All posts tagged: Streaming

Digigram Newsletter of January 2023!

Published by Gert Christen

Welcome back to DIGIGRAM! Thanks to those who read our last issue and inquired about USA Launching Pad and the recent Connected Life class at UC Berkeley. Excited to share that the next USA Launching Pad starts in March, and Connected Life will make a comeback in the fall semester (it was voted the second-most popular startup class at UC Berkeley, woohoo!). 2023 is off to a stormy start – literally! San Francisco just recorded the wettest 22-day period since 1862. It was so wet that it saturated sand dunes, which gave way to drop a world-war II bunker onto the beach below. Looks like a scene from the “1941” movie! Luckily, the sun has finally returned to dry out a soaked California. Photo: “Relocated” bunker at Fort Funston (Source) In this edition of Digigram: #1: MIT & Climate Energy Prize – This long-running competition for student-led climate startups is solving some of the biggest issues facing our environment. Hear from this year’s organizing team about how promising young people from the world’s best universities fight climate change today. #2: …

Streaming Replacing Cable

Published by Gert Christen

In the June 2021 DIGIGRAM, we made predictions for the consolidation of the entertainment industry in our article “Shapeshifting of Entertainment Ecosystems.” The trends we discussed have only continued as the three largest streaming companies, Netflix, Amazon, and Disney/Hulu, now control over 60% of viewers in the streaming market. Image: A new king of streaming emerged at the end of 2022: Prime Video by Amazon overtook Netflix. (Source) Now Roku, the company best known for making boxes to stream other companies’ content, just unveiled its own television offering at CES. They aren’t first-movers in this category, as Amazon introduced its own line of 4k TVs integrated with Alexa some years ago. However, Roku’s offering demonstrates the ongoing trend of switching from cable TV to streaming first.  In mid-2021, streaming accounted for only a fourth of America’s TV viewing time – most streaming was happening on laptops or phones. However, in July 2022, streaming services got more TV viewing time than cable networks for the first time. As cord-cutting continues, 87% of U.S. households had a subscription to a streaming service …

Shapeshifting of entertainment ecosystems:

Published by Gert Christen

Content is king! And in TV, the trend clearly shows us moving away from watching traditional channels paid via cable TV and moving towards subscription-based streaming services. Streaming benefitted from COVID with record growth: However, as the competitive battle heats up among the providers, winning new subscribers and preventing existing ones from leaving is becoming harder. As a consequence, providers started looking for more ammunition: attractive content to keep their viewers within their own walled garden longer and to attract new subscribers. A reshuffling of the assets in this industry has begun, and we have a front-row seat to a textbook case of a formerly new industry entering a more mature phase. WarnerMedia TV and Discovery merged to create a new premium mouthful, “pure-play direct-to-consumer entertainment company.” WarnerMedia was previously owned by AT&T, the U.S. telecom provider who, with this move, turned their entertainment assets into an independent business. This spinoff was a glycemic index-busting sweet deal for AT&T, as it received up to $43 billion dollars, which it can now pour into the 5G …