into it.

Live Sports Streaming and the Edison Tone Test

There can be little doubt that live sports streaming has a lucrative and dazzling future. But first, it needs to get past the Tone Test stage.

Dances with Wolves

Most of those following the Hollywood strikes of 2023 found reason to cheer on Nov. 8 when SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP reached a tentative agreement that reportedly resolved the AI-related disputes that largely motivated the strike (alongside the impasse over stream­ing residuals). But that resolution came with a significant compromise.

Amazon Prime Adds Ad-Supported: Not Too Late for Tiers

September 22 brought the unsurprising news that Amazon will soon join Netflix, Disney+, and Max by adding an ad-supported subscription tier for viewing its premium content in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Canada. Prime being Prime, it's slightly inverting the approach its fellow top-tier titans have taken. Instead of offering a reduced subscription price for those budget-conscious viewers who are willing to suffer through a few ads in their premium shows, Amazon is making the ad tier the default and tacking on $2.99 to its ad-free tier.

Stars, Strikes, Streaming, and a Reckoning on Rock-Bottom Residuals

Largely at issue in the first simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 60+ years are legacy residual rates in expired contracts that no longer reflect either the prevalence of streaming or the profit it brings to studios.

Max, Netflix, Off-Licensing, and The Real World

Perhaps the most surprising HBO outplacement news came just at this writing in late June, when WBD revealed that it was "in talks" to license the five-season HBO comedy series Insecure and other DFA'd HBO titles to Netflix, the first time HBO has ever let a tier-one original content competitor get its hands on HBO content. Like selling ads and staggered season releases for Netflix, for HBO, cutting such a deal with a premium rival was internally frowned-upon if not strictly verboten until recently.

Streaming Sustainability and Imaginary Bridges in the Cloud

Only time will tell how successful new sustainability reporting standards ESRS E1 (European) and the SEC (US) mandate will be in the near-term in curbing greenwashing and improving sustainability requirements and adherence in the streaming industry, or how much of the long-term their failure might costs us.

What Else Did We Get Wrong?

Based on what I'm hearing from a wide array of streaming producers, the heightened demand for streaming live events that we expected to be a natural outcome of its COVID-era ascendancy is either evaporating or simply hasn't materialized.

Let a Good Chatbot Answer That Question

If the recoiling-in-fear "Is AI coming for our jobs?" question is premature, it's also far from the most interesting topic these experiments raise. Rather, it's how can we get better answers by asking better questions?

Predicting a FAST-Approaching Future

In the last month of 2022, my inbox filled with predictions for 2023 from industry soothsayers of every variety, a phenomenon I found so fascinating that I gathered up the most interesting and posted them. Of course, the very nature of making predictions is sharing information you don't really have and guessing at a future you can't possibly see.

Where and When to Look

When it comes to knowing where to look to stay on top of the most meaningful developments in the streaming world, one simple maxim is not to always be tracking Netflix's stock price or churn rate to the exclusion of everything else, and at Streaming Media, we try to direct your gaze to the right places.

The Envelope, Please?

What lies ahead for Netflix in the ad-tier/hybrid era?

A Long Strange Trip

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen reflects on recent unexpected changes in his life, including a surprising newfound appreciation for the Grateful Dead, and his thoughts on his long-time tenure as editor of Streaming Media now that he is moving on from the role.

When the Levee Breaks: The Origin of On-Demand Content

Herbert Morrison's stunning narration of the Hindenburg disaster marked the first time recorded audio was ever broadcast as breaking news. The indelible words "Oh, the humanity!" remind us that it's the content—not whether it's live or on-demand—that makes the difference.