Brian Ring

2 weeks ago | streamtvinsider.com | Brian Ring

A spate of recent earnings calls suggests major media companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are finally turning profits from their streaming businesses. As streaming has evolved, it has migrated through many consumer propositions. From pay TV add-on to ad-free subscription VOD to fully ad-supported streams, we’re now in an environment that blends many of these models in different ways depending on the genre of content being supported.

3 weeks ago | streamtvinsider.com | Brian Ring

Antenna Data is a funny company. Their data is taken from a population of consumers that have opted-in to provide their personal purchasing behavior to a financial app. That’s not a representative sample. To be sure, I understand why consumers would want to trade their privacy for such services because I’ve seen many compelling RocketMoney ads preaching the proposition. RocketMoney puts the Easy Button to shame.

2 months ago | streamingmedia.com | Brian Ring

Seven years back I suggested that streaming would disrupt and reshape the business model of TV along genre-specific lines. Sports, News, and Entertainment would have to evolve differently as time marched on. I introduced the idea at across-genre panel curated for NABand tried to promote the awkward buzzword “genre-fication,” which I also wrote about in 2022. This past quarter saw DIRECTVmake not one but two massive changes to their bundles which now they describe as genre-based.

Oct 29, 2024 | streamtvinsider.com | Brian Ring

Time moves fast, doesn’t it? So I’ve decided to get more disciplined about an exercise I’ve done periodically in the past. Each quarter, I make a list of all the significant media & streaming stories from the previous quarter that made it to the Wall Street Journal. Then I narrow down that long list of headlines to just five that illustrate key trends that are going to shape the evolving TV ecosystem.

Sep 19, 2024 | streamingmedia.com | Brian Ring

1. One Simple Trick to Boost Ad Fill Right NowI’m not saying SSAI is dead. But it took a big hit at IBC 2024. There’s a new sheriff in town and it’s called SGAI. Server-Guided Ad Insertion, which cleverly rhymes with “server-sided,” is a fun new acronym for us but quite confusing to me. My proposal? Hybrid Ad Insertion, which—well, now you probably have a sense of it. Don’t let the flubbed acronym distract you.