NBC to Make Its Content Available on Set-Top Streaming Boxes Soon
NBCUniversal will soon enable viewers using set-top streaming boxes to stream its TV content, Jennifer Pirot, senior vice president-digital distribution, told the Streaming Media East conference in New York Wednesday. “We will be there,” she said of set-top boxes.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The company already has apps on mobile devices, including iPads and iPhones, that are especially useful in targeting “super fans” of programs, said Pirot. But it had yet to make its content available on any set-top streaming boxes, including those made by Apple and Roku, she explained to us after a TV Everywhere panel. It was just a matter of where to allocate “development resources” first, she said. Negotiations also still needed to be finalized with set-top box makers, she said.
The first set-top box to get NBCUniversal’s content will “probably” be Apple TV, Roku and the Xbox One, Pirot told us. NBCUniversal will “work hard” to have it done this year, she said.
HBO seems to be far outpacing other networks in making its content available to consumers via nontraditional platforms via a wide range of devices, panelists said. That is, in part, because HBO got off to such a huge “head start” with its HBO Go app, said Pirot. HBO also has a “deep” selection of content from which viewers can choose, she said. It’s also a “little easier” for a “premium” pay cable TV network that consumers subscribe to, like HBO, to make such a wide variety of content available on demand compared with networks like NBC that depend on ads, she said.
The need for better targeted advertising by TV networks across all devices was stressed during that panel and one earlier in the day on online distribution and monetization strategies for the TV industry. Targeted advertising will “help a lot,” said Michael Fisher, Sling Media senior director-business development. He predicted that will happen to a more meaningful degree across TV networks within the next two years. Earlier, Rich Greenfield, managing director and analyst-media and technology at research company BTIG, complained that every viewer watching a TV program such as ABC’s Modern Family is subjected to the same ads instead of more useful targeted spots.
Traditional TV ads aren’t as useful as they once were, said Betsy Morgan, president of multi-platform TV network TheBlaze. Her company has shifted its ad focus to more sponsorship deals and “live reads” of ads by a network personality, she said. “We found that people stay” and watch such ads and are “not changing channels,” she said. In stark contrast, viewers don’t pay attention to more traditional spots when viewing content on their devices, she said.
Netflix continues to significantly grow its user base and despite having about 35 million members, it’s “growing faster than overall streaming bandwidth” on the Internet, said Greenfield, citing data released Wednesday by Sandvine. That shows consumers “really love to stream video, especially to big screens when it’s a great experience and when it’s easy,” he said. Despite the popularity of HBO Go, the streaming gaming site Twitch has more viewers, he said, also citing Sandvine’s data. Twitch has “established itself among the top-15 applications on many fixed networks across the globe, and now generates more traffic” than HBO GO on U.S. networks, said Sandvine.