Universal Electronics Inc. signed Instreamatic’s AI-based voice dialog marketing platform for set-top boxes and smart TVs, it said Thursday. Conversational advertisements have been largely limited to mobile; UEI wants to bring them to smart TVs and MVPDs with personalized context.
Studios have fallen into “lockstep pursuit down the subscription streaming dream,” said CEO John Calkins from transactional over-the-top video platform company Row8. The current direct-to-consumer trend, driven by theater closures during the pandemic, “is a profit deal” for media companies, said Wedbush's Michael Pachter. Also speaking Wednesday at the virtual Digital Entertainment Group Expo, the analyst compared the rush to D2C services to the Steve Martin movie, The Jerk: “It’s all about giving away a bunch of crap and hoping people will pay for it.” Calkins said “everybody’s feeling like they’ve got a shot at that brass ring.” He questioned whether the model is valid or sustainable long term. When the “newness of subscription streaming wears off,” there could be a “day of reckoning,” he said. Pachter said most TV content doesn’t have to be viewed live, aside from sports and certain shows where immediacy is important. The analyst believes virtual MVPD services such as YouTube Red or fuboTV “will take over, and cable is doomed.” Pachter blamed the cable industry for allowing Netflix deals, saying it “cut its own throat.” Consumers “have been trained that you can just watch anything you want on demand,” he said. “People are pissed” when they have to wait a week to watch the next episode of a show like WandaVision from broadcast TV “because we’ve all been trained to expect to binge it.” NCTA didn’t comment Thursday. Calkins noted “some stall” in vMVPD subscriptions and that prices keep “creeping up,” making the streaming model not much different from traditional pay-TV. On what will drive success for vMVPDs, Pachter said content owners should “get religion and decide they can’t afford to give content away” and “just withhold it from all these people.” Also at the event, Pachter took aim at AT&T (see 2103250063).
The video services market is in a “historic state of disruption and disarray,” said Parks Associates analyst Paul Erickson Thursday, saying 45% of U.S. broadband households with traditional pay-TV service are likely to switch to a virtual MVPD in the next 12 months. A Q3 Parks survey found 29% of MVPD subscribers were unhappy with the price and value of their service, and vMVPDs are targeting the segment with different bundles and value propositions, said Erickson. An “unprecedented acceleration of consumer interest in aggregators and vMVPDs” occurred in 2020, “and there’s still a lot of room to grow viewership” through content discovery, said Nic Wilson, TiVo head-customer success, who's scheduled as a panelist on Parks' virtual Parks Future of Video conference Wednesday.
Many employees who “have acclimated to remote work are not in a rush to go back to an office full-time,” Verizon reported Thursday. Of the 3,000 U.S. adults canvassed online March 14-16 in a Verizon-sponsored Morning Consult poll, half would consider changing jobs to continue remote or hybrid work; 54% work remotely at least part time, vs. 28% pre-pandemic. Nearly seven in 10 prefer to continue in a year working remotely at least one to two days a week. A quarter hope to return to a physical office full time by a year from now. Nearly a third say they upgraded or considered upgrading their home internet bandwidth and their mobile data plans within the past year. Two-thirds spend at least three hours weekly watching live TV. Nearly six in 10 say the same about watching content through a streaming service. Forty-seven percent subscribed to a new streaming service during the pandemic, and 70% say they have binge-watched a show.
Qobuz is the first music streaming service to deliver 24-bit high-resolution audio content for playback on Sonos speakers compatible with the S2 operating system and controller app, said the companies Wednesday. Qobuz was available to Sonos customers in 16-bit FLAC streaming since 2013.
GameStop is “continuing the work” to expand its “addressable market” by growing its “product catalog,” said CEO George Sherman on a call Tuesday for Q4 ended Jan. 30. “This includes growing our product offerings across PC gaming, computers, monitors, game tables, mobile gaming and gaming TVs,” he said. “These categories represent natural extensions that our customers would expect to buy from us, expanding our addressable market size by over five times, and over time will reduce our reliance on the cyclicality of the console-based gaming market.” GameStop’s online store has a wide assortment of Vizio 4K TVs.
Comcast will target $1 billion over the next decade, including in-kind investments, toward closing the digital divide, like supporting its Lift Zone initiative of creating more than 1,000 Wi-Fi-connected community centers by year-end. It said Wednesday it will invest in grants for nonprofit community organizations and in its Internet Essentials program.
With the shift to online shopping and banking “here to stay,” more than three-quarters of U.S. consumers find their online consumer experience (CX) interactions “better than pre-pandemic, though brands often lack empathy,” reported Telus International Tuesday. The CX company hired Pollfish to canvass 1,500 working Americans this quarter, finding that 97% plan to continue shopping online in a “post-pandemic world,” it said. The proportions were somewhat lower for those who would continue online banking (92%), health and wellness activities (77%) and gaming (71%) “because of their positive digital experiences in 2020,” said Telus.
Workplaces with “shared seating” will be the new normal after COVID-19, reported Gartner Tuesday. It canvassed 127 finance and real estate executives last month, finding 59% expect shared seating arrangements will be the norm for at least a quarter of their employees who return to the physical office. “An increase in remote working will meaningfully change office space configurations,” said analyst Tammy Shoham. “The most obvious consequence is that firms will need less office space per employee.” More than a third of the survey respondents expect most employees to be in shared seating for at least the next year or two. This would be a “significant shift from the pre-pandemic workplace,” in which 80% of management leaders report that fewer than a quarter of their employees were in shared seating, Gartner said.
Employees’ sentiments are high for working from home after the pandemic, and management appears to support them, a Lenovo survey found. The PC vendor canvassed 8,500 respondents in the U.S., U.K. and 12 other countries Jan. 15 to Feb. 11, finding that 70% reported higher job satisfaction at home, with 56% feeling more productive than at the office. More than eight in 10 management respondents expect post-COVID-19 work to be remote “at least half the time,” it said. About 60% of employees canvassed would prefer working remotely at least half the time, and more than a third want to do so “most or all of the time,” said Lenovo. “This sentiment increases among workers in larger companies,” with about two-thirds of them preferring to work remotely at least half the time, it said. Work-from-home challenges abound, said Lenovo, with slow or unreliable internet “chief among them.” About half the employees in medium-sized businesses and 40% in small or very small businesses “report delays or challenges in getting any kind of IT support when needed,” it said.