It’s starting to get a little ridiculous, but Google’s YouTube shows no signs of bowing to traditional media (or even pure-play streamers) as it officially reached six months in a row on top of Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge in July. The platform now sucks up 13.4% of all TV viewing. That means YouTube – which …
The brain trust at Skydance Media gave us a good glimpse at how the new Paramount under their control will look at the world – and it’s through decidedly tech-covered (smart?) glasses. One of the most interesting revelations that came out of the company’s Los Angeles press conference Wednesday at the Paramount studio lot was …
It would be wrong to characterize Netflix these days as a “black box” that keeps us guessing. Executives like co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, as well as CFO Spencer Neumann, are consistently open about their plans if not necessarily consistent in implementing them (like launching an ad tier after saying they never would, although …
In the Golden Age of Hollywood that ran from the 1920s to the 1950s, MGM and Paramount Pictures dominated with the biggest movies, stars, and box office. Paramount even controlled its own vast theater chain until the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1948 Paramount Decree forced divestiture. Fast forward to today, and the global Internet has largely …
Netflix’s meteoric rise in recent quarters largely ended the streaming wars as the company ascended to unipolar dominance. That’s not to say other major streamers – especially Disney’s powerful ESPN-Hulu-Disney+ combo – can’t compete and sustain highly profitable direct-to-consumer businesses. But Netflix’s supremacy remains hard to deny. Still, it’s not just about rivalries with other …
Does Netflix even know how to fail? It made a valiant effort in April 2022 when it reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers and projected more pain ahead. But since then, the company has rebounded and then some, this week reporting the addition of 18.9 million subscribers in Q4 as it exceeded $10 billion in …
It was only days after Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery cancelled their planned Venu sports streaming service that DirecTV this week announced it would launch its own sports-centric service called MySports. The irony isn’t lost on observers, considering that DirecTV had threatened to continue the fight against Venu after the parties settled with Fubo …
For a company with little interest in major sports rights, Netflix sure talks a lot about sports – enough that we’re starting to wonder if its tip-toeing through the sports tulips will at some point become a prance that accelerates into a full-fledged sprint. We’re not there yet, of course. But while Netflix’s relatively error-free …
The movement toward widespread “shoppable ads” continues with this week’s expansion of Roku’s partnership with Instacart as Roku chases what it describes as “high-intent customers.” As QR code ads have gradually gained acceptance, the industry has been waiting for more sophisticated interactivity that could ease the customer conversion process and ultimately enable platforms to get …
At the end of 2023, YouTube announced a significant change to its ad break architecture for users viewing content on connected TV (CTV) devices. YouTube’s internal research revealed that 79% of viewers consuming long-form content on TV screens “prefer video ads that are grouped together instead of distributed throughout a video.” This insight led the …
