Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
ITV Hub is to build on the success of Love Island and the World Cup with a raft of box sets designed to retain younger viewers (B’cast)The combination of the two events helped propel the digital service to its best daily performance on record, according to ITV. On 3 July, when England’s knockout match against Colombia overlapped with the beginning of Love Island, Hub was the second most viewed live ‘channel’, behind ITV, with 1.2 million people accessing the digital service.
According to data compiled from Barb’s TV Player report, Love Island accounted for 18 of the 30 top live-streamed programmes over the four weeks to 24 June, with an average audience of 266,000. The remaining 12 most-popular shows were World Cup games, of which two were on ITV. The total volume of live-streaming minutes to ITV2, via Hub, exploded to 132 million from 5 million the week before Love Island launched. In the past few weeks, half of Hub usage has been live.
The combination of World Cup football and Love Island helped Hub’s total viewing time soar by 48% to 1.9 billion minutes for the four weeks to 24 June, up from 1.3 billion minutes over the same period last year. In comparison, a World Cup-buoyed BBC iPlayer generated 2.4 billion minutes over the same period this year.
Barb’s TV Player report also highlighted Love Island’s dominance of on-demand viewing, with the series accounting for 17 of the top 20 on-demand programme streams over the four-week period.
The most-watched episode generated 939,000 streams, with an average of 739,000 views over the period. The next best was iPlayer’s Peter Kay’s Car Share, which was viewed 362,000 times. It marks a significant uplift compared with the third series of Love Island, which averaged 525,000 on-demand streams over the same period last year, with a high of 642,000.
Measures taken to maximise the impact of the show include installing a satellite uplink at the Love Island villa in Majorca to ensure each evening’s episode is instantly available on-demand, significantly reducing last year’s 45-minute delay. Hub’s penetration of connected TVs has also been expanded and Hub+ opened up to allow subscribers access to the £3.99 per month ad-free service outside of the UK.
Love Island has “multiplied” the number of Hub+ subscribers, with 30% of its usage now taking place abroad. To maintain the momentum of the bumper summer, ITV managing director of online Paul Kanareck is finalising deals to offer an array of box sets that he will upload in the final week of Love Island to retain fans.
These are likely to include series three of Love Island, Love Island Australia and series one to five of The Only Way Is Essex, which will be available for a minimum of three months. “We are on a path to delivering TV over the internet. This summer is where that journey starts”
Kanareck’s box-set strategy is focused on timely acquisitions rather than volume to generate “maximum strategic return”. “ITV has demonstrated this s
Netflix is playing a risky game no one else dares (R) Netflix may be playing a dangerous game, but it's not doing so recklessly. To the winner, goes untold spoils. Even when underestimated, Netflix’s ever-escalating, industry-leading content spend remains a point of fear and fascination in the media industry. Each year, Netflix’s subscriber base and revenues grow (an average of 29% and 35% over the past five years), but its content spend grows faster (39%). And as the company has embraced its streaming business and washed its hands of its profitable DVD business (which Netflix stopped marketing in 2013), cash losses have swelled. In 2014, Netflix generated $16MM in cash from operating activities, but by 2017, it was losing $1.8B. In 2018, cash burn is expected to grow to $3-4B and CEO Reed Hastings has promised negative free cash flow will persist for “many years.” The company also reports more than $9.1B in debt payment obligations (up 93% year-over-year) and has $18B in content obligations (up 27%).
As a result, Netflix bears and competitors claim the company’s content spend is reckless. Not only does it imperil the company and its stakeholders, they say, but the company’s largesse and imprudence has also destabilized the industry. There’s no way to disprove this allegation, of course, but it misses the point on what Hastings is trying to achieve. Netflix’s goal is to have more subscribers than any other video service in the world, and to be the primary source of video content for each of these subscribers. The company doesn’t want to be a leader in video, or even the leader in video – it wants to monopolize the consumption of video; to become TV. This ambition has several important consequences, especially relating to the company’s spend.
Michel Barnier has declared that as much as 80% of the Brexit deal has been agreed, in a change of narrative that suggests that a full agreement can be sealed soon.
Speaking in New York, Barnier said he was looking forward to a “constructive conversation” with the UK after the white paper on Brexit is published on Thursday.
“After 12 months of negotiations we have agreed on 80% of the negotiations,” Barnier said, adding that he was determined to reach agreement on the remaining 20% by October or November