Pluto TV’s Post

What does ‘high-quality’ really mean? New research from FreeWheel and NBCUniversal aims to define what makes a high-quality video experience for most viewers and understand the impact of different quality viewing experiences on brands within those environments. #ComcastEmp https://bit.ly/3XARTNm

From THR: When Disney first began rolling out Disney+ across APAC in 2021, the company signaled it was preparing to go toe-to-toe with Netflix as a mass #entertainment platform that would invest heavily in local content throughout the region. At a splashy content showcase in Singapore that year, Disney’s president of Asia-Pacific, Luke Kang, promised to greenlight over 50 Asian originals by 2023. With the industry — and Wall Street — still exclusively focussed on streaming platforms’ subscriber numbers, the populous Asia-Pacific region was the place where analysts believed most of the globe’s growth resided. That first slate yielded several content successes for Disney+ Disney has doubled down on Korean content with a growing 2024 slate, featuring a new series in the Moving universe, Light Shop, and a period drama starring Korean film icon, Song Kang-ho (Parasite). But #Korea aside, amid the fiscal discipline that has defined the second coming of Iger, Disney has conspicuously downshifted on the scale of its local content output. [THR] These past two years have certainly been eventful for The Walt Disney Company overall. How has the streaming strategy for this part of the world evolved over that period [LK] Well, when we first started out in streaming, let’s just say that it was a different environment — whether the macro environment, the industry environment or the internal environment at the company. So, the decision that was made at the time was to try new things. If you look at those first 12 months, we did a bit of everything — lots of genres and different types of content. For North America, Western Europe and the higher per capita markets of Asia — Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore — our strategy was to go with a more traditional pricing for #streaming. But in some markets of Southeast Asia, where per capita incomes aren’t as high, we tried something new by going with a much lower-priced, mass-market pricing strategy. If you want to go after the masses, you need to produce a lot of mass-oriented content, and that was reflected in our slate at that time. But as the macro environment evolved —and the internal environment evolved with Bob [Iger] coming back — we had to pivot. What Bob asked us to do was really to focus. So we had to focus on where we felt we would get the biggest bang for the buck in the region. We also realized that the mass strategy in Southeast Asia would have been a very long-term trek. So we decided to pivot to a much more traditional, high ARPU (average revenue per user) strategy in Southeast #Asia. That wasn’t easy to do — it’s kind of like changing the wheels while the car is already driving down the road — but over the last 18-24 months we’ve successfully gotten to a solid subscriber base with good ARPUs in a lot of our Southeast Asian markets.

With Amazon reporting a 28% increase in content costs ('21/'22)* and 29% of US households dropping #streaming subscriptions due to financial considerations**, streamers are looking at how to dodge the profit crunch by rejigging their models. This means, for the short term, a pivot to a High #ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) model, focusing on mainstream content and higher prices, together with adverts. Here are my four predictions for what I see happening in the mid-long term: 1) data analytics and #ML will push further into customising recommendations and trying to shape #viewingtrends, adjusting the balance between what the user "wants to watch" and what the streamer "wants to the user to watch". This will be a long term, ongoing battleground to determine perceived value vs hard cost (on both user and platform sides), and how far users can be manipulated before they lose faith in a platform. My pick: very, very far. 2) Using the above, platforms will begin to customise price points and ad mix to each user account (already being done on a regional basis). This will evolve and likely formalise under the guise of a third-party app that offers to "negotiate with platforms on your behalf" based on your spending habits and financial status, in return for a soft NDA and access to your data. Side note: they already have your data, but asking you to surrender it will make this work better for everyone. 3) User behaviour based on reactions to the above methods will create a final data set that will predict how much each user account can be manipulated overall, ensuring the platform is able to reliably predict cost/benefit per user on an ongoing basis with very little margin for error. 4) This will also see a spike in piracy, as a certain subset of user reject the manipulation, either consciously or unconsciously. [You may already be feeling it, but the big question moving forward will whether it's enough to push you to piracy].

From Deadline: The #streaming war is over, but we are now in a streaming cold war as players work out which alliances they want to make and how to adapt to the new landscape, Warner Bros. Discovery international exec Jamie Cooke said during his keynote at the ongoing New Europe Market (NEM) Dubrovnik event in Croatia. Cooke is Group SVP and GM for CEE, North Africa and Turkey at WBD. His NEM interview, moderated by Deadline, was titled The Streaming War Isn’t Over. He was quizzed on whether, per that wording, conflict is ongoing between #SVODs. “If you think about the last four or five years and we’re talking from a global perspective, you can see that there was a de-aggregation of services with this perception that you could create a really niche product for different consumer groups, with heavy content investment,” he said. “I think that phase of the war is over. It’s turning more into the next phase, like a cold war; people are aligning, figuring out who they can work with, there is an acceptance that there is a need to come together more.” The WBD exec pointed to developments in the U.S. where Max is being bundled with The Walt Disney Company to create a product with Max, Disney+ and Hulu, and Venu Sports, the streaming joint venture from Disney, Fox Corporation and WBD. Asked whether the international markets will follow the U.S., with cooperation and alliances formed, Cooke said that was needed “otherwise you’re just into that spiral of spending more and more money on content and fighting with X amount of players,” but, he added, there are always challenges when huge companies align. “You’ve got to get over strategies that companies have established for the long term, you have to kind of rip them up and think about them differently, it requires collaboration, which is not always easy,” he said. “But I think it’s a necessity, and more so for the consumer. If you need seven subscriptions to find what you want, that feels really clunky.” HBO Max is in 65 markets globally and 25 in #Europe, including Poland where it has just gone live. Cooke said profitability, scale, and engagement are the three metrics WBD has in mind when considering where to rollout next. He also addressed HBO Europe shuttering its scripted unit and said it “hasn’t had a massive negative impact” in terms of the subscriber count or profitability.

Have the 'Streaming Wars' turned cold? 'The streaming war is over, but we are now in a streaming cold war as players work out which alliances they want to make and how to adapt to the new landscape', Warner Bros. Discovery international exec Jamie Cooke said during his keynote at the ongoing NEM Dubrovnik event in Croatia. Collaboration within streaming is crucial — it's a crowded market and competing against one another can be expensive. But how you choose to collaborate matters. One-to-one direct deals between competitors can create some complicated problems. Take one of the most recent joint ventures: the Disney / Fox / WBD creation of Venu Sports in the US. Before the service has even launched, Venu has been hit with an antitrust suit that already has significant support from other broadcasters and members of Congress. There are simpler ways to join forces. A Super Bundling hub like Verizon +play gives content providers the same opportunity to attract audiences through a more diverse content pool, but without the risk of stepping on competition laws. Why make a costly one-to-one deal when you can make a one-to-many connection much more simply? If we are in a streaming cold war, Bango: Subscriptions, bundling & payments are more than happy to be Switzerland. Fragmentation into small alliances is still fragmentation. We have to think bigger. https://lnkd.in/eub5eihn #Streaming #Content #Bundling

From THR: The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger gave a mea culpa for big losses incurred while launching #streaming platforms like Disney+ during an investor conference appearance on Wednesday. “As we got into the streaming business in a very, very aggressive way, we tried to tell too many stories. Basically we invested too much, way ahead of possible returns. It’s what led to streaming ending up as a $4 billion loss,” Iger told the MoffettNathanson LLC #Media, Internet & Communications Conference during a session that was webcast. Iger addressed a falling out with his hand-picked successor, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek, whose tenure he called out for lavish and misplaced content spending. “It was clear to me that our structure was not working, because we were removing accountability from those that were basically investing the most capital was a mistake,” he argued. Iger said Chapek had moved the P&L (profit and losses) responsibility to the studio’s distribution arm, a move he reversed on his return as CEO in 2022. The result of spending more on content than could be turned to profit “resulted in volume and not quality, which turned out to be a mistake,” Iger added. The Disney boss conceded volume was required to win the streaming wars against rivals like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. As part of his turnaround plan for Disney, Iger said he reinstalled a link between the creative and monetization sides of the studio “to basically help guide what was being made, when it was being made and where, meaning internationally.” That was followed by Iger when back at the Disney helm announcing he was looking at all options, including a possible sale of ABC, ESPN and its linear TV assets. He has since revised his strategic thinking around Disney’s linear TV assets, he told the investors conference, and now sees them as part of a wider slate of assets to engage consumers "When I came back, I did declare everything was on the table,” Iger recalled of a root and branch look at the studio’s asset base. “And I looked very expansively at traditional media. Ultimately I concluded – and I know I mentioned the word portfolio — where it’s not going to be a growth business, but it could become an important component to our ability to basically engage with the consumer,” Iger argued. Along with that strategy, Disney had reduced its content spend for traditional #TV networks, invested in some and then managed them seamlessly with streaming platforms, whether that’s ABC or Hulu . “So you have the same executives managing both, and their goal is to drive basically bottom line growth and success,” Iger argued.

IMO: Some short term impact to attendance b/c of broader macro issues but ultimately strong streaming will benefit parks as they can bundle tickets/subscriptions, offer exclusive content on streaming that feeds park experiences etc...Their ability to move between virtual and physical is somewhat unmatched (maybe Comcast is close) and is a distinctive competitive advantage. #disney #experience #entertainment #competitiveadvantage #strategy

Love this Dana McGraw... As subscription bundling partnerships continue to grow rapidly, like Mercado Libre Meli+ giving members Disney Streaming, standards like Disney Advertising's Clean Room or BridgeID (for #advertising), and Bango Digital Vending Machine (for entitlement and subscription management) become even more essential for success. They allow the industry to rapidly scale, get creative with super bundling and remain responsive to market opportunities. #retail #subscriptions #superbundling Mercado Livre Brasil

𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝘂𝗻𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗿𝗲-𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗴𝗲. If you want to SURVIVE, go together. 🎥 Take a page from Hulu's script. It was born when multiple major media players joined forces in a joint venture, combining their assets to create a powerhouse streaming platform. 💰 By identifying gaps and leveraging each other's strengths, they built a business that now has tens of millions subscribers 📈 The lesson? Strategic partnerships are key - look at where you can partner to fill in the missing pieces and unlock new growth opportunities. 🤝 I'm curious. What business moves have you seen shake your industry? Drop a comment below! #StrategicPartnerships #Strategy