Tag: ott

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 Verizon Is Launching Its Own Streaming Service Go90

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Verizon is reportedly getting ready to launch its own mobile-first, video streaming service named Go90 this summer, which will allow users to stream full episodes of TV shows from selected networks as well as music videos and other short-form content. Sources claim that Verizon will offer the service entirely free of charge, at least initially. Some of the content that Verizon gained through the recent AOL acquisition will also be added to the service.

What Brands Should Do
Verizon has long been making good use of the vast amount of consumer data gathered through its wireless service., including app usage and web browsing habits. That, coupled with the ad tech that AOL owns, could offer brands strong ad targeting tools on Go90’s ad-supported platform. Admittedly, it may be too early to tell if Go90 will be able to attract enough users that warrants brands’ attention. Nethertheless, brands need to be mindful of the great advertising potential it has.

 

Source: Variety

Pandora Now Lets Brands Sponsor Hour-Long Listening

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pandora has officially rolled out to all advertisers its “Sponsored Listening,” which it first started testing last fall. The new ad format prompts listeners to watch a branded video or click on a rich media ad in exchange for one hour of ad-free listening. Compared to more “native” audio ads, this ad unit seems disruptive to the user experience. Pandora claims that in pilot testing, those ads boosted purchase intent by 30% and brand awareness by 12%.

What Brands Should Do
If your brand is looking to reach the younger, streaming-heavy demographics, it may be worth your while to consider the kind of value exchange that “Sponsored Listening” presents: disrupt the audience to catch their full attention with the promise of a disruption-free experience later on. The lesson for brands here is that, if you want to cut through the clutter and engage with your audience, then you have to offer them some incentives to capture their attention first.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image taken from Pandora Advertising

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 Hulu Is Considering An Ad-Free Tier

Posted on by Lab Team

Hulu is ready to ditch the ads, at least partly. Wall Street Journal reports that Hulu may roll out an ad-free tier this fall and charge somewhere from $12 to $14 per month for it. Paid subscribers of Hulu (a tier formerly known as Hulu Plus) have long complained about having to sit through commercials despite paying $9.99 per month for the subscription.

While this move could finally help align the TV streaming service with its rivals Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, it also implies a lack of audience data on Hulu’s part to get the higher CPM rates for targeted ads, thus for it to be willing to forgo some of the ad revenues to gain more on subscription fee instead.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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

Video-Gaming Goes Streaming: PlayStation Now Launches App

Posted on by Lab Team

Sony launched PlayStation Now, an all-you-can-play game subscription service back in January on PlayStation 4, but its gameplay experience left much to be desired. Now, Sony is looking to fix that with a new dedicated subscription app. Launched today on the PlayStation store, the new application aims to streamline the navigation process and make it easier for users to find the game they want to play among the over 125 games currently available for streaming.

For now, Sony charges $19.99 per month, or $44.99 for 3 months for the gameplay streaming service, which are significantly cheaper than buying individual games for dedicated gamers. That said, the games are not the current titles which typically sell for $59.99 each but are older games which might retail for $19.99 or less and were released for the Playstation 3, not the Playstation 4.

Following the subscription-based model that Netflix helped popularize, it may not be too far off to imagine that Sony would start selling gaming consoles on a discounted price in order to get more players to use its streaming service and thus locked in its ecosystem. Microsoft tried this strategy towards the end of the Xbox 360’s life in 2012.

In the past few years, the all-you-can-consume subscription-model has quickly swept the entire media industry – be it news, TV, or music, every media owner started selling consumers access to their content on a month-to-month basis. In this regard, gaming is the latest addition to the subscription craze, and we think this new model is most likely here to stay.

 

Source: Engadget

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.