50 VOD Professionals 2020 – Nominations now Open!
Whether they work for broadcasters, content owners, content producers, film studios, operators, service-providers or technology vendors, tell us who you think are the 50 most influential people in the UK online video industry!
ITV Content Production Revenues up 9% in 2019
ITV, the UK's biggest commercial broadcaster, has published its 2019 financial results which show strong growth across a range of the company's activities. Content production revenues (via ITV Studios) rose 9% to £1.8bn YOY Long form online viewing broke 500m hours served for the first time (506m compared ...
BritBox To Launch In Australia
BBC Studios, the principal commercial arm of the BBC, and ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, today announce plans to launch the BritBox streaming service in Australia. The ad-free subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming service will bring Australians an unrivalled collection of great British TV shows, and will build ...
ITV Appoints Rhys McLachlan as Director of Advanced Advertising
ITV has announced Rhys McLachlan will become their new Director of Advanced Advertising. McLachlan was previously Head of Global TV Strategy at Amobee, the global digital advertising technology company with whom ITV signed an exclusive UK and Ireland licensing agreement with last year. Since announcing the Amobee deal, ...
Channel 4 Appoints Bede McCarthy as Head of Product, All 4
Channel 4 today announces the appointment of Bede McCarthy as Head of Product, All 4. Reporting to Chief Product Officer Dave Cameron, Bede will be responsible for creating Channel 4’s’s digital product experience on All 4 in order to drive additional consumption as part of the channel’s mission ...
Sky and Disney Announce New Multi-year Deal for Disney+
Sky and Disney today announced a new multi-year deal, making Disney+ available for purchase in the UK and Ireland on Sky Q, to be followed by NOW TV in the coming months. Customers will be able to watch great new shows like The Mandalorian and High School Musical; ...
Yann Madeleine joins Globecast as Director of Sales France
Globecast, the global solutions provider for media, has announced that Yann Madeleine has joined the company as Director of Sales, France and will sit on the company’s Executive Committee. He will join Globecast on March 16th, 2020. Madeleine replaces François-Regis Grenot who has taken up a role in ...
Kontron and Anevia Collaborate on New Video Delivery Solution
Kontron, a global provider of cloud and carrier-class integrated hardware platforms, has partnered with Anevia, a leading provider of OTT and IPTV software solutions, to offer a robust edge caching technology designed to reduce video traffic in the core network for operators and improve quality of experience (QoE) ...
DAZN Expanding to More than 200 Countries and Territories
DAZN, the leading global sports streaming service, will dramatically increase its presence in 2020, expanding to more than 200 countries and territories. The first global event on DAZN will be Mexican superstar Canelo Alvarez’s soon-to-be-announced fight during Cinco de Mayo Weekend, which will take place on Saturday, May ...
Box Office Still Dominates Growing Global Market for Movies
The latest research from Ampere Analysis confirms the growing global demand for movies, despite radical changes in the entertainment industry. Global consumer spending on movies has grown by nearly 30% over the past decade, encompassing theatrical/cinema, home entertainment*, premium pay TV and subscription OTT. And most film fans ...
So Who Does Win the OTT Streaming Wars?
Earlier this month I suggested that the Streaming Wars should more accurately be described as the Streaming Skirmishes because although this wasn't a winner-takes-all scenario, and that multiple SVOD services could happily coexist, even if (hypothetically) one champion emerged they'd still then need to tackle the wider threats ...
BT Shakes Up UK TV Market With The Launch Of New TV Packages
Exciting new range of flexible TV packages offer customers the freedom to choose the TV shows, films and sport they want, when they want - with the flexibility to change their package every month Customers can watch Sky Atlantic, hundreds of box sets, the latest must-see movies and ...
Content Distribution is Getting More, Not Less, Complicated
“Glass to glass” is an elegant phrase which describes the process by which a piece of content goes from the first screen (the camera lens) to the last (the screen on which a viewer watches a piece a clip, TV show or movie). This description, however, masks a ...
Sky TV Unveils Its Biggest Year Ever, Including 80 Originals
More commissions, more original series, more investment and a world-leading commitment to the environment. Sky today set out its stall for 2020. The news was unveiled Feb. 12 at Sky's "Up Next" showcase event, where the broadcaster shared exclusive previews of brand-new shows due to air this year, ...
A Personal History of TV Innovation (and Bingeing)
1980 My uncle’s house in Peterborough. 4 adults, 7 children, 1 baby. A weekend of watching Indian movies on VCR late into the night. The video recorder was hired. The remote control was wired, connected by a two metre cord to the machine. Delicious midnight feasts: samosas, bhajis, ...
Award-winning US comedy Seinfeld coming to All 4
Regarded as one of the most influential sitcoms, Seinfeld will find a new home on All 4 from 7 February 2020, as part of a streaming deal with Sony Pictures Television (SPT). Originally airing between 1989 to 1998, Seinfeld stars Jerry Seinfeld as a stand-up comedian whose life in New York City is made ...
The Streaming Wars are really the Streaming Skirmishes
It’s tempting to think of The Streaming Wars as a zero sum game in which, based on market caps, we can imagine a scenario where, for example, Disney buys Netflix, Comcast merges with NBCU and Amazon and Apple then vanquish or acquire those houses, claim allegiances, and duke ...
ITV Announces Sanjeevan Bala as its new Group Chief Data & AI Officer
Reporting to Rufus Radcliffe, Chief Marketing Officer and Director of Direct to Consumer, Bala, who joins in May 2020, will lead the transformation of ITV’s group-wide data and Ai strategy, evolving and consolidating the organisation’s data assets, raising the overall data capability and accelerating the adoption of AI ...
British Olympic and Paralympic Sports Prepare for Launch of OTT Platform
A ground-breaking initiative to develop a digital and an Over-The-Top (OTT) broadcast platform for British Olympic and Paralympic sports has today been announced by a group of leading sports’ National Governing Bodies, UK Sport, the British Olympic Association and British Paralympic Association. In their first move, the collective ...
BBC iPlayer Breaks 4 billion Requests for First Time to Record Best Year Ever
BBC iPlayer has broken 4 billion requests to stream programmes for the first time ever, ending the year with an all-time record high of 4.4 billion requests. The 2019 performance is up around 12 per cent on the previous year.* December was BBC iPlayer’s best month of all ...