2025 Predictions for Ad-Supported Streaming

The start of a new year is nothing without everyone making predictions, so here are a few that apply to the advertising industry. Advertising in streaming is doing pretty well when we compare it to following ad dollars that have left linear.

Warner Bros. Discovery the Big Loser in Disney’s Fubo Sports Move

The agreement to merge Disney's Hulu + Live TV with Fubo will not only see Fubo dropping its anti-trust lawsuit against Venu but appears to cast Venu's other main partner, Warner Bros Discovery, out in the cold.

Fubo Debuts Four New Interactive CTV Ad Formats Including Transactional and Gamified Ads

FuboTV, the leading sports-first live TV streaming platform, announced the availability of four new interactive CTV ad formats to further drive audience ad engagement. The personalized and dynamic experiences, including transactional and gamified ad formats, are part of Fubo's ongoing commitment to ad innovation and overall strategy to connect, interact with and convert premium audiences.

Altman Solon Global Sports Survey - A Q&A With David Dellea

Altman Solon's David Dellea discusses the findings from their 2024 Global Sports Survey, with topics including the impact of younger generations' changing consumption habits on live sports, the role of AI in enhancing viewing experiences, the challenges of content fragmentation, and more.

Roundup: Streaming Industry Predictions for 2025

In the last few weeks, my own editorial inbox has filled to bursting with unsolicited but much-welcomed season's greetings from a disparate array of industry experts and thought leaders ringing in "End-of-Year Prediction Season" with all manner of prognostications about what's to come in 2025. Here's a quick roundup of the most intriguing, thoughtful, and surprising ones, organized into some rough categories.

Why the DAZN and NFL Game Pass Partnership is Thriving - a Q&A With Zander Berlinski

The NFL has shared its pleasure with the existing ten-year DAZN Partnership for NFL Game Pass. DAZN's global footprint gives the NFL a much wider reach, which is hugely important as it continues to expand worldwide. In this Q&A with Zander Berlinski, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development at DAZN, he highlights the factors that make this partnership a success, such as improved live streaming quality, expanding device distribution, investing in proprietary tech stacks, enhancing user experience with features like the "Home of NFL" section, and much more.

Ultra-Low Latency Interactive Live Streaming Survey Report Launches

This report expands on live presentations from a recent Streaming Connect keynote.

Free Streaming and Sports

The second half of 2023 saw the launch of numerous premium brands and the rise of exclusive deals. What has happened in the FAST sports landscape since then? Let's find out.

Roku's 2025 Predictions - A Q&A With Tedd Cittadine

Roku has released its 2025 predictions report. Tedd Cittadine, SVP of Streaming Services Partnerships at Roku, discusses the key findings, including the impact of price increases on audience retention, the effectiveness of advertising-supported tiers, the importance of bundling strategies to meet consumer demand for flexibility, and the growing significance of sports programming in driving subscriptions.

Could Multicast ABR Really Have Saved the Paul/Tyson Fight?

When Netflix streamed the Paul/Tyson fight to a record-breaking 65 million simultaneous viewers, it wasn't all smooth sailing. Many viewers were left frustrated by buffering, freezes, and audio-sync issues. Like many other vendors, Broadpeak, a major player in streaming technology, claimed its multicast ABR (mABR) technology would have "knocked out video freezes" during the broadcast. It's a tantalizing promise, but could mABR realistically have delivered it? To understand, let's look at what mABR is, what's required to make it work, and why its widespread adoption is more complicated than Broadpeak might have you believe.

Live Sports in the Streaming Era: What’s Changing and Why It Matters

Samba TV's recently released report, Live Sports on Streaming Platforms, provides five key sets of data points to help advertisers and sports leagues better target their audiences both during and after live sporting events. The report begins with insights into web-only sporting events, revealing audience numbers for the most-watched and least-watched games on platforms like Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video.

Gracenote Resources Provide New Insights into State of Streaming Content

Gracenote, the content data business unit of Nielsen, has launched a new Data Hub providing insight into the current state of SVOD programming to identify global content trends and changes over time. Tapping Gracenote Global Video Data, the industry's most comprehensive database of TV show and movie information, the data visualization graphically illustrates the current makeup of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix, and Paramount+ content catalogs to provide visibility into the programming that's keeping viewers engaged today. In this article, Trent Wheeler, Chief Product Officer of Gracenote, provides further insights about the benefits of the new Data Hub.

Comcast Cuts Cord as Deckchairs Shift Again

Comcast has cut the cord from its own cable networks, the first major studio to sign away its linear TV assets for a future almost entirely based on streaming. The move has been widely viewed as bold and inevitable but positive by analysts who believe that Comcast will be better placed for growth after the split from the cable networks, which have seen audiences decline.

Tyson-Paul: A Black Eye for Netflix and Live Sports Streaming?

If the majority of Tyson-Paul viewers tuned in to see the notoriously erratic Mike Tyson in another train wreck, they got exactly what they came to see. Except it was a different sort of train wreck: VOD champ Netflix failing spectacularly to pull off a massive live event, with widespread and widely reported buffering and outages denying tens of thousands of subscribers their guaranteed ringside seat.

ICYMI: Streaming Media Connect November 2024

Streaming Media presented its 15th Connect virtual conference November 12-14, 2024, with Media Industry Cartographer & CEO ESHAP Evan Shapiro and Streaming Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Nathans-Kelly as hosts and MCs, and featuring speakers from Microsoft, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, Vevo, Philo, and more, and session topics ranging from streaming monetization to FAST strategy to OTT bundling to cloud streaming OpEx and live streaming at scale.

Cloud Streaming Experts Talk Live Broadcast Workflow Challenges at Streaming Media Connect 2024

On Tuesday, November 12, at Streaming Media Connect, streaming industry consultant Nadine Krefetz moderated the panel "Cloudsplitting: Tackling Common Cloud Live Broadcast Workflow Challenges." The group of experts from AWS, TV 2 Danmark, Alibaba Cloud, and Console Connect discussed actionable insights on refining and streamlining your scalable cloud live-streaming workflows and jumping and dodging the hurdles that threaten to break your stride.

Krafty Entertainment Acquires 17.5% Equity Stake in Sports First TV

Krafty Entertainment has acquired a minority equity stake in Sports First TV, the world's first global sports news TV channel. Sports First TV, which launched in March on FAST platforms in North America, was founded by Frank Brown, the former CEO of Viacom International Media/MTV Networks, where he served for 11 years. The channel is based in Sydney, Australia.

Sneak Preview: Engage and Grow - How to Succeed With Interactive Live Streaming

On Tuesday, November 12, Brian Ring, Principal Analyst, Ring Digital, will moderate the panel "Engage and Grow: How to Succeed With Interactive Live Streaming." The growth of highly interactive streaming genres such as gaming, auctions, and sports betting has put pressure on networks while increasing the need to integrate interactivity and heightened engagement into more traditional methods of content delivery. With the challenges organizations face to ensure that their users have the smoothest and most dynamic interactive streaming experiences, and the additional investment in delivery infrastructure required as those experiences scale, how can streamers deliver ROI from interactive streaming every time? Confirmed panelists include industry experts from Bulldog DM, Parks Associates, Play Anywhere, and Fox.

Take Streaming Media's Interactive Ultra-Low-Latency & Live Streaming Trends Survey

New survey gauges the impact of (and planning for) hardware acceleration

NAB New York: Advanced Streaming and FAST Revenue Strategies for Local TV

How can broadcasters go beyond antiquated methods to provide fresh chances for profit on their FAST and AVOD channels? Beyond programmatic, where are the income opportunities and how can they be realized? Which vendors are interacting with marketers on streaming the most successfully, and why are they doing so? Leading industry professionals from NBCUniversal Local, CBS News, Scripps, and The Weather Company debated these topics on a panel at NAB New York.