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Starz and the Eye

Lionsgate chief Jon Feltheimer this week outlined ambitious plans for the international expansion of Starzplay, the subscription video-on-demand offering of the US studio’s Starz premium outfit. Starzplay has launched as an Apple TV channel across Europe and Latin American territories including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The expansion, which follows […]

Ovum: Traditional TV can fine-tune to survive but must change radically to thrive

On a global scale, it’s clear that traditional TV services alone aren’t enough to satisfy a growing number of viewers, with audiences moving swiftly to enhance their viewing experience by subscribing to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or other OTT video services. As recently as 2014, some 94% of households took only traditional TV – either […]

Disney’s SVOD supremacy might not be so simple overseas

Disney has never shied away from wearing its streaming ambitions on its sleeves, but from the moment the company was rumoured to be interested in acquiring 21st Century Fox’s entertainment division, the industry knew that it was very serious in its intentions to take on the SVODs. Now, with the news that the mousey monolith […]

Ovum: 5G and foldable displays will not change smartphones’ fate

Multiple reports of failures of 5G and foldable displays have tainted the prospect of a smartphone market rebound in 2019. Smartphone market saturation has been a long time coming, and manufacturers and operators have already tried multiple times to reinvigorate the market. Despite bundling consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices with flagship launches (e.g., mobile […]

The new Freeview mobile app reflects demand for flexibility around linear    

With programmes such as Great British Bake Off and Love Island defying the growth of SVOD and OTT to attract record live audience figures year-after-year, there is no question that linear continues to sit at the heart of television viewing in the UK. However, in response to the unprecedented rise of viewing via mobile devices, […]

Ovum: SLIN overtakes SVOD as the overall number of services stabilises

According to Ovum’s latest (March 2019) update of its OTT Video Service Provider Tracker, the growth in new OTT video services globally has begun to slow down. In most countries, this is because streaming is already dominated by one to three transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) stores and three to five subscription services. The FAANGs (minus Facebook) […]

Disney’s streaming Fantasia

In the most famous section of one of Disney’s emblematic movies, Mickey Mouse plays the sorcerer’s apprentice who, tired of the daily slog of fetching water in a couple of pails, uses magic in which he is untrained to animate a broom to do the work for him, with disastrous results. Mickey’s employers this week […]

The BBC and Discovery: getting back together

One of the signature movie genres of the 1930s was the ‘comedy of remarriage’: films – often starring Cary Grant and/or Katharine Hepburn – that featured married couples who split up, dallied temporarily with other partners, but who ultimately got back together again. Without doubt this week’s biggest story would be the classic among classics […]

Blocked streams

Public and commercial broadcasters’ efforts to band together to take on the transatlantic juggernauts of Netflix, Amazon and now Apple face a number of well-publicised challenges, but one of the most frustrating must surely be the extent to which such projects are still stymied by out-of-time regulatory concerns and procedures. Speaking at the Series Mania […]

Ovum: On Netflix’s quest for “moments of truth”

Since 2013, Netflix’s stated aim has been to win “moments of truth.” That is, those points in time when someone chooses to watch Netflix, rather than do something else. More recently, the company has said its greatest competitor for attention is phenomenally popular video game Fortnite, suggesting it has little to worry about from its […]

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