VideoNuze Posts

There was plenty of news in the TV/streaming industries this earnings week. First up we discuss Comcast raising the idea of spinning off its cable TV networks to shareholders. A move like this has been speculated about for years, as the networks are buffeted by cord-cutting. Comcast also said Peacock gained 3 million subscribers in Q3, benefiting from the Paris Olympics. 

Meanwhile Alphabet said that YouTube’s revenue for the past 12 months hit $50 billion, a first for the company. As we discuss, it’s likely that subscription services, which include YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium, Primetime Channels and Sunday Ticket, exceeded $15 billion. That would make YouTube one of the top 3 streaming subscription providers by size. 

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Four topics for this week’s podcast:

First, Disney+ and Hulu are no longer available for sign up in Apple’s App Store. As we discuss, this feels like a move by Disney to preserve margins, though at the expense of some of its subscribers losing the advantages of unified billing and integrated search/discovery. It also means less competition for Amazon, which is already the dominant distributor of third-party streaming services.

Next, IAB Tech Lab this week announced an initiative to help standardize emerging CTV ad formats. We’re confident it will help more advertisers move spending into the channel.

Third, Fubo is boldly offering premium services on a standalone basis, not requiring a base subscription plan. Fubo aims to be a “super aggregator” and is breaking from pay-TV operators’ traditional approach of enabling access to premium services only for subscribers. It’s a sign of the times, with viewers requiring flexibility and it seems like a savvy play by Fubo to keep viewers engaged with its app.

Last, a variety of streaming services are partnering with grocery chains and delivery apps, which both of us think makes a lot of sense to reduce churn and cost per acquisition. We expect to see more partnerships going forward.

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Bloomberg’s Screentime 2024 conference in LA offered opportunities to hear directly from a variety of industry executives about their companies’ streaming initiatives and results (all video interviews here). Colin and I were especially interested in interviews with Comcast’s Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts and Amazon’s SVP of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios Mike Hopkins.

As we discuss, the interviews highlight the companies’ divergent future as premium video distributors. Amazon is ascendant, having become by far the dominant distributor of third-party streaming services in the US. Meanwhile, Comcast, long the biggest cable TV operator in the US, has seen cord-cutting erode its subscriber base.

However, as Roberts articulates, Comcast is using its formidable broadband presence and Peacock to re-position the company for future success. Meanwhile Hopkins underscores how Amazon’s vast resources allow it to invest aggressively in technologies like AI to continually improve the viewer experience and partner value proposition.

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In August Google announced its new Google TV Streamer device along with feature updates for all Google TV devices. To learn more about all of this, Rob Caruso, who leads product management and user experience for Google TV, joins us for an in-depth Q&A.

Rob is especially excited about two features: smart home integration and deeper integration with Google Photos. The former is an extension of the controls in the Google Home app. The latter is part of a trend Rob describes as “ambient computing” with the opportunity to use Gen AI to create new imagery and collections of images on Google TVs.

In addition to these features, we also discussed Freeplay, its newly-named its FAST service, how AI is being used for personalized content recommendations and much more. As Rob describes, Google is in a position to both address mainstream user needs with smart TVs, while also pushing the boundaries to introduce new features and see what new use cases emerge.

It will be interesting to follow how these new features impact Google TV’s market share in smart TVs.

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We’re pleased to welcome Antenna’s CEO and co-founder Jonathan Carson back to Inside the Stream for an exclusive interview about the firm’s new State of Subscriptions research focused on specialty SVOD services.

Antenna’s research has become a key source of industry intelligence and we’re excited to share that Jonathan will be a regular quarterly guest on Inside the Stream going forward, providing exclusive insights and detail on the firm’s ongoing research.

For this week, Jonathan dives into why the specialty SVOD category, which is still much smaller than premium SVOD, is actually growing at a far faster rate. Speciality SVOD is a highly fragmented category, and Antenna is tracking the progress of over 100 different streaming services.

We discuss particular services like AMC+, Crunchyroll and Hallmark+ and specialty SVOD’s churn profile. We also explore the fact that 58% of specialty SVOD subscriptions happen through Amazon Channels and what the implications of that are. We also touch on the interplay between specialty SVOD and FAST services which are closely linked. And lots more…

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Four topics for this week’s podcast:

Both Google and Roku announced new streaming media devices this week, with Google launching its Google TV Streamer, which is positioned as the “next generation of Chromecast,” and Roku releasing an updated version of its Roku Ultra. As we discuss, these are two companies at far ends of the TV OS battle, with Google somewhat surprisingly still a laggard, and Roku still a leader.

Next up, Disney+ officially launched its paid sharing globally, following its announcement earlier this year. Disney+ is clearly hoping to emulate the success Netflix had following its rollout of paid sharing, though as we detail, there are important differences between how Disney+ is executing that could lead to much different results.  

Then we discuss a newly announced initiative by Whip Media to bring more transparency to FAST viewership across channels. While this would be a step forward, as Colin explains there are critical challenges to making this a reality.  

Finally, we circle back to a report last Friday about remarks from Netflix’s co-CEO Greg Peters concerning the possibility of the company leaning into live sports. Peters said “never say never” about live sports and with nearly 280 million global subscribers, Netflix would have an immediate impact.

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In concert with its Made on YouTube event, YouTube unveiled a slew of innovations aimed at enhancing creators’, viewers’ and advertisers’ experiences. Potentially the most high impact is a revamp of its CTV app which will offer “immersive previews” of creator content, modeled on best practices of SVOD apps like Netflix. Creators will also be able to customize how they categorize and organize their episodes in the app. With CTV accounting for at least 40% of YouTube’s views, optimizing the CTV app is critical.

YouTube also updated a number of relatively new AI-powered tools, including “Dream Screen,” which generates backgrounds in YouTube Shorts and a 6-second clip generator, both using Veo, which is DeepMind’s video AI technology, plus a refreshed Inspiration Tab to help brainstorm new video ideas.

Also new is the launch of Communities which allows engagment within the creator’s channel, pulling into YouTube discussions already happening in other social platforms. The feature builds on commenting, which has long been available in YouTube.

YouTube also confirmed broad availability of Pause ads, long in use by others like Hulu, which are likely to get a strong reception.

Many of the features are described in this post.   

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