TV networks including ESPN are bracing for a drop in advertising revenue for football games in the coming season, which could drag down sales growth for sports broadcasts overall, advertising and television executives say.
Source: ESPN, Broadcasters Are Said to Confront Football Ad Slump – Bloomberg
Live TV viewing continued to decline in the first quarter, dropping by 10 minutes to 4 hours, 21 minutes per day per person among adults, according to Nielsen’s Q1 Total Audience Report.
Source: Live TV Viewing Falls in First Quarter: Nielsen | Multichannel
AT&T is getting ready to launch a new video platform that will underpin its DirecTV Now service and eventually support all of its consumer video services.
Source: AT&T’s new video platform will bring a cloud DVR to DirecTV Now – The Verge
The dominant position in movie and TV show rental and sales once enjoyed by Apple’s iTunes store has eroded steadily over the last five years, with U.S. market share falling from over 50% in 2012 to between 20% and 35% today.
So dominant are the top three SVOD services, according to the analyst’s OTT Video Market Tracker, that just a paltry 6% of US broadband households subscribe to an offering other than one of the top three.
Amazon started to ship its new Echo Show this week, and a number of media companies have been quick to jump on the bandwagon with optimized content for the device.
Source: Video Flash Briefings: How to Get News Updates for Amazon Echo Show | Variety
YouTube TV, Google’s new virtual MVPD service, is set to expand to 10 markets in the next couple of weeks, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced in this blog post summing up the company’s activities around VidCon.
Source: YouTube TV Set to Stream to 10 More Markets | Multichannel
Facebook Live dominates the space slightly with 45% market share, followed by YouTube Live with 44%, according to data from Magid Advisors.
Source: Facebook Live, YouTube Live Battle For Live Streaming Dominance 06/26/2017
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft said the future of NFL broadcasts is in “over the top” deals like the livestreaming agreement the NFL signed with Amazon this spring.
Source: Patriots’ owner says NFL’s future is through livestreaming | New York Post
Dish Network’s seminal virtual MVPD player, Sling TV, controls the lion’s share of subscribers in the nascent market, comScore said this week, touting more than 2 million users.
Source: Sling TV now has more than 2M subscribers, comScore says | FierceCable
Interesting sports/media/internet news: Starting this summer, one of the country’s biggest cable programmers will let people stream one of the world’s most popular sports — without paying for cable.
Source: NBCUniversal will stream Premier League soccer games, no cable subscription required – Recode
Warner Bros., Disney and Fox point to a declaration from VidAngel general counsel David Quinto where he describes how VidAngel purchases a motion picture from a service like Amazon Video before the film is tagged and a copy is then saved to a cloud storage location.
Source: Hollywood Studios Are Suspicious of VidAngel’s New Filtering App | Hollywood Reporter
France Televisions and Italy’s RAI have joined forces to co-produce a wide range of high-end English-language content for global distribution – including TV dramas, documentaries, animation series and entertainment formats – in a strategic pact meant to counter the growing force of U.S. streaming services in Europe.
Source: French, Italian Pubcasters Join Forces to Counter US Streaming Giants | Variety
Even as the hype over the technology has outrun its actual adoption, the video gaming industry has continued to pour money and resources into embracing virtual reality, cementing its development and advancement.
Source: Virtual Reality Is a Disappointment? Not in the World of Video Gamers – The New York Times
