Few key things that happened around the Ad Tech & Media Tech world this week.
Spending on streaming jumps to $1B per month
According to a brand new report from Grabyo, time and money spend by U.S. homes has seen a significant rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the monthly spending on streaming has risen by over $1 billion. This comes as a follow-up from their January survey and is titled “At Home Video Trends—U.S. 2020”. Per their report, 89% of U.S. customers currently buy video services and one-third of these customers subscribe to a minimum of one new streaming subscription since March. This resulted in the $1 billion rise in the per month spending, which equates to over 22% growth. which will could be the norm going forward, as 85% of video consumers say that they shall continue with a similar number of video subscriptions even after social quarantine constraints are elevated within the U.S. Streaming services have around 72% penetration within the U.S., up 13% from January 2020. Comparatively, pay-TV features a 56% penetration. an enormous reason for this streaming surge is that the rise of consumers 50 and over joining the streaming world. The report also found that 65% of these aged 50-64 and 50% of 65 years and older are now paying for online streaming. Social isolation has led to tighter alignment in video consumption habits between the older and younger age groups. Traditional pay-TV has also gotten a small boost during these times.
New technology could make streaming cheaper
A new compressing format called Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC), might not seem to be the most interesting or serious change to change humanity. Of the 4.57 billion people who are active internet users, 3.5 billion typically use a smartphone, 80% of worldwide internet traffic is compressed video data and over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Video is now a part of humankind’s common nervous system. COVID-19 has greatly improved internet usage throughout the world. It has the dual mission of keeping parents and kids connected for work and school using video conferencing. Families are now frequent users of an increasing array of streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, Peacock, and HBO Max. A 50% decrease in video file size is a huge deal for humankind’s accumulated knowledge in our new digital economy. The new codec offers a huge change that will result in load times becoming shorter, video resolution becoming better, and providing more bandwidth. The cost of data usage will decline, which will help reduce inequalities of access to digital content for global users.
Taiwan intends to prevent major streaming services from China
Taiwan is preparing to bar video streaming services from Chinese companies like Baidu and Tencent. Even though such services are apparently already illegal in the island republic, Baidu’s iQiyi and Tencent’s WeTV currently work under a lawful loophole that enabled them to associate with local companies. Presently, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announces that Taiwanese businesses will not be able to give these services as of September 3rd. The move tells us how Chinese companies are encountering increasing difficulty in selling into other markets as tensions continue to rise. President Trump has proposed to ban WeChat and directed ByteDance to divest itself of US operations of TikTok, while India barred dozens of Chinese apps earlier this year. China maintains Taiwan as its own territory, and Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic relationships with most countries. Its difficult political situation dates back to the Chinese Civil War, which eventually led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China by the Communist party in 1949 and the Nationalist party leaving to Taiwan. Now, Taiwan is administered as a democratic nation of about 24 million citizens. That gives it a potentially important market for Chinese companies, although the impact of the ban on the services of Baidu & Tencent is unlikely to cause any damage.
Kaleidoscope aggregates video streaming services on a single page
Google is currently working on new innovation for Google Chrome, that will aggregate content from different streaming platforms on a single page. The feature that is named Chrome Kaleidoscope is now available on the Canary version of Chrome isn’t working yet. A new report says that the Kaleidoscope project can be accessed on Chrome Canary by clicking chrome://kaleidoscope/ but displays an error message. But Chrome Story was lately able to obtain two new pages for the feature and was again redirected to the same error message. The page also notes down a few streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Choosing the services and clicking on the Next button below the page redirects to another page, which says: “Continue watching across all your devices.” The rest of the page is however blank. We guess that this page would note down content from the selected platforms on the last page after the feature finally launches.
In China’s streaming ware Tencent Video is fighting iQiyi
iQiyi, which was launched in 2010 has become used to the international media declaring it as the Netflix of China. An apt nickname since the video streaming pioneer’s success. But Gong Yu, iQiyi’s founder maintains that his company is more precisely described as “Netflix plus”. It is a bold claim for a company that is under loss and with a worth that is one-fifteenth as much as America’s streaming powerhouse with a market value of over $214bn. Like Netflix, iQiyi gives its customers an extensive catalog of both licensed and original content. Unlike Netflix that relies nearly solely on subscription fees, iQiyi has various revenue streams. They have a membership charges which start from around $3 per month that is accounted for a little over half of iQiyi’s 7.4bn yuan revenues in the second quarter. The remainder came largely from an online store that sells entertainment-related merchandise, a growing mobile-gaming arm, online book business, and advertisements; They have a “freemium” model which provides users on a budget to stream some content free of cost with ads.
