Everything in Streaming Has Its Price

This column isn't meant to be a downer, especially because the overall economy seems to be plugging along. But it is meant to ask those of you in the industry to share anecdotes and stories about the pain points you're facing. We know that everything in streaming has its price, but you are in a better position to help us fully understand what that price entails.

Personalization Is More Than What You Think It Can Be

With advances with generative AI, just-intime transcoding, SSAI stitching, and other streaming video tech stack components, companies like Infuse Video are demonstrating that the true vision of video personalization—changing the video content itself—is finally at hand.

The Argument for Addressable Advertising

For this column, I spoke with Larry Allen, VP and general manager of data and addressable enablement at Comcast Advertising, about a question that lands firmly on the deterministic side: "What is addressable advertising?" The term "addressable" refers to targeting digital and broadcast inventory and being able to buy audience segments on a household level.

Backward Design for Educational Video Production

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

Amazon Prime Adds Ad-Supported: Not Too Late for Tiers

September 22 brought the unsurprising news that Amazon will soon join Netflix, Disney+, and Max by adding an ad-supported subscription tier for viewing its premium content in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Canada. Prime being Prime, it's slightly inverting the approach its fellow top-tier titans have taken. Instead of offering a reduced subscription price for those budget-conscious viewers who are willing to suffer through a few ads in their premium shows, Amazon is making the ad tier the default and tacking on $2.99 to its ad-free tier.

Evidence That Survives Time

From war crimes to war crime tribunals and war commemorations, how do we guarantee that content is available to play?

‘Bulletproof’ Needs to Be a Standard Feature for Production Gear

There's a lot more imperfect gear on the market than ever before—gear we can't count on from gig to gig. Gear that can't deliver reliable video. Features that work and then don't. Devices that connect and then don't. We've lost core reliability. Bulletproof needs to be a feature.

Stars, Strikes, Streaming, and a Reckoning on Rock-Bottom Residuals

Largely at issue in the first simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 60+ years are legacy residual rates in expired contracts that no longer reflect either the prevalence of streaming or the profit it brings to studios.

Max, Netflix, Off-Licensing, and The Real World

Perhaps the most surprising HBO outplacement news came just at this writing in late June, when WBD revealed that it was "in talks" to license the five-season HBO comedy series Insecure and other DFA'd HBO titles to Netflix, the first time HBO has ever let a tier-one original content competitor get its hands on HBO content. Like selling ads and staggered season releases for Netflix, for HBO, cutting such a deal with a premium rival was internally frowned-upon if not strictly verboten until recently.

Nostr: The Next Step to Micropayment Video Content Monetization?

The impetus to create something like Nostr began with the Bitcoin community, which was seeking more ways to confirm known identities on the public Internet and create a path to send payments between two parties with more ease than ever before.

Streaming Sustainability and Imaginary Bridges in the Cloud

Only time will tell how successful new sustainability reporting standards ESRS E1 (European) and the SEC (US) mandate will be in the near-term in curbing greenwashing and improving sustainability requirements and adherence in the streaming industry, or how much of the long-term their failure might costs us.

An Impending Accessibility Backlash

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

Measuring What’s Possible—Is This a Real Problem?

Now that ad dollars are moving from broadcast to digital via CTV buys, maybe we need to accept that the measurement standards for digital and broadcast are always going to differ.

Producing for FAST? Take it Slow

FAST programming needs space for the commercials. Unless you intentionally craft that space into your show, it just slices into your content randomly, ruining the mood of narrative content and frustrating viewers just as the show was getting to the "good part." Watching YouTube content on a Roku device is like this now. The random "pop" to commercials in the middle of a scene is very annoying.

What Else Did We Get Wrong?

Based on what I'm hearing from a wide array of streaming producers, the heightened demand for streaming live events that we expected to be a natural outcome of its COVID-era ascendancy is either evaporating or simply hasn't materialized.

I’ve Seen The Future of The Streaming Video Tech Stack

The evolution of the evolution of TV is coming soon, hinted at by services like Norsk. I for one can't wait.

Follow-the-Presenter Tools for DIY Instructional Videos

Until fairly recently, if a teacher wanted to produce a DIY instructional video untethered to a fixed point in front of a camera, they'd need to remotely control either a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) head or a multicamera switcher. With the arrival of competent and inexpensive facial recognition software, several consumer videoconferencing cameras now offer automatic framing to allow teachers or other presenters to move around a scene to better engage with viewers and interact with props and visual aids.

Why the Upfronts Are So Yesterday

The internet fostered the ability to make changes on a continual basis, so how come national broadcast advertising is still being transacted in the upfronts (the same format that started in 1962), which require an annual dollar and audience-reach commitment in advance to buy and sell advertising?

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

Let a Good Chatbot Answer That Question

If the recoiling-in-fear "Is AI coming for our jobs?" question is premature, it's also far from the most interesting topic these experiments raise. Rather, it's how can we get better answers by asking better questions?