Another busy news week, another roundup of links and stories we didn’t get around to fleshing out. For your weekend reading pleasure:
1) There’s been a lot of talk at Upfront (and Newfront) presentations about how social strategies fit into their programming and what that means for advertisers. But Viacom, working closely with Spredfast, has some convincing ways of actually monetizing campaigns. Their Echo Social Graph sounds more complicated than it is. In an exclusive interview with The Drum, Spredfast VP of Media and Entertainment Josh Rickel calls it a “means by which Viacom could quantify the value of this audience using specific metrics, which in turn allowed their integrated marketing team to tell a value story to their sponsors.” You can see the full video below:
2) We wrote about the Fight of the Century and whether people will shell out $100 to watch the fight on their couch tomorrow night, instead of just YouTubing clips Sunday morning. But it looks like Mayweather- Pacquiao devotees (and your local bookie) won’t be able to stream the fight like they might have planned. Two alleged piracy sites were called out by HBO and Showtime and they’ve since pulled the links. From Variety:
In a previous joint statement, HBO and Showtime had said the two sites were “promoting unauthorized free streams of our intellectual property. As content creators and distributors, we believe that combating piracy and stopping content theft is crucial to maintain our ability to provide our customers with world-class programming like the Mayweather-Pacquaio fight.” The fight…[is] expected to pull in more than $150 million in pay-per-view revenue.
In the HBO Now, skinny bundle, streaming television world, it’s starting to sound ridiculous that the event is not more available, if not everywhere and unconnected from the network. Am I going to have to pay a cover in a bar? So retro.
3) ESPN and Disney are not happy about Verizon’s skinny bundles. Because who would have ever thought the telco would maneuver for cord cutters? Bloomberg put together a nice roundup of the economics behind it all, which makes you sort of feel for the networks. From their piece:
One way to gauge the number of households that might want to pay for a network as a stand-alone offering is to look at quarterly cumulative numbers from Nielsen. This is a measure of how many households, out of a pay TV universe of 116.4 million, tuned into a given network for at least six minutes during an average week. According to a Nielsen report provided by Brad Adgate of Horizon Media, 27.6 million homes spent at least six minutes with ESPN in an average week from Dec. 29, 2014, to March 29, 2015. If we take that as the number of customers willing to pay for ESPN outside a bundle, the network would need to charge them each $22.58 per month to match its current revenue from subscriber fees.
Check out the link for the charts, too.
4) It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Not only is it May and flowers are in bloom and Orange is the New Black is only a month away, today is the anniversary of when Mr. Rogers testified in front of Congress to get more money for PBS. And if you’ve ever tried to stream Downton Abbey from their site, you know they could use the cash. To draw awareness, Protect My Public Media is asking supporters to upload a picture of yourself in your best Mr. Rogers cardigan and tag it on social with #ItsABeautifulDay.