Movies on FAST channels: spotlight or sideshow?

In the fast-evolving world of free ad-supported streaming television, movie channels have quietly carved out a meaningful niche, yet they still struggle to command the visibility they deserve. To gauge their true footprint, I examined Samsung TV Plus, one of the fastest-growing FAST platforms across the US and Europe's five largest markets (EU5) to answer the question: Movies on FAST channels: spotlight or sideshow?

With live sport streaming, control the platform, control the game

Streaming platforms, tech giants, and traditional broadcasters are all fighting to become the destination for live sport viewers. And in the middle of it all are the fans, facing rising costs, fractured access, and a growing sense of fatigue. The rights war has become a platform war. And no one's sitting on the sidelines.

Introducing the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards Winners

The polls have closed, and the results are in! After an energetic voting period, we're excited to reveal the winners of the 2025 Streaming Media European Innovation Awards. Now in its 17th year, this year's programme attracted more than 1,200 participants who cast 8,000-plus votes votes across 13 distinct categories.

The 2025 Streaming Media Europe 51

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the Streaming Media Europe 51, making its much-awaited return after a pause in 2024. This marks the 11th iteration of this list and the second time we've streamlined the selection to just 51 standout companies—moving away from the more expansive Europe 101 format of the past to focus on the most innovative, impactful, and forward-thinking technology providers in the streaming ecosystem.

MoQ Trial: SVT and Vindral revolutionise real-time streaming at the World Rally Championship

At the forefront of innovation in live broadcasting, Swedish public service broadcaster SVT is taking bold strides toward modernizing its live streaming workflows. As part of this transformation, SVT has partnered with Vindral, a company specializing in next-generation, ultra-low latency live streaming solutions. Their joint mission is to streamline hardware usage, enable remote production, and push the boundaries of real-time media delivery by leveraging the emerging and evolving transport protocol Media Over QUIC (MoQ).

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.

The State of Corporate Video 2025

Due to limited growth in the size of the market, the solution to increasing profitability in the corporate video space has been consolidation and cost-cutting. After some signs of movement in acquisitions in 2023, 2024 final­ly saw the larger companies in the space getting ac­quired or beginning to look for formal partnerships or acquisitions.

The State of the Video Codec Market 2025

HEVC rode the 4K/HDR wave to success, but AV1, VVC, and LCEVC lack an equivalent killer app. With CDNs racing to the bottom on pricing and new royalty pools threatening to increase costs, codec adoption is no longer just about technical merit—it's about survival. These are the issues I'll explore in this article.

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.

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 Media & Entertainment Streaming 2025

Not unexpectedly, 2024 saw a slowing down in the rapid user acquisition that entertain­ment streaming platforms enjoyed in pre­vious years without the influx of new plat­forms and the boost in subscriber numbers gained during the pandemic.

AI and Entertainment: a Q&A with Hub Research's Jon Giegengack

AI is rapidly changing the way people interact with entertainment, and companies are embracing AI to streamline operations and improve efficiencies in producing, marketing, and distributing content. Hub Entertainment Research released its first study on AI in Entertainment, revealing that while most consumers have heard of generative AI, very few understand how it works or what it's for. Jon Giegengack of Hub Research discusses the report's findings and implications in this Q&A with Streaming Media's Tyler Nesler.

The Rise of Automated Translation in the Localisation Industry: A Q&A With Maria Castañeda of Lokalise

Lokalise, a cloud-based localisation and translation management system, has observed a fascinating shift in how content is being translated and has some intriguing data on the rise of automated translations versus human translations. Their findings illustrate a significant increase in automated translations in 2024. Maria Castañeda, Lead Product Marketing Manager at Localise, answers some questions about these new insights.

Altman Solon Global Sports Survey - A Q&A With David Dellea

Altman Solon's David Dellea discusses the findings from their 2024 Global Sports Survey, with topics including the impact of younger generations' changing consumption habits on live sports, the role of AI in enhancing viewing experiences, the challenges of content fragmentation, and more.

European Broadcasters’ Journey Into the Streaming Era

Linear TV faces a structural decline in weekly reach and viewership while its audience ages. The model as we know it is running out of steam. Death isn't around the corner, though. It simply calls for an extensive transformation of broadcasting businesses to survive and thrive.

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?

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.

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.

The State of Corporate Video

Jake Ward, Business Development Director at Groovy Gecko, breaks down the current state of corporate video conferencing, with detailed analysis of Hopin, Brightcove, Kaltura, Vimeo Enterprise, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.