There will be no Future of TV Briefing sent out next week, so stay tuned for a look at the top topics set to shape 2022 in the Jan. 5 edition. Happy holidays!

The year in review

The key hits:

• The streaming wars flattened
• The TV ad market tilted further but did not tip
• Production settled into the new normal
• The creator economy cashed in
• Measurement blew up

The future of TV is one year closer. 2021 saw some shifts in the TV, streaming and digital video markets start to settle, while other aspects of the landscape only became more unsettled. As the year comes to a close, here are the trends and developments that dominated the past 12 months and set up for what comes next.

The streaming wars flattened

The streaming surge of 2020 settled down in 2021. While “growing” remained an apt description of the overall streaming market this year, the rise in the number of streaming services on the market spread out that growth a bit. Meanwhile, many of the biggest players saw their growth slow, and streaming viewership even stagnated in some respects.

The story of the streaming wars in 2021 was a tale of two halves.

In the first half of the year, Netflix and Disney’s Disney+ reported slowing and even declining subscriber growth, as Discovery’s Discovery+ and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ (re)entered the market and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max received a boost from Warner Bros. film slate.

Then in the second half of the year — as people got vaccinated and spent more time outside of their homes — streamers across the board saw subscriber growth slip. Except for Netflix, which picked up the pace if only slightly. Meanwhile, streaming’s monthly share of overall TV watch time has held flat since June, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report (the latest of which is covered farther down in this week’s briefing).

Two-plus years after Disney and Apple kick-started the current era of companies rolling out subscription-based streamers featuring top-tier programming and often carrying a “+” in their names, the streaming wars continued to heat up in 2021. But unlike in 2020, when the major source of that warmth was the surge in overall streaming viewership, this year it was the pressure to keep people entertained amid all the competition, on-screen and off.

The TV ad market tilted further but did not tip

For the second year in a row, the TV advertising market was at a tipping point in 2021. Traditional TV audiences’ attentions are shifting to streaming, and advertisers are following suit, and streaming is set to overtake linear. Blah blah blah.

That’s all true, and yet the TV ad landscape has yet to come out on the other side of this rubicon. It’s getting closer, though.

While traditional TV once …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron