What Happened
On Monday afternoon, AT&T announced the official launch date and pricing for its over-the-top live TV service. DirecTV Now is set to launch on November 30th and offers three different plans that range from $35 per month to $70. It will carry live programming from most major U.S. TV networks except for those owned by CBS and Showtime. By all accounts, the competitive price and rather comprehensive content offering should make it a strong contender in the growing OTT streaming market and challenge the pay-TV providers.
At launch, the same ads on networks’ normal live feeds will also appear on DirecTV Now, and AT&T will start selling VOD ad inventory for 64 channels. Down the line, however, AT&T has bigger ambitions. DirecTV Now plans to introduce data-driven personalized ads by mid-2017, which will be dynamically inserted into live programming for the two minutes of commercial time per hour that AT&T can sell. The commercials that networks sell nationally will mostly remain the same.
What Brands Should Do
According to data from the U.S. Commerce Department, the percentage of U.S. households that have cut the cord on both TV and wired broadband in favor of wireless Internet access has doubled from 10% in 2013 to 20% in 2015. With viewers increasingly choosing on-demand viewing over linear TV, brands wishing to reach consumers at scale should start exploring the advertising opportunities on the ad-supported streaming services preemptively. In that regard, DirecTV Now’s ambition in adding personalized dynamic ads to live programming coupled with AT&T’s massive consumer data should prove to be valuable for brand advertisers.
To read more on how brands can deal with TV’s shift toward streaming platforms, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.
Source: Ad Age
Header image courtesy of DirecTV Now