Tag: Media

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Comcast launches SportsTech startup accelerator with NASCAR and others

Comcast NBCUniversal believes its can access startup innovation while supporting future Olympic gold-medalists.

The American mass media company launched its new SportsTech accelerator today, based in part, on that impetus.

TechCrunch attended a briefing with Comcast execs at 30 Rock NYC to learn more about the initiative.

The SportsTech accelerator is a partnership across Comcast NBCUniversal’s sports media brands: NBC Sports, Sky Sports and the Golf Channel.

The program brings in industry partners NASCAR, U.S. Ski & Snowboard and USA Swimming — all of whose sports broadcast on Comcast NBC channels.

Starting today, pre-Series A sports technology startups can apply to become part of a 10-company cohort.

Accepted ventures will gain $50,000 in equity-based funding and enter SportsTech’s three-month accelerator boot camp — with sports industry support and mentorship — to kick off at Comcast’s Atlanta offices August 2020.

Boomtown Accelerators will join Comcast in managing the SportsTech program, with both sharing a minimum of 6% equity in selected startups.

Industry partners, such as NASCAR and U.S. Ski & Snowboard, will play an advisory role in startup selection, but won’t add capital.

An overarching objective for SportsTech emerged during conversations with execs and Jenna Kurath, Comcast’s VP for Startup Partner Development, who will run the new accelerator.

Comcast and partners aim to access innovation that could advance the business and competitive aspects of each organization.

From McDonald’s McD Tech Labs to Mastercard’s Start Path, corporate incubators and accelerators have become common in large cap America, where companies look to tap startup ingenuity and deal-flow to adapt and hedge disruption.

Toward its own goals, SportsTech has designated several preferred startup categories. They include Business of Sports, Team and Coach Success and Athlete and Player Performance.

SportsTech partners, such as NASCAR, hope to access innovation to drive greater audience engagement. The motorsport series (and its advertising-base) has become more device-distributed, and NASCAR streams more race-day data live, from the pits to the driver’s seat.

“The focus has grown into what are we going to do to introduce more technology in the competition side of the sport…the fan experience side and how we operate as a business,” said NASCAR Chief Innovation Officer Craig Neeb.

“We’re confident we’re going to get access to some incredibly strong and innovative companies,” he said of NASCAR’s SportsTech participation.

U.S. Ski & Snowboard — the nonprofit that manages America’s snowsport competition teams  — has an eye on performance and medical tech for its athletes.

“Wearable technology [to measure performance]…is an area of interest…and things like computer vision and artificial intelligence for us to better understand technical elements, are quite interesting,” said Troy Taylor, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s Director of High Performance.

US Ski Team

Credit: U.S. Ski & Snowboard

Some of that technology could boost prospects of U.S. athletes, such as alpine skiers Tommy Ford and Mikaela Shiffrin, at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

In a $7.75 billion deal inked in 2014, Comcast NBCUniversal purchased the U.S. broadcast rights for Olympic competition —  summer and winter —  through 2032.

“We asked ourselves, ‘could we do more?’ The notion of an innovation engine that runs before, during and after the Olympics. Could that give our Team USA a competitive edge in their pursuit for gold?,” said Jenna Kurath.

The answer came up in the affirmative and led to the formation of Comcast’s SportsTech accelerator.

Beyond supporting Olympic achievement, there is a strategic business motivation for Comcast and its new organization.

“The early insights we gain from these companies could lead to other commercial relationships, whether that’s licensing or even acquisition,” Will McIntosh, EVP for NBC Sports Digital and Consumer Business, told TechCrunch.

SportsTech is Comcast’s third accelerator, and the organization has a VC fund, San Francisco-based Comcast Ventures — which has invested in the likes of Lyft, Vimeo and Slack and racked up 67 exits, per Crunchbase data.

After completing the SportsTech accelerator, cohort startups could receive series-level investment or purchase offers from Comcast, its venture arm or industry partners, such as NASCAR.

“Our natural discipline right now is…to have early deliverables. But overtime, with our existing partners, we’ll have conversations about who else could be a logical value-add to bring into this ecosystem,” said Bill Connors, Comcast Central Division President.

NASCAR could debut hybrids as early as 2022

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Quibi execs Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman explain their big vision

Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Quibi executives — including CEO Meg Whitman and founder/chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg — took the stage in a keynote laying out their vision for the mobile video service.

Katzenberg is a longtime Hollywood executive who led Walt Disney Studios during its animation renaissance in the late ’80s and early ’90s before co-founding Dreamworks Animation. Whitman worked at both Disney and Dreamworks, but she’s best known as the former CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

So it’s fitting that they presented Quibi as a company that exists at the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley — as Whitman put it, creating “the very first entertainment technology platform optimized for mobile viewing.”

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Netflix gets the most Oscar nods of any studio, with ‘Irishman’ and ‘Marriage Story’ nominated for Best Picture

Netflix looks like a serious contender at this year’s Academy Awards, with its films receiving 24 nominations — more than any other Hollywood studio.

“The Irishman” received 10 nominations, including Best Picture, Director (Martin Scorsese), Actor in a Supporting Role (Al Pacino and Joe Pesci), Adapted Screenplay (Steven Zaillian) and Visual Effects.

Another Netflix movie, “Marriage Story,” received six nominations — Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role (Adam Driver), Actress in a Leading Role (Scarlett Johansson), Actress in a Supporting Role (Laura Dern), Original Screenplay (Noah Baumbach) and Original Score (Randy Newman).

Other Netflix films with nominations include “The Two Popes,” “I Lost My Body” and “Klaus.”

However, even “The Irishman” couldn’t match the 11 nods for “Joker,” the most-nominated movie of the year. And despite receiving a number of nominations, Netflix came away relatively empty-handed from this year’s Golden Globes — winning just two awards, one for Dern’s performance in “Marriage Story” and the other for Olivia Coleman in “The Crown.”

Last year, Netflix’s “Roma” received 10 nominations and ultimately won three, including Best Director,. but it lost out on Best Picture, which went to the traditionally distributed “Green Book.”

There were also reports earlier this year of a campaign led by director Steven Spielberg that would have required Netflix and other streaming keep their movies exclusively in theaters for at least four weeks in order to be eligible for Oscars. Ultimately, those changes didn’t happen, but it’s a reminder that there’s some lingering industry skepticism towards streaming.

Beyond the Netflix news, the nominations were also notably disappointing from a diversity standpoint, with all-male nominees for Best Director, and only a single acting nominee of color (Cynthia Erivo for “Harriet”).

Netflix’s ‘Roma’ wins three Oscars, including Best Director (but not Best Picture)

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Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘6 Underground’ is very fun and very dumb

Netflix’s “6 Underground” feels like a movie that belongs on the big screen.

Sure, it isn’t part of a giant franchise (yet), and it doesn’t feature any well-known superheroes — but it does star “Deadpool”‘s Ryan Reynolds as a wise-cracking hero who criss-crosses the globe, going from one spectacularly destructive set piece to another. And behind the camera, you’ve got Michael Bay (who made “Bad Boys” and countless “Transformers” movies) coordinating the action.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, your hosts freely admit that we … enjoyed it?

The movie is spectacularly dumb, but Bay’s approach to action — cut as often as possible and blow up everything — never gets boring. “6 Underground” opens with a fast-paced car-chase that introduces the titular team of international operatives (each of them with their own specific skill), and it follows up with scenes that are even more inventive and/or pulse-pounding.

It also helps that the script comes from “Deadpool” writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, so there’s a glib, profane energy to all of the dialogue, and some of the jokes are genuinely funny.

But your enjoyment will hinge on your ability to turn off your brain — to not be bothered by a plot that’s both laughably slapdash and ridiculously convoluted, or by Bay’s tendency to film women as if their butts were their main features.

And you definitely don’t want think too hard about the core premise, which suggests that the world would be a better place if secretive tech billionaires ignore international law and could force regime change in the Middle East.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you want to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:42 “6 Underground” spoiler-free review
22:49 “6 Underground” spoiler discussion

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SiriusXM and Pandora test bundle discounts

It’s been less than a year since SiriusXM completed its $3.5 billion acquisition of streaming music service Pandora, but the two companies have already leveraged their collective assets to boost each other’s services. For example, SiriusXM talk shows arrived on Pandora as podcasts, while a Pandora-powered station now streams popular songs for both sets of listeners. Now, the company is considering tying the two services together in a different way — by packaging them as a discounted bundle.

What that bundle deal will look like isn’t yet known.

Pandora today offers four tiers of service: a free ad-supported version, the $4.99/month Pandora Plus service, and the $9.99/month Spotify rival Pandora Premium. It also offers a multi-user Pandora Premium Family plan for $14.99/month.

SiriusXM, meanwhile, also offers its own set of packages, with the most popular being a $5/month plan for the car and home (via an Echo device), an $8.25/month plan for in and out of the car, and an $8/month plan for streaming outside the car only.

Before rolling out a bundle deal, the company wanted to know what sorts of package price points and features customers would respond to best.

The company confirmed it’s been testing different cross-promotions, including those aimed at both Pandora and SiriusXM subscribers that offered discounts if you sign up for the other service. Essentially, the company wants to know what price point makes sense for consumers when it comes to subscribing to both services.

Today, these cross-promotions are aimed only at people who already subscribe to one or the other service, so it’s not really being marketed as a “bundle” deal yet. It’s just a promotion, if you want to get technical about the terminology.

“We would email our Pandora listener base or the SiriusXM listener base — we would test it with different user bases as a promotion,” Chris Phillips, SiriusXM/Pandora Chief Product Officer & Head of Technology, told TechCrunch. “We actually have a formal study going on to do it,” he said.

SiriusXM and Pandora haven’t yet settled on what a potential bundle deal will look like, but it aims to make a decision based on its tests this year.

“The power of the Sirius brand and power of the Pandora brand are very distinct. And people see unique value in the two,” Phillips added.

One challenge, however, is that people don’t understand that SiriusXM and Pandora are now one company, so the promotional emails confused them.

Similarly, people often find the language around “Pandora-powered” stations in SiriusXM confusing, as well.

One potential solution is to pick one consumer-facing brand and merge assets, including both programming and apps.

When asked if the two apps may merge into one in the future, Phillips said the company is “looking at what those opportunities might be.”

In the meantime, the company continues to explore how it can enhance both products using assets it has from the respective products.

“We are cross-pollinating content and features…into the distinct [user interfaces],” he said.

A recent example of this includes a new button within the SiriusXM app that allows you to launch a Pandora station based on what you’re currently streaming. And this new Pandora-powered station can then play right in the SiriusXM app — you don’t have to launch Pandora separately to hear it.

Efforts like this are aided by the fact that SiriusXM immediately put the two companies’ development groups together following the acquisition.

“We’re giving listeners choice. But when we give them choice, we want them to be able to have the best of what we offer in many places,” noted Phillips, of these sorts of integrations. “In the future, the idea that there’s a single opportunity — we’re looking at what that might be,” he said.

Nothing is yet determined, so all these plans could change, of course.

SiriusXM ended 2019 with around 30 million self-pay satellite radio and a record high of 34.9 million total paid subscribers. In 2020, SiriusXM forecasts revenue of $8.1 billion and earnings of $2.5 billion (adjusted EBITA).

Combined, Pandora and SiriusXM reach 100 million U.S. listeners per month.

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BuzzFeed hires The Mighty’s Peter Wang as its new CTO

BuzzFeed’s technical team has a new leader — incoming chief technology officer Peter Wang, who’s leaving his role as CTO of healthcare community The Mighty.

Wang has plenty of experience in the media industry, having served as CTO at Refinery29 and at Narrativ, a startup that helps publishers make money through commerce. He told me that he was “skeptical” when a recruiter first approached him about the position at BuzzFeed, but as he talked to the team, he was increasingly impressed by the vision and strategy.

For example, he pointed to CEO Jonah Peretti’s recent memo about his plans for 2020, in which Peretti said the company is “fighting for truth and joy, in a world where both are under threat.”

Wang acknowledged that it’s been a tough couple years for digital media, with BuzzFeed itself laying off 250 people at the beginning of 2019. However, he’s hopeful that in the last year, “that tide against publishers … started to turn around.”

Wang added, “It didn’t matter what the environment has been for publishers, [BuzzFeed] has always found a way to position itself and adapt along the way.”

During our conversation, he also echoed Peretti’s recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he said that BuzzFeed was slightly unprofitable in 2019 but has plans to turn a profit this year. Similarly, Wang said he wants to help BuzzFeed establish itself as a “profitable, trusted” media company.

“I’m really hoping to see that we can collectively make BuzzFeed the example in the media space — that you can make it happen and build a sustainable company in the media space by combining these components,” he said.

Wang is replacing BuzzFeed’s previous CTO, Todd Levy, who joined health startup Ro last summer. The company’s CTO role is also expanding — where it was previously limited to overseeing engineering, Wang said he’s now in charge of engineering, product, data, design and project management, and that he’ll be “a true business partner and sitting on the executive team.”

He’s scheduled to start on February 3 and will be reporting to Publisher Dao Nguyen.

“Peter’s broad skillset and deep understanding of digital media make him the perfect fit to both lead our Tech team and serve as a strategic partner to our executive team,” Nguyen said in a statement. “I’m confident that his entrepreneurial spirit and knack for innovation will enhance the user experience for our audience as well as drive meaningful growth for the company as we continue to strengthen and diversify our business.”

BuzzFeed launches a new website for its real journalism

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IAC sells CollegeHumor to executive Sam Reich, resulting in 100+ layoffs

IAC has sold off a majority stake in CH Media, the parent organization behind CollegeHumor . The new owner? CH Media’s chief creative officer Sam Reich.

Reich announced the move on Twitter, saying that digital media holding company IAC “made the difficult decision to no longer finance us,” but that it would allow him to “run with the company.”

He continued, “Of course, I can’t keep it going like you’re used to. While we were on the way to becoming profitable, we were nonetheless losing money — and I myself have no money to be able to lose.”

In fact, Reich said that more than 100 people are losing their jobs as a result.

Bloomberg reports that the company will be left with a team of between five and 10 people. It also reports that IAC will maintain a minority stake in the company.

In a statement, IAC said, “Sam was the best choice to acquire CH Media and define its next chapter. The decision places CH Media with an owner who is beloved by fans, passionate about the business and sees a future we believe in.”

CollegeHumor launched its own subscription streaming service called Dropout in 2018, and Reich said, “The #1 way you can support me is to stay subscribed to Dropout.” He claimed the service still has six months of additional content ready to go, and that it will be launching version 2.0 at the end of this month.

After noting that many Dropout shows may need to take “bold new creative directions in order to survive,” Reich added, “I will, however, do my very best to stay true to the talent, shows, fans, and principles that got us where we are today. We dropped out once before; we can do it again. Independent comedy lives on — just now more independent (gulp) than ever before.”

The streaming wars to come

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Quibi’s Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman offer a deeper look at the new streaming service

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman took the stage this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to offer a deeper look into the technology behind the soon-to-launch mobile streaming service.

The company had already revealed much about its intentions with Quibi, including how it’s the first streaming service designed exclusively for mobile devices, not the living room TV.

But until today’s keynote — and briefings with reporters yesterday — what Quibi hadn’t yet discussed in detail was the underlying, patent-pending technology that takes advantage of mobile devices to push forward a new form of storytelling.

Specifically, Quibi is using a new engineering technology it’s calling “Turnstyle” which allows the viewer to move between portrait mode viewing and landscape viewing, seamlessly — and without any black bars to fill the rest of the screen when switching to landscape video.

This technology, when demoed, worked very well. The shift from portrait to landscape and back again was smooth and fast — an almost imperceptible transition. And the video in either orientation was crisp, clear and high-def, thanks to the high production values of Quibi’s commissioned projects.

The end result is something that, though watched on a phone, wouldn’t ever be confused with user-gen services like YouTube or TikTok.

“[YouTube[ is the most ubiquitous, democratized, incredibly creative platform,” Whitman told me. “But they make content for hundreds of dollars a minute. We make it for $100,000 a minute. It’s a whole different level — it’s Hollywood-quality content.”

On Quibi, there are three tiers of content — unscripted shows, movies delivered in short chapters, and “Daily Essentials.”

On the unscripted side, you’ll find documentaries and docu-series as well as other shows about food, fashion, travel, animals, cars, comedy, sports and more. Daily Essentials, meanwhile, deliver the day’s news and information — including also weather, sports, and horoscopes — in 5 to 6 minute “quick bites.”

While these two categories could potentially be delivered on other video platforms, Quibi’s riskier bet is on movies told in chapters. That is, instead of releasing a two-hour film as single long video to consume, Quibi movies are told in 7- to 10-minute long segments. In year one, 35 of Quibi’s total 175 shows will be movies.

Every day, Quibi will deliver one episode of its movies told in chapters, plus 5 episodes of its episodic and unscripted series and 25 daily essentials. Combined, that’s over 3 hours of premium, original content per day.

“If you think about network television, and how much they produce for primetime, it’s 35% more than network TV does Monday through Friday,” Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said.

The service plans to launch with eight movies, and will then release a new movie every other Monday, she noted. But even if you don’t tune in on release day, the content will remain available so you can binge through what you’ve missed.

This idea of shorter-form storytelling is something Katzenberg — a former Hollywood executive best known for his time as chairman of Walt Disney Studios, and for being the “K” in Dreamworks SKG — has been thinking about for decades, he said.  Since 1999, in fact.

“I started a little company with [Steven] Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer called Pop.com. It lasted about 12 minutes,” he explained, referring to a Quibi precursor that was likely before its time.

“I’ve been a storyteller my whole life. That’s the thing that got me the most interested and excited,” he continued. “And I think what you’ll see is that every great innovation that has happened in Hollywood has actually been driven by a new technology.”

With Quibi’s support for full-screen, high-quality portrait mode viewing, the service can cater to an on-the-go user base — a user base that often fills spare minutes on social networks or messaging.

But turning the phone is only one way that Quibi will leverage mobile. Spielberg’s Quibi show “After Dark,” for example, will use viewers’ locations to determine what time they can watch the show — it will only be allowed after sunset.

In the future, Quibi’s filmmakers could tap into other mobile sensors and smartphone features, like the GPS or the haptics to make the phone vibrate. They could tell stories through the phone’s messaging system or even have your phone ring as part of a story. An exercise-themed show could tap into the phone’s pedometer for an interactive experience. Turnstyle, in other words, is just step one.

But what Quibi can’t know yet is how users will respond to these sorts of interactions. Will they find them clever, or gimmicky? Will they aid the storytelling experience or ultimately get in the way? And while Quibi wants to bring back the “watercooler” experience of weekly shows, it also doesn’t know if users growing up in the Netflix era will actually watch shows on the release schedule it intends, or save them to binge in longer stretches of time — perhaps even casting them to the TV via Chromecast or Airplay, which Quibi will support.

Despite an overabundance of streaming services, Quibi has attracted big-name talent to help kick off its first year, including Academy Award winners Steven Spielberg, Peter Farrelly, and Guillermo del Toro; directors like Antoine Fuqua, Lena Waithe, Sam Raimi, and Catherine Hardwicke; and stars like Stephan James, Chrissy Tiegen, Laurence Fishburne, Dave Franco, Bill Murray, Emily Mortimer, and Kevin Hart, to name a few.

Quibi isn’t opposed to working with younger creators or even YouTubers, but Katzenberg notes that Quibi won’t be making YouTube shows, but rather Hollywood-style programming.

“If there are good actors and good talent on YouTube who can transition to that, then we’re happy to have them,” he says of the YouTuber crowd. “But it’s highly differentiated…we’re not trying to do a high-end version of what they’re doing. We’re actually trying to bring the ecosystem of broadcast, cable, streaming, television and television storytelling and bringing that to this world,” he notes.

Quibi officially debuts on April 6, 2020 and will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads.

Interested users can sign up to be Quibi Insiders on the service’s homepage, in order to get exclusive looks at new shows and the first news of product updates.

CES 2020 coverage - TechCrunch

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Spotify brings streaming ad insertion technology to podcasts

2019 was a breakout year for Spotify’s podcasting efforts, and now the company is turning up the dial on its ability to monetize this popular form of audio programming. Today, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Spotify is announcing Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), its new, proprietary podcast ad technology for Spotify Podcast Ads.

The technology makes key data — like actual ad impressions, frequency, reach, plus anonymized age, gender and device type — available to podcasters and advertisers for the first time.

In previous years, podcasts have been delivered by way of downloads from RSS feeds, which would make this sort of data collection difficult if not impossible. The shift to streaming changes that, as Spotify can tap into its suite of planning, reporting and measurement capabilities, as it does for streaming music.

At launch, Spotify’s SAI technology will only be made available to its original and exclusive shows. That’s because Spotify can control this content and knows what its backend looks like, making the new technology easier to implement.

Podcast listeners are already more engaged with advertising often because the ads included in a podcast are read by the host or hosts themselves, making them feel less like an unwelcome interruption and more like a form of influencer marketing. SAI aims to improve the ad experience even more because the ads will be better-targeted and data-driven, like other modern-day digital marketing.

Early adopter Puma was the first partner to try out SAI by running host-read ads during the Spotify Original podcast, “Jemele Hill is Unbothered.” The ads resulted in ad recall lift of over 180%, Spotify says.

Today, Spotify has hundreds of originals and exclusives where it can leverage this technology at a time when podcast listening on its platform is growing. Podcast hours streamed jumped up 39% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2019, and Spotify now touts over 500,000 podcasts on its platform.

“The problem we’re solving with Spotify podcast ads is really on the advertiser’s side — advertisers have no idea how they’re ads are working. They don’t even know whether or not an ad they purchase is being consumed by a listener,” said Jay Richman, VP, Head of Global Advertising Business & Platform, speaking about the new ad technology at a press event during CES this week. The new technology, he continued, was a “first of its kind.”

“It introduces new targeting measurements and interactivity, which is a big step change for the industry,” he said.

Streaming ad insertion technology will give Spotify a way to better compete with the default podcast apps from Apple and Google. The former, Apple Podcasts, still claims the majority of podcast app market share — but that’s been slipping as Spotify gains. While Apple is rumored to be working on its own podcast originals, Spotify is speeding ahead to the next step of turning its shows into new revenue drivers.

Spotify’s new ad tech launch also comes at a time when the podcast industry itself is changing. Many podcasts today are really just audio programs, as they’re only accessible to a streaming service’s users — not the wider web.

General interest in podcasts is climbing, too. The number of people who are monthly podcast listeners in the U.S. is expected to climb to 106 million by 2023, Spotify notes. Meanwhile, ad revenue for podcasts is projected to reach over $1 billion in 2021. Spotify doesn’t disclose its revenue from podcasts, specifically but in Q3 2019 its ad revenue grew 29% year-over-year to $189 million — a boost many attributed to podcasts.  

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What to expect in digital media in 2020

As we start 2020, the media and entertainment sectors are in flux. New technologies are enabling new types of content, streaming platforms in multiple content categories are spending billions in their fight for market share and the interplay between social platforms and media is a central topic of global political debate (to put it lightly).

As TechCrunch’s media columnist, I spoke to hundreds of entrepreneurs and executives in North America and Europe last year about the shifts underway across everything from vertically-oriented video series to physics engines in games to music royalty payments. Looking toward the year ahead, here are some of the high-level changes I expect we will see in media in 2020, broken into seven categories: film & TV, gaming, visual & audio effects, social media, music, podcasts and publishing.

Film and TV

In film and television, the battle to compete with Netflix continues with more robust competition than last year. In the U.S., Disney is off to a momentous start with 10 million Disney+ subscribers upon its launch in November and some predicting it will hit 25 million by March (including those on free trials or receiving it for free via Disney’s partnership with Verizon). Bundled with its two other streaming properties, Hulu and ESPN+, Disney+ puts Disney alongside Amazon and Netflix as the Big Three.

Consumers will only pay for so many subscriptions, often one, two, or all of the Big Three (since Amazon Prime Video is included with the broader Prime membership) then a smaller service that best aligns with their personal taste and favorite show of the moment.

AT&T’s HBOMax launches in May with a $14.99/month price tag and is unlikely to break into the echelon of the Big Three, but could be a formidable second tier competitor. Alongside it will be Apple TV+. With a $4.99/month subscription, Apple’s service only includes a small number of original productions, an HBO strategy as HBO gets bundled into a larger library. CBS All Access, Showtime, and NBCUniversal’s upcoming (in April) Peacock fall in this camp as well.

Across Europe, regional media conglomerates will find success in expanding local SVOD and AVOD competitors to Netflix that launched last year — or are set to launch in the next few weeks — like BritBox in the UK, Joyn in Germany and Salto in France. Netflix’s growth in coming from outside the U.S. now so its priority is buying more international shows that will compel new demographics to subscribe.

The most interesting new development in 2020 though will be the April launch of Quibi, the $4.99/month service offering premium shows shot for mobile-first viewing that has already secured $1 billion in funding commitments and $150 million in advertising revenue. Quibi shows will be bite-size in length (less than 15 minutes) and vertically-oriented. The company has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into commissioning established names to create dozens of them. Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro each have Quibi programs and NBC and CBS are creating news shows. The terms it is offering are enticing.

Quibi, which plans to release 125 pieces of content (i.e. episodes) per week and spend $470 million on marketing this year, is an all-or-nothing bet with little room to iterate if it doesn’t get it right the first time; it needs hit shows that break into mainstream pop culture to survive. Billionaire founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman have set expectations sky-high for the launch; expect the press to slam it in April for failing to meet those expectations and for the platform to redeem itself as a few of its shows gain traction in the months that follow.

Meanwhile, live sports remains the last hope of broadcast TV networks as all other shows go to streaming. Consumers still value watching sports in real-time. Streaming services are coming for live sports too, however, and will make progress toward that goal in 2020. Three weeks ago, DAZN secured the rights to the 2021/22 season of Germany’s Champions League, beating out broadcaster Sky which has shown the matches for the last 20 years. Amazon and YouTube continue to explore bids for sports rights while Facebook and Twitter are stepping back from their efforts. YouTube’s “YouTube TV” and Disney’s “Hulu with Live TV” will cause more consumers to cancel cable TV subscriptions in 2020 and go streaming-only.

The winners in the film & TV sector right now are top production companies. The war for streaming video dominance driving several of the world’s wealthiest companies (and individuals) to pour tens of billions of dollars into content. Large corporations own the distribution platforms here; the only “startups” to enter with strength — DAZN and Quibi — have been launched by billionaires and started with billion-dollar spending commitments. The entrepreneurial opportunity is on the content creation side — with producers creating shows not with software developers creating platforms.

Gaming

The gaming market is predicted to grow nearly 9% year-over-year from $152 billion globally in 2019 to $165 billion in 2020, according to research firm Newzoo, with more than two billion people playing games each year. Gaming is now widespread across all demographic groups. Casual mobile games are responsible for the largest portion of this (and 45% of industry revenue) but PC gaming continues to grow (+4% last year) and console gaming was the fastest growing category last year (+13%).

The big things to watch in gaming this year: cross-platform play, greater focus on social interaction in virtual worlds and the expansion of cloud gaming subscriptions.

Fortnite enticed consumers with the benefits of a cross-platform game that allows players to move between PC, mobile and console and it is setting expectations that other games do the same. Last October we saw the Call of Duty franchise come to mobile and reach a record 100 million downloads in its first week. This trend will continue and it will spread the free-to-play business model that is the norm in mobile games to many PC and console franchises in the process.

Gaming is moving to the social forefront. Many people are turning to massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like Fortnite and PUBG to socialize, with gameplay as a secondary interest. Games are virtual worlds where players socialize, build things, and own assets much like in the real world. That results in an increasingly fluid interplay between socializing in games and in physical life, much as socializing in the virtual realms of social apps like Instagram or Twitter is now viewed as part of “real world” life.

Expect VCs to bet big on the thesis that “games are the new social networks” in 2020. Large investment firms that a year ago wrote off the category of gaming as “content bets” not fit for VC are now actively hunting for deals.

On this point, there are several startups (like Klang Games, Darewise Entertainment, Singularity 6 and Clockwork Labs) that raised millions in VC funding to create open world games that will launch (in beta at least) in 2020. These are virtual worlds where all players exist in the same instance of the world rather than being capped at 100 or so players per instance. Their visions center of digital realms where people will contribute to in-game economies, create friendships and ultimately earn income just like their “real-world” lives. Think next-gen Second Life. Expect them to take time to seed their worlds with early adopters in 2020 before any of them gain mainstream traction in 2021.

Few are as excited about social interaction in games as Facebook, it seems. Eager to own critical turf in the next paradigm shift of social media, Facebook will accelerate its gaming push this year. In late 2019, it acquired Madrid-based PlayGiga — which was working on cloud gaming and 5G technology — and the studio behind the hit VR game Beat Saber. It also secured exclusive rights to the VR versions of popular games like Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” and “Splinter Cell” for Oculus. Horizon, its virtual world for social interaction within VR, is expected to launch this year as well.

Facebook is betting on AR/VR as the paradigm shift in consumer computing that will replace mobile; it is pouring billions into its efforts to own the hardware and infrastructure pieces which are several years of R&D away from primetime. In the meantime, the consumer shift to social interaction in virtual worlds is occurring in established formats — mobile, PC, and console — so it will work to build the bridge for consumers from that to the future.

Lastly, cloud gaming was one of last year’s biggest headlines with the launch of Google Stadia and you should expect it to be again this year. By moving games to cloud hosting, consumers can play the highest quality games from lower quality devices, greatly expanding the market of potential players. By bundling many such games into a subscription offering, Google and others hope to entice consumers to try many more games.

As TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney argued, however, cloud gaming is likely a feature for existing subscription gaming platforms — namely Playstation Now and Xbox Game Pass — more so than the basis for a new platform to differentiate. The minor latency inherent in playing a cloud-hosted game makes it unattractive to hardcore gamers (who would rather download the game). Next to Sony and Microsoft’s offerings, Stadia’s limited game selection fails to stand out. The competition will only heat up this year with the entry of Amazon. Google needs to launch the Stadia integration with YouTube and the Share State feature that it promoted in its Stadia announcement to really drive consumer interest.

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