Ä¢¹½AV

India’s growing importance as an ad market: The world’s most populous country is seeing major shifts in time spent with media as competition ramps up.

Venu’s disruptive potential: The planned venture poses a significant risk to pay TV services that are already losing share to ad-supported streaming subscriptions. With Disney, Fox, and WBD’s linear sports offerings in one place at $42.99 monthly, Venu would offer cheaper access to sports than most linear and pay TV services. That threat is what spurred Fubo to launch its antitrust suit.

Women's sports viewership continues its upward trajectory with the NCAA women's basketball championship game drawing over 8 million viewers and peaking at 9.8 million, per ESPN ratings. While that figure is down over 2024’s 18.5 million, it represents a longer trend of sustained growth in women’s sports viewership. This phenomenon can no longer be attributed to one single star athlete—Caitlin Clark—but to an overall increase in women’s sports popularity.

CTV time—which does not include traditional TV viewed via a CTV but does include all forms of streaming OTT, digital pay TV, apps, and audio accessed via a CTV—has risen rapidly in recent years. But it will still trail mobile device time by 1:45 per day and traditional TV time by 40 minutes.

Digital sports viewers in the US now outnumber traditional pay TV sports viewers. Live sports broadcasts are still predominantly viewed on TV screens rather than mobile devices or computers. Live sports accounted for 96 of the 100 most-watched shows on US television in 2023, per Nielsen, with 93 of those slots filled by football specifically.

It's been a year since the messaging app Discord launched its own reward-based ad format called "Quests" for PC and game console users, and they're ready to celebrate its success.

AI-generated journalism arrives: Il Foglio’s all-AI newspaper edition showcases automation’s potential while raising ethical concerns about accuracy, credibility, and human oversight.

Why Amazon is returning to X: Elon Musk’s growing political importance is attracting spenders back to the platform.

OOH surges past $9B in ad spend: Programmatic DOOH and social amplification make OOH a performance-driven tool for modern advertisers.

Netflix saw a 16.8% increase in digital ad revenue in Q2 2024, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of growth, according to the company’s earnings.

On today's podcast episode, we discuss what happens next now that sports-focused streaming service Venu Sports has been blocked, how to get customers onboard with your AI-infused products and services, how the streaming bundle is changing, the US considering a breakup of Google to address its search monopoly, the most sort after plane seats, and more. Tune in to the discussion with host Marcus Johnson, director of reports editing Rahul Chadha and analysts Ross Benes and Max Willens.

Streaming services are offering a multitude of bundles as they try to expand their ad-supported audiences.

This analysis excludes digital pay TV services—known as virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) like YouTube TV and Sling TV—which skew even more toward subscription revenues. Netflix is a subscription revenue outlier. Netflix relies more on subscription revenues than any other streaming service that sells advertising.

Performers win key concessions, but holdouts like Disney and EA signal a slower path toward industry changes.

A major rebound for Disney's streaming sector: Losses cut dramatically to $18 million, while Disney+ adds 6.3 million subscribers thanks to key partnerships.

Partnerships between retail media networks (RMNs) and connected TV (CTV) platforms are giving brands access to better data, more shoppable ad options, and a full-funnel approach that drives results. These collaborations can make targeting smarter, shopping easier, and measurement clearer, helping advertisers prove their effectiveness.

Disney is encouraging its viewers to play. Instacart is balancing food content and advertising. YouTube is experimenting with less-intrusive picture-in-picture placements for livestreams. Here is how advertisers can capitalize.

Exclusive experiences like this are helping Amex to win over millennials and Gen Zers