Amazon in Good Field Position After NFL Deal

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Amazon won the auction for live-streaming rights to this season’s Thursday Night Football franchise with a bid of $50 million dollars for a package of 10 games. That’s 5 times what Twitter paid last year for essentially the same deal: Amazon will share the games with NBC and CBS and will stream the networks’ feeds, including their ads. Amazon will also be able to sell a handful of ads per game itself.

The games will be available for free to Amazon Prime members.

Although the 5X increase in price is impressive — and was probably too rich for Twitter — $50 million is still pretty small beans, both for the league — whose deals with the broadcast networks run into the billions — and for Amazon, which has $20 billion on its balance sheet. For both, it’s largely an add-on business at this point.

For the NFL, streaming is still largely an experiment aimed at finding a way to reach cord-cutters and out-of-home viewers, and to test the viewership waters outside the U.S., not to supplant its traditional broadcast deals. For Amazon, the NFL deal is a way to enhance the value of a Prime subscription and to attract to new subscribers at a relatively modest price. 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 »

From Winky-Dink to Facebook Live: Social TV’s Next Chapter

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Broadcasters have long dreamed of making TV interactive and social. From the days of “Winky-Dink & You,” which encouraged its young viewers to draw on the TV screen along with the show’s host (much to their parents’ dismay), to Time Warner’s Full Service Network in Orlando, Fla., to the short-lived flowering of second-screen apps, broadcasters and their technology partners have tried for decades to make watching TV a more engaging experience by giving viewers the means to interact directly with their programming, and with others watching at the same time.

Most of those efforts have failed to catch on as their backers had hoped, largely because broadcast platforms are inherently uni-directional. They’re winky_dinknot networked to support much beyond overlaying some pre-baked interactive elements. Even today, when second-screen use while watching TV is a mainstream behavior, most of that activity involves something other than the content on the TV screen, or happens on unrelated social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook that are opaque to the broadcaster until after the fact. Dedicated second-screen apps allow for greater dialog between broadcaster and viewer but don’t really capture the broader conversation around the content.

This month, however, we’ve seen the first steps toward what could be a new and more promising stage in the evolution of social TV. Last week, Twitter landed a deal with the NFL to live-stream a package of 10 “Thursday Night Football” games next season. Though Twitter was not the highest bidder for the streaming rights, the micro-blogging service is a natural online home for the NFL. Nearly 50 percent of the conversations on Twitter are sports related and the NFL is one of the most frequent topics of those conversations. Read More »

How Twitter Beat Out Rivals For NFL Deal

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Twitter this week landed streaming rights to a 10-game package of Thursday Night Football games next season for a surprisingly modest $10 million, edging out rival bids from Verizon, Amazon and Yahoo, at least one of which reportedly came in 50 percent higher than Twitter’s offer. Another rival, Facebook, reportedly dropped out of the bidding last week over objections to the advertising framework imposed on the deal by the NFL.

Twitter, in fact, will get minimal advertising rights as part of the deal. As a technical matter, it will be rebroadcasting the CBS and NBC feeds of the nfl_gamegames, which the networks will also be streaming over their own, authenticated TV Everywhere platforms as part of their $450 million deal to broadcast the games, and the networks will be handling the bulk of the ad sales for both broadcast and digital channels. Twitter will get a little bit of inventory around the margins to sell, plus some pre-game, player-created spots on Periscope. The deal is basically a $10 million brand-building exercise for micro-blogging and live streaming platform.

The games, in fact, will be available for free, without authentication, both on Twitter’s own platform and across its entire, syndicated global footprint.

That last point was obviously critical for the NFL, which has been working feverishly to expand its audience outside the U.S. and sees streaming as a way to reach potential fans in territories where broadcast rights would be a tough sell. Read More »

For Amazon, Live OTT Comes With A Twitch

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At his Streaming Media blog, Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing debate over why Amazon kicked Apple TV and Chromecast products out of its online store. According to Rayburn’s sources, Amazon has been chatting up content owners about offering a live, over-the-top video service of some kind.

Rayburn speculates that such a plan could help explain why Amazon recently acquired the cloud-based live streaming platform provider Elemental Technologies at an unusually high valuation:

cable_TV_not1Insiders say Elemental is on a run rate to do close to $100M in 2016. So if the rumors of Amazon valuing Elemental at $500M are correct, Elemental is getting about 5x projected 2016 revenue, a rather high valuation, unless Amazon is also placing value on them for other reasons, like the ability to power their own live OTT service.

I’ll add another data point in support of the notion: Twitch, which Amazon acquired last year for close to $1 billion. As noted in a post here last week, Twitch is rolling out a new set of tools to help its broadcasters linear-ize their channels, by mixing live and on-demand content and creating playlists that turn the channel into a 24/7 experience. Read More »

More Than A Game: What TV Can Learn From Twitch

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One of the enduring frustrations of would-be TV innovators, famously voiced by Steve Jobs back in 2010, has been the inability to integrate live, linear and on-demand content into a single, easy-to-navigate platform. “The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go to market strategy,” the late Apple CEO told the AllThingsD conference that year. “The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box..The only way that’s going to change is if you tear up the set-top box, give it a new UI, and get it in front of consumers in a way they’re going to want it.”

As discussed here in previous posts, the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a number of steps to promote greater integration, from redefining who qualifies as a multichannel video programming distributor to mandating downloadable security for set-top boxes, but none of those steps — or even all Forza-Forizon-2-Twitchof those steps together — would solve all the problems or resolve all of the commercial and technical conflicts that make seamless integration so challenging today, and in any case could be years down the road.

There is one corner of the media business. however, where the integration of live, linear and on-demand content is actually happening today: games.

Over the weekend, the hugely popular site for live-streaming game play, Twitch, announced a number of new features during its first annual TwitchCon in San Francisco, including the ability to upload videos directly to the Twitch platform. Up to now, Twitch channel owners have needed to stream content first and then incorporate the archived stream into their channel as on-demand content. Now, users will be able to upload video directly to the platform without having to stream it first. Read More »

YouTube and Twitch Channel Cable TV

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With the upcoming launch of YouTube Gaming, YouTube will have dedicated apps for its three most popular categories of videos: music (Music Key), kids (YouTube Kids) and now video games.

While the Google-owned site has long supported discreet “channels,” those are largely a convenience for individual video creators as they look to build their own YouTube_music_keycorporate or personal brands. They were not created by YouTube with an eye to sorting the content in its vast online library by category or genre. Nor, by extension, were they created to try to segment YouTube’s vast audience by interests, tastes or demographics  the way, say, a category-specific cable TV network like Nickelodeon or CNBC seeks to do.

By creating category-specific apps, however, YouTube is clearly edging toward that model.

The launch of YouTube Gaming, of course, is also Google’s response to the rapid growth of Twitch, the live-streaming gaming site it came close to buying last year only to have Amazon snatch it away at the last minute. While Twitch’s audience of 100 million active monthly users is a small fraction of YouTube’s more than 1 billion, they’re a dedicated bunch. The average Twitch user spends 106 minutes a day on the site, according to the company, and peak concurrent usage can reach 1.5 million. Read More »

YouTube Needs To Get Its Live Act Together

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YouTube is not confirming but not exactly denying a report by the Daily Dot on Wednesday claiming the video site is getting ready to relaunch its live-streaming platform in with a new emphasis on games and e-sports. An announcement could come as soon as June, during the E3 game expo in Los Angeles, the report said.

Asked for comment, YouTube provided the website with a link to a GIF with no further explanation.  Asked in a follow-up inquiry whether the GIF was meant as a joke, YouTube replied that no, “the GIF really was [its] official response.”

Make of it what you will. But for YouTube’s sake I hope the original report is correct, because Google really needs to do something big in live streaming, and soon. Read More »

Twitch goes to the movies

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We missed this amid the hubbub of CES, but apropos our Wednesday post Twitch has begun experimenting with live movie screenings on its platform through a partnership with Devolver Digital. Each Friday through February 20th Twitch will host a screening of a game-related movie, along with a live chat with the filmmaker on its main channel.

twitch_logo3The series kicked off January 9th with an airing of “Stream Dream,” a documentary about the growing impact of game streamers like Pew Die Pie, Smosh and Angry Joe. Today’s feature, at 2:15 PST, will be “Pixel Poetry,” a documentary on the artistry of games. Read More »