Manatt Digital Media – September Newsletter: Q3 Digital Video Update
- Digital Video News Roundup
- MDM in the Press
- It's OK to Stay Bullish on MCNs
- Apple's TV Vision—"The Future of TV Is Apps" (Tim Cook)—Highlights From Apple's Press Event
In this month's newsletter we highlight some of the latest activities in the digital video space. Social media, mobile and over-the-top (OTT) viewing continue to make waves in the media landscape, creating new opportunities for content production, distribution and monetization. (See highlights below.)
Digital Video News Roundup
In the last three months the online video space has seen new entrants, new offerings and further experimentation. Showtime's OTT service finally went live in July. Other newly launched OTT services include A+E's Lifetime Movie Club app, PGA Tour's mobile offering, and Canada's SVOD service Shomi. Mobile and pay-TV operator Comcast is also joining the fray with its YouTube competitor Watchables. Among the major online video players, competition heated up when Amazon Prime Video announced offline viewing for all its subscribers, something Netflix said they would never allow. Around the same time, Hulu unveiled an ad-free version to its users for $4 more per month. Read more
MDM in the Press
Below is a selection of commentary provided by MDM leaders around significant deals, players and activities in the OTT space.
- BuzzFeed Motion Picture's Winning Strategy. "It's not making decisions on the value of someone's 'gut' instincts, which was often the way to describe the way studio titles were green-lit," said Eunice Shin, who leads MDM's consulting arm. "With BuzzFeed and other savvy digital-first companies, it's making decisions based on data and science and applying that to an intimate understanding of its audience." (LA Times) Read more
It's OK to Stay Bullish on MCNs
By Peter Csathy
Multichannel networks have been getting a bad rap this past week as a result of a Recode report that Maker Studios' earn-out from its M&A megadeal with Disney might be less than half the maximum $450 million, which would still give Maker execs and investors a nice little $700 million-plus win. Not bad. Read more
Apple's TV Vision—"The Future of TV Is Apps" (Tim Cook)—Highlights From Apple's Press Event
Here are the highlights from this month's Apple press event:
I. AppleTV
- Headline story: "The Future of TV Is Apps" (Tim Cook).
- Apple TV is heavily voice-reliant with powerful (and highly specific) voice navigation via a Siri button. Navigation is enabled across apps (such as Netflix, Hulu, Showtime and iTunes) and displays all matches on one screen. This enhances content discovery and will become even more valuable as Apple opens up the platform to other OTT content providers. Voice navigation also enables easy and extremely powerful viewing control (e.g., "skip ahead 7 minutes into the show"). If this works as advertised, this indeed will be evolutionary and revolutionary in our TV viewing experiences.
- New remote has a touch screen surface. Read more