In The Frame – September ’15

Tom Pammenter Published: 30.09.2015 Industry news

A USA Today poll has revealed that a whopping 36% of American subscribers to streaming services share their login details with friends and family, costing the likes of Netflix and HBO $500 million in lost revenue this year.

But Netflix and indeed Amazon continue to invest huge sums to boost their offerings – both are estimated to invest £6bn in content by 2020.

Among those to benefit is Charlie Brooker, who’s signed a deal with Netflix for a third series of his satirical sci-fi creation, Black Mirror. Amazon’s investments include the acquisition of US drama Mr Robot as well as six TV pilots, one of which, Highston, is executive produced by Sacha Baron Cohen and guest stars Shaquille O’Neal and Flea, the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist who also appeared in The Big Lebowski.

Amazon is upgrading its hardware, too, introducing the latest version of Fire TV, which comes with support for 4K Ultra HD, and a new Fire TV Stick with voice remote (Fire TV Stick became the company’s fastest-selling product ever after its launch in November 2014).

BBC News

In America at least, Netflix is to face a new competitor: the BBC, which plans to launch a subscription-based video streaming service, possibly as soon as 2016, which “will not affect agreements with other services such as Amazon and Hulu”. Director general Tony Hall said: “We’re launching a new over-the-top video service in America offering BBC fans programmes they wouldn’t otherwise get – showcasing British actors, our programme-makers – and celebrating our culture.”

A comedy-drama based on the rivalry between snooker players Alex Higgins and Steve Davis is to be the first scripted feature film commissioned specifically for the iPlayer. The Rack Pack, which looks at the ‘glory days’ of 1970s and ’80s snooker and features Kevin Bishop as promoter Barry Hearn, will be released to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the 1985 World Snooker Championships final between Davis and Dennis Taylor, which was watched by a record audience of 18.5 million people.

ITV News

Staying online, ITV is to replace itv.com and the ITV Player with The ITV Hub, “the new digital destination for all its TV channels and online services“. The service will be available on Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick and the new Freeview Play service. Furthermore, new episodes of Family Guy and American Dad will be available on The ITV Hub – the first time a broadcaster has offered the shows via a VOD service.

ITV, along with Channel 4 and Channel 5, has expressed concern over EE TV’s Replay feature – which continually records 24 hours of viewers’ favourite channels and allows people to fast-forward through adverts on hundreds of hours of programming instead of having to watch commercials which have been inserted into catch-up services.

The BBC will broadcast the Olympics until 2020, after which ITV will compete with the corporation to win the right to show the Games from 2022. Discovery paid £920m in an exclusive pan-European deal in June 2015 but Ofcom lists the Olympics as a category A event, meaning they must have live coverage made available to free-to-air channels – and Adam Crozier, the chief executive of ITV, said the broadcaster would bid to sub-license the rights.

ITV will be pleased with this month’s England v Wales rugby World Cup match, which drew the biggest TV rugby audience in eight years – an average of 10.4 million viewers during the game, with a peak of 11.6 million.

And finally…

The dust settles on another IBC and among the new products revealed in Amsterdam were two from editing’s biggest players: Avid’s introduction of Avid All Access, a set of membership options which aims to add value to existing Avid Everywhere subscription and service plans and, secondly, Adobe Creative Cloud’s expanded support with new features, including the ability to work with UltraHD, 4K and 8K media and high dynamic range files.
Ericsson will transmit Channel 5’s portfolio of terrestrial and digital services from May 2016 having signed a contract that includes playout, media management, metadata, access services (captioning, audio description and sign language interpretation) and business continuity services.
YouTube’s most-viewed channel in August was WWE wrestling, boosted by Summerslam 2015 and watched 456.4 million times.
A government official was photographed recently as he entered Downing Street carrying a government document…and inadvertently revealed that Channel 4 could be privatised. The document read: “Work should proceed to examine the options of extracting greater public value from the Channel 4 corporation, focusing on privatisation options in particular.”
Travel Channel is to become the first broadcaster to trial Arqiva’s live restart functionality, allowing viewers to instantly skip back to the start of any programme during its broadcast.
The recent ratings battle between BBC1’s The Great British Bake Off and ITV’s live edition of Coronation Street ended in a dead heat, with 8.4 million viewers each.