Netflix Turns Up Heat In Online Video’s Shark Pool As Three More Services Jump In
As if the pool of big fish in on-demand video wasn’t already stuffed full, this past week saw three more sharks dive in, just to make it interesting, along with... Read More
Could An Amazon With Sports Be Pay TV’s Waterloo?
For a long time, we’ve been rolling our eyes at the whole cord cutting myth, at the gullibility of mainstream journalists who insist on repeating the canard about the “tidal... Read More
Week In Review: Ad Supported OTT Is Booming, So Is Churn On Subscription Apps
1. Ad Supported OTT Is Booming We’ve been hearing anecdotally from people like Frank Sinton at Beachfront Media that ad supported OTT is blowing up, getting both more viewers and... Read More
WEEK IN REVIEW: AT&T Introduces Xandr, Fox Sells The Rest Of Sky To Comcast
1. AT&T Introduces Xandr, AT&T, having completed its purchase of AppNexus, introduced a brand new ad platform it called “Xandr” (get it—Alexander Graham Bell started AT&T, Xandr/Alexander. Yup.) It’s a... Read More
Week In Review: The Sky Auction Is On, “Premium Video Ads” Showing Up On TV
1. The Sky Auction Is On Comcast and Disney (or Disney/Fox, to be more accurate) are having their final showdown over Sky this weekend, in an unnecessarily complex process known... Read More
Week In Review: Verizon To Start Rolling Out 5G On October 1st, AT&T Wants To Bundle HBO with Turner and Warner
Verizon To Start Rolling Out 5G On October 1st Verizon, which, as we’ve noted, seems to be going the “we’re a technology company” route, is going to be rolling out... Read More
Week In Review: Tim Armstrong On His Way Out At Verizon, CBS Says Bye, Bye Moonves
1. Tim Armstrong On His Way Out At Verizon In a move that wasn’t all that surprising to Verizon observers, and likely long overdue, Tim Armstrong, the former AOL CEO... Read More
Reconsidering The Bundle
Pity the poor bundle. For years now, it’s become the symbol of everything that’s wrong with pay TV, the poster child for the overstuffed packages MVPDs forced on customers for... Read More
The Genius Of Fox’s New Trivia App, FN Genius
Fox debuted its new app FN Genius last month during the Teen Choice Awards, and the trivia game, modeled on the very successful HQ, appears to be a genius idea. That’s because... Read More
Week In Review: Amazon May Be Launching An Ad Free Channel, Why Didja Could Disrupt Local Broadcast
1. Amazon May Be Launching An Ad Free Channel An unverified report in a tech publication this week has lead to much speculation that Amazon is going to be launching... Read More
Week In Review: Research Confirms Facebook Watch Is Still Facebook What?, Cheddar TV Makes Some Linear Moves.
1. Research Confirms Facebook Watch Is Still Facebook What? It’s something of a joke in the analyst community that most Facebook users think Facebook Watch is something you wear on... Read More
An In-Show Promo By Any Other Name: Netflix’s $13 Billion Gamble
There’s a whole lot of “peak TV” out there and most of it is not on Netflix. That’s not a slam against the service, but rather a cold hard fact,... Read More
Week In Review: Q2 Numbers Reveal Pay TV Subs May Have Risen, Ad Supported Xumo TV Grows By 325%
1. Q2 Numbers Reveal Pay TV Subs May Have Risen So Leichtman Research Group, which uses the actual subscriber numbers supplied by the MVPDs (they are public companies so the numbers... Read More
Week In Review: Comcast Partners With Amazon, Hulu Is Working With ComScore On CrossScreen Measurement
1. Comcast Partners With Amazon Comcast dropped another bombshell on the industry last week, announcing that it would be partnering with Amazon to integrate Amazon Prime into its X1 set... Read More
Ad-Supported OTT Keeps Growing, And Advertisers Would Be Wise To Take Note
AppNexus, the ad-serving company that was AT&T’s first post-Time Warner purchase, released stats this week showing a 748% year-over-year “explosion” in connected TV ad sales. That’s quite an explosion, and it’s the... Read More
Survey Says! How The Great Cord Cutting Myth Gets Spread
In case you were wondering how the The Great Cord Cutting Myth gets started and why so many people are convinced the TV industry is a breath away from doom:... Read More
Week In Review: Why Comcast’s Stock Is Up … And Facebook’s Is Down
1. Why Comcast’s Stock Is Up So Comcast lost 140,000 pay TV subscribers last quarter, as per their last earnings report. All the usual suspects will be shrieking that it’s... Read More
Week In Review: Sinclair/Tribune Falls Apart, Disney Wins America
1. Sinclair/Tribune Falls Apart The biggest surprise of Merger Season 2018 came last week when FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai seemingly put the brakes on Sinclair’s purchase of Tribune, a deal... Read More
Week In Review: Apple Music Is Not Really Beating Spotify; Netflix Stumbles A Little
1. Apple Music Is Not Really Beating Spotify You may have read a story this week that said that Apple Music was beating out Spotify, in the US, anyway. You... Read More
Week In Review: Trouble In ACR-Land, Whose HBO Is It Anyway?
1. Trouble In ACR-Land So the New York Times recently ran an article about how some ACR companies are not exactly being upfront when it comes to collecting data, couching their... Read More
Context Matters: IRIS.TV Looks To Put The Right Videos In Front Of The Right Viewers
When Spotify was still fairly new, the assumption was that people would want to listen to their own playlists and maybe share them with their friends. But developers of the... Read More
Week In Review: Apple’s Distribution Mystery, Nielsen Strikes A Deal With Comcast For OTT Measurement
1. Apple’s Distribution Mystery Last week Apple announced that it had signed Oprah Winfrey up for its new TV project. In classic Apple fashion, the announcement did not offer much... Read More