So let’s set aside looking ahead until the next edition of the Future of TV Briefing and end the year looking back at how the TV, streaming and digital video industry changed in 2020.

This year everyone — from major media conglomerates to TV advertisers to digital video producers — had to adapt in ways they hadn’t needed to before. While the shift to streaming has been in plain view for years, in 2020 TV network groups had to speed up their own internal shifts, and connected TV platforms, streaming services and digital video platforms accelerated their own development cycles in response to the streaming viewership surge. Meanwhile, the traditional TV advertising industry had to find a newfound level of flexibility, as did TV, digital video and commercial producers who had to pivot to remote productions. But not everyone adapted well to 2020, which marked the first full year of the streaming wars — as well as its first casualty.

Streaming took center stage

For the better part of the past decade (at least), streaming has been on pace to usurp traditional TV as the dominant way that people watch shows. Technically, that has yet to happen. Even in the second quarter, when shelter-at-home orders were at their strictest, adults in the U.S. spent, on average, 4 hours and 8 minutes per day watching shows on traditional TV compared to 1 hour and 12 minutes spent streaming programming on CTV, according to Nielsen. But at some point, that balance will change, and that tipping point is nearer now that the companies making the shows are prioritizing streaming.

Disney, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia each announced massive reorganizations to put streaming at the center of their operations. The moves make it likely that even more movies and TV shows that would have been otherwise slated for release in theaters or on linear TV will premiere instead on the companies’ respective streaming services, as WarnerMedia is already doing to Hollywood’s dismay. Adding to that likelihood is the fact that 2020 served as the first full year of the streaming wars. Following last year’s debuts of Disney+ and Apple TV+, this year WarnerMedia’s HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock rolled out, while Discovery and ViacomCBS each announced plans to launch (or relaunch) their own standalone streamers in 2021.

The ad-supported front of the streaming wars also heated up. While ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV remains the dominant free, ad-supported streaming TV service, Amazon, Roku, Samsung and Vizio stepped up their challenges by adding more 24/7 streaming channels to their respective FAST platforms. Meanwhile, Peacock provides Disney’s Hulu with its biggest competition yet among ad-supported streamers making actual TV programming available to people without pay-TV subscriptions. But …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron