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.

Should We Trust Nielsen Math?

After reviewing Nielsen/Gracenote's 2023 State of Play report, Data-Driven Per­sonalization: The Future of Streaming Content Discovery, I found the numbers they cited to be very much on the creative side. I don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I think about their research.

The State of CTV Advertising

Ad buying is changing. For example, now you can buy from an agency that has deep knowledge of data around local viewing, or you can go to a TV manufacturer that has deep knowledge of all of the viewing on its hardware.

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.

With Social Video Sizing, Serve Your Viewers What They’re Hungry For

The customer wanting to watch your stream on Insta does not want a horizontal video shoehorned into a vertical frame. The customer watching the horizontal version doesn't want the vertical slice with the same thing blurred out behind it to fill the frame. Each of those customers is hungry for that particular experience. It's your job to give your customers what they are hungry for.

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.

Personalization Is More Than What You Think It Can Be

With advances with generative AI, just-intime transcoding, SSAI stitching, and other streaming video tech stack components, companies like Infuse Video are demonstrating that the true vision of video personalization—changing the video content itself—is finally at hand.

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.

Measuring What’s Possible—Is This a Real Problem?

Now that ad dollars are moving from broadcast to digital via CTV buys, maybe we need to accept that the measurement standards for digital and broadcast are always going to differ.

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.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

Producing for FAST? Take it Slow

FAST programming needs space for the commercials. Unless you intentionally craft that space into your show, it just slices into your content randomly, ruining the mood of narrative content and frustrating viewers just as the show was getting to the "good part." Watching YouTube content on a Roku device is like this now. The random "pop" to commercials in the middle of a scene is very annoying.

Why the Upfronts Are So Yesterday

The internet fostered the ability to make changes on a continual basis, so how come national broadcast advertising is still being transacted in the upfronts (the same format that started in 1962), which require an annual dollar and audience-reach commitment in advance to buy and sell advertising?

The Top 5 Problems with Streaming Advertising

At Streaming Media West last November, I moderated a panel on how to keep advertising workflow flowing. The discussion yielded a number of valuable insights on the state of streaming advertising, including 5 key takeaways on the biggest challenges we face with advertising in the OTT world today.

What the Growth of FAST Really Tells Us About Viewers

The popularity and growth of FAST show us that viewing behavior, despite the rise of streaming, hasn't really changed much at all. People want choice, but they want it in a way that meets their needs. FAST doesn't scrap the broadcast experience with which so many are familiar; it is evolving it in a way that broadcast could never do to improve upon the viewer experience.

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.

What's the Point of Streaming?

You might think it's crazy of me, as the executive director of the world's largest streaming technical association, to ask the question in this column's title. But I think it's actually important that we do a gut check every once in a while.

Do Our Technology Advances Slow Down Justice?

Far from content being scarce, the integration of streaming into professional- and citizen-based news-gathering has generated such a monumental level of potential war-crime footage that every day sees an additional 10-100 documented cases of crimes against humanity. And this increased footage brings with it both greater accountability and a significantly higher backlog of cases that need to be tried.