Topic: TV
Sony Raises Monthly Price of Playstation Vue Packages by $10 (Jul 7, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Facebook Has Two More Original Video Series in the Works (Jul 3, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
AT&T More than Doubles DirecTV Now Live Local Channel Lineup (Jun 30, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
AMC Networks Confirms $5/Month Ad-Free VoD Service Through Comcast (Jun 29, 2017)
Back in March, there were reports that AMC was looking to provide an ad-free version of its TV network through pay TV operators, though the specifics weren’t then known. Today, AMC and Comcast have announced that the service will run (for now at least) as a partnership between them, providing AMC Premiere as a video on demand service through Comcast’s set top boxes and apps for $5 per month. As I said in March, that’s a hefty price for a network which commands just a fraction of that from pay TV operators each month, and which generates only half its current revenue from advertising. It may have decided that pricing a service below $5 per month devalues it, but the $5 price point clearly overvalues it, especially given that it won’t be a standalone service – in other words, you have to be an Xfinity pay TV subscriber to be able to get the service, so this is an add-on to the standard AMC channel, not an alternative to it. Taking a step back, the move clearly taps into a broad consumer push to get ad-free TV, something which Netflix has always offered and Hulu has made something of a default recently too for VoD. And of course competitors like HBO have never had ads either, but they also have massively more content including lots of big-budget original content to justify a higher price. This feels like a good concept in principle, but both the wrong channel to apply it to and the wrong price point for what AMC actually offers. I’m looking forward to better applications of the same idea from other content owners.
via Recode
Charter Launches Sports-Free $20/Month Streaming TV for its Broadband Subs (Jun 29, 2017)
Spectrum TV, which is the brand for television services offered by the entity formed from the merger of Charter, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks, is offering an over the top pay TV streaming service. So far, that probably sounds pretty me-too, but there are two important differences: firstly, the base $20 tier excludes all sports networks, and secondly, because this service is being offered by an existing pay TV provider in its franchise area, it includes the local broadcast channels. The big caveat is that the service is only available to Spectrum broadband subscribers, so this isn’t a national offering, but it’s arguably the most comprehensive set of basic channels offered by any of the streaming services, and sports and premium channels can be added at a pretty reasonable price ($12 for ESPN and others, and $15 for a premium package). I’ve long argued that the existing pay TV providers are in the best position to offer a really compelling streaming TV service, but of course they’re also the least incentivized to do so, because that means potentially cannibalizing their legacy pay TV services. As such, we’ve only seen fairly hamstrung offerings from the big satellite providers (DISH’s Sling and AT&T’s DirecTV Now). But Spectrum’s new service suggests we may finally be seeing some serious movement from the cable guys, and were Comcast to move in this direction too (something it’s been testing on a limited basis so far), I have to believe that would force the remaining telco and satellite players to get more serious about providing comprehensive streaming pay TV services.
NBCU Takes Some Premier League Soccer Games Off TV Everywhere, Onto $50 Subscription (Jun 27, 2017)
NBCU has announced a new subscription offering for watching England’s Premier League soccer games, which will cost $50 per season when it launches in August this year. The catch is that these games were previously available online and through NBC’s apps to authenticated pay TV subscribers as an additional offering over and above the games shown on its live linear TV channels. So it is taking what used to be a perk for authenticated pay TV subs and making it a separate, $50 service, making this a bid for new revenue from dedicated soccer watchers. What that means in practice is that viewers who care about this will now need to subscribe to TV packages that include the NBCU channels and to this separate subscription if they want to watch all possible games. This is definitely part of a trend towards direct-to-consumer offerings, many of which are coming from traditional players not willing to offer full cord-cutting solutions, which means that they actually end up setting the user experience back instead of moving it forward, as in this case. The traditional TV players continue to be more interested in experimenting and dabbling with services that can provide new revenue than – to use an analogy from a different sport – skating to where the puck will be by offering truly new offerings that allow users more control. I continue to believe that there will come a tipping point when we see real innovation in giving users just what they want because the alternative is rapid decline, but we’re clearly not there yet. But it’s also notable that both Fox (through the deal announced earlier today with Facebook) and NBCU are seeking new ways to monetize their second-tier sports content which otherwise doesn’t appear on TV.
via Recode
Facebook Secures TV Rights for Less Interesting Champions League Soccer Games Through Fox (Jun 27, 2017)
Facebook has been dabbling in sports rights here and there, and already has a deal for a twenty Major League Baseball games during the 2017 season. Now, it also has a deal to show some European Champions League games in the US through Fox, which owns the TV rights. The games Facebook shows will be the the lower profile ones which aren’t shown on live TV but which have been available through Fox’s streaming apps. Given that the focus is on these lower-tier games, it also has no rights to the last two rounds of the tournament, which features the top club soccer teams from throughout Europe. The article here from Bloomberg talks up the amount of social activity around soccer on Facebook, but of course the US is famously resistant to soccer, so only a fraction of the overall numbers relate to the US specifically. I certainly count myself among those who watch the Champions League here in the US, but almost exclusively the top-tier team I support, which almost certainly won’t be featured in any of the games Facebook shows. And that’s the challenge here – this deal sounds good in principle, and for any fans of relatively obscure European teams who happen to be living in the US (or who watch soccer indiscriminately regardless of the teams playing) this might be a nice value-add on Facebook. But this doesn’t seem likely to attract much bigger audiences than the MLB games on Friday nights.
via Bloomberg
Facebook Willing to Spend $3m Per Episode on Original, Clean, Non-Political Video (Jun 26, 2017)
The key part of this article many seem to have picked up on is the sheer amount of money Facebook is willing to spend on securing original video content – up to $3 million an episode, which is comparable to big-budget cable TV shows. And that’s certainly interesting, though it’s not yet clear just how much content Facebook is willing to commission at that cost level. However, in some ways more interesting is the nature of the content Facebook wants to commission: “Facebook has told people it wants to steer clear of shows about children and young teens as well as political dramas, news and shows with nudity and rough language.” In other words, this isn’t going to be the kind of content the other big original content spenders have focused on, which I’ve pointed out has tended to be mostly rated TV-MA. That’s a reflection of a tricky issue Facebook is going to have to deal with, which is that since it’s not explicitly a video platform, people’s expectations of what they find there are going to be different from, say, Netflix or Amazon. Given the recent controversy over Facebook’s role in elections, politics and news are obviously out to avoid any sense of editorializing, but given Facebook’s existing restrictions on content shared on the site (including nudity), it’s got to steer clear of some other forms of content too. And of course with children under 13 technically not allowed to use Facebook, targeting children doesn’t make much sense either. You might say – as a couple of people did to me this morning on Twitter when I tweeted about this – that that doesn’t leave much else for Facebook to show. But of course US broadcast TV has limits on nudity and swearing, and many of the dramas on network TV would comply with these restrictions and do just fine. And this could actually help set Facebook apart as the original video content hub which prioritizes cleaner stuff.
via WSJ
YouTube Makes Series of Announcements at VidCon (Jun 23, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Netflix Announces Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Shows for Kids (Jun 20, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Time Warner Signs $100m Deal to Develop Shows for Snapchat (Jun 19, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Nearly Half US Broadband Customers Have Streaming TV, Many Have Several Services (Jun 19, 2017)
This is a great counterpart to the FuboTV piece I posted earlier, because it illustrates the state of the current over-the-top streaming TV landscape. The survey quoted here from IBB Consulting suggests that nearly half of US broadband customers have at least one streaming TV service, with over half of those in turn subscribing to several. Moreover, nearly two thirds of those subscribing to these over-the-top services also still subscribe to traditional TV. That paints a picture in which subscription VOD (SVOD) services are both complements and substitutes to traditional pay TV, and even then largely fail to meet all of consumers’ needs for video. This is still a very fragmented marketplace, in which even the best providers are only partially meeting people’s needs. That creates both a near-term opportunity for someone to do better at meeting those needs, but also a long-term threat of consolidation as consumers balk at having to pay for and manage multiple subscriptions and long for someone to bring it all together. Given all the assets and relationships held by the major legacy pay TV companies, they’ve certainly in a strong position to aggregate some of this fragmentation on the part of consumers, while platform companies like Apple and Amazon are also positioning themselves in different ways as subscription aggregators, presenting another possible way forward. Regardless, as today’s FuboTV fundraising news suggests, there’s lots of activity still to come here.
via Multichannel
FuboTV Raises $55m, Adds Scripps Channels and Financing (Jun 19, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Apple Poaches Two Sony TV Execs to Lead Video Programming (Jun 16, 2017)
Apple has hired two executives who previously helped make Breaking Bad and The Crown on behalf of AMC and Netflix respectively as its new heads of video programming globally. Those two pieces of content are powerful examples of the role of original content in boosting video brands – Breaking Bad was a major plank of AMC’s push over recent years to turn itself into more than just a catalog player, and while The Crown isn’t Netflix’s most popular bit of original content, it’s very good and a sign of the kind of big-budget stuff it’s going to be making more of going forward. As such, these are fascinating hires, given that for now at least Apple is on the opposite of that process – commissioning rather than producing original video content. These hires could be a sign that change is coming, given that these two new execs have experience producing and not just commissioning video, but that’s a somewhat unusual model for original content compared with other major players like Netflix, which have still tended to farm out original content rather than lead production internally. It’s possible that they will merely become equivalents of Ted Sarandos at Netflix, using their expertise to commission and oversee outside projects, but they seem somewhat odd hires in that context. All of this, meanwhile, seems much less plausible in a continued narrow focus on video content in Apple Music, and much more as part of a broader push into video ahead of a subscription video service. Two other things worth noting: Apple put out a press release on the hires, something it does very rarely indeed, suggesting it wants to make a fuss out of this. Secondly, these two will report directly to Eddy Cue, which will set up an interesting dynamic with Jimmy Iovine, who has seemed to loom large over all of Apple’s content efforts, but especially in video, and who I’ve speculated before is a bit of a loose cannon in this area. I’m hoping these two coming on board provides some more clarity in who owns original video content at Apple.
via WSJ
Facebook Shares Data Showing Usage Spikes During TV Commercials (Jun 8, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Amazon Channels Accounts for Big Chunk of HBO, Starz, Showtime Subscribers (Jun 7, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
AT&T Adds $10 DirecTV Now Bolt-On to Unlimited Mobile Plans (Jun 1, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Verizon Had $100bn Offer for Charter Rebuffed (Jun 1, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.
Weekly Narrative Video – Disrupting TV (May 27, 2017)
This week’s Narrative Video covers the Disrupting TV narrative, or as I’d call it if these things could have slightly longer names: “Disrupting TV is Hard”. I talk through all the ways in which various entities are trying to disrupt traditional TV business and consumption models, and the barriers to their success. I also talk about the ways in which TV is being successfully disrupted, and argue that we’ll eventually reach a tipping point at which the legacy providers currently trying to resist and hold back disruption come to enable and even embrace it. As usual, you can find the Weekly Narrative Video on the relevant narrative page here if you’re a subscriber. And if you’re not a subscriber yet, you can sign up on this page, starting with a 30-day free trial.
Google Fiber Raising TV Prices Significantly Due to Content Costs (May 26, 2017)
This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.