streaming

During Disney’s upfront event on Tuesday, just hours after Amazon’s, the Mouse House couldn’t hold back on pitching its content and advertising prowess. Sports was a big highlight.

Amazon kicked off its first-ever upfront event with advertising right out of the gate, including pitches about its scale, shopper data and content, particularly its sports programming.

Actors, musicians, dancers and comedians vouched for the value of NBCU media in between flashy performances and trailers during the programmer’s TV upfront. But about advertising, NBCU execs barely made a mention.

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) broke the trend of streaming publishers reporting positive gains last quarter. But it’s slowly gaining subscribers, and expects bundling and global expansion to help speed up traction for its streaming service, Max.

For Magnite, the biggest growth opportunity lies in supply-path optimization. The trade-off is the pressure to differentiate itself from other supply-side platforms competing for agency deals.

PubMatic has its supply-path optimization initiative, its strategy to introduce direct deals for CTV and online video, to thank for its quarterly revenue growth.

Disney Advertising links up with Walmart Connect to let advertisers match Walmart’s and Disney’s first-party data for audience-based bids on Disney+ and Hulu inventory.

Disney is on track for its combined streaming offerings to reach profitability by the end of this year. Continued growth will hinge on bundling its streaming properties and its management of sports media.

Amazon unveiled three new interactive ad units for Prime Video, all of which are shoppable, ahead of its TV upfront debut.

It’s been a busy week in CTV and streaming, with Google kicking off NewFronts, Paramount ousting its CEO and the IAB projecting social video will outpace CTV in 2024.

Using Samba TV’s ACR data, StackAdapt is launching two features to help clients attribute and forecast incremental reach directly to streaming, compared to linear alone.

TV buyers predict that streaming publishers will heed their demands for greater flexibility, more programmatic execution and improved measurement during this year’s upfront season.

Paramount Global is reeling from shareholder pushback against a pending merger with private equity-backed production company Skydance Media. In the meantime, it’s hoping to impress advertisers with streaming subscriber and advertising growth.

Google used its NewFronts stage to unveil updates to DV360 that should make it easier for advertisers to manage campaigns across Google and other connected TV publishers.

If anyone asks what the main theme of Roku’s Q1 earnings call was on Thursday, say: “programmatic.”

Streaming services with the best chances of survival are those that can turn their media into a performance marketing channel with targeting and attribution that looks and feels like digital advertising – at least according to investors on Wall Street.

Netflix grew its overall revenue by 15% year over year, largely driven by account growth, thanks to anti-password sharing tactics. It also unveiled new ad measurement options for advertisers.

Advanced TV advertising company Cadent announced plans to drop $324 million to acquire the performance marketing company AdTheorent.

Seedtag announced a product called Contextual TV designed to help its clients apply contextual targeting tactics to their streaming ad buys.

Disney just took the next stop on its journey to automate as much of its ad sales as possible by the end of this year with the release of DRAX Direct, an expansion of its real-time ad exchange.

NBCUniversal is making its annual case for bigger streaming ad budgets at One24, NBCU’s annual ad tech and data dog and pony show, which took place in New York City this week.

Streaming services that monetize with ads must prioritize engagement first and foremost. But programmers and investors alike named engagement as one of the top challenges of streaming profitability.

Say hello to Blkfam (pronounced “Black fam”), a free ad-supported streaming platform that launched in February with on-demand content curated for Black families. The platform was founded by media vet Larry Adams with equity investment and creative direction from Whoopi Goldberg.

Why are there so many loss-leading streaming services? Blame it on Bob Iger, says LightShed’s Rich Greenfield.

Streaming services must juggle subscriber growth and ad revenue – an ongoing struggle that produced a mixed bag of Q4 earnings results. But there’s a reason why it seems like Netflix is coming out on top.

Self-serve CTV ad platform Vibe.co announced its $22.5 million Series A round, which it will use to bolster its machine learning and measurement chops to help SMBs give CTV a try.

Paramount touted its tailwinds during its Q4 earnings call, including a new partnership with Walmart that gives it access to the retailer’s shopper data.

If Walmart’s pending acquisition of Vizio makes it past regulators, the retail media giant will get to reap the rewards of a profitable data and ads business that strengthens its position as an adversary to Amazon.

Warner Bros. Discovery is in a tight spot with double-digit TV ad revenue declines – and its core streaming service, Max, hasn’t picked up the slack … yet.

Future Today, a streaming platform with a portfolio that includes content for kids, wants to rebrand itself to marketers and agencies as a “family-friendly” programmer that also has content designed for viewers over 13 years old.