Streaming Year in Review 2025: Online Video Is Now an Advertising-Led Business

Old Hollywood got Wall Street's memo: "Do whatever it takes to do what Netflix is do­ing." And finally, the studios have begun making money from streaming. With the exception of NBCUniversal, the biggest leg­acy media companies all reported a profit from their direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses in Q3 2024. They got there by variously writing down or shedding ca­ble assets, slashing jobs, hiking prices, policing pass­word-sharing, improving bundled offerings, and put­ting the full focus of their business strategy into online.

The State of Live Sport Streaming 2025

The sport media sector continues to undergo rapid change, with streaming aggregators attempting to reconsolidate for greater ef­ficiency but still falling short of traditional broadcast models in reach and revenue.

Streamticker: The biggest streaming mergers and acquisitions of 2024

The 2024 edition of Streamticker, recapping the streaming industry's most momentous mergers and acquisitions of 2023, kicked off with Disney's gobbling up the last extant portions of Hulu, as Comcast ceded its re­maining 33% stake. But if the late-2023 deal marked only the quiet conclusion of an already-silent part­nership, the much noisier news of Jan. 6, 2025, found Disney absorbing sports-centric streamer Fubo and merging it with Hulu Live + TV. Here we'll review this and other done (or more nearly done) M&A deals that reshuffled the stream­ing industry in 2024.

MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig Talks Resilient Edge Delivery and Optimising QoS and QoE at Scale

In this interview, MainStreaming CEO Tassilo Raesig discusses the ongoing challenges facing global CDN services in their efforts to deliver broadcast-grade streams that meet client expectations for performance, scale, and monetisation. Raesig explains how MainStreaming's edge solutions work within ISP networks to create resilient infrastructure, optimise video delivery, and reduce network strain.

Free Streaming and Sports

The second half of 2023 saw the launch of numerous premium brands and the rise of exclusive deals. What has happened in the FAST sports landscape since then? Let's find out.

Rebundling Fatigue, Ad Tolerance on the Rise, Says TiVo Video Trends Research Report

We're here to parse a new market report from TiVo called "Q2 2024 TiVo Video Trends Report: North America Consumers Getting Smarter as Fatigue Sets In Amidst the Re-bundling Marathon." The title is a mouthful, and the research doesn't deliver on everything it promises.

Dynamic Paywalls for Streaming Services

What would happen if we started to have dynamic paywalls for streaming ser­vices? Leveraging user data, machine learning, and generative AI could create offers based on con­sumption patterns. Some companies are dab­bling in this, but now we have the technology to really start developing it.

The Streaming Media European Innovation Awards Winners

The 16th annual Streaming Media European Innovation Awards competition - formerly known as the Readers' Choice Awards - returns with 12 categories. With more than 9,000 votes, who are the finalists? And who are this year's winners?

NBCUniversal SVP Monica Williams Talks Streaming the Olympics, Cross-Platform CX, and the Power of Metadata

In this wide-ranging interview with Monica Williams, NBCUniversal's SVP of digital products and operations for the company's content distribution business, we discuss how the proliferation of digital platforms across the OTT, CTV, and online ecosystems has brought new content distribution challenges, the boon of metadata for improving customer experiences, and the 17-day everything-must-go-perfectly marathon of distributing the Olympics.

AI and Streaming Media

This article explores the current state of AI in the streaming encoding, delivery, playback, and monetization ecosystems. By understanding the developments and considering key questions when evaluating AI-powered solutions, streaming professionals can make informed decisions about incorporating AI into their video processing pipelines and prepare for the future of AI-driven video technologies.

Games On! Programmatic Ads Compete for Eyeballs at the Olympics

FreeWheel is ready to support a streaming marathon for this summer's Paris Olympics, enabling programmatic buying for the first time for targeted ad-serving. Here's what this means for FreeWheel, NBCUniversal, advertisers, and premium sports streaming.

Q&A: Wurl’s Ria Madrid Discusses BrandDiscovery's Groundbreaking Generative AI for CTV Ads

A Q&A with Ria Madrid of Wurl - she discusses BrandDiscovery, their new tech that makes it possible for marketers to precisely match CTV ads with the emotion and context of what viewers are watching to create positive attention, using Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. Partners like Media.Monks are already driving impressive results for their clients through Wurl's solution, which uses scene-level contextual targeting to help advertisers align the emotional sentiment of their campaign creatives with content closest to the ad break.

All the News That’s Fit for FAST

News broadcasting is one of the most exciting and quickly growing areas for FAST development, highlighted by the recent announcement of the BBC/AMC 24-hour live FAST news channel. Other legacy media news broadcasters, such as Scripps, Sinclair, Hearst, and USA Today, have also entered the FAST news space, many of them with a focus on local content. What are some of the current trends and challenges for FAST news delivery? In this article, several leading industry commentators provide insight.

Welcome to FAST Times

2023 got everyone on the same page: FAST should be part of the me­dia mix whether you are a content provider, a broadcaster, or a distribution platform.

The State of Video Monetisation 2024

So, what does the future of streaming monetisation look like? This post-Peak TV media ecosystem is a brave new world, and being able to find the content you want, with the price you want to pay, will likely keep consumers on their toes for years to come.

Leveraging Metadata and User Data for OTT and FAST Monetisation

Nothing makes recommendation engines—and every other means of profit-making leverage—go, go, go like data in its many varieties. Metadata in particular is the key to personalising viewer experiences and optimising content portfolios. AI plays an ever-greater role in enhancing the metadata quality and improving recommendations. As analysts focused on the M&E industry and insiders at major media companies playing critical strategic roles agree, data is also essential to understanding customer journeys and making informed decisions on how to reach and retain subscribers and, on the ad-supported side, deliver the right ads to audiences and the right audiences to brands.

The State of CTV Advertising

Ad buying is changing. For example, now you can buy from an agency that has deep knowledge of data around local viewing, or you can go to a TV manufacturer that has deep knowledge of all of the viewing on its hardware.

Instant Replay: Streaming Media Connect November 2023

Streaming Media presented its 12th Connect virtual conference November 13 - 16, with media industry cartographer Evan Shapiro as host and MC. Shapiro kicked off the event with a dynamic keynote, digging deep into the Q3 earnings call data to hold the spin doctors accountable and giving an unvarnished view of the industry. Other highlights included The Future of Streaming with Shobana Radhakrishnan, Senior Director of Engineering at Google TV, and several panels covering topics such as Cloud Workflows for Streaming and CTV, Optimizing Live Streams at Scale, How Codec Patent Pools Will Impact Streaming in 2024, Making Live Streaming and VOD More Accessible, Live Streaming Technology Trends, and more.

How Premium and Freemium OTT Content Strategies Differ

When it comes to leveraging and building an audience for premium OTT content, how do strategies differ for premium ad-supported content and subscription-based content? Roku VP Jenn Vaux and ESHAP's Evan Shapiro discuss how and why these strategic approaches differ in this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2023.

Generative AI and the Future of Media Tech

Incorporating generative AI into our workflows has the potential to impact almost everything in media technologies, and I'll examine several of the possibilities in this article.