Mirror Mirror

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Netflix’s content chief Ted Sarandos once famously quipped that his goal was for Netflix to become HBO “faster than HBO can become us.” By that he meant, for Netflix to establish itself as a high-end global TV content brand before the reigning high-end global TV content brand, HBO, could un-tether itself from the legacy pay-TV ecosystem.

So far, Netflix is winning that race. The streaming service now reaches over 100 million subscribers worldwide, more than the entire U.S. pay-TV universe, and will spend upwards of $8 billion in 2018 producing 700 original series.

What’s more, Netflix has successfully colonized HBO’s home turf in the living room. Although today you can watch Netflix on virtually any connected device nearly anywhere in the world, the company reported this week that 70 percent of its streams are delivered to a stationary TV set, either directly via smart TV app, via streaming box, or via its growing number of integrations with traditional pay-TV platforms. Read More »

NBC, Rio, And the Long-Term Value of Televised Sports

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NBC’s Olympic efforts in Rio are falling short of its previous best. Through the first 10 days of the games, the broadcaster’s prime time coverage has averaged 27.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s more than enough to trounce CBS, ABC, and Fox, but it’s down 17 percent from NBC’s coverage of the 2012 games in London, despite a more favorable time zone that allowed for high-profile events where American’s typically excel, like swimming, to be shown live in prime time.

usain_bolt_smileThe fall off among viewers 18-34 has been even steeper, down 25 percent from London.

NBC execs are quick to point out that the ratings for its prime time coverage on its broadcast channel don’t tell the whole story. NBC Universal is showcasing the games live across its entire suite of cable networks throughout the day, some of which have drawn strong ratings in their own right. The final of the men’s golf competition, shown live on NBCU’s Golf Channel on Sunday, delivered the second highest ratings for any 90 minutes of televised golf this year after the final round of the Masters, despite the absence of many high-profile players. Between noon ET when it started, and 3:10 p.m. when it ended, the competition earned the highest household rating (1.02, with 1.6 million viewers) since Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson went head to head at Pebble Beach in 2012. Go figure.

NBC also points to record-breaking digital viewership of this year’s games. Through Aug. 14th, NBC had delivered 1.86 billion live-streaming minutes, besting the total from the last three Olympics combined by more than 25 percent. NBC is live-streaming all the events in Rio as well as simulcasting it’s prime time coverage. Read More »

What UI Voodoo Will Hulu Do In Linear Debut?

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One of the more interesting subplots to Hulu’s apparently pending rollout of an over-the-top bundle of linear channels will be what it does with the user interface.

As I’ve noted here previously, the traditional programming grid that still drives navigation on most pay-TV systems today is at the core of the current tussle over Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal to “unlock” the set-top box to allow third-party devices and applications to interoperate with pay-TV services. And apart from pay-TV operators themselves, the loudest objections to Wheeler’s proposal have come from programmers, who fear those third parties will not honor the agreements networks have with operators concerning their position within the traditional pay-TV UI.

“ArmHulu_homepage’s length agreements between MVPDs and programmers provide the necessary licenses to transmit the content, and in exchange the MVPDs agree to a range of license terms, including security requirements, advertising rules, [electronic programming guide] channel placement obligations, and tier placement requirements,” the Motion Picture Association of America wrote in comments submitted to the FCC. “These terms are material to the grant of the copyright license, and to copyright holders’ ability to direct the exploitation of their works in a manner that enables them to continue to invest in the high-quality programming that viewers expect. ..The only terms the proposal would explicitly recognize are copy, output, and streaming limitations. Extensively negotiated terms on matters including “service presentation (such as agreed-upon channel lineups and neighborhoods), replac[ing] or alter[ing] advertising, or improperly manipulat[ing] content,” are all left unaddressed by the FCC’s proposal.” Read More »

What Broadcasters Are Talking About When They Talk About Netflix ‘Ratings’

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The chattering and sniping touched off by NBCUniversal research head Alan Wurtzel’s release of purported ratings data for Netflix last week during the Television Critics Association winter meeting, taken from network-backed Symphony, is still going strong.

After blasting the numbers released by Wurtzel as “remarkably innaccurate,” Netflix piled it on in its Q4 letter to shareholders this week:

The growth of Netflix has created some anxiety among TV networks and calls to be fearful. Or, at the other extreme, an NBC executive recently said Internet TV is overblown and that linear TV is “TV like God intended” [sic]. Our investors are not as sure of God’s house-of-cardsintentions for TV, and instead think that Internet TV is a fundamentally better entertainment experience that will gain share for many years. The challenge for traditional media companies, most of whom see the future pretty clearly, is to use the revenue from Netflix and other SVOD services to fund both great content and their own evolution into Internet TV networks. Seeso, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, CanalPlay, HBO Now, and CBS All Access are the beginnings of these efforts.

Our titles are watched on the go and at home on a wide range of devices, making measurement of the viewing of any given title difficult for third parties. We don’t release title‐level ratings as our business model is not dependent on advertising or affiliate fees. Instead, we release “ratings “ for Netflix as a whole every quarter with our membership growth report (75 million and counting!). It is member viewing and satisfaction that propels our growth.

It’s that bit about Netflix not being dependent “on advertising or affiliate fees” that is at the core of the controversy. Read More »

Netflix Is A Ratings Winner

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NBCUniversal president of research and media development Alan Wurtzel got a bit cheeky with Netflix this week, leaking some preliminary data from Symphony, the network-backed rating system (still in beta) that uses audio-recognition technology to measure viewership of unrated OTT channels like Netflix.

According to Wurtzel, Symphony measured the average audience in the 18-49 demo for each episode of Netflix original series within 35 days of their debut on the service between September and December, and over that time Netflix’s most-watched show was “Jessica Jones,” which averaged piper-orange-is-the-new-black4.8 million viewers per episode. “Master of None” was second, with an average audience of 3.9 million, while “Narcos” pulled in 3.2 million per episode. “Orange is the New Black” remains Netflix’s most-watched series, according to Wurtzel, but the current season was released in June and most of the viewing happened during the summer. During the period covered by the study, OITNB averaged 644,00 viewers per episode.

In comparison, the most watched scripted series in the 18-49 demo on linear TV channels during the 2014-2015 TV season, in the live-plus 7-day window, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” averaged 13.2 million viewers per week, followed by Fox’s “Empire” at 9.0 million and CBS’ “Big Bang Theory” at 8.3 million. Read More »