Quibi aims to offer big stories in quick bites exclusively for mobile users. It is set to launch on 6 April for $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without. At CES in Las Vegas, co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman took to the stage to explain their thinking. The big idea is apparently to make short dual-format episodes of under 10 minutes each that work in both portrait and landscape orientation on a phone.
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The informitv Multiscreen Index of 100 leading subscription television service providers shows a net loss of 2.09 million worldwide in the third quarter of 2019. 1.88 million were in the Americas, while the Europe, Middle East and Africa region showed a loss of 0.66 million. Asia Pacific showed a small gain of 0.46 million. The top 10 service providers in the United States lost 1.67 million television subscribers between them in the third quarter of 2019, with a cumulative loss of 5.53 million in 12 months, although they still have 78.73 million between them.
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TiVo Stream 4K, announced at CES in Las Vegas, is a streaming product that combines live television and network video recording from the Sling TV app with other services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO and YouTube. The idea is to integrate the viewing experience for people who do not want to switch between different apps to find something to watch. It marks a new strategy for TiVo, which was a pioneer of digital video recording, was acquired by Rovi and is in the process of merging with Xperi.
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Branded as NEXTGEN TV, ATSC 3.0 compatible receivers will be on show at CES in Las Vegas. That follows news that the International Telecommunications Union has adopted ATSC 3.0 as a recommended digital broadcast standard, alongside DVB-T2, developed in Europe, and DTMB-A, which was developed in China. The good thing about standards is that there is plenty of choice. The ITU is effectively leaving it up to the relevant administrations to select which standard to use.
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Christmas is traditionally a time of large television audiences, although they have been getting smaller in recent years. In a notable exception, the BBC gained its biggest Christmas Day audience for a decade, thanks to those watching later online. The television coverage of the fireworks in the first few minutes of 2020 also attracted one of the largest audiences over the festive holiday period in the United Kingdom. That tells us a lot about the medium of television, despite the challenges of reproducing such an experience.
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At the start of 2010, informitv offered 20 practical predictions for the next 10 years in television, anticipating that new networks would subvert and transcend the broadcast model. Some readers suggested these forecasts were not ambitious enough. Others suggested they would not all be achieved within a decade. Looking back after ten years, with 20/20 hindsight, how did we do?
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