Such availability of content has been created by a democratisation of the TV landscape, where broadcast-quality channels can be spun up efficiently and cost-effectively like never before. Setting up, operating, and monetising a high-quality streaming service is more affordable than ever – mainly because it is now possible to create high quality content and launch streaming apps more efficiently and with fewer vendors.

In this article, I will spotlight how any organisation with good content can get involved in this exciting era for digital distribution.

Maturing technology

The streaming market is fierce and demanding to compete in. Huge investment in vast content libraries has created access to thousands and thousands of films, shows, and other content. Despite such access at the tip of their fingers, audiences often report that they struggle with searching for content and getting relevant recommendations. There is a huge opportunity for niche streaming services to get a slice of the pie as a result, as they can cater better to specific interests. Maturing streaming technology has levelled the playing field by providing such niche content owners a more affordable route to market by going direct-to-consumer (D2C), while also guaranteeing a high-quality viewer experience.

Now, there is an exciting opportunity for niche content providers to meet the needs of an under-served audience in the simplest way. Whether it is content for older audiences, people who like art, independent films, education, fitness or health and wellness, or live streaming faith-based services, there is now the possibility of providing a dedicated service to suit a viewer’s specific interests that the big platforms don’t provide.

The streaming technology market has been evolving rapidly for over a decade now and it has given vendors a lot of streaming experience. There are now genuine end-to-end solutions available – from content ingestion and management through to app development – that deliver great quality experiences.

Such technology has levelled the playing field for content owners with high-quality video content, and its potential is giving them the power to ingest, organise, distribute, and monetise that content to any digital destination.

More monetisation options

D2C also provides a fantastic opportunity for content owners to build first-party data sets and monetise them. What these organisations are doing, ultimately, is getting control.

They can leverage the potential of FAST channels and distribution to grow audiences. They can also embrace subscriptions, advertising, or a hybrid of SVOD/ AVOD to maximise revenues across all bases. For brands, D2C providers can offer an appealing proposition: brand-safe, contextually safe ad placements for a highly dedicated audience.

Securing your future today

The digital media paradigm has changed forever and has set the pace for a new ecosystem. By providing consumer access to all kinds of high-quality content, the opportunities have never been greater for audiences to find the content they want via D2C services. The playing field has been levelled and, while the big streaming companies may continue to occupy viewers’ top one or two subscriptions, there is a fantastic opportunity for niche services to take the next spot.

We are all in the media business now, and it looks like it will stay that way.

Max will be the destination for HBO Originals, Warner Bros. films, Max Originals, the DC universe, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, an expansive offering of kids content, and renowned programming across food, home, reality, lifestyle and documentaries from leading brands like HGTV, Food Network, Discovery Channel, TLC, and ID. Warner Bros. Discovery is promising an average of 40+ new titles and seasons every month to keep the Max catalogue fresh.

“Max will offer an unrivalled range of choice,” declared JB Perrette, President & CEO, Global Streaming & Games at Warner Bros. Discovery. “This new brand signals an important change from two narrower products, HBO Max and discovery+, to our broader content offering and consumer proposition. While each product offered something for some people, Max will have a broad array of quality choices for everybody.”

Max will arrive with three pricing options:

• Max Ad-Lite at $9.99/month or $99.99/year, which comes with two concurrent streams, 1080p resolution and 5.1 surround sound quality, with advertising.
• Max Ad Free at $15.99/month or $149.99/year, which adds 30 offline downloads and removes the ads.
• Max Ultimate Ad Free at $19.99/month or $199.99/year, which is still ad-free and adds two additional concurrent streams, supports resolution up to 4K UHD, boosts offline downloads to 100 and provides Dolby Atmos sound quality.

Existing HBO Max subscribers will have access to Max at the same price as their HBO Max subscription, and will still have access to their current plan features for a minimum of six months following the launch of Max. HBO Max subscriber profiles, settings, watch history, ‘Continue Watching’, and ‘My List’ items will also migrate to Max.

Returning to the subject of content, Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO, HBO and Max Content, says: “The Max service is a wide-ranging mosaic of content that will be unmatched in the breadth, reach, and excellence of its offerings. We are unique because we have the best-in-all-categories across the board by any measure – be they ratings, awards, fandom. We know we can satisfy any craving because we have the brands that people love. At Max, they will find what they want, when they want it.”

Peter Parmenter, SVP of Business Development at DAZN Group, shared his insights at Connected TV World Summit last month, where he was interviewed by Minal Modha of Ampere Analysis.

Investing in local teams to create the best experience

Asked how DAZN has managed to scale successfully with its expansion into new markets across Europe and the differing rights to manage across these, Parmenter highlighted the need to have boots on the ground wherever DAZN plants its flag.

“Our rights portfolio in every market is very different,” he said. “Therefore, we have to have a very local feel to the product. We’ve put new management teams in many of our biggest markets to really take us to the next level in terms of delivering to local consumers.”

One of DAZN’s biggest achievements was securing the UEFA Women’s Champions League, which was the result of a collaboration with YouTube, and Parmenter explained how this came about.

“This was the first time UEFA centrally sold the competition through the group stages right up to the final. It was a four-year deal and we desperately wanted to be involved. We operate in 9–10 core markets and didn’t feel we had the scale on our own to deliver the mission, which is ultimately to grow the women’s game.

“We took what we think was a very innovative proposition to UEFA by partnering with YouTube, the world’s biggest video platform — that can literally get video to every device in every corner of the world — to deliver on that mission. YouTube and Google massively bought into this and we had, collaboratively, an incredible proposition to take to UEFA.”

Uniting linear and OTT to give sports fans choice

In addition to its streaming partnership with YouTube, DAZN worked with various free-to-air broadcasters across Europe — such as ITV in the UK — to ensure the Women’s Champion’s League couldn’t be missed.

Asked if DAZN saw a difference between their OTT and broadcast offerings, Parmenter said: “We take a very practical view about where people want to watch; we make a service available to as many people as we possibly can.

“So, it’s not just about device penetration and making sure we have an app that works on a phone screen all the way up to 85” OLED screens in your living room, which we do. But if there’s an audience out there that would prefer to watch via a linear channel, why not? There are hundreds and thousands of fans out there who have been used to watching [football] on channel 253 every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Why change that?

“What we can do, over time, is convert that audience into an app-based audience, but the app’s got to be better, it’s got to deliver value more than the linear channel, and that’s something that anybody who’s involved in the OTT space is trying to do.”

Avoiding streaming gridlock by collaborating with ISPs

Among all of DAZN’s successes there have also been stumbles, such as the opening weekend of Serie A in Italy when its streams became gridlocked. When it came to learnings from this, Parmenter said it was all about understanding what they could and couldn’t control, and boosting technology to avoid similar issues in future.

“We can’t control when the season starts and we can’t control Italians’ holiday plans,” he commented. “What you saw in the opening weekend of Serie A was a huge, huge amount of the potential audience travelling, particularly in the south where some of the networks aren’t as strong as they are in major cities.”

To bolster DAZN’s network capabilities, it has become more network-aware, installing its own technology stacks with big ISPs in Italy to get closer to users, while developing its video player to better support adaptable bitrates to ensure a continuity of service when there are fluctuations in bandwidth.

“It wasn’t a great weekend,” Parmenter admitted, “but every weekend subsequently we are delivering millions of concurrent streams of Serie A in full HD to devices all over Italy very, very successfully. We will never rest on our laurels, and we will continue to innovate.”

Filling the gaps with diverse content

When asked what makes DAZN better than the linear experience for investors, sports rights holders and sports fans, Parmenter said that beyond the obvious benefits of being able to watch anywhere the DAZN app is available, it was also about how the diversity of content keeps users coming back.

“We’re not just serving you live content, we’re giving editorial, we’re giving you statistics, we’re giving you data. All of these services combine in your pocket so that it’s multiple views a day rather than an appointment-to-view in front of your TV in the evening.”

ITVX will replace ITV Hub and ITV Hub+. The plan is for ITVX to launch in time for the FIFA World Cup finals, which start in late November. ITV wants to double the number of monthly active users (MAU) on ITV streaming over the next five years, but another key KPI is total consumption, with Kelly Williams, Managing Director, Commercial, at ITV, looking to “double or even triple consumption over the next five years.”

ITVX is effectively a new build streaming service – it is based on completely new technical and UX architecture, underpinned by “a significantly enhanced data capability.” Greater personalisation will be one of the most obvious consumer-facing benefits. Deep Bagchee, Chief Product Officer at ITV, promised a destination for discovering content that includes a much richer visual experience. “The more you watch, the more accurately ITVX gets to know you so we can personalise the product experience,” he explained. Children can create their own viewing profiles, in an example of the personalised UX features.

There is scope for dedicated show/events spaces within the new user interface and the FIFA World Cup Quatar will provide an early example of what is possible, where ITVX viewers will find World Cup related content including interview highlights and companion shows. The World Cup will also be the perfect introduction for a service that is partly designed to bring lighter TV viewers to ITV and then persuade them to stay. In the words of Williams: “People will come in and think, ‘This is a better and stronger service proposition’.”

The launch of ITVX is part of ITV’s previously announced strategy to increase its share of on-demand and streamed viewing while maintaining super-scale live audiences for advertisers – with the linear broadcast channels still central to the share-of-time and share-of-ad-revenue ambitions. The company confirmed: “It has become increasingly clear this year that live channels are incredibly important, whether people are watching broadcast or streaming versions. That will be a significant differentiator [for ITV and ITVX]. Viewers are increasingly choosing to watch live TV in a streaming environment,” said Williams during a briefing to media buyers.

ITV has promised an enhanced live experience via ITVX that includes better discoverability – partly driven by better search engine optimisation and by social sharing of big, live television moments.

Chris Goldson, Director of Commercial Marketing and Pitch Development at ITV, added: “We will be doubling down on live streaming as a differentiator, harnessing daytime, soaps, news and sport to ensure we continue to be the biggest game in town for those valuable mass audiences.”

The company will also leverage its own deep library of programming to feed series-stacking and boxset binge-viewing habits in the VOD space, and ITVX will provide a casual linear zapping experience for streamers via FAST channels (as well as standard linear channels). The FAST channels will be a themed curation of shows and other content, played out on a linear schedule. ITV says the common denominator for what goes in one of its FAST channels could be genre, an actor (e.g. you could have a David Tennant themed channel), cultural moments and calendar events, or they can be based upon a specific programme – with The Only Way is Essex, The Chase and Real Housewives offered as examples.

“FAST channels are big in the U.S., and we think we can be very strong in this space,” Williams declared. There will be 20 FAST channels on ITVX at launch and the broadcaster likened their curation to ITV putting together a Spotify playlist that they think their viewers will love. The FAST channels can be added and removed with ease, based on viewer demand, harnessing digital data smarts. The broadcaster aims to introduce a new FAST channel to ITVX every week.

ITV has also announced a significant increase in content investment, taking spend from £1.1 billion to £1.35bn per year, with streaming prioritised. The extra money will be used to attract harder-to-reach, [for TV advertisers] lighter TV viewers to the broadcaster. In total, ITVX will have 15,000 hours of content at launch versus the 4,000 available on ITV Hub today. ITV will welcome third-party content into ITVX. All of this justifies the broadcaster’s assertion that ITVX will be a streaming destination [rather than a catch-up service].

Goldson talked about bonfires and fireworks within the programme mix, with ‘bonfires’ being the always-on programming that keeps people coming back, underpinned by a wider choice of on-demand titles. ‘Fireworks’ are the programming launches, exclusives, series drops and “special moments” that create a big bang. The ‘bonfires’ will include a collection of feature films, with 50 films available on the service at any one time, regularly refreshed. ITV named some of its partners, including Warner Bros, Disney, NBCU, Sony and StudioCanal. “We expect to show 500 films for free in the first year alone,” Goldson revealed. “We will have extremely well-known franchises in their entirety, for free, in one place for the first time.”

ITV used the launch event to stress that ITVX is first-and-foremost an ad-funded service and that ITV’s future is all about free-to-air television. Because the service will include an ad-free subscription tier under the same roof – bringing what is currently ITV Hub+ into the same integrated platform – and because ITV at the same time announced that a lot of content will premiere in ITVX up to nine months before it goes onto broadcast linear TV, some assumptions were made that ITV was shifting further into the paid domain as a strategic objective. In fact, as you can read here, the new exclusive streaming windows apply to the free-to-view tier on ITVX as well as the paid version. The strategic shift embedded in the new windowing is not from free to paid, but from broadcast towards streaming.

One of the first ITVX exclusive premieres, this autumn, will be the flagship four-part drama Litvinenko, with David Tennant playing the lead role of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian Federal Security Services and KGB officer who was murdered in November 2006 by polonium poisoning, creating a security and diplomatic crisis.

As part of the new windowing strategy, every episode of a new series will also be dropped onto ITVX as soon as the programme airs on ITV broadcast television (if it is not premiered ahead of broadcast). “Viewers could watch all the remaining episodes that same night,” Goldson pointed out. “We tested this with five dramas last year and it brought in new viewers and added incremental viewing, so we are going to do it with 20 series in Year One of ITVX.”

Speaking about the strategy to give ITVX a 6-9 month exclusivity period on a significant amount of drama and documentary programming, Goldson said this content will receive a second surge of viewing when it is finally unleashed on the linear broadcast channels. “This is an opportunity to bring in new and younger audiences with refreshingly different types of ITV content as we are unshackled from the linear schedule,” he declared. Streaming-first Sci-Fi, Indie and Documentary programming is expected to bring new viewers to ITV.

The paid tier on ITVX will include content that is exclusive to subscribers plus the full BritBox experience including programming from BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 (the UK’s other major ‘terrestrial’ broadcasters).

Rhys McLachlan, Director of Advanced Advertising at ITV, doubled down on the message that ITV is all about ad-supported television. “ITVX is an AVOD-led proposition; it is advertising funded front-and-centre. There is a subscription tier, with ITV Hub+ and BritBox being integrated into ITVX, but if you de-duplicate those subscribers, we have about one million subscribers. We have modest ambitions in this [subscription] area.”

Emphasising this point, Williams said ITV is “perhaps looking to double the subscription base over five years.” He declared: “It is not true that we are looking to take on Netflix and Amazon – this is about being a premium AVOD service. The premium tier is a small add-on.”

It is worth noting that ITV Hub+ – the current ad-free subscription streaming offer from ITV – is only ad-free for on-demand content, with live programming still carrying ads. This model will be carried over to the subscription ad-free tier of ITVX.

Speaking to advertisers and agencies during the ITVX briefing, Kate Waters, Director of Client Strategy at ITV, emphasised that ITV serves the whole country and [for the purposes of market research] the broadcaster has now defined the national audience into various viewing types, including those primarily looking for tentpole and flagship live entertainment and drama, and those described as VOD-first consumers who are looking for content that drives social conversation, and who skew younger. Another group are later adopters of digital technology who tend to also focus on British content, and yet another group are the streaming subscription stackers who are looking for quality rather than quantity of content. ITVX is designed to serve everyone.

McLachlan said ITVX will increase ITV’s addressable market, increasing the breadth and diversity of the audience as well as encouraging more people to watch more content. ITVX advertising will be 100% traded through Planet V. Advertisers can expect all the targeting options they are used to within ITV Hub, but McLachlan promised that targeting will also be turbo-charged, with more permutations possible by taking content multiplied by audience multiplied by context.

ITV AdLabs, ITV’s new strategy, tech and process innovation initiative, is currently developing an ACR-based solution that will read programme metadata to understand what is happening inside shows or films not just at programme-level but at scene-level. McLachlan gave the example of knowing when it is family mealtime within a show. It is this kind of context that he is referring to in the expanded content-audience-context planning options.

ITVX targeting is backed by privacy compliant data from ITV’s 33 million registered streaming users and ITV will use the new service launch to actively engage with consumers to understand more about them. This will be achieved using a fair exchange of value in a GDPR compliant way.

Asked about the likely ad loads on ITVX, McLachlan said there are no hard-and-fast rules, “and as the proposition grows, we will be much more agile in how we schedule breaks.”

In terms of app distribution, the expectation is that ITVX will appear on any platform where you find ITV Hub today.

Photo: ITV has concluded a wide ranging ITVX content deal with WarnerMedia International Television Distribution for programmes including UK premieres of The Sex Lives of College Girls (featured) and All American. More third-party content deals like this are anticipated.

More around this subject

Interested in the future of free-to-view television, the evolution of content strategies (including windowing) and (subscription and ad-supported) streaming strategies? Then check out Connected TV World Summit in May, which also has three sessions dedicated to advanced TV advertising. Full details here.

The rapid growth of streaming TV consumption makes it imperative that networks, studios and MVPDs have a ‘grown up’ connected TV offering – one that allows them to compete for every eyeball and ad dollar that migrates into the premium digital video environment. This means:

• Holding onto audiences, and attracting new viewers, by ensuring a consumer-friendly ad experience with modest ad loads, frequency capping and relevant ads.
• Enabling ad insertion (and targeting) at huge scale with total reliability, so that mega-events including sport and breaking news can be fully monetized.
• Maximizing the value of inventory by carefully managing direct sales with multiple programmatic demand sources.
• Effectively using audience data to achieve better targeting and a personalized ad viewing experience, even in a cookie-less world.

The pandemic accelerated all digital behaviours, including TV viewing. Mass-scale connected TV was tomorrow’s opportunity and challenge, but tomorrow arrived early. Join us live to hear how networks, studios and distributors can rethink the ad-supported TV model and ready themselves for connected TV primetime.

Register here.

This webcast explores:

• What a holistic ad performance and revenue strategy looks like, and how you find the sweet spot where ‘audience + avails = best possible yield outcome’, and how you avoid the one extra ad that loses you money, as viewers ‘tune out’.
• The potential for greater integration and synergies between SSAI and audience data and targeting capabilities –and how this could be implemented.
• How to manage ad frequency in a multi ad server (direct, programmatic, affiliate) environment and so ensure ad repetition does not degrade the ‘premium’ TV experience.
• The next steps in dynamic ad insertion, including the benefits of server-side ad insertion and client-side ad insertion, and how these can be used successfully in a hybrid model.
• The potential for a multi-DAI vendor strategy (similar to multi-CDN strategies) and how this could influence ad delivery performance and costs.
• How to manage multiple inventory owners within the same video session using an understanding of who has the ‘right to sell’, plus the ad routing and decisioning processes that support sales business rules.
• The special considerations when streaming ad-supported content into MVPD set-top boxes.
• How to monitor and diagnose the causes of ad errors, and so increase ad delivery reliability.
• How organizations are managing ad insertion for very large scale events, including the implications for ad insertion infrastructure

Maureen Bossetti, Chief Partnerships Officer at Initiative, an agency under the IPG Mediabrands umbrella, said her planners are much more focused on connected TV and OTT and are looking at more audience buying in general and addressable TV in order to deliver ‘growth audiences’ for clients because linear TV can no longer match her agency’s reach needs on its own.

As you can read elsewhere, Bossetti told the audience that clients that are heavily into DR [direct response TV] found themselves building frequency rather than incremental reach, but results have improved after seeking new supply opportunities like connected TV and OTT. “We are still spending in [linear] television but we are expanding our purview to other video sources,” she told an online audience.

Jen Soch, Executive Director, Specialty Channels at Group M, is another buyside executive who confirmed that her advertisers are excited by the growth of streaming. “We want to follow the consumer wherever they go within appropriate messaging,” she noted.

Turning to some of the challenges still associated with streaming, Soch said she is still having conversations about measurement and metrics, and highlighted the need for a cross-channel understanding of what the viewer is doing rather than the separate buckets of knowledge buyers have today – when the burden falls on them to figure out the big picture.

Maggie Zhang, Head of Measurement Success at Amazon Advertising, picked up on the growing importance of streaming on media plans. “It is now mainstream,” she declared. “Advertisers are following audiences to streaming platforms but at the same time they are still investing in linear TV. The streaming platform is creating incremental reach contributions to linear TV to achieve the omnichannel goals of advertisers.”

Zhang believes streaming TV is the most exciting addressable media available and Amazon Advertising is combining industry recognised third-party measurement solutions with its own exclusive first-party insights and metrics in an attempt to boost the TV advertising model. The first-party insights emanate from billions of shopping, browsing and viewing signals, with IMDb TV and Twitch among the touchpoints. Interactions include brand-based search, detailed page views and new brand purchases, with loyalty and purchase intent derived from actions, for example.

Meanwhile, Henry Embleton, Head of Ad Products and Revenue at Crunchyroll, a leader in anime, predicted a dramatic rise in the value of the connected TV addressable advertising market, partly boosted by the arrival of older demographics. Demonstrating the role that passion/special interest services have in the expanding television universe (thanks to streaming), he contrasted Crunchyroll’s purpose to that of global streamers he characterises as providing ‘something to everyone’. “We are more verticalised – we are more like ‘everything to someone’,” he said.

Crunchyroll also has a very focused advertiser appeal. “We offer 13–35 year-olds with an interest in gaming, entertainment, fast good and CPG.” Giving an example of the targeting capabilities via this digital service, Embleton pointed to an anti-smoking non-profit that listed age and gender in its target requirements, but only if they had spent money in a vaping store within the last 90 days. “We were able to forecast users and potential impressions based on frequency caps, and the price.”

Philo, the streaming service that aggregates U.S. television channels for $25 a month, logs 98% of all its viewing on connected TV devices, Reed Barker, Head of Advertising at the company, revealed. “That is great because we think that is the prime television experience that everyone wants.” 100% of Philo inventory is addressable, harnessing first-party data from authenticated paying subscribers.

Barker highlighted the value of programmatic to both the sell-side and buyside. “It allows you to very quickly find an audience. You can traffic an ad to a DSP at noon and before lunch that ad could run to a large audience. Programmatic gives you the flexibility to take the scatter dollars – and upfront dollars – and place them in the right place at the right time.”