Podcasts

I’m pleased to present the 514th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. As always, we hope our listeners are staying well.

This week we share thoughts on the nearly 2.1 million video subscribers that large pay-TV operators lost in Q1. It was a record loss, and approximately half of it was attributable just to AT&T. Virtual pay-TV operators also had a tough first quarter. As a result linear TV networks must look to direct-to-consumer models, which is what ViacomCBS is doing with CBS All Access and Pluto. Subscriber gains have been impressive and we examine the company’s successful strategy.

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I’m pleased to present the 513th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We hope all of our listeners are staying safe as we continue to weather the pandemic.

Stay-at-home guidelines continue to drive both SVOD and ad-supported viewing, and on this week’s podcast we discuss new research from Hub Entertainment Research detailing both (more here and here). Overall Hub found that the average number of TV services per viewer rose to 4.8 in April, 2020, from 3 services 2 years ago.

While Netflix remains by far the most popular SVOD service, Amazon, Disney+ and Hulu have all gained. We dig into more of the numbers as well as other research released in the past week that paints a fuller picture of how viewership has changed in the past couple of months.

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I’m pleased to present the 512th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We hope all of our listeners are staying safe and doing well.

On this week’s podcast Colin and I look at what’s ahead for premium video on demand (PVOD), whereby movies are released direct to consumer, preempting the theatrical window. PVOD has been a contentious topic and with theaters currently closed due to the pandemic PVOD’s appeal has accelerated.

PVOD was in the news earlier this week as the Wall Street Journal wrote how Universal Pictures’ PVOD release of “Trolls World Tour” generated 5 million rentals at $20 apiece. That yielded a split to Universal that was on par with 5 months of theatrical release revenue for the first “Trolls’ movie, underscoring PVOD’s profit potential for studios.

The article triggered pushback from executives at leading theater chains who are justifiably nervous about PVOD eating into their  windows. Colin and I dig into the pros and cons of PVOD and what’s likely ahead as stay at home orders slowly lift.

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I’m pleased to present the 511th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We wish all of our listeners good health and hope everyone is staying safe.

Earlier this week, Netflix reported an unexpectedly large gain in global subscribers for Q1 ’20, which management attributed to the shelter-at-home situation. On today’s podcast Colin and I discuss how Netflix has uniquely benefited from shifting viewership and also how it will continue to do so in Q2 and likely during the second half of the year.

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I’m pleased to present the 510th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We’re keeping all of our listeners in mind and hoping everyone is staying well and healthy.

On this week’s podcast we discuss the many options available these days to access free TV and movies, as I've written previously. Some companies are being especially consumer-friendly and aggressive with their promotions. Sling TV is notable to us, and their latest “Happy Hour Across America” looks appealing for a number of reasons. But there’s lots more, with special offers from HBO, Amazon, Roku, Noggin, Apple TV, Peacock and others. We dig into all of these and what changes they could drive in the industry.

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I’m pleased to present the 509th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We wish all our listeners well and hope that everyone is staying healthy.

First up this week, we discuss the success of Disney+ which now has 50 million paid subscribers, less than 5 months since launch. Both Colin and are impressed with the growth, which has been remarkably steady on an average daily basis. Disney+ is clearly way ahead of its forecast of 60-90 million subscribers in September, 2024. Colin thinks there may have been an “under-promise, over-deliver” approach in forecasting. Regardless, Disney+ looks like it’s in a strong position.

We then turn our attention to Quibi, which launched earlier this week. We both like the app and think it’s quite functional. We also recognize that we’re not in the target audience, so the content isn’t necessarily for us. The big issues are that Quibi needs to be on connected TVs to give viewers more flexibility, and also a tier of free content (past the 90-day trial), to serve as an on-ramp for subscriber acquisition. Quibi is competing against an abundance of free alternatives; while it will get many trial sign-ups, conversion to paid will be the key challenge.

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I’m pleased to present the 508th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. We hope all of our listeners are staying well and we urge everyone to take all precautions possible.

In this week’s podcast, we focus on how the virus and stay at home guidelines are continuing to change viewership and monetization. First up we review Conviva data that shows a huge uptick in daytime viewing. Colin shares Nielsen data that Netflix recently accounted for 29% of video streaming on TVs and 9 out of the top 10 most viewed streaming shows.

Colin likes Sling TV's “Stay in & SLING” initiative, which seems like a smart on-ramp to get viewers engaged with free VOD content. HBO’s decision to make 500 hours of its classic TV programs and Warner Bros. movies available for free is in line with this thinking and a great promotion for HBO Max. We agree that Quibi could also benefit from a free tier of content, beyond the 90-day trial it is offering at launch.

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I’m pleased to present the 507th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First, we hope all of our listeners are staying well. The virus has brought many new realities to our daily lives and also to the video industry. As a quick side note, please check out the Coronavirus Video Research Hub I launched yesterday to help all of us better track relevant data and insights being released by many leading companies.

On today’s podcast, we dig into some of this research. Colin discusses data from Hub Entertainment showing how much more time viewers are spending with services like Disney Plus, Netflix and Hulu. Colin wonders how sustainable the trend is for Disney Plus though given the production stoppages and lack of new marquee content. There are broader questions about SVOD adoption/churn in this era of belt-tightening.

An area of continued interest for me is what sports fans are doing with their time given the suspension of live sports and also where associated ad spending is moving. New research from Altman Vilandrie & Co. indicates that “reading” and “watching non-sports on TV” were the 2 activities most cited by sports fans as their preferred activity.

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I’m pleased to present the 506th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. It's a difficult time for everyone these days with the virus and we hope all our listeners are staying well.

On this week’s podcast we discuss how the spike in virus-driven streaming will benefit advertising-supported VOD services. There is still a lot of uncertainty about the extent of the benefit; mainly I believe the question is whether there is enough advertiser demand to meet the soaring supply of inventory.

Answering this question leads back to how billions of ad spending intended for live sports will be reallocated. Based on discussions I’ve been having with industry leaders, these allocation decisions are currently taking place. But some categories like travel and entertainment are now dark. Can others pick up enough slack?

We also spend a little time exploring the virus’s impact on SVOD. We are both modestly optimistic, but believe that there are numerous reasons even the stay at home spike won’t ultimately benefit SVOD. We also touch on the impact on pay-TV, which is even murkier given the lack of live sports.

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I’m pleased to present the 505th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week we discuss the PGA Tour’s $6.3 billion, nine-year rights deal announced this week with CBS, NBC/Golf Channel and ESPN+. The deal will reportedly generate $700 million in fees, up 75% from the current deal’s $400 million. Anyone looking to me to explain how the PGA managed to get this increase, despite so many factors that should have given the TV networks leverage, is going to be disappointed. I just don’t get it, but as a golf fan, it’s still lots of fun to talk about.

One thing is for certain - with the bulk of the new money going to the Tour’s players, the 2020s are going to be a very good period for them. As is to give a sneak preview, when this weekend’s PLAYERS Championship was cancelled after round 1 yesterday, half the purse of $15 million was divided evenly among the field of 144 players. So each player got $52,083, irrespective of how they played in round one. So if average round lasts 4 hours then they earned $13,020 per hour. Or if they shot par 72 they received $723 per shot (including gimme putts). Life is good.

ESPN+ popped up as the streaming partner in the new PGA deal, which provided a good opportunity for Colin to explain the remarkable turnaround Disney has effected with the network. ESPN is now in 98.1 million U.S. homes vs. 98.5 million in 2013. After dipping to 89.7 million in 2017, ESPN successfully negotiated its way onto all major virtual pay-TV operators’ lineups (8.9 million). And it cleverly bundled ESPN+ with Disney+ and Hulu (another 7.5 million) creating significant DTC optionality down the road.  

Reviewing the new PGA deal and ESPN’s bounce back, we believe executives for both entities deserve to be on the Mount Olympus of media negotiators.


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I’m pleased to present the 504th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On this week’s podcast, Colin and I dig into the question of whether linear TV is dying, dead or just changing? The narrative around  conventional linear entertainment TV networks contracting is hard to argue with, especially for younger viewers moving to OTT. However, sports and news continue to do pretty well. And then there are newer types of linear TV experiences, like those from Jukin Media, that are finding new ways to serve linear audiences.

Colin views Jukin, Xumo, Pluto and other OTT services that offer linear TV options as capitalizing on the “more things change, the more they stay the same” motto In other words, even as people embrace new on-demand options they still value linear TV at certain moments. Colin then discusses how these trends merge with pay-TV operators who are eager to reduce programming expenses. He highlights free, ad-supported Zone.tv, whose 13 “linear-like” channels became available to Cox’s Contour subscribers this week. 

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I’m pleased to present the 503rd edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up on this week’s podcast, Colin shares details of Verizon Media’s new research on live sports streaming, which found that 53% of fans are paying for some type of extra subscription service. Also noteworthy is that two-thirds of respondents said DVR is a critical feature and that 39% use the DVR feature to skip ads.

These underscore how different the user experience is becoming between ad-free SVOD viewing and ad-heavy live sports viewing. Lots of fans seem to be willing to watch time-delayed just to avoid the ads. But we agree that connected TV is going to drive lots of innovation in both sports streaming and advertising/monetization going forward. On that topic, we also review Extreme Reach’s latest Video Benchmarks Report. Though CTV ad share settled around 50% in 2019, Colin and I see plenty of growth ahead - and accompanying innovation.

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I’m pleased to present the 502nd edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

First up this week, on the heels of ViacomCBS reporting 11 million subscribers between CBS All Access and Showtime, Colin and I agree that the company is looking well-positioned in OTT. While more needs to be learned about its “House of Brands” strategy and how Pluto TV will be fully leveraged, we both believe ViacomCBS is looking more and more like a serious OTT contender. A big unknown remains what pricing and bundling will be for “CBS All Access Max” as Colin dubs it. And then there’s the impact of pricing pressure from Disney+, Apple TV+, Peacock, etc.

Regardless, ViacomCBS’s OTT success is coming not a moment too soon, because, as we discuss, new UBS data based on Nielsen ratings, shows TV viewership continuing to plunge in Q1 ’20. Net, net, we both believe connected TV advertising is continuing to shape up as TV advertising’s long-term savior…though who falls through the cracks in the meantime remains to be seen.

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I’m pleased to present the 501st edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week we discuss Roku’s Q4 and full year 2019 results, which were reported late Thursday. Roku now has nearly 37 million active accounts, up almost 10 million in 2019. More important, Roku continues to demonstrate strong capability in monetizing its viewers, with ARPU up $5.19 to $23.14. Looking back over the past few years, Roku’s ability to pivot its business from being player-based to advertising and licensing-based is very impressive, all the more so because it has pulled it off under the long shadow of CTV competition from Amazon, Google and Apple.

Putting Roku’s growth in perspective though, Colin and I also spend a few minutes reviewing Nielsen’s latest Total Audience report, which showed that overall, streaming still accounts for just 19% of total TV usage. As Colin notes, it’s far higher for younger age groups and cord-cutters. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to conclude that it is still relatively early days for both ad-supported and subscription OTT.

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(Note: I own a small number of Roku shares)

I’m pleased to present the 500th(!) edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On today’s podcast, Colin is still mopping up his tears from the 49ers’ heartbreaker last Sunday night, but is being a good sport about the loss. He quickly recaps the game’s streaming audience and shares his insights.

This week’s main topics are Disney+ and YouTube. Coincidentally, this week we all got a first look at both of their performances, in Disney’s and Alphabet’s earnings reports, respectively. The headline from Disney+ was clearly the 28.6 million subscribers reported after just 84 days after launching - a noteworthy accomplishment by any standard. We discuss how sticky those subs are (i.e. what will the churn rate be?) and what Disney+ will need to do from here to keep up momentum.

Then we shift to YouTube; we’re both a little surprised that YouTube TV only has 2 million subscribers given how much advertising around marquee sports it has done (by comparison, Hulu Live had 3.2 million at the end of 2019). Nevertheless we are both quite bullish about YouTube going forward, particularly if Google decides to hold off price increases for some time and cord-cutting continues to accelerate. I believe the company as a whole could crack $25 billion in revenue in 2020.

(Apologies - Colin’s audio quality isn’t very good this week, we’re working to fix for future podcasts.)
 
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I’m pleased to present the 499th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

Earlier this week AT&T reported its Q4 ’19 earnings. There was plenty of lousy news, and as Colin and I discuss, at the top of the list was a loss of over 1.1 million pay-TV subscribers in the quarter, compared with 658K subs lost in Q4 ’18. For the full year, AT&T lost 4.1 million, more than 5x the 750K it lost in 2018. The combined 4.8 million subs that AT&T has lost in the past 2 years is nearly 20% of what it started with back on Dec. 31, 2017.

There is arguably no bigger influence on the pay-TV industry’s overall cord-cutting rate than AT&T because of its sheer size and outlier loss level. All of that - and lots of other factors - lead us to believe that the rate of cord-cutting is actually going to accelerate in 2020. Colin has crunched the numbers and believes when all the Q4 results are reported, the traditional industry (not including vMVPDs’ gains) will probably lose around 6.5-7 million subs in 2019. He sees that escalating to around 8.5 million in 2020.

We dig deeply into all of this on the podcast. We all have a front row seat to an industry in complete transformation. As it has in countless other industries, we are watching the Internet massively disrupt the pay-TV and TV industries.
 
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I’m pleased to present the 498th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

On this week’s podcast, we do a deep dive into Netflix’s Q4 ’19 results (reported earlier this week), and what they imply for 2020. Colin mostly focuses his comments on the decelerating growth rate in international subscriber additions and the ARPU squeeze that’s coming this year.

My focus is on the all-important domestic or “UCAN” (U.S. + Canada) region. Based solely on Netflix’s prior results and its own Q1 ’20 global subscriber addition forecast of 7 million, I think there’s at least a 50-50 chance Netflix will lose subscribers in UCAN in Q1 ’20. Just two years ago, this would have been an unimaginable thing to say; remember in Q1 ’18 it gained 2.28 million U.S. subscribers and in Q1 ’19 it gained 1.74 million.

That’s all before talking about Q2 ’20 where it will almost certainly lose UCAN subscribers, at a multiple of the 130K it lost in Q2 ’19, given the new competitive landscape. Netflix really needs to launch a lower-priced ad-supported tier, but yet again Netflix management rejected the idea, this time for inexplicable reasons.

Add it all up and Netflix is in for a bumpy ride in 2020. Meanwhile, since announcing its results on Tuesday after the market’s close, Netflix stock is up over $30 (about 10%, or around $15 billion extra market capitalization), once again proving that speculators simply can’t quit the stock regardless of the company’s actual performance or prospects.
 
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I’m pleased to present the 497th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

This week Colin and I share our initial impressions of Peacock, NBCU’s new streaming service. Our impressions are based on watching the investor day presentations yesterday. We break down our discussion into covering Peacock’s economics, release plan and user experience. Again these are all our first impressions and not meant to be an exhaustive analysis.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Peacock’s Premium tier viewer monetization is below its two nearest ad-supported comparables, Hulu and CBS All Access. Both charge $6 per month while Peacock is $5 per month. Peacock is also ensuring maximum ad load of just 5 minutes per hour, which it forecast would amount to $6-7 per viewer, compared to the $7-10 per viewer Hulu is currently generating.

Peacock’s pricing and financial projections remind me why I still believe Comcast should have bought the remaining 70% of Hulu it didn’t own, as I wrote in May, 2018. It feels like an even bigger missed opportunity now. It probably would have cost Comcast around $12-$14 billion to do so, a fraction of the  $39 billion it paid to acquire Sky - and it would have been more strategic.
 
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I’m pleased to present the 496th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

It’s a new year and a new decade, and on today’s podcast we discuss Quibi, the mobile video provider which, having raised $1.4 billion, is one of the industry’s most closely followed startups.

But as we discuss, Quibi’s go-to-market strategy seems at odds with the realities of the broader video industry, and mobile video specifically. Quibi is rolling out with a paid-only model, targeting 18-34 year-olds with expensive, original content.

With regard to content alone, it is extremely difficult to see where the “white space” is in the market. In the “Peak TV” and social media era we live in, the world hardly seems to need more long-form original TV programming nor more short-form news/information.

Net, net, Colin and I are pretty convinced Quibi will be pivoting soon after its April launch. To what though is unclear.
 
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I’m pleased to present the 495th edition of the VideoNuze podcast, with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia.

In today’s podcast, our final one for 2019, Colin and I share our top 10 video stories of the year. Whether you agree or disagree with our top 10 (or the ordering), no doubt we can all agree it’s been quite an eventful year for the industry. But as busy as 2019 has been, 2020 is setting up to be a year of even more innovation and change.

As always, Colin and I have had a ton of fun discussing all of the industry’s happenings each week, and we hope you enjoyed following along throughout the year.

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