NEW YORK—BIScience, the company behind the AdClarity AI-driven ad intelligence platform, today announced the launch of its TV Intelligence Suite, bringing U.S. linear TV coverage into AdClarity’s existing digital, social, video, and CTV capabilities. The platform now delivers cross-media intelligence using one consistent methodology and consistent performance metrics, the company said.

AdClarity is a digital-first ad intelligence platform that covers more than 250 leading categories and industries in the U.S., including top spending sectors such as CPG, financial services, news and media, technology, and others.

As advertising budgets continue migrating from linear television to digital channels, organizations that lack cross-media visibility cannot determine whether they are overspending or underspending relative to the market. For senior marketing leaders, media planners, analysts, and operations teams, this gap creates significant operational overhead and an inability to set strategy with confidence.

According to AdClarity data, total tracked U.S. digital advertising spend reached $174.4 billion in 2025, up 5.5 percent year over year, with CTV the fastest-growing channel at $38 billion (up 8.1 percent). Adding approximately $51 billion in U.S. linear television spend gives customers visibility into how budgets shift across the full media mix.

AdClarity’s Linear TV coverage spans more than 100 U.S. networks and local affiliates, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and leading cable, news, and sports channels, with breakdowns by Designated Market Area (DMA), daypart, program, and creative execution. By pairing DMA-specific digital insights with local TV data, the platform delivers what BIScience describes as the most granular picture of U.S. local advertising available.

The platform is powered by AdClarity’s proprietary data infrastructure, spanning 52 global markets and 30 million opt-in panelists. Data is updated daily, with point-in-time data available from 2018 onward.

AdClarity provides real CTR analysis for each ad and campaign and Ad Objective attribution that classifies ads as performance or brand awareness. The platform also provides DMA-level spend analysis and AI-driven insights with a chatbot for automated competitive and media mix analysis, according to the company.

“Until now, understanding where advertising budgets are moving between digital and television required stitching together disconnected tools with incompatible metrics,” said Dorit Kaplan, VP Product and Strategy at BIScience. “With the TV Intelligence Suite, AdClarity delivers what the market has been waiting for: a single cross-media view, built on consistent methodology, that enables teams to see the complete picture and make decisions with confidence. Our digital-first foundation gives us a distinct advantage as we bring every major advertising channel into one platform.”

AdClarity serves more than 2,000 customers worldwide, including 27% of the Fortune 500. The platform is used by global brands such as Adidas, Amazon, Booking.com, Disney, Shell, Sony, and Wix, and is trusted by partners including Nielsen, Kantar, WPP, and MediaRadar.

The TV Intelligence Suite is available now for enterprise customers in the United States. CTV coverage is currently available in the U.S., Germany, Canada, the U.K., and Australia.

A new report from the Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) casts doubt among those who think linear TV’s days are numbered.

According to the association’s 2026 Media Comparisons Study, TV, viewed on a television screen, has the highest reach and time spent of all media platforms studied, for all age groups and categories measured and in addition, the majority of those viewers are reached through broadcast TV.

The report, conducted by GfK/NIQ and commissioned by TVB, examined media use among adults 18+ on over 20 traditional and digital media platforms including free, paid ad-supported, and advertising-free streaming platforms, as well as user-generated and short-form content like YouTube. It measured linear broadcast viewing of programs on TV, mobile devices, websites/apps, and digital devices to get a complete picture of broadcast’s assets, TVB said.

In addition to analyzing reach and time spent, the study also looked at what news sources are considered most trustworthy, the level of community involvement, and motivation to do further research online.

The report also had more good news for local TV, as the majority of respondents (79%) cited local stations as their most trusted news source, with 47% of respondents citing local broadcast television assets as “most involved in their community.” Ranked at the bottom of the list were social media and news aggregator websites.

In terms of broadcast, the study reported that more time is spent with broadcast TV across all devices than with cable and streaming programs and that respondents spend far more time on broadcast TV than on user generated and short-form content like YouTube.

Other key findings of the study include:

• TV ads motivate viewers to do further research online.
• 85% of broadcast viewing is on the larger TV screen, while 51% of viewing time on platforms like YouTube is on smaller digital devices.
• Total broadcast assets can reach nine out of ten adults 18+ and in key categories.
• Broadcast websites, and broadcast TV on a digital device, added more reach to broadcast TV than cable and AVOD.
• When looking at long-form ad-supported programming, linear TV represents 68% of viewing time, while streaming represents 32%.
• Broadcast reaches 94% of ad-supported streamers who stream on their TV sets.
• Advertisers cannot reach ad-free streamers, but broadcast assets can reach 92% of them.

The survey covered a base sample of 4,000 and was conducted in November and December 2025.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.—A new survey indicates that cable networks and broadcasters are losing the battle for being top of mind with viewers as the default destination for viewing TV, with nearly half of all viewers (46%) saying that their first stop when they start watching TV is with an app from one of the top five SVOD streaming services.

Hub Entertainment Research's latest "Decoding the Default" study found that for the first time in five years of tracking, the combined "Big 5" SVODs (Netflix, Prime Video Disney+, Hulu, and Max) are more likely to be the "first stop" for 46% of viewers versus 38% starting with live TV via cable, vMVPD or antenna.

This is a monumental shift in viewing habits that has worrying implications for traditional TV. In 2018 only 30% started viewing with one of the top five SVOD services versus 62% for live TV. In a landscape of endless viewing choices, the services that viewers turn to first are the ones that consumers engage with most and are least likely to cancel, the researchers said.

The survey also found that Netflix is the top SVOD default, on par with cable TV as a "first stop" to watch. Around one quarter of viewers (26%) say that Netflix is the first place they turn to when they want to watch something, on par with the 26% of viewers who say traditional cable (excluding vMVPD and antenna) is their default source.

The research also found that different kinds of content play a key role in anchoring viewers to SVODs, live TV and FAST services.

About 42% of viewers who default to a major SVOD say that "favorite shows" connect them to that service. In contrast, live programming (sports, news) continues to make traditional cable a default source, while those who default to a free ad-supported (FAST) service say that "variety" is the big draw.

While sports rights are migrating to streamers, the current hold-up of Venu sports and other challenges in finding sports content online will continue to challenge viewers juggling both traditional cable and online options.

In another worrying finding for pay TV, broadcasters and linear TV the researchers reported that loyalty to SVODs is notably stronger compared to traditional MVPD sources. Default usage helps stickiness, but only so much: when viewers are asked to choose a service to drop, live TV from MVPD does not hold up as well as streaming services. Even among devoted cable viewers who say it is their "first choice" for viewing, they are less loyal to that service (24% say they will drop), compared to SVOD "default" users (3%-13%).

"The first stop people turn to watch will always be the one that has the highest loyalty, and favorite shows can deepen those loyalties across streamers," said Jason Platt Zolov, Senior Consultant for Hub. “While football and the election may help keep cable TV viewers watching this fall, we can expect a quicker abandonment of cable as live sports becomes more easily available online."

These findings are from Hub’s 2024 “Decoding the Default” report, based on a survey conducted among 1,600 US consumers with broadband, age 16-74, who watch at least 1 hour of TV per week. Interviews were conducted in August 2024 and explored consumers’ default options for viewing sources and how those have changed over time. A free excerpt of the findings is available on Hub’s website. This report is part of the “Hub Reports” syndicated report series.

SAN FRANCISCO—A new study from Samba TV analyzing 45 billion hours of linear and streaming viewing in the first half of 2024 has found that OTT viewing continues to set new records while linear TV viewing has fallen to levels not seen since the pre-pandemic. 

Samba TV’s State of Viewership Report for the first half of 2024 found that OTT viewing grew by 40% while linear TV viewing declined by 1%, dropping to levels not seen since pre-pandemic. The study also found that less than half of U.S. households now watch linear TV each day, according to Samba TV.

Among its standout findings, the report also highlighted the critical role of advanced AI measurement tools like logo recognition, the value of tailored release schedules and bundles for streaming platforms in increasing viewer engagement, and the importance of optimizing cross-screen advertising campaigns through new AVOD and FAST opportunities. 

As the 2024 election season intensifies, political advertisers in particular need to employ comprehensive data strategies to effectively reach diverse voter segments and drive meaningful engagement across screens. Non-political advertisers should anticipate a significant increase in CPM-rates for highly coveted ad inventory and platforms that reach potential voters in swing states.

"The AI hype cycle has passed, but AI transformation has just begun. In this evolving landscape, and on the brink of a transformative election season, now it is more important than ever to employ a cross-channel strategy for audience outreach and measurement," said Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of Samba TV. "Streaming video providers are innovating to retain viewers fighting tooth and nail for engagement, and collectively eroding the base of linear. The advertising market focused on linear and CTV formats is seeing stability, particularly in the pharmaceutical and health sectors, but we are seeing declines from the entertainment vertical, as some ads shift to social and digital."

"The rise of ad-supported streaming and the decline of linear TV illustrate a pivotal shift in how audiences consume content," Navin continued. "Smart marketers are capitalizing on these changes, leveraging advanced targeting capabilities to reach consumers across screens with incrementality. This is an exciting time for advertisers to explore the full potential of omniscreen engagement and story-telling, driving both impact and innovation."

Other key findings include: 

• In the first half of 2024, U.S. households watched a record level of over-the-top (OTT) content, marking a 40% increase from 2023. This surge coincides with a 1% decline in linear TV consumption as audiences age and live events shift to streaming platforms, continuing the trend toward cord-cutting.
• FAST and ad-supported tiers of SVOD are becoming key avenues for advertisers to reach audiences who are increasingly moving away from traditional cable and broadcast. This shift towards ad-supported streaming offers advertisers ample opportunities to engage with younger audiences and adapt to the evolving media consumption landscape.
• Streaming TV has become ubiquitous, with 99M U.S. households watching OTT content during H1 2024. However, streamers have their work cut out for themselves in preventing churn, as many viewers cycle through subscriptions after watching only one piece of content on a platform. 
• Sports and politics captivate linear viewers while streaming originals based on existing IP shine:
• The 2024 Super Bowl achieved the highest viewership since pre-pandemic times and was the most watched linear event of H1 2024, reaffirming the enduring appeal of live sports. However, with many sporting events moving to streaming platforms, linear will struggle to maintain viewers. 
• The first presidential debate of 2024 between Trump and Biden was the most watched non-sports program of the half, highlighting the importance of news and political events in sustaining linear TV's audience in addition to sports. 
• From a streaming perspective, drama was the leading genre of the half, comprising 68% of the top 50 streaming shows. However, the prominence of crime and mystery within the top 50 shows increased significantly year-over-year, and those were two of the genres with the highest binge rates.  
• All of the top 10 streaming programs of the half were based on franchises like books, video games, etc., led by Netflix’s Fool Me Once S1 and Max’s House of the Dragon S2. The dominance of original content in the streaming landscape showcases the power of leveraging existing IP to engage audiences and drive streaming success.
• Entertainment dominates ads while the Pet industry amplifies presence: Entertainment is the leading vertical in ad impressions, accounting for 18% of total impressions across linear and OTT platforms.
• The Pharmaceutical & Medical and Health & Beauty sectors have gained traction, each increasing their share of ad impressions by two percentage points year-over-year.
• The Pet industry increased ad impressions by 17% in the first half of 2024, driven by 66% of U.S. households owning a pet, highlighting the sector's expanding influence. These trends underscore the dynamic nature of the advertising landscape, with emerging sectors gaining prominence alongside traditional leaders.

The full report can be found here. 

BARCELONA—Viewers worldwide viewed more on demand and linear TV than in the previous two years, according to NPAW’s 2023 Video Streaming Industry Report released this week. 

The amount of time the average user spends watching content per day increased globally in 2023 by 12% for VoD and 4% for Linear TV content. This pivot might signal an increase in consumption or a shift in the consumers' attention toward a more selective number of platforms, according to the researcher.

Previously, NPAW had blamed declines in VOD and linear TV on fragmentation in the streaming market but growth in Connected TV sales and “Quality of Experience” helped revive the sector in 2023, the researcher said. 

(NPAW’s 2024 Predictions: Role Of AI In Video Streaming To Climb Next Year)

The most notable finding of the report is the consolidation, in the second semester of the year, of the upward trend in daily user engagement for VoD and Linear TV, at 4% and 3% respectively, NPAW noted. Episodic content continued to dominate as the primary type of VoD content for another year, capturing 67% of the total global playtime. However, movies saw a slight increase, accounting for 26% of all VoD minutes streamed in 2023.

Additionally, 2023 was also a year of significant improvements in the Quality of Experience front, both globally, with a global decrease of 38% in the buffering ratio, and regionally, with regions like Asia experiencing an 18% increase in the average bitrate. These boosts signal that there is still room for optimization of the viewing experience.

At the device level, the growth in Smart TV sales helped drive up total playtime by up to 8 percentage points. NPAW concludes that this reaffirms that consumers overwhelmingly prefer big-screen experiences when streaming video content, reserving smaller-screen devices like smartphones for casual streaming or while on the move.

"These findings underscore a significant year of renewal and growth for the streaming sector. The increase of up to 12% in daily playtime per user, coupled with tangible improvements in the Quality of Experience, highlights how the industry is consolidating and evolving to meet and exceed viewer expectations," said Ferran G. Vilaró, CEO and Co-Founder of NPAW.

"As providers navigate this journey of optimization, leveraging deep end-user behavior and experience data will be crucial in capturing the attention and loyalty of consumers. Understanding the insights derived from NPAW’s 2023 Video Streaming Industry Report will play a pivotal role in shaping successful streaming strategies moving forward." Vilaró added.

The data analyzed in the report were extracted from the NPAW Suite from January to December 2023 and compared to data from 2022. They represent real-time data from over 190 global NPAW clients, including leading OTT providers, broadcasters, and telecom operators. 

The report can be downloaded here.

SAN FRANCISCO—The slow but steady decline of traditional linear TV continued apace in the second half of 2023, according to Samba TV.

In its latest State of Viewership report, the researcher analyzed approximately 46 billion hours of linear and streaming in the last six months of 2023, providing some insight into how the Hollywood actors and writers strikes have impacted an industry in an increasing state of flux.

"Our industry was presented with unique opportunities and challenges in 2023, such as the rise of live streaming sports, the impact of the strikes, and the proliferation of new measurement to understand ad performance,” said Samba TV Co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin. “The traditional TV advertising playbook no longer applies. As the audience shifts to streaming across live and scripted programming, smart advertisers optimize frequency, impact, and efficiency together in one comprehensive strategy.

According to Samba, year-over-year, linear TV reach experienced a slight decrease but remained steady compared to the first half of 2023. Although the drop in the first half of the year has been fairly common in recent years, linear viewing has usually increased in the second half (perhaps influenced by the NFL). However, this year it didn’t, with the average daily reach of linear TV in the second half of the year on par with the first half, and down 4% from the previous year.

Streaming hours viewed experienced increases during Q3 and Q4 of 2023, with 23% and 18% spikes respectively, compared to the previous year. This rise in viewership occurred despite a decrease in programming releases by services like Netflix, Samba TV said, adding that linear hours viewed decreased during both quarters, as the balance between time spent with connected and traditional TV closes in the coming years.

As subscription costs rise and the trend of “exclusives” increases, Samba’s report showed that “subscription cycling” and platform churn has only increased over the past year. More than two-thirds of Gen Z and millennial consumers plan to cycle in the next six months. Nearly half (46%) of U.S. households watched two or fewer services throughout the second half of 2023, Samba said.

As streaming platforms made a big push via ad campaigns to convert linear and OTT viewers to subscribers in the second half of 2024, with Paramount+ and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max ranked as the top streaming platforms to serve up ad impressions for their platforms in the second half of 2024. Paramount+ ads dominated with a quarter of the share of voice, particularly during CBS primetime airings. Meanwhile, Netflix experienced the most significant year-over-year growth, serving more than double the number of impressions in the second half of 2023 compared to 2022.

Original programming is not necessarily the best way to gain loyalty, according to Samba which said its research shows that many top platforms see over half of their viewers watching only one of the top 50 programs. The exception to that rule is Netflix, with almost 70% of viewers engaging with multiple top shows.

In terms of the types of content that have the biggest impact, adaptations, docuseries, and blockbuster movies on streaming platforms are successful, while live sports remain dominant on linear TV, Samba TV said. Eighty-nine of the top 100 most watched linear programs of the second half of 2023 were sports, and NFL games accounted for 76% of those programs, led by "Monday Night Football" on ABC and "Sunday Night Football" on NBC. "60 Minutes" was the top non-sports program, with episodes on Ukraine and the Israel and Gaza conflict ranking high, boosted by accompanying NFL games.

Netflix dominated streaming originals in the second half of 2023. Samba TV said Netflix's strategy to overcome the actors' and writers’ strikes involved focusing on programs based on novels, real events, or docuseries, with 70% of the top 10 streaming shows falling into these categories. This trend is expected to continue into the first half of 2024 as the impact of the strikes lingers.

"On the horizon for 2024, we believe SVOD services will face increased competition from FAST and the reduction in available new content due to the strikes. Streamers need to explore alternatives to the bundling strategy, such as targeting audiences with specific interests on social media where return on ad spend can be attractive relative to traditional media.” 

Meanwhile, the disruption in the TV business is forcing advertisers to respond to the challenge of optimizing reach and frequency in order to drive real-life outcomes, especially ahead of the 2024 election season, Samba TV said.

During the busiest shopping season, QSRs and retailers took the lead in advertising, with pizza chain Domino's reigning as the top advertiser by impressions. While retailers faced supply chain and inflation challenges, big box retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart increased their ad spend, outpacing department stores like Macy's and Kohl's during the second half of 2023.

According to Samba TV, during the second half of 2023, 92% of ads reached just 50% of U.S. households, with the most engaged half of households bombarded by an average of 150 ads per day. Meanwhile, the other half only saw 8% of ad impressions, averaging about 13 ads per day.

Navin continued, “In what will be a record-setting year of political campaign spending, these advertisers are facing the challenge of reaching a voter base that is more fragmented and disenfranchised than ever before. This election will be determined by streaming. To reach key voters in a meaningful way, it is crucial for these advertisers to lean into a data-driven, holistic, and real-time approach to addressing both traditional TV viewers and streamers alike.”

MUMBAI, India—As the NBA 2023-2024 season gets set to start in October, the league, which has made international expansion a key priority, has issued data showing that NBA games attracted record numbers of viewers in India during the 2022-2023 season. 

The NBA said that 2022-23 NBA season was the league's most-watched ever in India, surpassing 100 million unique viewers across linear, social media and digital media platforms for the first time ever. 

The 2023-24 NBA regular season action starts on Wednesday, October 25 and games will air live in India on Sports18-1, JioCinema and NBA League Pass via the NBA App.

"Surpassing the milestone of 100 million unique viewers last season is a testament to the growing interest in basketball here in India. Our strong distribution network and local language commentary on the platform has expanded the league's audience in the country, especially within the Hindi-speaking markets," said NBA India global partnerships & media business head Sunny Malik. "As we gear up for the 2023-24 season, we look forward to building on this momentum by providing fans in India with new and exciting ways to experience the NBA, including digital innovations and customized content on the devices and platforms they use the most."

The NBA also reported these stats from the 2022-23 NBA season in India: 

• Viewership of NBA games on digital platforms grew 12x from the 2021-22 season. 
• Overall linear and digital watch time of NBA games and programming grew by 50 percent compared to the 2021-22 season.
• Fifty-three percent of viewers were 30 years-old and younger, while 45 percent of all viewers were female. 
• Hindi commentary was available for 112 games throughout the season, contributing to an overall reach of 33 million viewers.
• The NBA introduced a youth-focused educational broadcast series on Nickelodeon Sonic featuring local cartoon characters Happy & Pinaki to further engage with Indian children and teach them the fundamentals of the game. The series reached 11 million viewers.
• More than 3.8 million fans follow the NBA's localized social media channels in India, registering a 2.6x increase in followers added this season as compared to 2021-2022.
• NBA's localized social media channels in India generated 1.3 billion video views, up 209 percent from the 2021-22 season, and 968 million engagements, registering an increase of 200 percent from last season.
• The NBA released 10 locally-produced content series in India that generated 182 million views across the league's social media channels, including This is Basketball starring NBA Brand Ambassador for India Ranveer Singh, which showcases the diversity of the basketball community in India; All The Way Up, a series with leading hip-hop artists that explores the convergence between hip-hop and basketball; The NBA India Weekly Show, centered around all things NBA and basketball in India; and The Real Talk, a video series featuring players, legends and other special guests.
• The NBA's user-generated content initiative #MadeInBallywood generated 42 million views on social media and received more than 50 entries from aspiring players across the country.

SAN FRANCISCO—Samba TV has announced today it is working with Epsilon, which is part of the Publicis Groupe, to integrate Samba TV’s OTT and linear television viewing data into Epsilon PeopleCloud. Samba TV’s U.S. viewership insights are sourced from 10 diverse television manufacturers (24 globally). 

The integration will provide Epsilon clients with granular insights into customers’ TV and streaming TV viewing to guide their media buying strategies. 

“Epsilon is a preeminent identity and audience provider to many of the world’s largest marketers,” said Kris Magel, head of enterprise solutions at Samba TV. “Their integration of Samba TV’s rich and representative viewing dataset will offer Epsilon and Publicis clients a deep understanding of the modern viewing behaviors of their  customers, as opposed to age/gender proxies. Epsilon and Publicis will also be the first agency holding company to build and deploy Samba TV Behavioral Audiences connected to Epsilon’s CORE ID on a self-serve basis, across all addressable media channels and partners.”

“Every marketer is searching for valid and representative views of today’s modern viewing behaviors to understand their current customers better and build new relationships with future customers,” added Kate Sirkin, executive vice president global data partnerships at Epsilon.

“Connecting CORE ID with Samba TV’s wealth of linear and OTT viewing data will enable sophisticated customer viewing insights and more versatile planning and targeting solutions for our clients across all major categories. In a time where we must optimize every dollar, our partnership with Samba TV supports our vision to have a full, 360-degree view of customers and prospects with which to better guide media spend to achieve growth in the most effective way possible.” 

NEW YORK—In what researchers are calling an inflection point in the time Americans’ spend viewing video, a new forecast from Insider Intelligence is predicting that for the first time, U.S. adults will spend more time watching digital video than traditional linear TV, according to the latest time spent forecast from Insider Intelligence.

In 2022, digital video time among US adults nearly caught up to TV time. U.S. adults spent an average of 3 hours and 2 minutes per day watching digital video and 3 hours and 7 minutes watching linear TV. Except for a slight uptick in 2020, daily TV time has declined every year since 2013, and it will continue to drop through 2024, the researchers said. 

Conversely, digital video time saw double-digit growth every year between 2011 and 2021. Growth slowed to single digits in 2022 but will remain positive through 2024, Insider Intelligence is predicting. 

This year, Insider Intelligence is forecasting that U.S. adults’ daily TV time will drop to 2 hours and 55 minutes, while digital video time will climb to 3 hours and 11 minutes. Linear TV will now represent 47.7% of total time spent with TV and digital video per day (the first time it’s dropped below 50%), while digital video will make up 52.3%.

The researchers noted that TikTok is driving social video consumption and they are predicting that TikTok's total viewing time will surpass Facebook in 2024

The researchers have defined traditional linear TV as any type of video content delivered via cable, satellite, telecom, or over-the-air antenna; they define digital video as video viewed via over-the-top or connected streaming services, as well as video viewed on social media, including YouTube.

“This milestone is driven by people spending more and more time watching video on their biggest and smallest screens, whether it’s an immersive drama on a connected TV or a viral clip on a smartphone,” said Paul Verna, principal analyst and head of the digital advertising and media desk at Insider Intelligence. “The growth of digital video is especially impressive when you consider that, as recently as four years ago, it accounted for roughly half of TV time. And bear in mind that our time spent forecasts are for adults only. Given teens’ preferences for social and streaming video over TV, we can expect these trends to continue to shift in favor of digital.”

Live sports shifting to streaming services is one reason why digital video consumption is surpassing TV. YouTube won the NFL Sunday Ticket at the end of last year, stealing Sunday evening football games away from DirecTV. Also, MLB sold the streaming rights to Friday night games to Apple TV+ and Sunday morning games to Peacock, Insider Intelligence reported. 

Its forecast also shows that YouTube and Netflix are neck and neck in terms of viewing time, with each grabbing an average of about 33 minutes per day among US adults. Hulu is in second place with 24 minutes, followed by Amazon Prime Video with 11 and Disney+ with 8, the company reported. 

Another key driver of digital video time is social video, the researchers said in a blog post. Average daily time spent with videos on social networks among US adults will climb 9.3% to 45.2 minutes this year. 

“TikTok is a key driver: Its total time spent among all US adults* will climb 14.2% this year to 17.4 minutes. With time spent with Facebook on the decline, TikTok will overtake it next year as the most-consumed social network among US adults. TikTok has been well ahead of Facebook among adult users of each platform since 2020,” the blog post explained. 

“Looking only at adult users of each platform, TikTok is already well ahead of every other social network and YouTube in terms of time spent. Adult TikTok users will spend roughly 56 minutes on the app each day in 2023, versus 48 minutes for adult users of YouTube,” the researchers said. 

“TikTok versus Netflix will be a major trend to watch this year,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “The lines between social and entertainment have blurred, and TikTok is now coming for the bigger-screen video players. New TikTok users add incremental new time spent, while its efforts in longer-form video, livestreaming and, more recently, music streaming, keep users on the platform longer. Growth in time spent on Netflix, meanwhile, is stagnant.”

“TikTok’s enormous popularity among young consumers is also what gives it an edge: We expect 18-to-24-year-old TikTok users in the US to spend an average of 1 hour on the app per day this year,” he continued. “With TikTok sending notifications to users ages 13 to 17 when they’ve spent more than 100 minutes on the app in a day, it stands to reason that teens are spending an exorbitant amount of time using TikTok.”

Although it’s not primarily a video platform, it’s worth noting that total time spent with Twitter among US adults will drop 10.7% this year and another 13.3% in 2024, the company predicted. A key reason is that they are predicting a 6.2% decline in monthly active Twitter users in 2023 in the US, and another 8.3% drop next year. Among the six social platforms they cover for time spent, Twitter has ranked next-to-last since TikTok overtook it in 2020. Reddit is sixth.

“As a primarily text-based platform, it’s easy to assume that video is an afterthought for Twitter,” said Enberg. “But videos about news and world events are an important engagement driver for the platform. The problem is that Twitter’s efforts to encourage more original videos, from Vine to Fleets, have so far been unsuccessful. Twitter owner Elon Musk’s attempts to bring more video to the app, including potentially incentivizing YouTube creators to post to Twitter, will be futile at improving time spent among all US adults unless he also manages to stave off a user decline.”

MENLO Park, Calif.—Families—usually the target audience for primetime TV—are losing interest in linear TV for kids and family content according to a survey from Future Today, a provider of family-oriented AVOD services. 

“More families have shifted away from traditional linear TV altogether,” said Vikrant Mathur, Co-Founder, Future Today. “As that has occurred, it’s important to better understand how families are choosing to view content and what ad experiences they find worthwhile, especially as ad-supported video-on-demand viewership in the US surges.”

Key findings from Future Today’s study include: 

More Than 60% Have Cut the Cord Completely
According to Future Today’s research, as an audience, parents who stream kids and family-focused programming are unique, young, diverse, and more engaged than the average streamer. 

Nearly two-thirds (62%) don’t have access to linear TV and 90% say they rarely watch it. Additionally, of the families surveyed, 85% of the parents fall in the 25-44 age range. Thirty six percent are also more likely to identify as Black, while 78% are more likely to identify as Hispanic. Finally, 98% of families polled say they love watching TV and 81% agree that TV is their favorite form of entertainment, making it a key channel for advertisers. 

“For advertisers trying to reach a diverse and engaged audience, buying kids and family-focused inventory presents a rich opportunity,” added Mathur.  

Kids & Parents are Discussing the Ads They See
Future Today found that ads featured in kids and family-oriented streaming programming are engaged with and evaluated across a household, with kids being a key decision maker over purchases and brands.

According to parents, 60% of kids who see ads talk to them about the ads afterwards. This includes broader family-based ads in categories such as Travel, Restaurants, Food Products, Insurance and Auto that are non-kids-centric as parents say 88% of kids who watch these ads are “engaged,” while more than half (52%) ask them to buy what they saw.

“Kids are the CEO of the streaming household,” said Mathur. “If a message resonates with them, they are vocal about it to their parents, influencing purchases and brand equity. For brands that are trying to connect with millennial parents, having a presence on Kids & Family channels not only provides a conduit to the entire household but also sparks conversations that create lasting brand equity. ” 

More than 300 families were polled for the study. 

Viewers want great content, and they want it now. Consumer demand for video-on-demand (VOD) content has increased exponentially in the last decade yet there is still a substantial market for linear TV. 

As long as that market exists, linear TV will remain attractive to advertisers as integrating advertising campaigns across digital and linear channels allows for a much larger audience to be reached. With more new channels launching, it is clear to see that this increased demand is creating opportunities for new startup channels. The high standards held by audiences with access to huge amounts of high-quality content mean that there is little room for error in modern broadcasting. 

With so many VOD offerings available, to attract viewers, linear startup channels need to deliver unique and polished shows with spot-on scheduling and channel management. Launching a startup channel can be technically difficult, especially when workflows are not well established or haven’t been tried and tested. This is particularly true with news and live shows, where there is potential for last minute schedule changes and risks of technical issues to consider.

To successfully launch a startup channel, broadcasters need to ensure that the key challenges associated with delivering a new channel are overcome. Namely, these are establishing infrastructure that is both efficient and integrated, and recruiting experienced staff. Internal workflows need to be established so viewing experiences are enhanced, and monetization opportunities are maximized.

Infrastructure
Establishing the infrastructure for a startup channel is undoubtedly one of the key challenges that broadcasters face. There is a huge choice in hardware and software out there so deciding what to use will depend largely on business needs, broadcast requirements, initial costs, and set up times. Deciding on the right mix of cloud-based and on-premise technology is critical, and ensuring that tools are interoperable will avoid problems down the line. All these things need to be carefully considered and balanced out.

When establishing infrastructure for a startup channel, a decision will need to be made early in the process about whether or not to go through a specialist broadcast systems integrator. If the channel owner has the necessary knowledge and experience, the integration can be done in-house.

Integration is key
In an age where interoperability has become a necessity rather than just a nice to have, being able to fully integrate your traffic management system with third party playout and other broadcast systems and workflows is essential. Using interoperable tools makes it easier for broadcasters to choose the best kit for their operation, so workflows can be efficient, streamlined, and as cost effective as can be, without compromising on quality. 

Recruitment of talent
The post pandemic era has made it more difficult than ever for companies across all sectors to attract and retain the right talent. This is understandably a challenge for startup channels because of the need to recruit a whole team from scratch. Modern cloud-based infrastructures potentially ease this challenge.

Historically, broadcast workflows were hardware dependent so remote working was not a viable option. Remote working makes it easier for content production companies to work collaboratively with people and teams across the globe but also to search out and use both local and non-local creative talent. 

Channels need effective management
Whether a startup channel is being launched individually, or whether a new linear channel is being launched by a digital video service provider to grow brand identity and broaden reach, intelligent management of broadcast traffic is a priority. 

As a minimum, if operating a single channel, broadcasters need the ability to manage advertising sales and traffic, program planning, transmission scheduling, as-run scheduling, and media. 

For more complex operations, broadcasters need a comprehensive business solution that can be tailored to meet a specific business or operational workflow. For maximum efficiency with multi-channel operations, broadcasters need to be able to manage all scheduling systems in a single integrated application, regardless of whether it is for linear or digital. 

Monetization options when growing a startup channel
When launching a startup channel, a range of monetization opportunities are available to the channel owner, such as advertising sales, program sponsorship, channel sponsorship, and profit-sharing advertising with online platforms. 

To maximize advertising opportunities, ad management and monitoring are critical. Viewers don’t want to see the same content repeated during an ad-break, nor do they want to see irrelevant or inappropriate ads. An advanced advertising management system enables ad campaigns to be optimized in terms of placement, target audience, and time slots. This will help to ensure engagement with viewers and maximize return on investment for advertisers. 

For broadcasters with multi-channel operations, there is an additional need to coordinate advertising campaigns simultaneously across various platforms, both digital and linear. In order to optimize ad campaigns, broadcasters need the right management tools and insights at their fingertips.

Business Intelligence and analytics
For a startup channel to be successful, revenue needs to be maximized by ensuring that scheduling and advertising are managed effectively. To do this, broadcasters need tools that can generate comprehensive management and analysis reports which then provide accurate audience measurements. This gives broadcasters the information they need to make operational decisions that are in line with their business strategy.

Future proofing
You may not be planning to dominate the TV market straight away, but it is still worth taking the time to consider future proofing your service so that when you are ready to expand, you’ve got the right tools already in place. It is important to ensure that broadcast tools use current technology, are agile, flexible, scalable, and suitable for deployment in other regions where different languages may be in use. Making sure tools are flexible and scalable from the off will help give your channel resilience and longevity. 

Delivering a new startup channel is indeed complex, but with careful planning, and with the right infrastructure and team in place to meet technical requirements, channel owners can ensure they are in the best position to exploit monetization opportunities and grow their channel. 

Counter to sensationalist headlines, linear television remains the best starting point for driving reach. However, with each passing day, linear supply shrinks as viewers shift to streaming. Fewer linear impressions means that advertisers need to spend more on other platforms to drive reach, moving dollars from their traditional linear budget to these other channels and tactics.

Enter linear addressable.

According to who you ask, we are either on the precipice of national broadcast addressable capabilities or we have already arrived, effectively opening 14 minutes of publisher-controlled inventory to one-to-one delivery. This means that publishers have a vast array of inventory newly available to them, as they can now sell and addressably deliver an ad spot that is traditionally bought by one advertiser to dozens or even hundreds of advertisers.

A Significant Leap
Today, this technological advance is discussed primarily as a mechanism for precision ad delivery, increasing the accuracy of audience targeting tactics. Over the past decade or so, linear television has slowly advanced beyond age/sex transactions towards advanced audience targeting with data driven linear, and addressable capabilities will provide a significant leap over even that.

But while this precision targeting is an important offering for publishers and value-added for advertisers, it remains only half of the equation. Addressable advertising needs to be conceptualized as part of a larger advertising purchase, driving both precision targeting and incremental reach to complement the traditional linear plan.

As linear TV reach continues to compress and frequency expands, it becomes more important for publishers to ensure that addressable impressions are reaching either people who will not be exposed to the brand’s linear campaign or have light levels of frequency.

To achieve that, we can take one of two paths: We can use a standard segmentation, like targeting light network viewers for addressable impressions. But the challenge with this is inventory supply; by definition, networks have limited impression supply among light network viewers.

Predictive Forecasting
The other approach would be forecasting exposure levels at a campaign-specific level. Through predictive forecasting at a campaign level, brands will have a larger pool of inventory for addressable targeting, returning value to the publisher, and ensuring truly incremental addressable impressions to a given campaign, returning value to the advertiser.

In our tests comparing these methodologies, we found that forecasting unexposed/low exposed viewers to a specific moderate-size network campaign created almost double the remainder audience for incremental targeting compared to a traditional light and medium network viewers’ audience. So it seems like this is a win-win for both the sell and buy side. 

The fact that campaign-level targeting offers greater inventory to utilize makes logical media sense: just because someone watches linear TV a “medium viewer” amount, does not guarantee their exposure to a specific ad campaign. And just because someone is designated a light TV viewer does not mean they won’t have received several exposures to a specific ad campaign.

Publishers, to maximize the value that linear addressable offers, need to shift from using addressable to deliver precisely in target and to start using it to deliver precisely and incrementally. While standard segmentation is a step in the correct direction, we at datafuelX enable predictive forecasting at a campaign-specific level, returning the best value to both publishers and advertisers.

NEW YORK—Standard Media Index (SMI) is reporting a slight increase of 1% for U.S. advertising in May of 2022 compared to a year earlier and an increase of 2% for linear television in May. 

But TV advertising is tracking downwards by 10% in the first two months of Q2 2022 compared to a similar period in 2021. 

The report is based on SMI Core data, which captures the actual spend data from the SMI Pool partners of major holding companies and large independent agencies, representing up to 95% of all US national brand ad spending on TV,  OTT, digital, out of home, print, and radio.

While the total May 2022 advertising spending was relatively flat year-over-year with a modest amount of growth, it was the second-highest spend month so far in 2022 and the best May on record per SMI Core data, since 2017, SMI reported. 

Based on pre-bookings, total June 2022 spending is projected to be relatively flat vs. June 2021, SMI said. 

Digital and out-of-home continued to post the largest percent spend increase vs. 2021 and the shift in ad dollars towards digital continued, with online channels representing a 56% share of dollars.

The SMI report noted that the linear TV spend receded in Q2 2022 to date, as gains in the sports genre (+15%), primarily NBA and NHL, failed to balance out the pull-back across entertainment (-14%) and news (-4%).     

In terms of the major media players, SMI reported that only Facebook and Disney sustained ad spend gains into May 2022 vs. 2021.

Facebook reached a new high for the month, with ad revenue growing 8% vs. 2021 and +61% vs. 2020. 

Disney ad revenue grew +5% vs. March 2022 and +46% vs. March 2020. Disney was the only top-five traditional media owner to display increased spending in the linear TV space (+8%). Warner Bros. Discovery Digital ad revenue rose +46% vs. 2021, counteracting linear TV declines (-5%) but not enough to tip the scale toward overall growth. 

Our industry is in the hunt for a new currency to measure TV ads. The kicker? That better measurement and currency is already here.

It’s easy to think advertising measurement is a perfect science, a ruler with which we measure precisely and accurately every time. The truth is that advertising measurement is constantly evolving to follow consumers’ changing habits. That change has never been more apparent than today.  According to Nielsen, Q1 ’22 was the first time that weekly streaming TV reach eclipsed linear TV reach among 18–49-year-olds.

As a result, the advertising industry is putting more into measurement than ever before. Investors from celebrity angels like Edward Norton and Ryan Reynolds to private equity funds like Bain Capital are backing advertising measurement ventures.

This isn’t to say that measurement evolution hadn’t existed before. Digital platforms and publishers, born out of the internet boom of the early 2000s, built new performance measurement to help marketers to shift marketing budgets. 

These platforms and publishers-built measurement solutions on digital connections—allowing for second-by-second understanding of user choices, web clicks and ad views—all tied to consumer provided audience demographics.  Advertisers could transact on these evolved currencies—from demos to performance KPIs to viewability guarantees.

Unlike digital, linear TV, an analog viewing experience, could not understand consumer behavior without a panel.  TV ratings measure demographics of shows via a representative sample. That show data is a proxy to identify and buy ads reaching larger groups of target demos. 

Given this data is neither consumer provided nor real time, relying on shows as proxies when buying audience demographics frequently leads to impression waste. For example, a show on linear TV that skews 70% female inherently has 30% waste built in against a female targeted campaign.  

As TV networks evolve into streaming services, being able to target and measure more granularly against consumer provided data becomes increasingly important in order to better plan and measure audiences and consumer purchase behavior. 

Any platform without a direct consumer relationship will be limited in the data they collect and the measurement they can offer. These intermediaries face a challenging future. They rely on data consortiums, third party cookies, IP addresses, and mobile IDs that are set to go away. 

Brands that prioritize consumer-less measurement will struggle to understand what is happening with their consumer. Publishers who not only maximize their relationships with consumers but also invest in data sources like automatic content recognition (ACR) and identity resolution will create the future of cross platform currency.   

So, what can you do as an advertiser to better tap into these existing measurement and currency solutions?

• Identify what key performance indicators are most important to you as a brand – whether its audience reach, brand building or performance based. And if you’re fortunate to have your own CRM data, build out those assets to directly support those transacting and measuring those KPIs.
• Once you’ve narrowed in on your KPIs, partner with publishers that also have their own consumer provided data that can help plan, optimize and measure against those specific targets with more precision.
• Lastly, once those campaigns are running and measured, develop performance benchmarks together with that partner which will help to dictate the best currency that’s right for you.

This is an exciting future for TV advertising – addressable, flexible, full-funnel, and measurable. And it’s already here, now.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—New data from Samba TV for Q1 2022 shows that advertisers face serious challenges in reaching targeted audiences, thanks to fragmentation and a saturated linear TV ad market that has become more complex in the wake of increased cord-shaving and streaming subscriber churn.

A telling stat highlighting those difficulties is the fact that 94% of TV ads reached just 55% of linear TV audiences, according to Samba TV’s State of Viewership Report for Q1 2022.  

“With $68 billion poured into linear advertising every year, the substantial waste taking place in this sector should be a wake-up call to advertisers,” said Samba TV CEO and co-founder Ashwin Navin. “The reality that 94% of linear ad impressions in Q1 only reached just over 50% of audiences demonstrates the dramatic need for a flexible approach to ad spend and the imperative of leveraging guaranteed incremental reach opportunities to effectively maximize ROI.”

Samba TV’s quarterly State of Viewership Report provides a comprehensive overview of television, movie, Connected TV (CTV), and advertising viewership. 

One key takeaway from the report is that the majority of linear ad impressions oversaturate the same half of tv viewers, with 94% of all ad impressions reaching just 55% of audiences.

These same audiences saw an average of 144 linear ads per day, while 45% of American households saw only 11 ads per day. 

While it improved by 3% since Q4 2021, this dramatic imbalance suggests that linear campaigns are still reaching the same viewers over and over again while leaving the rest of Americans unexposed to messaging, the researchers said. With little opportunity to reach new viewers via linear, advertisers need to look to guaranteed incremental reach opportunities to maximize spend across devices and platforms.

Another key finding in the report is that cord-shaving is on the rise. Although the average percentage of households watching linear each day remained at approximately 50%, the rate of cord-shaving accelerated by more than 20% year-over-year. This dramatic rate of cord-shaving is even more severe across millennial households where one in four watched less than one hour of linear per week. 

The report also suggests that a ceiling to SVOD consumption may be coming into view. While streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) consumption remains on the rise, Samba TV data shows that just 59% of SVOD-viewing households watched more than one service in Q1 2022. In addition, less than a quarter of households watched four or more SVOD services in the quarter, showing there is a point beyond which consumers are not willing to spend, the researchers said. 

The Samba TV report also suggests that SVODs risk churn if they can’t make their offerings more attractive. More than half of Hulu, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime Video’s top program viewers watched just one program among the streamer’s top 50 shows during Q1 2022, the report found. 

With viewers only tuning in to one new buzzy movie or show, providers risk “cyclers” hopping between platforms and canceling subscriptions, the researchers said.

Another key takeaway from the report is that advertisers are missing key demographic groups on linear. The report found that top advertisers over-index among white and Black viewers but aren’t reaching Hispanic and Asian audiences at a proportional rate. Meanwhile, each of the top 10 advertisers on linear served a disproportionately low number of impressions to audiences below the age of 44.

“From the consumer viewership landscape shifting further toward streaming to major advertisers breaking legacy molds to select currency-grade measurement partners, the industry has undergone several shifts over the past quarter,” Navin concluded. “Despite the consumer flocking to streaming, these platforms face substantial challenges in maintaining growth and retaining subscribers. This quarter’s State of Viewership Report underscores the distinct challenge advertisers are facing in their quest to reach fresh and diverse audiences across devices,” 

The full Samba TV's  State of Viewership Report is available here. 

The future in which linear TV is driven almost exclusively by live sports, news and events has arrived, according to analyst Michael Nathanson after crunching numbers from Nielsen.

“Time spent on cable networks built on movies, syndicated TV and kids content has collapsed over the past two years as consumers and media companies adopted a streaming first mind-set, said Nathanson, senior analyst MoffettNathanson in a report Thursday. “As a result, it is clear as day, looking at a two-year stack, that live sports and news are rising in importance and value to linear stake-holders.

Nathanson found that the reach that cable and broadcast has evaporated, falling by double digits over the past few years, leaving mainly older viewers.

“There has been a dramatic reduction in the consumption of original scripted cable network content as audiences move to SVOD for that fare,” he said. “In the end, linear viewing appears headed to a world of 'live' programming while almost every other genre is served on demand.”

By the fourth quarter of 2021, 69% of broadcast network viewership was by people age 50 and up. On cable, 69% of consumption came from older viewers. Only 5% of broadcast network viewing was by people 17 or younger. On cable, it was 6%.

“Older viewers may be cutting the cord,” Nathanson noted, “but younger folks are increasingly asking the question, ‘What is a cord?’”

In 2021, C3 ratings for the big broadcast networks were flat, with NBC getting a boost from the summer Olympics.

On cable, Nathanson noted the news networks total day viewing–measured by C30– is down by between 27% and 33% after 2020’s intense news cycle. Kids networks Cartoon Network was down 34% and Nickelodeon dropped 23%. 

Overall cable network viewing was down 18% in 2022, with ESPN being the only top network to show an increase.

Reach has fallen even more over a five-year span starting in 2016. 

“CNN’s reach fell from 38% to just 17%,” Nathanson said. “While much of this can be chalked up to the cyclical nature of news and election cycles, the same cannot be said of AMC, FX, and Comedy Central, which face a real existential threat from streaming. Without either sports or news, these networks simply do not provide any of the content we believe will keep viewers tuning into linear.”

Networks have also seen big drops in length of tune–an important statistic to advertisers–since 2016. 

“Among the networks in company portfolios under our coverage, Investigation Discovery, MTV2 and TNT saw the biggest declines in length of tune, declining 18.3, 11.1, and 10.8 minutes, respectively, Nathanson said.  “Oxygen saw the biggest gain in length of tune from 2016 to 2021, increasing 13.8 minutes. Other big winners include other general entertainment channels such as Pop TV and Ovation.”

Even the top shows on cable were showing declines in viewership. Nathanson looked at the top 3 shows on each of the top 30 networks.

“Of the 60 shows on this list of the top three shows per cable network, only 14 increased in time viewed from2020 to 2021,” Nathanson noted. “NBA on TNT" experienced the largest increase in absolute time viewed in 2021. ESPN’s NCAA football coverage did third best. Paramount’s Yellowstone stands out as one of the few scripted shows to grow, near the top of the list, coming in fourth.”

As ratings have declined, linear ad revenues have remained relatively flat, Nathanson noted.

"Networks and affiliates have managed to stave off a complete collapse of their revenues by matching declining viewership with inflating ad prices, but given the dramatic drop in certain cable networks’ reach, this long-running trend clearly looks less sustainable from here,” he said.

VICTORIA, Canada—Linear TV is dragging as OTT continues its ascension, evidenced most recently by the Convergence Research Group when looking at the two areas' total revenues for 2020 and beyond.

Per Convergence’s “Battle of the American Couch Potato” report, linear TV (cable, satellite and telco TV) saw its 2020 revenue drop 6% to $94.7 billion. Things are not slated to get better in the next couple of years; revenues are projected to drop another 6.5% in 2021 and 10% in 2023, per Convergence. 

Contributing to this is the loss of pay-TV subscribers. In 2020 pay-TV lost 6.49 million subscribers and is forecasted to lose another 7.35 million in 2021. The rate is not slowing down either, as Convergence projects that 2023 will see the loss of 7.76 million subscribers.

OTT, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. OTT’s 2020 revenue came in at $29.6 billion, an increase of 35%. By 2023, that could double to $60 billion. This growth is supported by both established streaming services—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video—and newer ones—HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+.

Consumers are expected to add more OTT platforms to their households over the next couple of years. Likely related, the number of homes that are expected to not have any kind of linear TV is expected to increase from 42% to 60% by 2023.

Despite the changing market landscape, and a small decline in 2020, Convergence says that the U.S. TV business still drew in $220 billion.

For more information, visit the Convergence Research Group’s website. 

LONDON—OTT is now the leading source for watching TV and movies across the globe, according to a new report from MiQ. It took nearly a year into the pandemic, but OTT overtook traditional linear TV in the last couple of months of 2020, where practically all of the 2.2 million households that MiQ tracked for the report had an active OTT use based on normalized index (averaged consumption across households tuning in at least once over 45 days and a greater than 15 minute viewing time).

The data comes from MiQ’s “A Year of Lockdowns” report.

At the start of 2020, more global households were actively watching linear TV than for OTT, per MiQ. Those numbers actually dipped in February 2020 until spiking in the first two months of pandemic (March and April), increasing 25-30%.

In the summer months, after initial lockdown orders began to lift, active household numbers dropped for both linear TV and OTT, representing just an 11% year-over-year increase. However, starting in August, things started to pick back up again. 

OTT saw rapid, exponential growth when second waves began to hit, reaching a peak in November; that number stayed flat in December. As for linear TV, it’s numbers increased more slowly through November, before dropping again in December. Not only did OTT surpass linear TV in active households in November, it also saw people spending more time watching it.

The largest growth sector for OTT consumption is among people 35 and older, which grew 21%, as MiQ estimates that many are new to OTT. There was also growth in the 18-34 age group of 19%.

In general, when it comes to watching more TV, Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. had more people say they spent more time watching TV than they did a year prior. Germany had less, while India was just about even.

“It’s a safe bet that this new enlarged audience means marketers will need to rethink their profiles for OTT targeting in the future,” MiQ wrote in the report.

To access the full report, visit MiQ’s website.

NEW YORK—While the advertising market is starting to shift more toward CTV and streaming avenues, linear TV is still seen as the most valuable resource for advertising, according to a new survey from Advertisers Perceptions.

Gauging how advertisers are planning to spend their 2021 budgets, Advertisers Perceptions found that video advertising is increasing. About a quarter of TV screen advertising budgets are going to streaming, but 51% of advertisers believe that linear TV is the most valuable video platform; the next closest is social media (16%) and video sites (15%), with streaming at just 6%.

Even those advertisers that are putting a greater emphasis on CTV prefer to do so with TV networks. Citing concern over fraud in online video, Advertisers Perceptions found that larger advertisers will more often go with TV networks’ CTV options, and in the event they opt for a digital video platform, they will often want linear TV-type assurances, i.e. insisting their ads appear on reputable sites, pairing with brand-safe content and to run within professionally produced video content.

In addition, the bigger the advertising budget, the more likely they are to rely on linear TV. Per the survey, those spending less than $25 million find video and social media sites to be more effective than linear; those spending more than $25 million prefer linear TV and rely less on video or social media.

“Big TV networks have really beefed up their CTV opportunities at the right time,” said Justin Fromm, executive vice president, Business Intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions. “They’re becoming safe harbors for the largest advertisers as fraud climbs in the medium. While the major internet platforms will lead in volume of streaming ads, TV network safety is keeping them the gold standard in video as the platforms evolve.”

Other findings from the report show that advertisers are decreasing reliance on video sites and social media and are increasing their use of programmatic TV options (DSPs, vMVPDs). Also, more than half of advertisers said it is harder to have precise measurements of campaigns reach the more impressions are bought outside of linear TV.

The upcoming 2021 Upfront is expected to be an opportunity for advertisers to see how networks will improve cross-screen opportunity, measurement and brand safety.

Streaming video’s rapid expansion—fueled by explosive growth during the COVID-19 outbreak—will continue to increase in coming years, along the way finding a new equilibrium with traditional broadcast and cable TV.  

That was the consensus of three virtual sessions at CES 2021 that examined the evolving media relationships of the digital ecosystem.

Data from Nielsen Global Media showed that the pandemic encouraged viewers, especially in older demographics, to learn how to use streaming technology, Nielsen senior vice president of product strategy and thought leadership Brian Fuhrer said. As a result, the audience measurement firm’s year-end assessment showed that total streaming audiences at all age categories were very similar to the segmentation of traditional (broadcast and cable) viewing. But the assessment also showed that older viewers (age 55 and up) are now among the biggest users of linear, rather than on-demand, streaming services—reflecting their comfort level with linear, ad-supported formats, Fuhrer said. 

Despite the growth of streaming viewership from December 2019 (117.7 billion minutes) to last December (132 billion minutes), the percentage segmentation of preferences, topped by YouTube and Netflix, remained relatively consistent.

Moreover, Nielsen’s findings underscored the continuing crossover between programming on traditional media and over-the-top platforms. For example, reruns of sitcom "The Office" attracted 10 million viewers on Netflix (before the show moved to Peacock in January).  But "The Office" also attracted 11 million viewers for episodes airing in syndication on Comedy Central, local stations and from other sources. 

“That is really important when looking at content,” Fuhrer said, emphasizing “the long-term life in multiple platforms simultaneously.”

Nielsen’s research also identified emerging release protocols, such as the value of offering all episodes of a series simultaneously (thus allowing immediate bingeing) versus regular rollouts, such as weekly release. Fuhrer noted that Disney+’s "The Mandalorian" had very high viewership during every weekend release, while series unleashed all at once showed steep viewership dropoffs after a one-time spree. 

Fuhrer’s data was reflected in the discussions on two separate CES panels dealing with streaming. In particular, panelists said, the role of original content versus “acquired” programming such as off-network series is a work in progress. Speakers also looked at the role of content in consumer acquisition and retention.

At a session titled “The Great Unbundling in Video,” Philo CEO Andrew McCollum predicted cord-cutting would continue to accelerate the viewer shift toward streaming. He expects the streaming companies will “offer new options to people who cut the cord long ago and are looking for new options,” he said. 

Five to 10 years from now, McCollum said, consumers won’t consider OTT options to be “cutting the cord,” but rather “a better way to get the content they care about.” 

Both McCollum and fellow panelist Scott Reich, senior VP of programming at AVOD platform Pluto TV, cited the growth their services experienced during the early COVID crisis. For Philo, it was a surge of attention to kids’ content, while Pluto TV’s “massive influx” came as the 2020 political campaign heated up.  

As PlutoTV, owned by ViacomCBS, had a lot of political and health information, its channels offered “an interesting combination” of political and pandemic news, plus “a whole lot of escapism” from its entertainment channels, including cross-selling of Showtime programs via streaming teases of selected shows. 

Reich and McCollum agreed that streaming isn’t a winner-take-all marketplace, though both said there are lots of questions about how many entrants the SVOD market can support. 

FINDING SHOWS STILL A CHALLENGE

Predictably, data is at the heart of video navigation and search. At the “Streaming’s New Era” session, Sandeep Gupta, VP and GM of Amazon’s Fire TV, acknowledged his company — known for its algorithmic awareness of customer preferences and usage — is not sharing what it knows, even with partners such as co-panelists from Starz and WarnerMedia. 

“The key thing is helping them discover content in ways that [the programmers] didn’t think of before,” Gupta said. 

Viewers know what they want to watch and can find it some two-thirds of the time, said Sarah Lyons, senior VP, product experience at WarnerMedia. “We believe in a blend of human curation with underlying data to facilitate that curation,” Lyons said. 

“We are all in this battle to make sure our customers can find our content as easily as possible,” said Starz senior VP of distribution Stefanie Meyers. “We’re just trying to make sure that we make it as easy as possible for our consumer on whatever platform … so they can engage.”

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—Linear TV saw the return of some of its biggest draws in Q3 of 2020, and as a result it drew the eyeballs of viewers, according to an overview by Samba TV.

Samba TV, a global TV data and audience analytics provider, released its inaugural “State of Viewership Report” for 2020, which gathered insights from 33 billion hours of TV consumption projected across households in the U.S., U.K. and Germany in the third quarter of 2020. Among the findings from the report was that the return of sports and major U.S. political events proved that there people still turn in to linear TV when premium offerings are available.

On the political side, Q3 saw the Democratic an Republican National Conventions, the first debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, as well as multiple interviews with both candidates. Key swing states in the election over-indexed in viewership, with particular interest among white Gen Xers and Boomers, per Samba TV.

In July, the NBA, NHL and MLB all returned after being postponed at the start of the pandemic. Each sport saw high tune-in rates across audiences, but the numbers were below pre-pandemic broadcasts of games. At the end of the quarter, the NFL returned, and it reaffirmed its position as the most consistent sport for driving viewership.

Samba TV found that cable news has been one of the most popular viewing options throughout the year, though it had highs and lows depending on events and audiences mood about it. During the early days of the pandemic, and the subsequent coverage of racial justice protests, Q2 saw a huge surge in cable news viewership. However, that didn’t hold in Q3, with Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all seeing lower household tune-in in Q3 compared to Q2, despite interest in political conventions and other events.

Overall, linear TV reach across 27 networks in September was 7% higher than the summer (June-August).

The increase in linear TV viewing did not negate viewing on connected TVs (CTV), however. From March to July, Samba TV says that there was a 225% increase in average daily viewership over CTVs. In September there was still growth, though it had flattened to a 3% increase.

“Despite what many have said, linear TV is far from dead,” said Ashwin Navin, co-founder and CEO of Samba TV. “Linear TV recovered in Q3, but not at the expense of CTV’s ongoing growth. Both are proving their staying power, bolstered by current events and the incredible diversity and quality of programming available across all platforms.”

Samba TV’s “State of Viewership Report” also touched on movie releases that went straight to streaming and linear ad performance between Q2 and Q3.

For more information, visit www.samba.tv.  

NEW YORK—While IAB reports “light at the end of the tunnel” for the likes of digital advertising, the outlook for traditional media does not look so rosy. Buyers expect an average estimated -8% ad spend across all media channels, with linear TV in particular down 24% in 2020.

IAB projects that overall U.S. traditional media ad spend is expected to be down 30% in 2020 from its 2019 numbers. Digital, on the other hand, is estimating a 6% increase year-over-year. As has been reported by other outlets, the amount of time and money spent on digital platforms during the pandemic has increased, likely helping push it to this growth.

IAB gives a specific focus to the rise in digital video consumption (OTT/CTV) during the height of the pandemic (March through May). The number of households that watched OTT daily went up from just over 44 million at the start of March to nearly 50 million by the end of May, per IAB. The average daily streaming hours rose from right around 240 million to more than 280 million as June started—it reached a height of 300 million hours a day during April.

As a result, while linear TV is expected to decline 24% in as spend, CTV and digital video ad spend is expected to increase 19% and 18%, respectively, over 2019 numbers.

There is still a lot of uncertainty about how the pandemic will continue to impact advertising as we head into 2021. At least 70% of buyers still have 2021 ad dollars in flux, according to IAB. However, there is an expectation that 2021 ad budgets will increase by 5.3% from that of 2020.

The full IAB report is available online. 

LONDON—Linear TV held on to its top spot for consumer TV viewership in the U.S. and other major economies in 2019, according to a new report from Omdia, despite declines in viewership.

Per Omdia’s “Cross-Platform Television Viewing Time Report—2020,” 63% of television viewing in the U.S. in 2019 came from linear TV. Long-form viewing accounted for 16%, while PVR time-shifted TV was at 12%. The 63% for linear TV is down from 67% in 2018.

Other countries covered in the report—Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, France and the U.K.—saw similar trends.

Average linear TV viewing time declined in all but one market, the Netherlands, where it remained unchanged. The U.S. saw a dip of about 19 minutes.

“Although traditional linear television viewing is undergoing a broad-based decline, this form of entertainment remains central to most people’s viewing habits,” said Rob Moyser, an analyst covering TV media, service providers and platforms at Omdia. “As a result, linear still accounts for the majority of viewing in all countries tracked.”

Moyser said that in Italy, linear TV still accounts for 90% of total viewing.

When looking at the non-linear areas of TV viewing, online long-form video was the biggest growth sector in 2019, growing in all markets and driven by services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The largest amount of growth occurred in Australia (55%).

Omdia finds that growth in OTT subscribers, D2C launches and a rise in connected TV and pay-TV partnerships are fueling the increase in online, long-term video viewing.

The fastest-growing segment on non-linear viewing, however, is for social media. Across the all participating markets, social media viewing increased by 10 minutes in 2019, surpassing all other forms of non-linear TV video. It had an average of 41 minutes per person, per day in all markets, an increase of 10 minutes; the U.S. led the way with an average of 49.3 minutes in 2019.

Additional details provided in the Omdia report found that the average total daily viewing time increased to 306 minutes per person, per day; and TV viewing saw a massive rise during March and April 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For more information, access the full report on Omdia’s website. 

NEW YORK—National TV advertising is expected to see a 13.2% decrease in the U.S. market for 2020, with the coronavirus shutdown outweighing the typical gains that political ads generate in an election year, according to a new report from investment and media intelligence resource MAGNA.

MAGNA projects that linear advertising sales—which encompasses linear TV, radio, print and OOH—will see a net loss of 13%, equating to about $83 billion. MAGNA says without political ad revenues ($4 billion), the decline would have come out to -17%.

While linear TV saw a surge in viewing for the first few months of the quarantine, the loss of sports and the greater economic impact on national and local businesses limited the amount of advertising revenue for that period. Now, TV viewership habits are reverting back to their pre-COVID numbers as social distancing restrictions are beginning to ease.

Local TV ad revenue is also slated to see a decline, though at -2.4%.

The recovery between national and local advertising is expected to differ vastly, per MAGNA. National TV is forecasted to see a 4.3% increase year-over-year in 2021, but local TV—with no election helping to boost sales—could see a decline 14.5% year-over-year.

“Many industries face significant economic headwinds and have been forced to cut considerable amounts of spend as a result,” the report reads. “The travel, entertainment, automotive and restaurant industries will be among the most affected, and MAGNA expects each of those industries to reduce linear advertising spend by -25% or more on a full year basis.”

Digital is among the advertising formats that has remained resilient during these times, directly benefiting from increased consumption habits. MAGNA expects for ad spend on digital formats—search, video, social, banners, digital audio—to stabilize in the summer and recover in the second half of 2020 to the point of stability or even some modest growth year-over-year (2%). Digital video is expected to see the most growth at 10%.

Overall, across all platforms, U.S. advertising revenue is projected to decline 4.3% in 2020 and then recover in 2021 with a 4% growth, according to MAGNA.

MAGNA also shared data for global advertising revenue, with linear TV ad revenues shrinking by 12%, and the entire range of global advertising revenues decreasing an estimated 7%.

For more information, the full report is available on MAGNA’s website. 

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif.—The COVID-19 pandemic is fueling a resurgence in viewership of local news and linear television in the United States, according to the results of a survey conducted in March by international research and strategy firm SmithGeiger.

“It is clear that the world has changed for most Americans, and that local news has played a critically important role in helping audiences to find solace, feel safer and gain important insights into how to navigate past the confusion and to regain a sense of wellbeing,” says Seth Geiger, co-founder of the firm.

The survey of more than 1,300 U.S. news consumers ages 18 to 64 revealed that local news has become the primary destination for trusted news and information during the pandemic. Further, the reach of local news has grown 20 points, and daily viewing has nearly doubled to 35%. Eighty-two percent of respondents report watching local news, and 91% use at least one local news platform.

The robust growth in local news viewership coincides with the close attention Americans are giving to the pandemic. The survey found 59% are paying a great deal of attention, and another 33% are paying some/moderate attention.

Sixty-four percent of respondents said the pandemic has affected their lives at least somewhat. Seventeen percent reported being significantly impacted, and parents ages 35 to 44 said they have been most significantly impacted at 28%, the survey found.

One in five respondents said they have lost wages due to the effects of the pandemic on daily life, while 81% reported having their livelihood and pocketbooks affected.

“This unprecedented event is disrupting daily habits, sowing confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, and driving shifts in media patterns as Americans seek out personally relevant information, with clarity and reassurance that will help them to manage and navigate this dynamic landscape,” said Geiger.

Another of the shifts is the resurgence of linear TV, the survey found. Two years ago, watching streaming content surpassed linear TV viewing with Americans ages 25 to 54 spending more time with OTT content. However, the survey found this trend has reversed during the pandemic, with linear TV re-establishing itself as the leader over SVOD—although both have seen dramatic expansion, SmithGeiger said.

Social media is helping Americans stay connected with friends and loved ones during the rise of stay-at-home orders and social distancing. The survey found Facebook is the primary platform Americans are using to stay connected, with 63% reporting checking the platform daily. For respondents ages 18 to 24, Instagram was the top platform.

However, the most frequent users of Facebook, trust in the platform the least, the survey found.

PLUS: Pandemic Brings TV to the Forefront

When asked about what they expect to happen as a result of the virus, 54% said they believe their lives will change for the worst in the coming weeks. Half said they were uncertain about what’s to come, 47% said they were anxious and 43% said they were alarmed.

However, 55% said they believe society will emerge for the pandemic stronger. Forty-four percent said they can’t wait to go shopping, and 39% said the crisis has brought out the best in their family and friends, the survey found.

More information is available on the SmithGeiger website. 

LONDON—Adult commercial impact of linear TV saw a decline of 4.4% in 2019, but if these trends in advertising reach continue it could result in a 21% drop from recent numbers by 2025, according to marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity.

In Ebiquity’s “Mind the Gap: A Closer Look at Video Advertising Reach in the Age of Increasing Media Fragmentation” report, the firm saw its initial prediction of a loss of 3.6% for commercial impact jump to 4.4%. A key reason for the increased drop in linear TV’s commercial impact came from a greater than expected loss among younger viewers, who are increasingly moving to online video, as well as broadcaster and subscription VOD services.

Advertising served on platforms like YouTube and Facebook were broadly able to match the reach delivered by TV for those in the 16-44 age range. Ebiquity believes that brands targeting younger consumers using YouTube will see the most incremental reach moving forward.

Even if the numbers for younger viewers were to slow down, as Ebiquity anticipates will happen, it still believes that more than half of today’s audience (56%) will disappear by 2025.

Still, focusing more on online may not be enough. When analysis shifts from a pure impression level to 50% or 100% completed reach, both YouTube and Facebook deliver less incremental reach.

“Although TV remains the primary driver of ROI, the change in media consumption habits is no secret and is a phenomenon that brands cannot safely ignore,” said Christian Polman, chief strategy officer at Ebiquity. “What our new study does is to confirm that the rate of change in viewing behavior is affecting brands. The ability to reach mass audiences at scale is critical for efficient and effective brand building. Advertisers need to take several actions today in order to close their own coverage gap and ensure success in the age of media fragmentation.”

Those four steps, according to Ebiquity, are:

• Understanding what your coverage gap is and what the implications are for your business;
• Taking a more granular approach to measurement;
• Make the right creative for the right channel or platform;
• Use structured testing to evaluate and optimize the channels you use to fill the coverage gap

The full report is available for download on Ebiquity’s website.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google Fiber TV is fading away, as Google Fiber has announced that it will stop offering its linear TV product to new customers in favor of promoting online TV resources, including a new deal that allows customers to automatically sign up for fuboTV.

In a blog post, Google Fiber writes that “customers today just don’t need traditional TV,” and that all the content that they want to access is available online.

Effective immediately, Google Fiber TV is no longer an option for new internet customers. Current customers of the service will still be able to access the traditional TV service, but Google Fiber does say that it can help customers explore other options to make sure they have access to the programming of their choice.

One of these options is sport-centric streaming service fuboTV, which new customers can sign up for simultaneously when they join Google Fiber as part of a new partnership. In addition to sports, fuboTV also offers access to popular TV shows, movies and news.

This is the second streaming service that Google Fiber has partnered with, following a deal with YouTube TV in December 2019.

Customers are not required to sign up for either of these services, but can select any streaming service of their choice if they so desire.

For more information, visit fiber.google.com. 

New product specialists join from broadcasters to enrich customer understanding

Cambridge, 7 October 2019: Underlining the importance of its solutions business, Pixel Power has added two new product specialists to the team. Tanya Schurawel and Toria Farrell both come direct from broadcasters, and will use their unique insights to help customers develop optimised solutions for automated production, graphics and playout.

Tanya Schurawel joins from Univision in the US, where she was most recently technical supervisor, animator and designer. With her strong technical and creative background, Tanya – who will be based in Florida– will engage with customers during the pre-sales period, ensuring their complex requirements are identified and satisfactorily met with Pixel Power’s virtualizable, modular systems.

Toria Farrell was previously a transmission controller at Red Bee Media/Ericsson. Toria began her career at the BBC as an EPG scheduler, and her career has seen her act as network director and playout director. Toria was a key member of the transmission launch team for the BT Sport launch in 2013, and became a senior playout director in 2015. She has worked within many client transmission areas from uktv and ITV to Channel 4, BT Sport and BBC World News. Based in the Pixel Power headquarters in Cambridge, she will work with customers to define software and virtualized playout solutions which enhance their businesses.

“As playout moves from large hardware installations to the almost infinite capabilities of software-defined, virtualizable solutions, broadcasters need to look at their operations and workflows afresh,” said James Gilbert, CEO of Pixel Power. “Vendors have an important role here, in translating a broadcaster’s business needs into innovative, practical and affordable technologies and workflows.

“Tanya and Toria, because of their extensive and current experience in broadcast and online transmission, are great assets in these discussions,” Gilbert added. “I’m delighted they have joined the Pixel Power team, helping us – and our customers – go from strength to strength.”

###

About Pixel Power, a Rohde & Schwarz Company
Pixel Power develops software-defined, virtualizable, solutions for broadcast playout, automation, master control, graphics & branding used in linear television channels, OTT and VOD. Our award-winning branding and promotions systems, graphics-enabled master control switchers and sophisticated switchable graphics production systems allow producers to deliver dynamic live and pre-recorded content for any SD, HD, 4k, mobile, online or interactive application.

Pixel Power has 30 years’ experience of engineering prowess and dedication to customer support that has made it the industry’s first choice in graphics, branding and playout. With more than 2500 installations worldwide, customers including market-leading broadcasters such as BBC, Ericsson, ITV, SWR, WDR, TV2 Norway, Danmarks Radio, TV5 Monde, CBC, Disney, Discovery, ESPN, ViaSat and Sky.

Recently acquired by Rohde & Schwarz GmbH, Pixel Power corporate headquarters are in Cambridge UK with regional offices in Grass Valley California and Dubai UAE.

Pixel Power can be contacted online at www.pixelpower.com.


Pixel Power Contact:
Name: Ciaran Doran
Title: Exec VP
Email: cdoran@pixelpower.com
Tel: +44 7775 581301

PR Contact:
Name: Jennie Marwick-Evans
Company: Manor Marketing
Email: jennie@manormarketing.tv
Tel: +44 7748 636171

Despite the industry’s focus on streaming and on-demand video, linear TV dominates Americans’ time spent viewing and is on the rise, according to a new report from Nielsen.

The report found that adults spent a total of 5 hours and 57 minutes watching video during the first quarter. That’s up from 5:46 in the Q4 and 5:27 in Q3.

Nielsen has changed the way it measures digital activity and it cannot prove comparisons to a year ago.

TV programming is so pervasive it is being seen in non-TV homes, according to the Q1 2018 Nielsen Total Audience Report.

The share of homes getting subscription video-on-demand services grew to 64% from 58% a year ago in the second quarter.

The report also said that 2.7% of homes now subscribe to virtual multichannel video programming distributors such as Sling, DirecTV Now and YouTube TV.

Viewers have access to internet enabled TV-connected devices in 67% of homes, up from 61% a year ago, with 34% of homes having two or more connected devices.

Despite the increase in access to streaming video, adults spent 4 hours and 46 minutes watching live and time shifted TV, compared to 46 minutes watching on TV-connected devices, 10 minutes with video on a computer, 10 minutes with video on a smart phone and 5 minutes on a tablet.

All of those numbers were up from the previous two quarters.

In the first quarter one of 10 minutes of TV viewed in streaming homes is streaming video through a TV-connected device or smart TV. Streaming to the TV is most popular with 12- 17-year-olds at 23% of viewing, with 18-34-year-olds streaming 18% of their TV watching.

Including radio, older viewers, ages 65 and up, spent the bulk of their media time, 60%, with live and time-shifted TV.

[Read: TiVo Report Sees New TV Data Shaking Up Measurement]

Among 18 to 34-year-olds, live and time-shifted TV represents a 26% share of viewing, eclipsed by smartphone viewing with a 29% share—the largest share for any demographic group. Overall 18-34-year-old adults consume 43% of their media on digital devices.

Amid all the talk about cord cutting, Nielsen said that 81% of TV households pay for some sort of multichannel video subscription, while 13% get TV over the air and 6% are broadband only.

Using its older methodology, in which the categories are not mutually exclusive, Nielsen said total multichannel TV homes fell 0.7% to 97.043 million homes from 97.730 million a year ago.

Wired cable homes fell to 50.197 million homes from 51.783 million; satellite homes dropped to 34.705 million from 35.507 million; and telco homes were down to 34.705 million from 35.507 million.

Broadcast only homes were up 6% to 16.529 million from 15.602 million and broadband only homes jumped 55% to 8.752 million homes from 5.627 million.

Multichannel subscribers consume the most TV on a daily basis. Those couch potatoes consume 6 hours and 2 seconds on average. Over-the air households consume 4:48 of TV and broadband-only homes watch TV for 2:47 a day. Subscribers to vMVPDs watch TV for 2:20 daily.

The Nielsen report noted that about 4 million U.S. homes, or 4% of all homes, do not qualify as a TV household. But six of 10 of those households have access to the internet that would enable them to stream content and only 18% said they do not watch TV.

When asked where they watch TV, 27% of people in non-TV homes said they watch on a computer, 17% said at a friend or relatives on a TV, 13% said in a public place on a TV, 10% said on a smartphone, 6% said a tablet, 5% work and 5% other.

The top reasons for not owning at TV set or having TV reception are: too expensive or can’t afford one (22%), not interested in TV programming (18%), watch video on DVD or VCR (16%), no digital TV converter box (12%) and not enough time to watch TV (12%).

“Consumers in today’s fragmented media landscape have so many ways to discover content that matters to them. This plethora of options is shaping behavior, too, as the ability to choose the source, device, location and time becomes more and more tailored,” said Peter Katsingris, senior VP, audience insights at Nielsen. “With each passing day, consumers are able to further customize their own media usage into an individualized experience akin to a media DNA, each consumer with an ability for complete personalization.”

Katsingris added that as the media landscape evolves, Nielsen has “also made advancements in our measurement solutions and this progress is represented throughout the report.”

WASHINGTON—Collectively, the growing wave of streaming and OTT versions of linear programs has generated a tidal wave of usage, posing challenges to producers and distributors who are hustling to find ways to create a “consistent experience” for audiences who see programs on a variety of devices and via multiple delivery systems.

According to a Parks Associates analysis last month, 52 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both pay TV and one or more OTT video services. The study also found that about two-thirds of U.S. broadband households subscribe to an OTT service, and 38 percent have more than one OTT subscription.

A separate study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that in North America, 65 percent of viewers watch streaming video once or several times per day—slightly less than the streaming usage in Europe, Asia/Pacific and far less than in South America and the Middle East. And yet another report from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that OTT video revenue will reach nearly $31 billion by 2022, up from about $22 billion this year.

MULTIPLE CHALLENGES

Despite such rosy data, however, the video streaming outlook faces multiple challenges. For example, Dan Rayburn, a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, frets that the current streaming infrastructure cannot keep pace with the growth in streaming demand. In a recent online blog Rayburn contended that, “if online video consumption continues to take market share from traditional distribution channels and ultimately replaces traditional broadcast distribution, then streaming video infrastructure will need to increase its capacity by over 3x in the coming years.”

Moreover, Rayburn predicts that if 4K UHD replaces the current high-definition signals for streamed content, then “the required bandwidth will increase by a factor of another 4x.

”Adding 8K, used for “true virtual reality” would trigger the need for “another 3x increase in capacity,” Rayburn said in a blog last month. He concluded that such growth scenarios would require a 20-fold increase in the streaming video infrastructure during the coming decade.

“Building 20x the data centers and filling them with 20x the servers in addition to constructing the power plants to power this infrastructure is clearlly not an economically viable or sustainable strategy,” Rayburn added. But his modest conclusion was only that “we need to start talking now about how to meet the “capacity gap” challenge.

WANTED: NEW WORKFLOW TOOLS

That realty—the necessary coexistence of linear and streaming content—has triggered aggressive efforts to empower the media supply chain with new tools to handle workflows for the emerging market.

“Workflows, as repeatable processes, are evolving constantly in reaction to new content manufacturing and distribution scenarios,”said Richard N. Yelen, head of North American Business Development for Accenture Digital Video Products and Services. He cited “the migration from traditional licensed content distribution to ‘app syndication,’ as content owners take greater ownership over the viewing experience.”

“We are increasingly looking at ways of using data [aggregated from consumption platforms, AI-generated from media analysis and other sources] in a highly secured way to drive automation into the supply chain,” Yelen added.

He acknowledged the “distinct differences” between broadcast and cable operator products and services “with obvious intersections” but emphasized that both of those traditional platforms are “quite different” for video on demand and live streaming.

“The difference is between file-based workflow vs. active real-time streaming,” Yelen said. “Live streaming requires more careful/intense real-time management of service continuity and user experience since popular large live events, such as sporting matches, can cause unpredictable viewership spikes.

“These spikes often have load implications across the viewing platform ecosystem, including both core platform services [e.g. user authentication], as well as network and caching [e.g. CDN performance],” Yelen added.

Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai, noted the special considerations for live vs. on-demand.

“For live and linear delivery, we emphasize live origin capabilities—ingesting video into our network from as close to the origination point [ideally production or playout] as quickly as possible,” Alexander said, noting that for on-demand content, Akamai seeks to move content “into our storage environment or from a customer’s on-premise or cloud storage platform. He emphasized the architecture that seeks to enable “capabilities such as multisource multicast and prepositioning of content.”

The technologies Akamai leverages for OTT video delivery differ from those used for traditional broadcast and cable transmission, according to Alexander.

“The workflows themselves are different, as is encoding and security,” he said. “For OTT, we’re delivering content files in chunks, and we’re using the open, unmanaged internet as the transport layer. While there are changes on the horizon, the majority of OTT delivery today is unicast—one stream to one device—as opposed to one-to-many broadcast delivery.”

But although the underlying technologies are very different, Akamai is working to enable the same experience, he said.

“The bar for consumer expectations has been set by broadcast, so we’re aiming to reach and ultimately exceed those expectations by tuning every layer of the delivery stack from the client and network transport protocols all the way through the application,” he added. “This helps enable efficient video delivery across the internet from the origin to the end-viewer device, whatever or wherever it may be.”

Aspera, an IBM operating unit, has developed a range of streaming video solutions, based on its Fast Adaptive Secure Protocol (FASP), a large data transport protocol that eliminates TCP’s loss and error handling and the resulting erratic transfer rate swings.

“FASPStream enables centralized, real-time production of high bit-rate programming, eliminating the need to colocate costly production staff at remote venues,” Todd Kelly, director of product marketing, explained. “It also supports in-line transcoding, packaging and delivery to accelerate live video delivery and facilitates open file workflows for real-time editing and production. By lowering the production costs for all kinds of events, especially ‘tier 2’ and ‘tier 3’ events, broadcasters can create and deliver new content [that targets] new audiences.”

Kelly also emphasized the value of collaboration, citing his company’s work with Telestream to build a joint solution that integrates FASPStream technology into Telestream’s Vantage and Lightspeed Live software.

“This API-level integration provides a truly innovative approach to delivering live, broadcast-quality video streams from the venue to the remote production facility, enabling workflows never before possible,” Kelly said.

SeaChange International is also focusing on the multiplatform ecosystem with its new “cFlow solutions” portfolio, which debuted in June. According to SeaChange Marketing Vice President Kurt Michel, the solution was developed to serve broadcast, cable and OTT customers who “want a single workflow management system that handles all of the associated workflows.” In addition, SeaChange’s PanoramiC platform, a pre-integrated end-to-end cloud-based video delivery platform, can be used by content producers, broadcasters, cable and mobile operators and aggregators (such as vMVPDs) for multiplatform delivery.

“We have customers who perform over 1,000 quality checks on incoming content, before they even start processing it,” Michel explained. “With adaptive bitrate streaming, their workflows can literally produce dozens of variations of a given title,” including content rights, geo restrictions and other factors.

He characterized SeaChange’s “medium-agnostic” approach as a “cohesive, viewer-centric system” with modular elements that are “medium-specific where technical requirement dictate.”

Michel cited ad insertion technologies that can be adapted to the mechanisms used on different networks.

“Our session management capabilities allow a viewer to stop watching a title on their traditional TV, and pick up where they left off on their smartphone,” he explained.

VIDEO LATENCY & SPORTS SPEEDS

IBM Aspera’s Kelly underscored the importance of low-latency for streamed content.

“Capturing and producing content for live events such as sports, news, training or education programs poses unique challenges, and true real-time, remote production has long been one of the ‘holy grails’ for broadcasters that produce live events,” he said.

The issue of latency in high-speed streaming of sports has become more prominent due to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing sports betting in the U.S., Kelly added.

Akamai’s Alexander agrees that latency is one of the most significant differences between traditional broadcast/cable delivery and OTT systems.

“We’ve done a lot of development to reduce end-to-end latency to 10 seconds on our generally available delivery and live origin products... equivalent to the latency you see on traditional television,” Alexander told TV Technology. “This is especially important for the live sports experience, where you want viewers—no matter how they’re watching—to see a big play at roughly the same time rather than hear cheers or groans or see something on social media before they actually see it live.”

“While 10-second latency is acceptable for most applications, we continue to push for lower latency,” Alexander added. “We have demonstrated two- to three-second end-to-end latency using chunked-transfer encoding, which is being successfully tested with several customers at the moment.”

SeaChange’s Michel also addressed the latency challenges for sports events and other live programming, which he characterized as part of a bigger reality: “workflow complexity is increasing.”

“Real-time content protection [adds]... an additional layer of complexity,” he said. “Viewer tolerance for problems with live sporting events is usually very low, since they are emotionally attached and the content is highly perishable. The live experience is everything.”

He emphasized that providers are not satisfied with an either/or for live video-on-demand.”

“They require both live and VOD,” he said.

PROMISING OUTLOOK

As vendors look toward the next steps in managing conventional and future video delivery, one theme comes through: the need for a consistent experience.

“A consistent experience across viewing devices and platforms” is the objective of SeaChange’s portfolio of content management systems, advertising management and back office systems, explained Kurt Michel, vice president of marketing for the Acton, Mass.-based company.

“Consistency of the viewing experience,” is Akamai’s goal, said Jon Alexander, senior director of product management for Akamai.

“Uniform, unaltered, in-order byte stream that equally supports constant bit rate and adaptive bit rate formats,” according to Todd Kelly director of product marketing for IBM Aspera, in more technical terms.

“Reliable functioning of many large platforms,” is how Accenture’s Yelen summed it up.

“OTT will continue to grow and to dislodge traditional viewing experiences, with mobile traffic growing even further in prominence,” Yelen said. “The rollout of 5G services will be an additional accelerator because it will provide much higher quality and less compressed images when streamed to a device or television. Better connectivity in highly populated urban areas as a result of 5G may also boost consumers’ desire and ability to stream videos.”

Alexander expects to see more mainstream adoption of the HEVC and CMAF [Common Media Application Format] standards for streaming this year.

“We’re still early in the OTT adoption cycle, so consistently meeting performance expectations at 10x or 100x current traffic levels is a major point of emphasis for Akamai,” Alexander said.

Kelly, citing IBM Aspera’s work with Fox Sports on World Cup coverage, pointed out that, waiting for transfers to be complete before editing is “not an option.” He explained that while monitoring the soccer action in Russia, the Fox Sports production team in Los Angeles was “able to create clips while files are still growing,” constantly keeping in mind that delays “would not meet the audience expectation for live viewing.”

Collectively, all that upbeat exuberance seems to justify the forecast of Colin Dixon, chief analyst and founder of nScreenMedia, a Silicon Valley consultancy.

“By 2022, video streaming will scale to TV audience size,” Dixon said in June. “Linear TV broadcasters will be taking advantage of technology to provide fully addressable linear experiences.”

Consistently.

There is nothing new in the distribution of linear TV over the internet; TV Everywhere (TVE) is pretty much demanded by consumers and is now considered the norm. Traditional broadcasters are forced to keep up with evolving viewer habits by making content available online pretty much immediately and on any device.

But in almost all cases, they are doing so without inserting the necessary signalling which indicates where within a linear stream advertising and other content segments begin and end, and which segments can, must, or must not be replaced with alternate content. Broadcasters already consider providing content Over-The-Top (OTT) a cost of doing business–they know it is part of their future. However, without the right signalling, it is virtually impossible to realize the maximum monetization OTT has to offer broadcasters. Moreover, without the right signalling it is extremely difficult to provide the seamless professional viewing experience broadcasters and viewers expect.

By failing to invest in the technology which can make OTT so lucrative, including signal delivery and correct metadata signalling, broadcasters are not making the most of the opportunities presented by OTT, of which there are many.

THE OTT CHALLENGE

Although OTT should be looked at as an opportunity (as long as the right technology is in place), distributing linear content over the internet is considerably more complex than OTT VOD or TVE distribution. Even the process of reformatting content for OTT is time-consuming, let alone the challenge of correctly adhering to content distribution rights across various devices and regions.

OTT distributors must now programmatically and automatically react at the last second if a piece of content cannot be distributed to viewer X on a cell phone in California because it does not have the right to do so. Without the correct signalling in place to trigger the replacement of this content with something else, the broadcaster could be fined and the OTT distributor may just default to putting up a “slate” to blackout the content. With the current level of competition for viewing time, modern viewers simply won’t wait for this to be resolved and are likely to switch off or watch another video stream.

Linear TV advertising is big business with transactions for the priciest slots coming in at over half a million dollars. Broadcasters are able to cover the astronomical cost of putting a channel on air with the revenue generated from this advertising. But making this content available online could involve costly duplication of workflows and costs, which are not covered by today’s OTT advertising and subscription revenues. The sad fact is, however, that it doesn’t have to be like this for broadcasters, with OTT presenting a number of opportunities to add further value to their existing linear content.

[Read: Syncbak To Conduct 'First Ever' Live OTT Broadcast Using Local Dynamic Ad Insertion]

One of these opportunities is dynamic insertion, or more accurately, replacement of targeted ads. But again, this simply isn’t as easily done in the case of linear TV streamed OTT. For example, it makes no sense for ads broadcast on linear TV to remain with the content for OTT VOD streaming several days later. These ads may be stale and irrelevant by then. More pressingly, the replacement ads must be the exact duration of those needing to be replaced otherwise there will be a discontinuity (a black frame if the ad is too short, or cutting off the beginning of the following content segment if too long, for example). To do this seamlessly and to make OTT as profitable as possible, the broadcaster must be able to deliver the metadata, which signals the frame boundaries and duration of every content segment, to OTT distributors so ads can be replaced dynamically.

DELIVERING THE RIGHT SIGNALS

Broadcasters also have the opportunity to capitalize on the expansion of Nielson Ratings to include the first few days after a linear broadcast, in order to account for on-demand viewing. Linear content streamed OTT effectively has “two bites at the apple,” but only if broadcasters are able to making this content available almost immediately within the C3 window, and cost-effectively too.

Integration with broadcast systems, like media asset management systems, automation playout systems, on-air switchers, etc., provides the most effective way to access timing data associated with content segments. This way, information including timing, asset type and unique IDs can be signalled in-band or delivered out-of-band and applied to the video stream later, with no impact on the main linear broadcast workflow.

If a broadcaster were to extract metadata describing a linear TV channel, including the start and end of each content segment, and deliver these as SCTE 35 messages, it is possible to automate a whole host of value adding applications. This includes Dynamic Ad Insertion/Replacement, the creation of on-demand assets and even interactive TV. As this is done in an automated fashion, it removes much of the cost and labor associated with making linear TV available OTT and solves many associated business challenges.

For example this solves the issue of complex rights management. A policy can be triggered downstream when metadata within a content segment indicates that a particular piece of content must be replaced according to certain parameters as further defined using SCTE 224. For example, if a stream is requested by a viewer in country X or on a particular network, the metadata signalling can indicate that a different stream must be delivered instead.

With the ability to dynamically replace ads on-the-fly, thanks to correctly delivered metadata signals, providing linear content OTT can be a much more valuable process. This is particularly the case if these ads are personalized. In fact, a recent study found that ads within OTT platforms are 67 percent more effective per impression than those on broadcast or cable television. This is because it is much easier to personalize ads according to individual users when delivering content over the internet, as an individual stream is sent to each viewer.

Using additional metadata about users, such as location, viewing history, browsing history etc., it is possible using a distributed playout architecture to deliver much more targeted ads to specific users. Naturally this means the ads themselves are much more valuable and therefore profitable. As long as the timing information and metadata about each segment and ad is delivered, either in-band or out-of-band, to the last video server in the distribution chain, operators can make sure the ads they insert are seamless and accurate.

CONCLUSION

Broadcasters have very little choice when it comes to providing OTT content if they want to remain relevant. This does present many challenges as we have discussed, but none of these are insurmountable with the right technology in place to deliver signalling and metadata information. With these measures in place, linear broadcasters can take advantage of the applications that can make OTT an attractive proposition. Everything from content replacement, rights management, automated asset creation and dynamic ad insertion/replacement are all possible, increasing the value of linear content and opening up new revenue streams. OTT is no longer a cost of doing business, it is a lucrative business. 

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New broadcast ecosystem
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We are witnessing demographic shifts in the age of linear TV viewers, with millennials and younger consuming more content online, and increasingly mobile; social media outstripping TV as the primary news source; Youtube showing the Champions League and Europa Cup Finals, Twitter streaming the NFL, and Facebook Live. The broadcast industry has gone from seeing social media in particular as having only marginal impact to something far more threatening. This potential threat was neatly encapsulated in a recent Royal Television Society (RTS) event ‘Social media muscles in on TV’ which had Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on the panel. However, the panel members emphasized that they:

• operated distribution platforms, that enabled content makers to publish their content, and were not content makers themselves; and
• already had established partnerships with existing broadcasters, rights and content owners

The implication is that social media may offer more opportunities for content owners or producers rather than threatening their existence.

ERA OF COMPETITION

Traditional linear broadcast

This is not the first time that disruption has caused concerns for linear TV broadcasters. The deregulation of TV in the 1980s and 90s focused on increasing competition through program quotas and licensing more channel capacity.

The most significant impact came from digital thematic channels at the time more TV capacity was seen as heralding an era of competition, greater consumer choice and where Public Service Broadcasters would no longer be relevant. Of course, this did not happen in that way. These new channels needed content—but high-quality, and well produced high-quality content costs money—which most thematic channels operators did not have . The winners from that deregulation were actually the people who were predicted to be the biggest losers —the producer-broadcasters. They were the only ones with the talent, resources and budgets to produce high-quality content. It is only many years later that the successful thematic channels could afford to commission originated content.

The intent was to broaden the market (as shown in the diagram in red) and deliver niche segmentation rather than diminish the existing players.

With hundreds of channels, the thematic genre-based broadcasting model was an effective means of providing more choice. The impact on production was more mixed. Program quotas opened the market for independents and there was a demand for more content but there was not the same increase in budgets, which were stretched further. The ‘atomization’ of production—the ability for smaller new entrants to compete—did increase. This was enabled by lower cost file-based HD cameras, but it did not radically alter the cost or process for making content.

SOCIALISM

So what will be the impact of social media?

The first impact of social media has been to massively increase ‘atomization’ of viewers to the point of ‘hyper-segmentation,’ where it is now affordable to serve segments that are very small. So the first effect may be to generate even more revenue for existing content producers, just as the multi-channel model generated a new wave of revenue in the 80s and 90s. This reinforces the conclusion that the producer-broadcasters are content owners rather than just broadcasters.

But there are threats. This time social media coincides with the dramatic fall in the cost of production of technically high quality content. Whilst smartphones and consumer video cameras may not meet the UHD (or even HD) standards of traditional broadcasters, this is not an issue for social media.

New formats, such as AR, VR and 360 may bypass broadcasters altogether. This enables far greater democratization of the production market and the minimum equipment investment for a production company making high quality content has never been lower, and importantly the route to viewers is no longer bound to broadcasters. But is this good news for production companies? The growth in demand for content on social media may well fuel demand for their services, but the pressure on cost is also likely to increase, and so yet again they face a world of “more for less, please”.

STAYING RELEVANT

For broadcast technology vendors, the market for specialist hardware is only going one way—down. Whilst not yet a ‘meteorite’ moment, it will be essential for traditional broadcast technology vendors to embrace cloud technologies if they want to stay relevant.

We are moving inexorably towards a binary market in ‘broadcasting’—we will have the known high-end world of premium content commissioned by big broadcasters and global OTT providers, where production values remain high and technology innovation will be expected to drive operational and infrastructure costs down.

At the other end, we will have the chaotic and brave new world of atomized markets and production processes—where it’s all about personalization, mobile, on-demand, produced by commoditized tools and systems. For those willing to adapt and embrace the change this is a compelling opportunity.

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TV Technology Global.