Topic: Video
YouTube TV Adds 10 New Markets with Local Channels (Jul 20, 2017)
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Snapchat Launches Daily NBC News Show (Jul 19, 2017)
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★ Netflix Q2 Earnings: Later House of Cards Launch Drives Strong Sub Growth (Jul 17, 2017)
Netflix today kicked off the Q2 earnings season with the first official earnings from a company that I cover, and reported stronger than expected subscriber growth off the back of a House of Cards season launch that was pushed back from Q1. Netflix was way off on its sub growth forecast, and though it surprised on the upside this time around that hasn’t always been the case in several recent guidance misses. Even though Netflix didn’t mention it this quarter, the delayed HoC launch screwed around with lots of year on year comparisons both this quarter and last, since Q1 is usually by far its strongest quarter for subscriber adds and Q2 is usually the low point of the year. Taking a step back, though, Netflix continues on its recent tear, with international growth the major driver, and profits domestically continuing to grow nicely off the back of last year’s price increases. Importantly, Netflix is now projecting that the international business will be profitable on a contribution basis for 2017 as a whole, which will be another major milestone after total non-US subs surpassed US streaming subs for the first time in Q2. The cash flow drain continues to be rapid, with an average of over half a billion dollars per quarter in negative free cash flow over the past year, and over $2 billion in cash content costs in Q2, and $8 billion over the past year, relative to the $6 billion Netflix protected for 2017 on a P&L basis (see this Variety piece I wrote last month for why cash and P&L spending are so different). For now, the subscriber and associated revenue growth are keeping Netflix out ahead of its content spending, but Netflix absolutely has to continue to grow at close to the current rate if it’s to continue to finance massive original content costs and grow profits at the same time.
This is a good time to remind you about the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service I also offer, which provides slide decks and videos on roughly a dozen major tech companies including Netflix each quarter during earnings season. Tech Narratives subscribers get a 50% discount, so let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send you a coupon code. The Q2 Netflix deck is available now, and will be updated in a few days when the 10-Q is out with more data. You’ll find some of the charts in this Twitter thread from earlier.
via Netflix
Amazon’s Video Direct Program Starting to Generate Meaningful Revenue for Creators (Jul 17, 2017)
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Netflix Squeezes Fox Out of Top 4 Must-Keep Viewing Options (Jul 12, 2017)
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Apple’s Share of Video on Demand Sales and Rentals Said to be Falling (Jul 10, 2017)
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Sony Raises Monthly Price of Playstation Vue Packages by $10 (Jul 7, 2017)
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Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter Reported to Seek World Cup Highlights From Fox (Jul 6, 2017)
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Facebook Has Two More Original Video Series in the Works (Jul 3, 2017)
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AT&T More than Doubles DirecTV Now Live Local Channel Lineup (Jun 30, 2017)
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Amazon’s Twitch Adding New Features on Mobile App (Jun 29, 2017)
Amazon’s Twitch streaming service is adding a bunch of new features to its streaming app in July, something I missed yesterday. The big addition is streaming live video (though not the usual gameplay video) from the mobile app itself, something which will be useful for direct-to-camera or other vlogging-type content which Twitch is trying to push as it expands beyond its core historical gaming video roots. Twitch also touted 83m downloads of its app, though with just under 10m daily active users, that number feels a bit irrelevant, and merely highlights the fairly small percentage of people who’ve tried the app who use it daily. The 9.7m daily active user number is also a great illustration of how niche a video platform Twitch remains, though it’s clearly very important to the users it does have: they spend an average of 106 minutes per day on the site, which is huge. But given YouTube’s recent 1.5 billion monthly user announcement, it’s clear that Twitch is still a marginal player in the overall video space, even if it’s a much more significant one in the gaming segment specifically. Something else I’d never really looked at before but is stark once you do look is the fact that there’s basically no sign anywhere on Twitch that it has anything to do with Amazon, even on the About page. So it’s clear that, though Amazon likely has some integration plans in mind longer term, for now it’s very much running as a separate independent entity, much as Zappos always has in the e-commerce space.
via TechCrunch
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 Prepping New App for Video Creators (Jun 23, 2017)
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YouTube Makes Series of Announcements at VidCon (Jun 23, 2017)
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Netflix Announces Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Shows for Kids (Jun 20, 2017)
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Time Warner Signs $100m Deal to Develop Shows for Snapchat (Jun 19, 2017)
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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)
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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
Amazon Channels Accounts for Big Chunk of HBO, Starz, Showtime Subscribers (Jun 7, 2017)
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