Episode 69: NFL Streaming Kickoff: Detailing How YouTube, ESPN, Peacock, Amazon and Xfinity Did With Opening Weekend

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to this week's edition of the Dan Rayburn podcast, the show that curates the streaming media industry news that matters most, unvarnished, unscripted and providing you with the factual data you need to know, without any of the hype, the pulse of the streaming media industry.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Welcome to the Dan Rayburn podcast. I am Dan Rayburn, running solo today. The co-host, mark Donaghan, is at the IBC show and I do not envy him or anyone else who is at the show. I know it's an important show but just like any bee man, that is tiring, so good luck to everyone who's there.

Speaker 2: 0:39

I did not see any news as of yet. This is Friday, september 15th, that I'm recording this, so first day of the show in person. As far as conferences and the show floor open, I haven't seen any news yet that I'm going to cover. Today. I did see some news from vendors, but just features functionality type. I didn't see anything around acquisitions or raising money or things to really talk about what the impact would be. But when Mark gets back I'll see what he saw and what he learned and, if there's enough, we'll do a whole podcast just about IBC. So with that, I'm going to jump into a couple things. Today A lot of this is going to be about NFL. It's incredible how much information is out tied to the NFL streaming, because just in the last week we had NFL Sunday kickoff right.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Last Thursday start the season and on Sunday we had NFL Sunday ticket on YouTube TV. That night was also football on Peacock, so Sunday night football on Peacock, and then Monday you had football on ESPN, and then Thursday yesterday you had Thursday night football on Amazon Prime. So I watched all of these services. I did, for some of them, more work than others in terms of testing different devices across different setups as well. But I'm going to start here with YouTube and the NFL Sunday ticket. I spent a lot of time with that. I started at about noon and I went to let's see, based on my blog post, 9.30 pm, so I spent about 10 hours that day. If you go to my blog, streamingmediablogcom, you can see that. But overall, youtube did an amazing job and I was really, really concerned about the job they were going to do because it's new to them. They were rolling out a lot of features and functionality. Last minute they changed some things with their multi-view and they also offered a way to sign up for NFL for free for seven days, really just as a trial through YouTube TV. So I was really concerned with traffic as well in terms of how much traffic they were going to get and they're not relying on any third-party CDNs for delivery. They're using the YouTube infrastructure. So a lot of moving pieces there, but I was really impressed with the quality of the stream that they put out, the user experience. During those 10 hours I was nonstop on Twitter, reddit message boards, looking at comments, looking at feedback, looking at what setups people were using. So the problems I saw and the comments I saw seemed to be very few and didn't seem to be a lot of them. You obviously don't know what total impact was for the audience in terms of technical problems, because none of these companies will ever say. But I did not see a lot with NFL Sunday tickets. So I was really impressed. Those guys deserve a lot of credit for what they did. There are not any numbers out as of today, as of yet, from them or NFL. I did ask. They said they've not put anything out. There was no clarification as to whether or not they would. So if they do, I will definitely put out some comments on that.

Speaker 2: 4:08

I would say the one biggest thing that I saw people having an issue with was something they weren't able to do, which YouTube made clear. But right, this is consumers. They don't. They don't read everything, which was the fact that they wanted to be able to select which game showed up in the multi-view screens, and you can't do that. You could pick from a pre-packaged set of games many different ones in multi-view, but you couldn't pick every single game in all of them. So that was something people were complaining about. I don't know how to do it. I can't find it. Well, you can't do it. So YouTube made that clear.

Speaker 2: 4:47

Their support pages were really good. That's another thing I give them credit on. From a support standpoint, anything you had to look for was on the site. It was easy. It was spelled out, it was step-by-step instructions. It worked. All the links worked. I didn't see any broken links, unlike some others I'm going to talk about shortly. So overall, I think they did a really good job.

Speaker 2: 5:09

I didn't see any major outages. Also, note that all these games were 1080, 60 frames. There's no 4K of any kind. Some people were debating that online. There's nothing to debate. They put the information out. Also, if you look at stats for nerds, which is the way you can see on YouTube TV, the stats of the actual stream It'll tell you the frame rate codecs, everything you want to know latency. You can see all of that.

Speaker 2: 5:41

As far as latency goes, I think too many people in the industry just spend way too much time on that. This latency was between 20 and 30 seconds for me, depending on the device I used. I tested primarily with Apple TV, roku and Amazon Fire TV Max, all connected via Ethernet. I didn't do a lot through Wi-Fi, also Mac desktop. So the biggest issues I saw were just issues around things that really was not YouTube's fault. We also saw quite a lot of people, of course, complaining about blackouts and cursing out YouTube, and consumers obviously don't know that that's not YouTube, that's an NFL issue, so that's not a problem on that side. There was a few issues here and there on Apple TV, just for something specific where I also liked that.

Speaker 2: 6:38

Youtube support was very good in saying, yeah, we know it's a little issue, you should see it fixed in a minute, but it was nothing big. So overall just a really good job. I don't think people many in the industry realize how big a deal this really was, because if this failed or melted down anyway, every single news outlet out there would have said look, streaming technology is not ready for prime time. It will never be on par with cable TV. And yet how many people in the media actually covered NFL Sunday ticket on YouTube? Almost none, almost none. The next day, almost nobody wrote stories about it and the reason was there was no problem. So that's actually good for us. So YouTube, good job. They got a lot of credit for that. I Was really impressed. I hope they continue this now every week.

Speaker 2: 7:37

I did great job the first week, but they have to continue. All takes is one bad week and people are gonna notice. Now let's get to some folks who had their companies, I should say who had a absolutely terrible Experience. Comcasts infinity stream app was suffering an outage which took place just as the games kicked off. An hour later, xfinity acknowledged the outage and replies to the users on Twitter saying we're aware of the issue and Our fixed teams are engaged in doing everything they can to restore it as quickly as possible. But note that they didn't post any messages on their social accounts. They didn't post it anywhere in Dix infinity website, so they completely failed from a communication standpoint and we can continue to see companies do this. You really wonder who their PR and comms teams are. You wonder how they keep their jobs. This is a an outage completely for everybody across the platform, and you don't even know it, which is crazy. I also think it's just ironic that the post that they had on Twitter that they had pinned from about six days before Was entitled. We understand the importance of keeping you connected, except you didn't for the NFL games and you didn't communicate what the problem was, so that that is a real problem.

Speaker 2: 9:05

Two hours later, they just said that Some people on support were saying to consumers will resolve this at no time. Well, that's, that's completely non-definite. Definite, it's non-definitive. Well, what does that mean? There was no ETA. Two and a half hours later, they said they were aware of the streaming issue with the app and website. Our experts are working and getting this fixed as soon as possible. Soon as possible is not the same as in no time.

Speaker 2: 9:37

At 4.05 pm, they said we have since resolved the issue and services now been restored, but they still didn't post that to their main feed. Now, at 411, they were posting in Twitter. Quote most of the problem has been fixed up. Well, most of the problem being fixed up and service has now been restored are not the same things? So it just is laughable. The lack of communication. So, xfinity, you get an F. You stunk that weekend. You didn't offer refunds to everybody automatically. If somebody called in and complained, you were willing to offer them a $10 refund one time. The problem is people were complaining online. It took three hours to get someone on the phone, so three hours of your time and can't watch Many the games for multiple hours for $10 refund. Yeah, thanks, not interested. Now here's a way to do it. Shaw in Canada confirmed that some customers are experiencing an interruption To the NFL Sunday ticket games on what's called their ignite platform. Shaw posted this message to the Shaw website and kept users informed and said follow this page for updates, and they gave updates as soon as the service was restored. That is the way you should do it. So Shaw unfortunately had an outage, but at least I kept people informed.

Speaker 2: 11:04

Next up, let's go to Thursday night football and Amazon Prime Boy. Amazon had quite a few issues here and, unfortunately, the same issues I saw and documented in detail last year. So for me in particular, frame rate issues. The video is stuttering, audio was out of sync. A lot of people on Twitter were reporting this. Now, when I say a lot, that's not a number. So what I put up in my post was 20 posts per minute. We're coming in about this non-stop on Twitter and that's just the people who are Posting right, there's plenty who aren't. So 20 comments per minute with the exact same problem. That's clearly an issue. Amazon.

Speaker 2: 11:46

Amazon did give out stats, their details, saying they were doing native 1080p HDR. The game was far too dark. We saw a lot of comments on social about that as well. Also, just me, to naked eye, it did not look 1080p. I guess it was, if they're saying it is, but it sure did not look like it. So comments on Twitter. I think it's a little bit more like 1080p, but it's not a lot of people saying it is, but it sure did not look like it.

Speaker 2: 12:14

The video is like watching in slow motion. Why is Amazon playing the whole game in slow-mo? The screen is lag and blurred. The picture quality is blurry. My audio is out of sync. Why is your stream so choppy? Why is my screen so dark? The clarity of the feed is absolutely horrible. Picture is blurry. You get the idea. These are the comments that were coming in non-stop.

Speaker 2: 12:40

So, even though I knew this was going to be a waste of time, I did contact Amazon support If you had an issue. Amazon said click on this link, please go to our chat. But chat is not able to handle the problems, just like I saw last year. So I started off the chat giving my name, my device details, telling what OS I was running on the fire TV stick, the model number Verizon's, my ISP. Here's my zip code I'm on half gig speed. Description of the problem. They transferred me to three different people and then the first support post person told me to ensure I am only using the power adapter that came with the device. So I don't know what that was about. It's kind of weird. Then I was told to disconnect my cable box from the TV. But I don't have a cable box and obviously I'm not watching it through the cable box when I identified fire TV. So just to get to that point took 47 minutes. So after about an hour and 10 minutes I just gave up and said don't worry about it anymore, I don't have the time.

Speaker 2: 13:49

On Twitter, amazon was reporting to users who were reporting all these issues sorry, replying to users, which is the same cut and paste text telling you to go to the website. But the problem is many of them in support in Amazon were saying more information can be found here, giving an Amazon link. But when you went to the page, you returned an error of sorry, we couldn't find the page with the photo of you know the cute little dog there. So it's like oh so even the support link doesn't work. Every support person I dealt with, english is not their native language. Now, when I put this up on LinkedIn. Yesterday someone wrote into me and they're like hey, you know you shouldn't talk about people from other countries that way. Okay.

Speaker 2: 14:34

I don't know what you're talking about here, because NFL this NFL particular game on Amazon Prime Video it is only offered in US, which means people who are going to be contacting support the vast majority of them are going to be native English speakers. So you already know that this isn't a global audience. It's not available outside the US. So when you don't have somebody who understands the language, especially in a chat, you're starting off a chat with somebody who's already confused based on the words that you're typing in. What type of level of support do you think they're going to be able to offer? So I think you have to have people who understand better the audience that's going to be calling in or that you're going to be communicating with them in chat to better resolve their issues. I think that's pretty straightforward for any company. These are the exact same issues I had with support last year, so none of that surprised me. Now how widespread these issues were, don't know. Amazon's not saying there's no numbers out yet on the audience. I'm sure we'll have that next week. So unknown at this time Sunday Night Football and Peacock. They did put out numbers. So a lot of industry people say, oh, nfl games, like you know, such big traffic and big events and the vast majority of NFL games are not when they're on broadcast TV, especially even just in local markets. And to give you an idea, the average minute audience what we call AMA on Peacock for Sunday Night Football kickoff was 1.8 million viewers. That's not that big. Now that's from NBC Sports Also. That is the most streamed Sunday Night NFL game on record. It was up 11%. So that tells you a lot of NFL games, even when it's on Peacock or another service like that and still on TV, they're doing a million to 1.5 million AMA. It's not that big of an audience. So if NFL is still on pay TV, that is the vast majority of where the traffic is still at.

Speaker 2: 16:51

A couple of interesting news pieces Apple announced the new A17 Pro chip will now support AV1 video via dedicated AV1 decoder in the new iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. That's a big deal. It's going to take a long time to really make an impact because the amount of people over time that'll have to upgrade their phones, so that's more really in the future years down the line. But that's a big deal for the industry, for those that want to really nerd out on that the Kodak nerds and whatnot see my post on LinkedIn. A lot of people who know way more than I do on that stuff are commenting of who they'll impact and when and to what degree, but that's definitely that's a big deal, so that's good to see.

Speaker 2: 17:38

Last week, sling TV dish technologies filed a suit against Fubo, alleging infringement on eight patents related to streaming video. All of these patents relate to what they're calling multi bit rate content streaming and adaptive rate chip shifting. So what's interesting is these are this is all ABR related stuff, but some of these date back to the move networks patents in 2014,. Which is which is fascinating. I know a little bit about those patents. I have worked on some patent cases previously tied to God. Back in the days it was a burst, burst networks or no burst technology that I forget. Someone will remember. Burst move, obviously real, had a bunch of bunch of patents as well. So interesting patent case here.

Speaker 2: 18:32

Many people were commenting online hey well, why are they only going after Fubo and not Apple or Amazon or others? That I don't know. 2021 dish did file similar patents suit against Peloton and also icon health and fitness, who makes Nordic track. Also Lulu lemon, because they made that mirror workout device. Earlier this year Peloton paid dish a one-time settlement fee of $75 million. So they settled that suit. Nordic Track that suit is still ongoing. So why they go after some and not others I don't really know.

Speaker 2: 19:16

I do know previously that what I heard from companies that had patents was well, if they do go after an Apple, google, somebody like that, they have the means and the wherewithal to push back. And sometimes these companies look at well, would we rather get one big payment from one company or a bunch of smaller payments from a lot of other companies? Sometimes that's how they can make more money. So this will be very interesting. Fubu did come back after quite a long period of time and basically said that they don't believe that they need to get a license. So Dish says in the filing that quote after four years of negotiation attempts to no avail, fubu TV continues to use Dish on technology and it's streaming services without a license. So interesting that Fubu's come back after all. The time is like, nope, we don't think we need a license. I'm not saying he's right or wrong at this point, I'm not working on this case but that was interesting to see and we definitely have to watch that one see if it potentially impacts other companies going forward.

Speaker 2: 20:28

And then let's close here with Disney. A lot happened with Disney. I'm not gonna go in a lot of details here. Chances are, most of you have already read what's taking place between Disney and Charter as far as working out the agreement. I think, though, that from a high level here, some folks are getting this wrong, in the sense that Charter had the opportunity here to really change the landscape around the licensing and bundling of carriage fees, but they caved in. They really did. So I think it's funny in the press Spectrum is Charter saying we got everything we wanted in a deal, and then Disney's like we got everything we wanted in a deal. Well, that's not true. There's no way. So yeah, it's nice that Spectrum TV video packages they can drop Disney XD, fxx, snatchy a while, they can drop some of those baby TV, whatever that is, but they're paying higher carriage fees to Disney. So Disney makes more money. Now the Disney Plus basic ad tier will be included in Spectrum TV select video packages, but Charter still has to pay Disney for every single one of those it gives away for free. Now it's paying a wholesale price, what's called a wholesale agreement, but Charter still has to pay. So Charter's paying to give away that and they're paying more for licensing channels. So Disney's the winner there.

Speaker 2: 22:03

Now some are saying Disney's not the winner because ESPN Plus is gonna be included in Spectrum TV select video packages and when ESPN does come out with a direct to consumer service, it will be included for Spectrum TV select subscribers at no charge upon launch. But for some reason, what people seem to forget here is PTV operators raise their pricing almost every year like clockwork. So do you really think that Spectrum's not gonna pass on these quote free accounts, that customers getting in rate hikes sooner rather than later? And you know what they're gonna say. They're gonna say we've added so much more additional content to the platform that we need to raise rates. So this idea that even though they're giving it away for free, that it's gonna be free for consumers, that's not gonna happen. Charter's also gonna make Disney's direct to consumer services available for purchase by its broadband only customers Also. A little news came out after the fact. It was not in the press release. Disney is the one that keeps the ad revenue from the Disney Plus basic ad tier offering. Disney keeps it. So Disney gets paid a wholesale fee and they keep the ad revenue and they get paid more for linear services. Disney's the winner.

Speaker 2: 23:32

Now people are saying Disney's not the winner because Spectrum got them to get rid of seven channels so that we can, as consumers, buy more a la carte, which sounds promising, but the issue is we still can't buy based on per channel. Spectrum does want the ability to offer more skinny bundles where they can take out all sports, for instance, but that's not new. We've had skinny bundles for five or six years. Other companies pay TV providers have done that before. So I don't see, personally, how this is anything but a win for Disney. Will Disney follow suit with other pay TV operators and distributors to cut similar deals and maybe not bundle in all the channels? Yeah, potentially so, but if you're a Spectrum TV subscriber for pay TV, the fact that these channels were moved let's see. I think it's seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. No, looks like nine channels were removed. Are they now gonna lower your bill? No, so I think people are putting too much emphasis on the fact that some channels have been removed, because until Spectrum comes out and says, okay, we'll now offer you a lower tier package, you're still paying the same rate. So let's see what happens.

Speaker 2: 24:56

Also tied to Disney, byron Allen made a $10, $10,. It's been a long day. Today they made a $10 billion bid to buy Walt Disney's ABC Television Network and Assets, which includes FX, national Geographic, cable Channels as well. So, unsolicited bid $10 billion. Disney's also held initial talks, it was reported, with Nextstar. Disney did come out and make a public statement in a press release saying they've made no decisions on what they're doing with this business because of what the media was reporting. So interesting we're already having unsolicited bids come in. Clearly something's gonna happen over time. How quickly, we don't know.

Speaker 2: 25:42

I also wrote last I think it was last week, just the week before I was looking at Disney's numbers in terms of the number of direct-to-consumer subs and, more importantly, disney Plus subscribers they said they'd have by end of fiscal 2024. And I don't see how they make those numbers. I don't think there's any chance of it. So on my blog I put a detailed post up about that. And, interesting yesterday Bloomberg is reporting that internally Disney has cut their forecasted numbers for Disney Plus subscribers and will miss their most recent public projections by tens of millions of subs. That's gonna be a problem on Wall Street. Now if Disney could say, okay, but the R-Pu is a lot higher than we thought, okay, you'd rather have some fewer subscribers and hire R-Pu. But that's not gonna be the case, especially internationally, r-pu is much lower. So, man, disney's got a lot going on right now. And if they come out and talk about lower numbers again because they did already lower their long-term forecast in August of last year it was down both $50 million, both on the low and the high end my guess here is I will bet you Disney will no longer put out numbers at all. The same way, netflix shifted the goalposts and decided not to put out numbers the way they previously did it as far as subscribers goes, in terms of projections for the next quarter, I think Disney will follow suit. I think all it does is hurt them with Wall Street when they don't make those numbers. So I expect they will stop giving out those numbers. I have no insight into that. I just I expect that they will. I would not be surprised at all.

Speaker 2: 27:33

Netflix also put out today a date for their earnings. Netflix tends to put out earnings pretty much before anyone tied to streaming. So Netflix's next earnings date will be October 18th, so just about a month away. Should be pretty interesting to see what they talk about. As far as Ava goes, what else this week? That's a lot. It's a lot to go through. Some other news, we'll wait. We'll hold on to until next week.

Speaker 2: 28:01

Something else I thought was pretty interesting watching CNBC this week. They had the CEO of Casey's. I never heard of Casey's, but it's the fifth largest pizza chain in the country. It was really funny because he said that they rolled out a new. They rolled out a new thin crust pizza. That's all they did, right, but what did he call it? He called it a new thin crust pizza platform. I was like, wow, is everything a platform these days? It seems like it is. So it was funny because he spoke for like five minutes and I was like are you talking about pizza or are you talking about technology? But he literally was talking about pizza, not that you could tell. So interesting to see what people are talking about now when it comes to transformative AI and even pizza's a platform. We saw a lot this week because of the ARM IPO and what people were talking about with ARM, even though it's not AI related. So just remember, this isn't about terminology. This isn't about marketing buzzwords. This is about what is the actual service or product that's being provided behind the scenes. What problem is it solving? That's all that really matters.

Speaker 2: 29:19

Last two pieces of information here funding and acquisition. So, adtech company Videoamp. They announced a series G raise of 150 million. Their last round of funding was 275 million in 2021. Now here you go. This is a number to know. In September, in 2014, videoamp has raised $600 million. At the end of 2021, they publicly disclosed they were at an average revenue run rate of $80 million.

Speaker 2: 29:54

What are these investors thinking? The last round here, the G round, it's reported that company was valued at 1.5 billion and that it was not valued at any more money since their latest raise in 2021. But you're talking about a company valued at $1.5 billion that, even if they doubled let's just say they doubled their revenue, let's say they had $150 million the fact that they're getting that type of multiple is ridiculous. That's not what these companies are worth. So I understand that people are. Probably some investors are looking video amp and saying well, look at all the issues Nielsen is having. If someone can replace him, there's a huge opportunity. Yes, but you also can't do that overnight, and you can't do that with money. Money is not what's stopping that from taking place. It was also reported today that just before video amp took the money, they did it around the layoffs. So a lot going on there with them.

Speaker 2: 31:00

And then the final one is iSpot. If you don't know who they are, they're TV ad measurement, the platform. They've acquired a measurement and attribution company called 605. So with that, ispot gets to add set top Spock's data from, they say, 16.6 million homes to its smart TV data footprint, which brings their total footprint now to 82.7 million. So big deal for them in terms of adding to their footprint. 605 had 85 employees. They're all going to join the iSpot team. No terms of the deal were disclosed. I did not hear evaluations on this one. I didn't hear anyone so far to date come through and talk about what they were valued at.

Speaker 2: 31:46

And actually one more piece here because I think it's important. You know, as much as we talk about streaming, we obviously still need to also watch the audience on pay TV, especially around sports. So TF1 said 15.4 million viewers turned into their opening night coverage of Rugby World Cup, making it their largest domestic TV audience of the year. So think about that. So that's a big deal. It was in Paris. So 15.4 million viewers. Pay TV is still where it's at from an audience standpoint, especially with sports. Now it's interesting because, coming up for sports, you're going to have some NFL games are going to be exclusive now to Amazon right, it's the Black Friday game, I believe and then you're also going to have at least one game in 2024 on Peacock, a playoff game. That's going to be exclusive. So super curious to see what those numbers are. Now, even though it's exclusive to streaming, it will still show on pay TV in local markets, let me make that clear. So it's not technically 100% exclusive to streaming, but 15.4 million viewers for TF1 just shows you where the audience is. So with that I'm going to end this here.

Speaker 2: 33:06

I hope everyone's had a good time. If they're at IBC, if you're coming back, be safe. We've got the I-D-N-A-B show in New York coming up next month. We've got a lot of new speakers on there. Super excited to announce that Disney is going to be the kickoff keynote. So their ad team is going to sit with me and talk about what they're doing with AdTec and Avod, what they're seeing in the market Super interesting there. Netflix is also going to be doing presentation as well on how they're doing some unique stuff on the transcoding, building out their pipeline scaling. So we've got some great speakers.

Speaker 2: 33:38

So go to nabstreamingsummitcom. Contact me if you have questions. If you want a discount code, I'm happy to give you one. Just reach out to me. Appreciate everyone listening. We're over 30,000 downloads now for all the podcasts. Every month more and more people are listening. The numbers are going up. It's looking at them the other day. Big stat for everyone More than 70% of all the playbacks are on the iPhone, and then 60% of all that is done through Apple's iTunes app or Spotify. So interesting to see the platform breakdown as well. So that's it for this week. Mark will be back next week We'll do another recording, maybe a little bit of IBC. We've got some other stuff to cover on the business economics side of what we're seeing in the market, when it comes to someone on Wall Street as well. But meantime, thanks for listening, appreciate everyone being here and we'll talk to you next week.