LUXEMBOURG—The cloud and edge solution provider Gcore has introduced new per-minute billing for its Streaming Platform. 

The simplified plans, which start from $0.001 per minute, is designed to help startups and small businesses deliver streaming services to end users with more predictable costs, and high quality performance.

"The Gcore Streaming Platform offers free transcoding and a video streaming price as low as $0.001 per minute,” said Alexey Petrovskih, head of Gcore's Streaming Platform. “This is possible thanks to several Gcore capabilities: first, we have our own infrastructure, including storage for video hosting and a CDN with over 150 points of presence; second, Gcore has its own transcoding technology, which means that, unlike competitors, we don't have to pay for third-party services."

The simplified billing supports video streaming for up to 100 million viewers, with Gcore's Streaming Platform managing all technical aspects, including upload, recording, storage, delivery via CDN and playback.

The platform also low-latency streaming, live broadcasting of vertical and horizontal videos worldwide and offers adaptive bitrate, which means that even viewers with unstable internet connections can enjoy streaming broadcasts.

LOS ANGELES—TV5Monde has signed a new distribution deal that will bring its premium streaming service TV5Mondeplus to Roku users spanning several territories. 

TV5Monde is a global French language entertainment network available in 422 million homes with 60 million weekly viewers across 211 countries worldwide.

As part of this new global agreement, the TV5Mondeplus app began rolling out on Roku streaming devices on Sept. 22, starting with France, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, with additional countries to come.  It will be jointly marketed in each local territory by TV5Monde and Roku.

The agreement will allow existing users who have subscriptions to TV5Monde via pay TV or a streaming service to stream TV5Monde for free on Roku once they authenticate their TV subscriptions. 

TV5Mondeplus is the world’s largest streaming platform for French language content, featuring thousands of titles subtitled in up to six languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Romanian and Spanish, with more to come). 

It was developed with the support of TV5Monde's partners including SRC (Société Radio Canada), Télé Quebec, TV5 Québec Canada, RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse), RTBF (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone), France Télévisions and TV5Monde SAS, the company said. 

“With TV5Monde available in more than 200 countries around the world, we are pleased to expand the availability of TV5Mondeplus as we continue to seek additional opportunities to grow our streaming audience,” said TV5Monde president and CEO Yves Bigot. “Roku, as one of the world’s top streaming platforms that is growing internationally, is an ideal partner for this expansion.”

"This partnership with Roku brings added value to our subscribers in the U.S. who are now able to access thousands of premium French language programs simply and easily via their Roku devices," added TV5Monde executive vice president of global growth and business development Patrice Courtaban.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA — As Hollywood moviemakers desperately work a Change.org campaign to try to convince WarnerMedia from shuttering movie-buff-targeted SVOD site FilmStruck, the dam supporting many other niche-oriented subscription streaming platforms might be ready to break.

Indeed, Parks Associates recently tallied the known universe of subscription streaming services at more than 200. And Fox Networks senior vice president of distribution Sherry Brennan said that “only a handful of platforms can support themselves in the niche OTT world.”

A small number of subscription-based over-the-top services have more than 100,000 subscribers at this point, added Brennan, speaking on a morning panel at the Streaming Media West conference, a video-tech-focused event held annually in November at a beachside Orange County, Calif. Hyatt.

Brennan said the subscription streaming platforms in general are seeing increased churn, with consumers becoming more savvy in how to exploit the rampant number of available free trials.

“That only adds to the cost” of these platforms, she said.

Notably, Brennan made her comments alongside Michael Dale, executive VP of media and entertainment for WarnerMedia-owned Ellation Media.

WarnerMedia made news last month, when it announced that it would shutter not only FilmStruck, but Korean drama SVOD platform Drama Fever, as well.

Conversely, WarnerMedia is pouring resources into Silicon Valley-based Ellation, which operates the anime focused streaming platforms Crunchyroll and VRV.