Disney is losing money faster than it’s adding subscribers. The media giant reported a $1.5 billion loss on its streaming business lines for the quarter, calling Q4 the peak of its operating losses. But Disney isn’t worried (or so it seems). It’s hanging on until the US launch of an ad-supported Disney+ tier on December 8.
Samba announced its merge with the St. Louis-based AI startup Disruptel to bolster its machine learning chops, namely in automatic content recognition (ACR). Samba plans to incorporate Disruptel’s tech, which is built on show-level content identification and analysis, into its ACR-based measurement.
Warner Bros. Discovery is rushing the launch date of its AVOD streaming service meant to combine WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and Discovery’s Discovery+. Combined, WBD networks lost 8% in total Q3 revenue, but the company doubled its streaming ad revenue, giving WBD hope as it smooths out its rocky post-acquisition start.
The third quarter wasn’t a good one for Roku, which shared belt-tightening plans in expectation of worse results to come during the all-important upcoming holiday season. That’s what happens when advertisers get nervous and hit the brakes.
Ocean Spray is assembling its cross-channel campaigns for the holiday season – and just producing and managing the video assets alone requires Santa’s Workshop-levels of effort and cross-team collaboration. But fragmentation is both a challenge and opportunity, according to Melanie DiBiasio, the brand’s associate director of media and martech.
Although Netflix lost roughly 1 million users in Q2, the streaming giant gained 2.4 million subs in Q3, which helped boost the company’s revenue by 6% year over year. The question is: What happens to Netflix’s subscriber count when it flips the switch on ads in less than two weeks?
TV ad measurement has seen a lot of positive progress, but it’s still something of … a big fat mess. Luckily for advertisers, TV measurement is nowhere near as messy as it was just 12 months ago, said Kelly Metz, managing director of linear and advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group, speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in New York City this week. Still, buyers aren’t getting the data transparency they say they need in order to make more informed media buys.
The data clean room category is like wet cement right now. And Snowflake is writing its name everywhere. On Monday, Snowflake announced an investment in OpenAP, an advertising identity data company co-owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
Netflix has ads starting in November. The Netflix Basic With Ads plan is launching in 12 countries on November 3, including the UK, Italy and Korea, and will cost viewers $6.99 a month. Netflix was originally planning an ad tier for 2023, but the streaming wars are moving full steam ahead.
Roku became the second major CTV publisher to adopt Nielsen’s new ad deduplication tool for measuring its ads across linear and streaming video inventory, following YouTube this summer. The tool is designed to help programmers deduplicate audiences across linear and streaming by comparing reach across screens, Kim Gilberti, SVP of product management at Nielsen, told AdExchanger.
