Weely Digest from the West
Jean-Baptiste Piron
Cultural Attaché I Attaché culturel I Québec Office Los Angeles
-Golden Globes: The Complete Winners List: ‘1917’ Wins Best Drama Film - Tom Hanks was honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, while Ellen DeGeneres received the Carol Burnett Award.
-Former HBO Chief Richard Plepler Inks Five-Year Deal With Apple TV Plus: The former head of HBO, Richard Plepler, has made it official with Apple TV Plus, inking a five-year production deal with the entertainment streaming arm of the iPhone maker. The agreement between Apple and Plepler’s newly launched production company, Eden Productions, spans original series, feature films and documentaries. “I’m excited to work with Zack, Jamie and the standout team at Apple who have been deeply supportive of my vision for Eden from day one,” said Plepler in a statement. “The shows that Zack and Jamie produced, ‘The Crown’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ are among those I most admired. Apple is one of the most creative companies in the world, and the perfect home for my new production company and next chapter.” His boutique production company will be focused on just a few high-profile programs. As Variety reported in November, Plepler was said to be molding a small team of executives in New York to build out the production company. His advisors on the Apple deal include investment advisor Paul Wachter and attorney Lawrence Shire. The talks between Plepler and Apple’s worlwide video heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht spanned several months. The move comes after Plepler left his position as chairman and CEO of HBO last February after a 28-year tenure, amid structural changes to its parent company, WarnerMedia. Apple TV Plus, which launched in November, has a small but high-profile slate of original programming, including “The Morning Show,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.
-Music Streaming Soared From 7% to 80% of U.S. Market in the 2010s, RIAA Stats Show: Streaming rose from 7% of the U.S. music market in 2010 to a whopping 80% in 2019, according to an eye-popping number from the RIAA, one of several statistics the organization tweeted Monday from what is apparently a forthcoming decade-end report. The statistics also showed that paid streaming subscriptions rocketed from 1.5 million to some 611 million by the middle of 2019, and vinyl sales soared from just over $50 million in revenue in 2010 to just under $450 million in the same period — in other words, they were nine times greater.Separately, the RIAA showed that Adele, Taylor Swift and Drake dominated the decade’s top 10 albums chart, accounting for some 8 of the top 10 titles of the 2010s. (Head here for a deeper dive on those numbers.) Specific numbers and details on methodology were not available at the time of this article’s publication, although some specifics can be found in the organizations previous year-end reports. (A rep for the RIAA told Variety there was no further information to share at the time of this article’s publication.)
-YouTube TV Adds a New Feature for Sports Fans: If you are a sports fan, YouTube TV has a new feature you are going to want to test out. Recently YouTube TV added a feature called Key Plays. This new feature will allow YouTube TV subscribers to watch a condensed version of DVRed sporting events. Instead of watching a two-hour basketball game or a three-plus-hour football game YouTube will automatically create a custom list of the must-see plays from the game, which allows you to watch the important points in a fraction of the time. Recently on YouTube supercuts of sporting events have become hugely popular with networks like ESPN and FS1 putting extended highlights of sporting events up for fans. Now YouTube TV is jumping in the game in an effort to attract sports fans to subscribe. This is not just a pre-produced video, but the key plays feature allows fans to also pick the play they want to watch. You can find this new option when you click on a sporting event right next to an option to watch the game from the begining. We successfully tested it out on an Android smartphone using the YouTube TV app.
-How AI Is Really Going To Change Real Estate In 2020 And Beyond: By 2030, AI is predicted to add +$15 trillion to the global GDP thanks largely to solving data issues according to PwC. Lending money used to be a tricky business but time consumers and technology is changing. Banks and other industries are struggling to cope with the changing consumer demand, but a few are getting it right. Real Estate is one industry that has a big AI opportunity due to its late mover position. The early pitfalls have been identified and now fast progress can be made with a sensible strategy. Lending money is an easy task but validating a client is tricky. "Risk is the biggest hurdle to get over" according to Reynaldo Reyes, Director of Sales, Sharp Loan. "Biases still exist, and algorithms aren't going to solve the issues if they are built-in from the ground up...let alone when facial recognition and GPS really get integrated into systems." Real Estate is starting to use technology to its full potential, according to Reyes. From virtual reality, smart contracts, virtual assistants to better UX on sites and voice bots; « We’re using AI chat bots and Virtual Assistants, it really helps answer consumer queries with little delay. This feature is more targeted toward millennials looking for property because trigger messages based on certain actions or keywords provide timely assistance which makes the mortgage experience less stressful. Technology is helping us get people to the right place, figuratively and literally. »
-10% of Netflix, YouTube TV, Disney+, & More Subscribers Cancel Every Month: The greatest fear for streaming services has been churn. This is the practice of subscribers canceling a service after just a few months or sometimes before the free trial is over. Now Bloomberg gives us some insight into how many streamers and cord cutters stay with a streaming service once the free trial ends. According to Bloomberg, just one third of streamers stick around after a free trial ends. Even more scary for streaming services is 10% of subscribers to streaming services like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Disney+ cancel every single month. The good news for these services is even though they are losing 10% of their subscriber base every month the number of new subscribers is typically outpacing the number that cancel. As you can understand subscriber losses of 10% every month is scary. Some streaming services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ will be releasing shows weekly instead of all at once to help fight churn. The hope is that they will be able to keep subscribers. Others like Netflix have opted to offer a growing list of high quality exclusive programming that you can only get with the service. Even more have used promo offers with a free Roku as long as you agree to pre-pay for several months. The fight to figure out how to keep subscribers in a post-contract world will likely be one of the biggest battles of 2020. Some like AT&T are even trying to put contracts on streaming services like the new AT&T TV service that comes with a 2-year contract.
-HBO Max is the Most Anticipated New Streaming Service of 2020 (Cordie Awards 2019): We’ve seen several new streaming services launch over the past few months, and there are still more to come. This year, we asked our readers to share which upcoming streaming service they were most excited about. Here’s how they were ranked. HBO Max took 27% of the votes. NBCUniversal’s Peacock was next with 20.6%. T-Mobile TV was third with 17.1% of the votes. Vidgo, which had not yet launched when the survey was taken, took 8.8% of the votes. The remaining 26.5% of readers answered “N/A” or “other” when asked which streaming service they were excited about. HBO Max has been announcing original content, ranging from a dark comedy starring Hugh Jackman to reality shows from Ellen Degeneres to a Gossip Girl reboot. You can check out more of the content announced by HBO Max in this post. Peacock has been in the news a lot lately, as we’ve been getting more information about a tiered pricing schedule and learned that NBC is planning to include live TV on the streaming service. T-Mobile TV has been a bit of a mystery. We answered the question of whether T-Mobile TV is dead in November and have been waiting to learn more since then.
-Hasbro Completes $3.8 Billion Acquisition of Entertainment One: Hasbro is poised to become a bigger player in entertainment now that the toy giant has completed its acquisition of Entertainment One. The $3.8 billion all-cash deal was unveiled in August. Entertainment One CEO Darren Throop will report to Hasbro chairman-CEO Brian Goldner. Olivier Dumont, eOne’s president of family & brands, Steve Bertram, president, film and television, and Chris Taylor, global president of music, will also make the move to Hasbro and continue to report to Throop. Hasbro also said Monday in announcing the closing that it would pay off about $700,000 in eOne debt as part of the transaction. As of eOne’s most recent earnings report from March, the company has about $450 million in debt on its books. Hasbro aims to capitalize on eOne’s kidvid brands including the “Peppa Pig” franchise, and it aims to use eOne’s production and distribution infrastructure to boost its array of well-known properties ranging from “Transformers” to board games such as Monopoly to “My Little Pony.”
-Faster Wi-Fi 6 will be called Wi-Fi 6E, if 6GHz spectrum is available: As the FCC and similar regulatory agencies around the world prepare to open up 6GHz radio spectrum for use in Wi-Fi networks, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced today that it has selected a new name to identify devices that support the technology: Wi-Fi 6E. The branding is expected to see early use over the next year or two, assuming regulators continue on their current path toward approval. Current Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) devices use 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio frequencies to transmit relatively huge quantities of data at homes, businesses, and schools. Wi-Fi 6E extends the latter standard’s support to include adjacent 6GHz frequencies, with 14 additional 80MHz channels and seven additional 160MHz channels to serve as extra wireless pipes for data.
-The major battle of the 2020 streaming wars will be over ads: Everything we know about actual consumer behavior—and heck, logic—from the last decade (and maybe the last four) is that people will do just about anything, and buy just about anything, to avoid ads. DVRs, ad blockers, and Netflix have all seen their rise fueled by a desire for ad-free entertainment. Yet as we enter the next phase of the streaming wars—with AT&T’s HBO Max, Peacock, and Quibi coming online this spring, all of which have promised ad-supported versions (with some of them even stating that their ad-supported versions would still carry a monthly subscription fee), this pause moment has once again become one of the newest advertising opportunities on TV. Last month, AT&T announced that its Xandr ad-tech arm is now selling video ad time during pause breaks. Hulu, which is majority-owned by rival Disney, had already been using that pause to post static ad images, but the AT&T announcement signaled that the old-school commercial break was alive again. The difference here, as Xandr CEO Brian Lesser told Variety, is that these pause ads don’t interrupt your show. “That’s a noninterruptive ad,” he said. “It’s very high value. It’s very brand safe. It’s 100% viewable, and our sales team is in the market now with that product, and it’s gotten great reception.” Well, that’s one way to look at it. Within Media Gulch, there’s a reason for that great reception. One, it’s a new ad format. Two, it’s currently for linear and cable TV customers, which means it’s a way to extract more value from the holdouts who have not yet cut the cord. Finally, it points the way forward for perhaps a new revenue source for streaming services. Traditional broadcast television created predictable commercial break standards; now platforms and brands are searching for ways to shoehorn ad opportunities into the streaming experience. Welcome to the fight of 2020.
-80% of money spent on digital games goes to free-to-play titles: Fortnite was, predictably, the biggest game of 2019, according to a new report. Market research firm SuperData says Epic’s battle royale game topped the list of digital games, generating a total of $1.8 billion over the course of the year. SuperData’s report also says free-to-play games make up four out of every five dollars spent on digital gaming – and 74% of that amount comes from mobile. Turning to premium games, FIFA 19 was the biggest earner, with FIFA 20 also included at No. 4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto V continue to generate revenue, too, at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. The games industry is worth a total of $120 billion, SuperData says, with PC games representing the second-biggest segment with $29.6 billion of revenue. After mobile games’ leading $64.4 billion market share and PC’s portion, console games make up a further $15.4 billion, with XR (augmented and virtual reality) and gaming video content (Twitch, YouTube, Mixer, and other gaming video providers) attracting around $6.5 billion each in 2019. Overall, however, the premium games market dropped 5% year-on-year due to “a gap year in AAA game launches”. 2019 featured fewer “mega-hits” than 2018, SuperData says, after that year brought us Spider-Man PS4, Monster Hunter: World, and Red Dead Redemption 2 (on console).
-Facebook’s Chief Researcher: ‘When The Next Generation of VR Shows Up, It Will Be Because We Did It’: Facebook’s chief VR researcher revealed his belief that the tech giant will be the company to deliver next generation VR. In an interview with The Information he also warned that AR glasses could be as much as 10 years away from wide appeal.
AI Human Capital Development | UC Berkeley Faculty | CEO
5yLooking forward to seeing what Plepler does with TV+