Welcome to the latest installment of Dan Rayburn's Streaming Insights & Intelligence, a weekly insights column on StreamTV Insider where the industry analyst puts facts and figures to the news you need to know about. Join the discussion on LinkedIn and check back each week as he recaps key industry happenings.
For the week of December 4, 2024, Rayburn is tracking Brightcove, Vizio, TelevisaUnivision, Epic Games and more.
- In regulatory filings (two 8-Ks and one 10-Q), more details have emerged in Bending Spoons plans to acquire Brightcove, including some terms for employees who stay on with the new company, the number of aggregate shares of company common stock tied to RSU awards, the exact number of Brightcove employees, a disclosure of a "material weakness in internal control over financial reporting,” and other company details. More details here.
- Walmart has completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of Vizio. With Vizio being the only company to break out revenue and ARPU for its FAST service, WatchFree+, the industry may have just lost the single data point available to the market. Hopefully, Walmart will continue to provide the same data. Walmart says that, for the foreseeable future, Vizio will continue to operate separately.
- Epic Games said that 14 million concurrent players partied up for "Remix: The Finale," and more than 3 million people streamed it online, calling it a "new Fortnite record for an in-game concert.”
One ISP in the US told me the concert and other associated downloads helped them hit another new all-time peak traffic mark, with their internet traffic (peering, CDN/caching, Transit) up approximately 43% over the average of all of the peaks in the rest of the month. There isn’t much growth in the volume of streaming bits YoY, but gaming downloads are a different story, and we are still seeing some massive YoY growth within ISPs for downloads.
- Amagi announced the acquisition of Argoid AI, which specializes in recommendation engines and programming automation for OTT platforms. The acquisition will allow Amagi to deepen its AI-powered content programming, metadata enrichment, and recommendation engine services. It was a technology acquisition, not a revenue or customer acquisition.
- In a memo to staff on Monday, TelevisaUnivision's CEO announced plans to restructure the organization, including layoffs, but didn't disclose the exact number of jobs to be impacted. Sources are reporting the number to be 120, but the company has not confirmed that. The COO of its ViX streaming service will now oversee all digital and streaming operations. The company's U.S. ad sales, local and national, will now be centralized under one individual. The company is also creating a new global organization dedicated to all content efforts.
- Google’s "Video Quality Report,” a website that helped users determine the quality of their ISP for streaming YouTube videos, including when an ISP was "YouTube HD verified,” has been shut down. As Google said in a blog post when it launched the tool, the company's goal was to convince users that it is rarely Google's fault when a video buffers. Some users in Reddit threads are discussing how Google has left functions in place for the quality report with a link that goes nowhere and does nothing. Multiple links on Google’s support pages return 404 errors.
Google didn’t say why they shut the tool down, but about a year ago, I posted that the tool was wrongly listing third-party CDNs, including Akamai and Fastly, with the quality of videos being delivered from YouTube, even though neither CDN was delivering them. Google told me it was looking into the issue at the time, but I never heard back.
Dan Rayburn is an analyst in the streaming media industry, with regular TV appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Schwab Network amongst others. He is conference Chairman for the NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas each year, and his streamingmediablog.com website is one of the most widely read sites for broadcasters, content owners, OTT providers, Wall Street money managers, and industry executives. He also has a podcast at danrayburnpodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected]
Dan Rayburn’s Streaming Insights & Intelligence is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.