Look for 2024 to see continued growth in ad-supported streaming. The New Year also will see artificial intelligence take on even more important roles, says Witbe CEO Mathieu Planche. Here are his thoughts about 2024: 

“Streaming ads [will be] in the spotlight. While streaming video was once regarded as the way to watch content without ads, the tide resoundingly turned in 2023. Ad-supported services like Tubi and Freevee hit the mainstream; video apps like TikTok made billions of dollars in ad revenue; and top streamers like Netflix, Max and Disney+ all added cheaper, ad-supported subscription tiers.

“In 2024, we can expect to see even more ads, beginning with Prime Video adding them to its content in the first half of the year. The challenge will be in dynamically inserting these streaming ads without compromising on video performance or viewers’ quality of experience.

“AI… [will enable] innovation behind the scenes [next year]. Video service providers have relied on test automation for years to help them ensure their services perform equally well on every device and network available. AI has already begun to take over some of the workload, speeding up the automation process. In 2024, we expect that new AI innovations will transform the video delivery process even further, easing the workload for testing teams and offering new ways to bring viewers personalized content and consistent performance across devices.”

New research from Attest on U.S. media consumption indicates that Americans have some very definite opinions on how Netflix should be changing its service, with the largest number of current subscribers saying they would switch to Netflix with ads if it were free and 40% saying they would like Netflix to begin offering new episodes on a weekly basis rather than offering all of them at once. 

Attest’s researchers found the largest number of current subscribers want it for free, with 19.9% saying they would switch if it were free followed by 17.3% who say they won’t switch. Of respondents who would be willing to pay for a discounted subscription, most would be willing to pay $5-6 per month (15.5%), followed by $9-10 (12.7%) and $7-8 (11.2%).

The survey also indicated that subscription tiering may be a zero-gain game for Netflix. When Attest asked non-subscribers their thoughts on the introduction of ad-supported tiering, it found that Netflix may add some new subscribers, but at the cost of existing subscribers also downgrading their current subscription, meaning a negligible net gain in revenue. For example, pricing this new subscription tiering at $5-6 would persuade 18.9% of non-subscribers to sign up, but it would also encourage 15.5% of existing subscribers to switch to this cheaper price point. 

The survey also found that consumers would like a shift to weekly episode drops. Netflix once pioneered releasing entire series all at once, allowing viewers to “binge” at their convenience. With reports that it might be shifting away from this model to release episodes on a more traditional weekly basis, a majority (40.1%) said they would singly support such a move.

Password sharing still appears to be an issue with the Attest survey findings indicating that one in five (22.6%) rely on using an account paid for by someone else.

Attest also released its Q3 US Media Consumption Tracker Results, which found that it was a summer of growth for all forms of media.

Other key trends from the report include:  

• Attest’s research found that YouTube TV made the biggest gains of all the TV streaming services in Q.3. The platform increased weekly U.S. users by +6 percentage points to 23.0%. This could grow further following the launch of a new mix-and-match offering that means users don’t have to pay $64.99 a month for the YouTube TV Base Plan.
• Despite plans to shut down HBO Max as a standalone platform next year, it saw a 4.8 percentage point uplift to 32.6%, assisted by the popularity of its "Game of Thrones" prequel "House of the Dragon", which was the most-named show of the quarter. HBO Max and Discovery+ will merge into one platform next summer. 
• The growth that Disney+ enjoyed in Q2 has eased off in Q3. Netflix also remained more or less static but it still holds the title of the nation’s most popular streaming platform, watched by 70.1% of people weekly. By contrast, Amazon Prime grew 4.4 percentage points to 47.3%, joining Hulu in second place (47.2%). 
• Viewing time for subscription TV was modestly trending up, with Americans most likely to say they watch between 1-2 hours per day (30.9%). Viewing time is also on the up for free on-demand TV, although a lesser 22.5% of people watch it for 1-2 hours per day (and 34.4% don’t watch it at all).
• Live TV also saw a +4.4 percentage point increase in regular viewers: 77.7% of Americans say they watched at least some live TV each day. This is most likely to be between 1-2 hours.
• All of the 9 social platforms Attest measured showed growth. Twitter bounced back, increasing users overall by +6.9 percentage points to 56.5% and upping weekly users by 8.8 percentage points to 42.5%. This allowed it to overtake Pinterest and reclaim 6th position, although Snapchat still sits ahead at number 5.
• Americans are most likely to spend 1-2 hours (24.1%) a day on social media. A further 18.3% spend 3-4 hours. 
• TikTok saw the biggest growth of all social media platforms. The platform increased US usership by +8.3 percentage points to 68.1%. Those visiting it weekly grew by +9.5 percentage points to 55.5% (including 34.6% who visit the platform daily). 
• Instagram also performed well, expanding U.S. users numbers by +7.5 percentage points to 71.9%, and increasing weekly users by 9.7 percentage points to 60.9%.
• Attest also analyzed social media newcomer BeReal for the first time. The platform has been designed to combat the superficiality of regular social media by requiring users to take photos at different times each day - regardless of what they’re doing at that moment. It found that only 15.2% of Americans are using the platform currently, with 11% using it frequently. 
• All forms of news media enjoyed a positive quarter. Digital magazines chalked up a +6.5 percentage point increase in readers to 63.9%, with 33.0% of people accessing them weekly (+5.7pp). Readership of printed magazines also grew by +4.9 percentage points to 68.5%. This is alongside a 3.6 percentage point increase in people reading on a weekly basis (to 29.7%). Finally, news websites and apps saw a +4.5 percentage point increase in users (to 82.0%) and a +6 percentage point uplift in Americans accessing them weekly (to 59.7%).
• Printed newspapers even saw a surprise boost in Q3. They grew readers by +6.6 percentage points to 61.6% - that’s the highest the figure has been all year. Reading frequency also increased, with 32.1% of people (+6 pp) picking up a printed newspaper at least once a week.  
• Subscriptions to news media also grew this quarter. Following a +3.1 percentage point increase, 40.0% of Americans have at least one paid-for content subscription (either print or digital).

TORONTO—Paramount Global and Corus Entertainment Inc. have announced that the free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service Pluto TV will debut in Canada on December 1.

The launch will feature Pluto’s most robust content offering at launch to-date, with more than 100 unique, curated channels and over 20,000 hours of content, including a wide spectrum of free programming such as drama, comedy, lifestyle, kids, movies, around-the-clock news and more, Paramount reported. 

In addition, audiences will have access to flagship Canadian series from Corus Studios as well as key series from the popular NCIS Franchise. 

The FAST service will also feature curated movie channels programmed by genre, including Pluto TV Comedy, Pluto TV Drama, Pluto TV Action, The Asylum, Christmas 365 and Thriller 365.

“Our initial channel lineup further illustrates how we are working to combine Corus' incredible local content offering with Pluto TV's global content, to meet the tastes of the Canadian audience,” explained Olivier Jollet, executive vice president and international GM for Pluto TV at Paramount Global. “I'm confident that Pluto TV will quickly become a new destination both for fans of curated content as well as for clients and partners interested in investing in a new and unique streaming service upon its launch."

NEW YORK—A new report from Horowitz Research finds that six in 10 (58%) of consumers say that brands and advertisers are offering consumers “more ads featuring diverse people, lifestyles and cultures” and half of consumers surveyed feel like they are seeing “more companies making a sincere effort towards diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their business practices because they really want to do better.”

But the survey also found widespread skepticism about those efforts, with four in ten consumers—including 41% of Black, 38% of Asians, and 37% of Latinx/Hispanics saying they are seeing more “companies that are insincere in their efforts towards DEI because they just want to get more business.”

“What this means” noted Adriana Waterston, chief revenue officer and insights and strategy lead at the research firm, “is that companies must step up to the plate if they don’t want to be perceived as performative and pandering.”

The data is from the newly released report “State of Consumer Engagement 2021” from Horowitz.

The report and survey also provides insights into what companies can do to prove their commitment to diverse audiences and communities. 

According to the study, 44% of consumers say it’s important to know companies’ socio-political stances so they can make choices about who to support with their dollars based on how aligned they are with their values. 

In particular, the study reveals that Black (53%), Latinx/Hispanic (51%), and Asian (50%) consumers find it important to know a brand’s socio-political and environmental stances so they can factor that into their respective purchase considerations, more so than their white counterparts (40%).

The Horowitz study also found that over half of consumers have taken action either in support of, or against, brands based on their perceived alignment with their socio-political views. Some of the brands that consumers have supported positively (by spending more money with them or defending others who were critical of the brand) or negatively (by boycotting their products, calling them out in social media, etc.) are Amazon, Walmart, Chick Fil-a, Nike, and Coca-Cola, Horowitz reported. 

To not be perceived as not simply going through the motions, brands must understand the values of their target market and actively demonstrate an alignment to those values, for example, by supporting and investing in local Black, Latinx, and Asian communities, the report noted. 

Seven in ten consumers in the Horowitz survey say that it is important to them to see a brand’s commitment to the communities in which they place their businesses, such as through job creation, small business grants, and other substantial investments. The study also looks at other ways brands can demonstrate their support of diverse people and communities, such as by committing to spend advertising dollars in Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian media.

Waterston noted that “so many more companies have entered the multicultural space in the past year, but it’s not as easy as some might think to build trust among communities that have long been overlooked and undervalued. Moreover, between today’s socio-political climate and the transparency the internet and social media provide, it’s challenging for a brand to attempt to say one thing in their advertising but do something completely different when it comes to their political endorsements, their track record on worker’s rights, and their commitment to DEI internally with their hiring practices and so forth.”

Waterston also stressed that while diverse groups are generally aligned in terms of their expectations from brands, these groups are distinct and nuanced, they do not all think alike or have the same set of values. “This is why investments in research among diverse audiences is more important today than ever before,” Waterston adds.

For more information about "State of Consumer Engagement 2021" contact Sally Schachat at sallys@horowitzresearch.com.

Part 1 of 2

The monetization of ad-supported, linear over-the-top (OTT) video suffers from multiple issues: domains of expertise are distributed (try catching an ad insertion and demand person in the same room); acronyms seem designed to confuse (why do some people call it AVOD?); and it uses new, complex, sometimes-wobbly technology. We’ll clear all of that up in this article. 

Not really. You really thought that was possible? Pshaw. But we’ll clarify a small portion related to ways that monetization in server-side ad insertion (SSAI) OTT video delivery can fail. An architecture for that ecosystem is shown below.

Publishers monetize their content by creating ad breaks in their linear streams into which ads are spliced. In typical OTT delivery, these ads—targeted or not—are fetched in close-to-real-time from an ad server and spliced by an SSAI system into each user’s linear video stream. Ad calls are made when ad breaks occur in the playout stream. The returned ads typically require transcoding into the delivery streaming format before they can be spliced for delivery in the stream. 

A publisher with a 15% ad load—that is, nine minutes per hour—might imagine that they can fill each hour of viewing with 36 15-second ads, resulting in, as an example, $0.36 of revenue per hour viewed, assuming a $10 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). Unfortunately, that rate of insertion doesn’t ever really occur, because a significant portion of the nine minutes will be filled with ad holes—spots where no ad was inserted for a variety of reasons—which will be covered in this article.

Ad holes are a rarity in broadcast video, where ad placement is carefully pre-planned and is rarely programmatic. In OTT, ad placement is most often not pre-planned; it is often programmatic, and demand is not yet as high. Ad holes are everywhere. 

What causes an otherwise perfectly good ad slot to become an ad hole? There are, broadly speaking, plain errors, systematic issues and misunderstandings. Understanding the root causes of ad holes can help publishers improve their monetization, at the very least by understanding which ecosystem partner to hold accountable for less than optimal yield.

THE VARIOUS ERRORS THAT CAUSE AD HOLES

Even with relatively comprehensive specifications (e.g. IAB’s VAST), straightforward but hard to find errors are common. The most direct error is a “non-conformant VAST response.” Even some major programmatic DSPs—the systems where most ads originate—suffer from this issue occasionally. Non-conformant VAST leads to a parsing error, which isn’t always flagged by the VAST parser on the SSAI system. A more subtle variant of this is an incompatibility between the VAST response and the VAST parser.

Issues encountered in the wild include:

• Expectation on the VAST payload formatting. These include issues such as white space in CDATA blocks or ordering of XML elements in the VAST response. The VAST specification allows variability, but the overwhelming majority of VAST responses, as an example, position XML elements in the same relative order. Some (major brand) systems make assumptions about this order and will break when elements are not in the expected order. 

• Expectation on non-empty VAST XML elements. Data, such as the Ad System ID, are expected by some components as ways to categorize VAST responses. If they are omitted, the response may be completely rejected.  
• Inconsistent data. For example, some ad insertion systems balk when the VAST-signaled creative duration is different from the actual creative duration. Is this an error or a feature? It’s not clear: Should ads that are longer than specified be inserted or rejected? One can make an argument for either approach.  
• Beacon length issues. Inserted ads are measured by beacons—URLs that signal to the ecosystem participants that an ad was viewed. In some situations, these beacons may exceed the URL limit of 4,096 characters and are rejected. These aren’t ad holes; they just look like ad holes, since they do not register as having received an impression, and hence are not monetizing. 
• Weirdly long HTTP headers. Some responses carry very long strings of data that break some servers.    

The above all result in ad holes: ad responses that do not lead to a monetizable impression. 

How are these issues mitigated? Bad or incompatible VAST generated by a DSP is difficult to track. The most common approach to uncovering these issues is to note certain ads that never lead to impressions. This requires per-ad-creative monitoring, which is difficult to automate. Fixing these issues is also difficult, since normally there aren’t direct relationships between DSPs and SSAI vendors, not to mention publishers.

Problems, like long headers, that manifest pair-wise between ecosystem partners—for example a DSP and an SSAI system—are almost impossible to fix without a central entity that can manage all the partners in the ecosystem, each of which is convinced the problem is elsewhere.

The good news is that these types of errors are becoming less frequent over time as the ecosystems mature, including the introduction of central mediating entities. 

However, some issues aren’t errors, they’re incompatibilities between distinct systems, e.g. the demand ad server and the SSAI system. These issues are a bit arcane but worth understanding, so stay tuned for Part 2, which will dig deeper into the systemic issues that cause ad holes and misunderstandings that lead to unfilled inventory.  

Yuval Fisher is senior vice president, technology for Wurl.

NEW YORK—Subscribers to streaming/OTT services generally are OK with the concept of advertising in exchange for ad-supported or free subscriptions. However, they are sensitive about the value of ads in exchange for lower subscription rates and are not interested in ads in a traditional linear format.

These are a few of the findings in Hub Entertainment Research’s “Monetization of Video” report, which surveyed 1,764 broadband subscribers last month.

According to the survey, an equal percentage of respondents are cool with advertising on OTT services in exchange for free or lower-cost subscriptions, even without the capability to skip ads. However, the preference falls with age; 20% of respondents 18-24 do not support ad-supported streaming services, but that figure is 10% for older viewers.

Streamers that do use ads to subsidize subscription costs have to be sensitive to viewer perceptions of ad/price balance, according to Hub. “If Netflix is considering including ads in its service, the results show that the monthly subscription fee would need to be significantly lower than the current fee—to avoid losing subscribers,” the researcher said.

Subscribers also don’t want their streaming service to reflect a traditional linear TV service either. “Almost no respondents who viewed a show recently on linear through an MVPD considered the ad load reasonable—and a third felt it was unreasonable,” Hub said.

Another attractive feature for OTT services is the absence of term contracts that pay-TV providers traditionally require. Among 18-34 year olds, a seven-day free trial has become more important in attracting new subscribers in recent years, with the percentage rising from 29% to 38% in one year, Hub said.

Hulu is tops in customer satisfaction, with 80% of respondents rating it an “excellent” or “good” value, while Netflix came in second at 75%. That’s also the percentage of respondents who say that having access to Netflix on their cable box makes their cable TV subscription more valuable.

NEW YORK—The TV business has long looked to the Super Bowl as a tent-pole sales event that can rival Black Friday. And according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), this year’s Patriots-Eagles game won’t disappoint.

The trade group’s annual Super Bowl survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, shows that 8 percent of American adults plan to buy a new TV for the Feb. 4 contest, unchanged from last year.

Explained Phil Rist, Prosper’s strategy executive VP, “Consumers are carrying strong spending momentum from the holiday season into their Super Bowl festivities. Fans aren’t afraid to spend a few extra dollars to make this year’s game the best one yet.”

A separate survey by online services firm InstartLogic also bodes well for Super Bowl LII advertisers, which will include a considerable contingent of tech companies. According to its poll of more than 1,000 adults, nearly half (46.7 percent) rank watching the ads as the most important online activity during the game, while a whopping 87.2 percent admit to being affected by Super Bowl commercials.

A running ad tracker by Adweek points to at least five Big Game advertisers with their hands in the CE sauce, including Monster, Verizon, Groupon, Squarespace and Hulu. Here’s a quick Adweek rundown:

· Fresh from CES, Monster spokestar Iggy Azalea will appear in the company’s first ever Super Bowl spot.

· Verizon Wireless, which finds itself in the uncomfortable position of defending its No. 1 status from T-Mobile, will make its first Super Bowl appearance since 2011, when it touted the recently released iPhone 4.

· Groupon, ranked 28 on the TWICE Top 100 CE Retailers Report, will air a 30-second, fourth-quarter spot with comedienne Tiffany Haddish, the merchant’s new celebrity spokesperson.

· Web-hosting service Squarespace will follow up last year’s Emmy Award-winning spot featuring actor John Malkovich with a camp-side cameo by Keanu Reeves.

· Hulu is back for a second year but is keeping its Super Bowl plans under wraps.

This story first appeared on TV Technology's sister publication TWICE. 

NEW YORK—When it comes to streaming, viewers say they are becoming ok with advertisements, according to a recent report from Telaria. In a survey that featured respondents from five countries, half of the respondents said that watching ads was a fair value exchange for low-cost content. They also found ads on connected TVs to be “less annoying” than those on linear TV. Ads on connected TVs also seem to work better, with more than half of weekly users researching or purchasing items they saw ads for.

Read the full story on TVT’s sister publication B&C.

NEW YORK—According to a new report from FreeWheel, advertisers continue to make their way to premium digital video. Premium ad views great at 17 percent year-over-year, with a strong push from full-episode and live stream monetization. Video starts were up 26 percent.

To find out more, read the full story on TVT’s sister publication B&C.