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.

Is This the End of the CDN As We Know It?

Recent news, like the shuttering of Edgio, signals to many the imminent death of traditional content delivery networks (CDNs). But does it really?

Designing Streaming Experiences for Seniors

As I celebrate my one-year anniversary of relocating to my hometown of St. Louis to care for my 84-year-old mother, I'm looking at 2025 as a year of improved UI and UX for seniors, particularly those with memory issues.

Why Ads Are Good for Streaming

The streaming business model must change. Services that rely solely on subscriptions are going to plateau. They will have to continually return to their subscriber base and "milk" them for additional revenue via fee hikes. But by taking the plunge and embracing advertising as the primary part of creating and supporting quality television, streaming services will meet the ultimate need of their viewers: getting to see the content they want.

The Blurring of Shared Experiences Via Streaming

The shared experience of enjoying a program that's happening at (or very near) the same time as reality is gone. YouTube, Facebook, et al. are typically 20 or more seconds behind when the event happened. Streaming services and apps can have their own pathways and delays. Add more viewers or more processing, and it can get longer.

Dynamic Paywalls for Streaming Services

What would happen if we started to have dynamic paywalls for streaming ser­vices? Leveraging user data, machine learning, and generative AI could create offers based on con­sumption patterns. Some companies are dab­bling in this, but now we have the technology to really start developing it.

The Monetization Story of 2024 and Beyond

For the longest time, people I've interviewed have complained about how much of the video advertising budget went to social. Now the tide is turning.

Casual Streaming Piracy and the Cost of Chasing it

At Streaming Media NYC, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel around stream security. It's probably the fifth or sixth time that I've done so in the last decade, but an interesting dichotomy popped up during the prep meeting with panelists, and again while we were on stage during the live session. The concept was "casual piracy" and how it differed from "professional piracy" in both intent and scale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.