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As readers of VideoNuze know, live sports is the last bastion of hope for TV execs that want to retain their legendary grip on Madison Avenue. So it’s no surprise The Wall Street Journal catalyzed media insider rumblings with its October 6th piece entitled “Ratings Fumble for NFL Surprises Networks, Advertisers: So far this season, viewership on major networks is down about 10% from last season.” Writers have followed-up with speculation about why the NFL is experiencing the decline.

Is it the content? Perhaps Presidential politics are blame; maybe it’s the “Kaepernick effect”; or, it could be an unlucky streak of boring games.

Is it the disruption of TV ongoing? Perhaps younger viewers are catching the highlights and recaps they need on Social Media. Or young adults might be watching online; or doing something else entirely.

When it comes to questions about the future of Sports Television, Social Media has important things to say. New research from Ring Digital llc gives us insight into the challenges and opportunities facing Sports TV as Social Media consumption grows.

Here are some fascinating findings along with the Thuuz Sports perspective on one possibility that no one’s talking about.

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It’s no secret that Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have begun using AI for commercial purposes, and now, numerous marketing and advertising agencies have begun to follow suit. Indeed, AI has begun to permeate the marketing and advertising industry because of its capacity to process, analyze and optimize big data in ways heretofore impossible.

As a result, we are seeing a revolution in digital advertising, including in the video sector, and in particular, programmatic advertising; and it’s a revolution that’s only just begun.  In fact, industry experts believe that what we see today is just the tip of the iceberg of what we will see four years from now when AI will have an even more profound impact on marketing and advertising.

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The pay-TV industry has undergone a seismic shift since the introduction of OTT streaming. Although broadcast TV viewing remains robust in the U.S. with TV’s weekly reach remaining steady at 86 percent in Q4 2015, according to Nielsen viewing figures, both online video and subscription video on demand (SVOD) services, like Netflix, are growing. SVOD penetration rates in the U.S. are currently around 20 percent but are expected to reach 30 percent by 2020. Online video streaming is on the rise as well. As YouTube points out on its own website, consumers watch “hundreds of millions of hours” of its content on a daily basis.

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Flash became popular in the early 2000s for good reason - it added interactivity and polished design to the Web.  Over the last few years, Flash has been operational and has been very important when using websites like YouTube and Hulu, among other sites.

However, with the emergence of HTML5, especially since the beginning of 2016, the Flash ad has seemingly become useless and has lost trend over the past few years. There are predictions that showing Google will finally close this ad type by the end of this year, 2016. I also predict that the majority of advertisers will need to shift their video ad supply to be delivered in HTML5 format, while currently, about 30% of the ads worldwide are in the HTML5 player (according to Selectmedia’a server stats from Aug/2016).

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While digital consumers used to search the internet for content, several years ago Facebook began pushing content to us. And as our attention spans got shorter and shorter, we no longer wanted to read past the first paragraph of an article. But our eyes are still drawn to sound and motion, so we want to consume all of our content and news in video form.  

The news cycle is no exception. In digital publishing, the most successful companies are those that have the foresight to stay ahead of the technological curve. Even as publishers face huge monetization challenges, they have discovered something new: native video.

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When MTV stopped ruling the music world maybe 20 years ago, the joke was that people had been tuning in not to watch the song of the day, but to watch their song of the day. So, as MTV tried  to appeal to the widest possible audience, hard-core music fans tuned out.

These days, MTV is focusing again on music after a long sojourn in reality programming. But when people want to watch music videos these days, they tend to go to one of two places, YouTube and Vevo, which YouTube owns along with major music labels. There they can find, if they know what to look for, a bewildering and fantastic array of videos about all kinds of music.

That's a key phrase: "if they know what to look for." YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine and search is what drives discovery there. But how do you find music you'll love, particularly music that's situationally relevant, if you don't know what to look for? More importantly, what if you'd like to go somewhere else to watch music videos? Music discovery shouldn’t be something that is left to one or two destinations.

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Apple made an important announcement at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference that marks a significant step toward simplifying online video delivery thereby reducing the cost of content preparation. By announcing support for fragmented MP4 (fMP4) within HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Apple is bringing the industry closer to the realization of a single format for OTT medial delivery. This could save the OTT industry millions in revenue lost from processing their content across the plethora of formats that exist today.

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In today’s on-demand culture, the days of passive television viewing are over. People prefer to choose the exact content they want to watch when they want to watch it. It’s no longer about who controls the TV remote – it’s now about controlling our individualized viewing experience and schedule.

It’s no surprise, then, that more than half of all U.S. homes own a Connected TV (CTV), a set that plays traditional TV programming yet is also connected to the Internet through a stand-alone streaming device. These devices, such as Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Chromecast, etc., enable access to over-the-top (OTT) services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, to name but a few, as well as ad serving and digital measurement.

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