While national sampling of TV viewing reveals a somewhat unsurprising hegemony of YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video dominating streaming consumption, the audience reach picture gets a little more nuanced when local Nielsen data is crunched. 

Working on a research report sponsored by Spectrum Reach, Charter Communications' local advertising sales agency, research analyst Evan Shapiro came up with a surprising graphic his client is certainly pleased with ... and admittedly, this client boast is objectively interesting.

You can see the whole report here. 

Shapiro crunched Nielsen data, and combined usage for Charter's Spectrum TV app with TV consumption for affiliate streaming apps including Pluto TV, which pay Spectrum Reach to sell their local ad time.

Collectively, Charter's local TV sales efforts cover 18.4% of all streaming occurring in its top 22 local markets measured by Nielsen, second only to YouTube. (Spectrum Reach operates in 91 markets nationally.)

"In their local markets, Spectrum Reach works with affiliate partners whose advertising inventory they represent in market. In an enormously fragmented CTV ecosystem of concentric walled gardens, this allows advertisers to execute a wholistic, interoperable campaign using the vMVPD’s local market expertise and national reach, without having to deal with a dozen or more partners," Shapiro writes in the sponsored report, titled Time Well Spent.

You may not know this, but I create maps of the Media Universe. I started charting the media ecosystem just three years ago this August. I suspect people think it’s been longer. It does feel that way, to be honest. Maybe that’s because I’ve updated my map more than 55 times over the last three years. 

It’s the first map ever with Apple valued at more than $3 trillion and NVIDIA over the $1 trillion market cap (now worth more than Meta). 

I am biased. And this is my favorite version yet. It’s also the last map I’ll create before totally redesigning it over the summer.  (Click on the multi-directional arrow icon in the top right corner of the graphic to expand it to full screen.)

This fall, I’ll be speaking at the Royal Television Society, IBC, Medientage Munich, MIPCOM, THIS Conference and NAB. With all these events, and so many smart people watching, I am feeling extra pressure to change things up — kind of the same way the media industry is feeling about itself these days. 

After charting this course for three years, this summer we’re trying to look at this map, and the ecosystem it represents, differently. The goal is, as always, increased perspective based on the data — to offer you a view of this arena from a new angle. 

If you want to see specifically how this map has changed since 2020 — starting with the first one — high res versions of maps from the last three years, including this latest one, are available at this link. 

If you want to know what the new view looks like, stay tuned this fall.

YouTube did not present at this year’s NewFronts. Rather, their annual ad sales presentation was during the television upfronts. 

Why?

YouTube is now the most watched platform on Television. More than Netflix. More than Fox News Channel. More than ESPN. More than any streamer, broadcaster or cable channel. That’s according to Nielsen (which we should always swallow with many grains of salt) and every other form of available TV measurement.

Most of what TV execs say at these events is spin-covered-baloney. Read the quotes from every other Upfront this year for examples. In this case, however, Mohan spoke the truth. 

On the big CTV screen, YouTube is now a daily habit for a huge and growing swath of the television audience, young and old. And this year, that swath is about to get even bigger. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell featured prominently in YouTube’s upfront. He shared the stage with one of the world’s biggest stars, Mr. Beast (ask your kids), talking about their collaboration for exclusive NFL content. 

That sentence should strike fear into the hearts of everyone else who sells TV ads.

It’s not just that YouTube sells more video advertising than anyone else on earth. It’s not just that YouTube now has more viewers, across every demographic, on the same exact screen as “traditional TV.” It’s not just that YouTube now has TV’s most popular programming, football. 

The larger threat to all the other TV and streaming platforms: YouTube is actually better at selling today’s TV advertising than everyone else. Way, way better.

The majority of advertisers who buy video ads, only buy social video. That’s a whole class of advertisers that the traditional and new streaming players can’t get to. As social video audiences stampede to CTV, YouTube’s platform is so much easier for marketers to buy, better at targeting, better at measuring outcomes, and delivers exponentially more daily reach than everyone else in the space.

On top of all those advantages, YouTube’s parent, Google, offers a full suite of services to augment reach, frequency and measurement — a set of ad tools unparalleled in human history, let alone TV ad sales.

Alphabet’s cloud offers a data clean room, Ads Data Hub, that allows partners to mix their customer data with billions of other data points to better target their media and measure the effectiveness of each campaign against ROAS (return on ad spend) across all their platforms. 

While everyone else in TV talks about programmatic (a technology built for web display ads), YouTube is bringing TV advertising into this century, decade, and year - across 2.5 billion monthly active users on all platforms, and 150 unique monthly viewers on CTVs. 

The YouTube threat isn’t limited just to OG TV folks. Netflix’s major upfront announcement was that they now have 5 million monthly average users on their ad platform. And while Roku boasted about 71 million active monthly accounts, they did not mention that a huge share of those users spends an enormous amount of time using Roku … to watch YouTube.

So, my biggest takeaway from this year’s very strange upfronts and NewFronts was not about the writers’ strike, or FAST or HBO morphing into Max. For me, the headline going into the next year of TV ad sales was crystal friggin’ clear: While nearly everyone else in television is still playing last decade’s TV checkers, YouTube has them all in check.

Evan Shapiro has hardly been laying low since NBCUniversal pulled the plug on his Seeso over-the-top comedy service. Shapiro, former digital executive vice president at NBCU, is behind streaming series Bartlett, which debuts on Vimeo on Demand and Amazon Prime Jan. 30.

Inspired by the life of ad executive Martin Edwards, the series is about a highly dysfunctional agency and an executive there looking to quit the biz and start a music career.

Shapiro said it targets those who may be going through a “quarter- or midlife crisis.”

“It’s about finding out what is really important to you, and concentrating on that,” he said.

Episodes of Bartlett can be acquired for 99 cents on Vimeo or Amazon, and it’s $4.99 for all six in the season.

Chrissy Mazzeo and Anthony Veneziale are in the Bartlett cast, and Lin-Manuel Miranda even turns up. “It’s a story a lot of people can relate to,” said Mazzeo, also a co-creator. “You come to a point in your life where you look back and realize you went down the road you didn’t intend to go down.”

Shapiro, the former president of IFC/SundanceTV, has come to terms with the demise of Seeso: “Are we thrilled it ended the way it did? Absolutely not. Are we thrilled by the work we did? Yes.”

He likened Bartlett to the offspring of Thirtysomething and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and said it’s a bit of counterprogramming in the peak TV era. “Everything is dark and post-apocalyptic,” he said. “This is not that.”

Back to the dark show theme, there’s a dramatic shift coming up for SEAL Team on CBS. In the Jan. 31 episode, fittingly titled “Getaway Day,” David Boreanaz’s Jason and the rest of his team face what he calls “a big hurry-up situation.” When another SEAL team is ambushed in Afghanistan, Jason’s crew is ordered to get their butts to Jalalabad ASAP.

The episode, No. 13 of the season, is an intriguing look at how deployments are dealt with, not only by military personnel, but by the families they leave behind. Boreanaz said he and the other producers were keen to push the SEAL Team players into the great unknown. “We wanted this to happen so it’s not a Mission of the Week show,” he said. “It’s a new world for these guys.”

The SEAL team on SEAL Team — including Max Thieriot’s Spenser, Jessica Paré’s Mandy and Neil Brown Jr.’s Ray — is a tight bunch. Boreanaz said their deployment makes them even tighter.

“It really brings the characters together,” he said. “Their bond is even more prevalent in episode 13.”

NBCUniversal has tapped former Pivot President Evan Shapiro as its new executive vice president of digital enterprises.

In the newly created position, Shapiro will focus on company-wide strategic development of digital opportunities to reach emerging audiences, said NBCUniversal. Shapiro, who will report to NBCU executive vice president Cesar Conde, will begin his new position Dec. 8.

Shapiro most recently was president of millennial-targeted network Pivot, where he oversaw its 2013 launch and was responsible for original programming and all aspects of the network’s business affairs. Prior to Pivot, Shapiro served as President of IFC TV and Sundance Channel.

“Evan brings a robust understanding of emerging media trends and extensive experience programming for the millennial audience to NBCUniversal,” said Conde in a statement.  “He’s a seasoned strategic thinker with a strong track record of programming, production and digital marketing successes. His leadership will be a key asset as we continue to navigate the evolving marketplace.”