Tag: tv

Discovery Channel Plays With Sharks In Virtual Reality Shorts

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Discovery Channel is dipping its toes into the uncharted water of virtual reality and 360-degree spherical video as it announced the launch of its virtual-reality platform, Discovery VR on Friday. The cable channel will kick things off with a series of short-form VR videos that invite viewers to swim with sharks as part of its hit show Mythbusters. Other nature-focused VR shorts are also reportedly in development.

What Brands Should Do
Virtual reality holds great potential as an immersive media platform for brands to fully engage their audience with innovative, branded experiences. The lack of quality content has been hindering VR from mainstream consumer adoption. In recent months, however, a slew of media owners and brands have started creating original VR content, including Facebook, BBC, Birchbox, and major Hollywood studios.Therefore, it is important for brands seeking to immersively engage with its audience to create branded VR content sooner than later.

Source: AdWeek

Hulu Opens Up To Programmatic Ads With Help From Facebook And Oracle

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Tuesday, Hulu announced it will begin selling ads programmatically across its platforms on desktop, mobile and connected TVs with the help of Facebook’s ad exchange system LiveRail and the Oracle Data Management Platform (DMP). This marks the first time Hulu’s inventory will be available for programmatic buying.

What Brands Should Do
As Hulu goes programmatic, it should become much easier for brands to reach the right audience segments with the vast user data that Facebook holds. Moreover, with access to Oracle DMP, advertisers will be able to combine their first-party data with third-party data for ad targeting to offer granular personalization.

 

Source: MediaPost

The Traditional TV Industry Has Reached A Tipping Point

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
This past week has been a particularly awful one for the TV industry. Over $35 billion was lost in market value across seven major media companies, whose weak earnings results this week highlighted the seismic change from linear TV towards on-demand viewing. For example, Viacom Inc., the owner of youth-oriented channels like Nickelodeon and MTV, reported a sharp 9% quarterly decline in its domestic advertising revenue, and its market share resultingly plummeted 21% in two days. Losing its tight grip on the advertising dollars, it seems safe to say that the TV industry has reached a tipping point.

What Brands Can Do
As the audience, especially younger generations, continues to migrate from the ad-supported traditional platform towards OTT on-demand platforms that have little to no ads, marketers and brands will have to follow the eyeballs. This also means that brands need to develop a more comprehensive digital strategy and campaign approaches. As for those in the traditional TV industry, launching an on-demand platform to cater to the changing viewer behaviors should be a top priority. Moreover, differentiation through unique, quality content would be key for survival.

 

Source:Wall Street Journal

Why Streaming Services May Soon Get The Broadcasting Channels

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened:

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that streaming company FilmOn could “potentially” be entitled to a compulsory license to retransmit broadcasters’ copyrighted content, suggesting that OTT streaming services should be treated like traditional cable providers. If the ruling survives scrutiny on appeal, the broadcasting channels – CBS, Fox, NBC and ABC – will have to license their content to a digital outlet at below-market rates, which means that streaming services like Sling TV could add those broadcast channels if they pay the retransmission fees.

What you should do:

If this decision holds, it will hasten TV’s transition from a network-cable structure to OTT services. Brands should prepare for this possibility by testing media on existing OTT services, and carefully monitor their customers’ usage patterns and adjust their spend accordingly.

Source: The Verge

Why Netflix Is Having Such A Good Year… For Now

Posted on by Richard Yao

Netflix seems to be having a very good year so far. In an earnings call earlier today, the company reported that it has added more subscribers than expected around the world during its most recent quarter, generating more than $1.6 billion in revenue. The better-than-expected performance propelled the stock share of the streaming service giant to increase 10%.

Already bigger than all cable channels, analysts predicted that by next year Netflix U.S. viewing will surpass all big four broadcasting networks. In a letter to its shareholders, Netflix highlighted its slew of original shows launched this year as a major factor for its accelerated growth, citing that “90% of Netflix subscribers have engaged with original content.”

Meanwhile, in other good news, the 2015 Emmy Nominations were announced this morning, and Netflix’s original shows scored 34 nominations in total, up from 31 last year. OTT streaming services have been steadily encroaching on TV networks in attention and awards, a trend that this year’s nominations reflects.

Despite the double good news, however, Netflix does have a potential issue in the fact that it doesn’t actually own any of its originals. Its hit series Orange is the New Black, for example, is produced and owned by Lionsgate Television, while its Emmy-nominated freshman series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt comes from Universal Studios. In comparison, rival Amazon’s critical darling Transparent is produced by its in-house Amazon Studios.

Acquiring content from outside studios is a smart and cost-effective move for a new platform seeking content, but if web-based TV continues to grow in prominence, Netflix could very well lost their original shows to growing rival platforms. In order to avoid losing the brand value it has built upon its original content, Netflix will probably need to bring more production in-house in the future.

 

Comcast Announces New Internet TV Service For Xfinity Customers

Posted on by Lab Team

Comcast announced on Monday, Stream, a new OTT streaming service for its Xfinity customers. Stream will offer laptop and mobile access to HBO and all 4 major broadcasting networks. At just $15 per month, it has a competitive price that could help it challenge the likes of Sling TV. Previously, cable service providers typically saw the rise of OTT services as threats to their TV business. But as TV continues to transition from linear viewing to on-demand, web-based streaming, it only makes sense for a cable provider like Comcast to throw its hat into the ring to keep up with the changing audience behaviors.

Source: The Verge

Hulu Report Shows Viewers Prefer The Bigger Screen After All

Posted on by Lab Team

Read the original story on: TechCrunch

As content streaming services like Netflix and HBO Now continue to infiltrate TV households in the States, traditional TV viewing in the living room is undeniably on decline as more and more viewers gain access to content on their PCs and mobile devices. Yet that doesn’t mean TV manufacturers should start panicking, as it turns out, people would still choose to watch content on the biggest screen under the roof.

A new report from Hulu indicates that living room viewing is actually on the rise, which now accounts for over 58% of Hulu’s content streams, up from 44% it recorded back in the Q1 of 2014. This means nearly 3 out of 5 people are watching Hulu with a streaming set-top box like Roku, which would provide a more lean-back experience that resembles traditional TV viewing.

 

Meerkat’s Makes TV Debut At The CMT Music Award

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

Live-streaming app and SXSW breakout Meerkat teamed up with cable channel CMT and Mountain Dew to give users a front-seat view of country duo Florida Georgia Line’s performance during the CMT Music Awards aired this Wednesday. A live, exclusive angle of a TV event with a brand sponsor is a first for Meerkat, who has been eagerly conquering new grounds to stay ahead of its better-funded, Twitter-owned archrival Periscope.

 

Head image taken from meerkatapp.co

On Trend: TV Streaming Market Continues To Expand And Fragment

Posted on by Lab Team

Three significant new developments emerged in the OTT market this past week as the TV landscape continues to evolve.

  1. Sling TV is coming to Android TV after Dish Network struck a deal with Google. As part of the agreement, Sling TV will offer new customers 50% off Nexus Player devices when they pre-pay for three months’ subscription.
  2. Netflix confirmed a new user interface on the web is rolling out next month. The new UI is said to be closer to what Netflix has been offering on mobile devices, which eliminates the slow scrolling carousels for content discovery in favor of larger, expandable thumbnails.
  3. Meanwhile, Comcast finally added support for HBO GO And Showtime Anytime for its Xfinity customers, after purposefully blocking the two premium channel’s streaming apps for years. However, the unlocked services will only work on Amazon’s Fire TV devices for now.

Taken together, these three news items not only prove the fragmenting effect OTT services have on the traditional sector of the TV business, but also points to the complexity within its own ecosystem. As TV content continues to move away from cable companies’ control towards web-based streaming services, brands would be wise to follow where the eyeballs are going.

 

 

CBS Expands Beyond Nielsen And Talks Behavioral Data

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Variety

Backed with new data analysis from Nielsen Buyer Insights and Rentrak Polk Automotive, CBS is now claiming the top spot among TV networks across virtually all consumer product categories. While the broadcaster still insists on the necessity of traditional demographic-based ratings, it is very encouraging to see the usually conservative network recognizing the value in behavioral audience data as well.

In related news, CBS also announced that their OTT service CBS All Access now offers live TV streaming in over 60% of the US markets. As the TV landscape continues to fragment, and with better attribution tools now at their disposal, it is time for all advertisers and marketers to recognize the value of viewers based on how they behave in the marketplace, instead of merely their gender and age.