Free and subscription video-on-demand services sparked a major shift toward over-the-top viewing. Now, the emergence of virtual pay TV providers is stoking another big OTT movement — this time toward linear, live TV services.

This latest trend is shepherded by a new breed of virtual multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) services such as Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and will now expand with last week’s launch of DirecTV Now, as well as online pay TV offerings coming from Hulu and YouTube.

Though use of OTT services is on the rise, even during highly viewed “tentpole” events, it remains relatively small compared to traditional pay TV audiences. Significant scale is coming, though. Meeting the increased demand for live TV feeds via the Internet presents a broad mix of critical technology and business-related challenges that will need to be addressed as Internet- fed audiences continue to expand in the years to come.

STARTED WITH VOD

For OTT video, on-demand was the first entrée, in part because it was easier to engineer. VOD requires materially fewer moving parts and less complicated workflows, John Bishop, chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies’ media business unit, said.

Next came one-off live events, which were more difficult to handle, though Akamai’s platform now handles tens of thousands of them — perhaps 100,000 — per day.

“But what is new right now is linear [networks],” Bishop said. “They are similar to live events from a functionality standpoint, but when you look at it from a redundancy, planning and maintenance perspective, they are very different.”

Some live events, including NBCUniversal’s expansive online coverage of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janiero earlier this year, are especially intensive. They also provide windows of inactivity that allow for changes and tweaks, though.

“We don’t have that luxury with linear,” Bishop said. “It’s always running.”

While picture quality, consistency and the quality of the experience are all key “tenets” of live streaming, “scale is always the hard one,” he said.

Online video publishers are seeing a greater push into the live arena. “Most every new customer has a requirement for some kind of live [component],” Arik Gaisler, Kaltura senior director of product management, infrastructure, said.

Even partners that don’t have a live stream are looking to add a live-like experience using preprogrammed VOD content that can be spliced into a linear-style stream, Gaisler said.

Progress is being made. It wasn’t long ago that any streaming number with the word “million” tied to it was cause for major concern, Bishop recalled. “We would’ve all gotten the cold shakes — this was an all-hands-on-deck, student-body-left movement,” he said.

These days, preparing for 5 million concurrent streams doesn’t cause a lot of lost sleep.

“North of 10 million gets me very worried,” Bishop said. “And what scares me online is 125 million coming in possibly for an event like the Super Bowl. We’re not there yet.”

Fortunately, neither is the online viewership of pro football’s marquee matchup. Availability of live Super Bowl streams are now the norm, but they tend to be a complementary option to the traditional TV feed.

CBS’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 in February drew 3.96 million unique viewers, far behind the 111.9 million viewers who tuned into the CBS telecast.

SCALING UP

“We still have a long way to get to the point where we can handle broadcast-level scale,” Devin Poolman, senior vice president of digital platforms at Fox Sports, said. “We’re seeing tremendous growth curves … but we need to start building for [broadcast-level scale] now — not just for ourselves, but as an industry.”

During Game 7 of Major League Baseball’s World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians on Nov. 2 — a tight contest that saw the Cubs prevail by a score of 8-7 — more than 1 million consumers viewed some 3.5 million-plus streams via Fox Sports Go, the programmer’s TV everywhere service. Those were OTT records for Fox Sports, yet relatively small figures placed against the 40 million viewers who tuned in via traditional TV for the series clincher.

“Relative to our past records, over the last six months we have quadrupled our bests in terms of concurrent audience,” Poolman said.

Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT TV service, doesn’t break out subscriber numbers, but says its totals have been on the rise since its debut in February 2015.

“We have seen continued growth and we’re pleased with how the year has progressed,” Ben Weinberger, chief product officer at Sling TV, said, noting that live events, led by sports, tend to drive traffic to the OTT TV service.

The recent presidential election, and the debates that surrounded it, also created spikes in usage. And, on occasion, sports and the election collided.

A case in point was on Sept. 26, when the first Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate outstreamed the New Orleans Saints-Atlanta Falcons Monday Night Football game. On Sling TV, the debate at its peak generated 68% more viewers than the football game. Together, the game and the debate helped to shatter all of Sling TV’s previous viewership records.

Jason Thibeault, executive director of the Streaming Video Alliance, a cross-industry group that counts members such as Comcast, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Charter Communications and NeuLion, is also taking on the scalability challenge that live OTT will face as Internet-using audiences continue to grow.

“We don’t have the infrastructure available to deliver live video to 15 million people concurrently. That would break the Internet,” Thibeault said. “There’s a whole value chain when it comes to delivering live video. It has challenges in front of it in order to make it broadcast quality.”

INFRASTRUCTURE WORRIES

Among the solutions getting a close look are multicast streaming, which is more efficient than unicast streaming because it allows a subset of viewers to share live streams; and LTE-B, also referred to as evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS).

SVA, meanwhile, is focusing on the live-streaming challenge in part through a new Open Caching working group that’s focused on putting caches deep into the network, as close to the user as possible. In addition to helping with concurrent streaming, the project will also target latency so that OTT viewers receive a feed more closely synched to the traditional TV broadcast, rather than one that lags 30 seconds behind it.

SVA is creating the functional requirements and technical specifications to build a new open caching infrastructure for companies in the OTT ecosystem. Next year, several SVA member companies are expected to collaborate on a proof-of-concept/demonstration of the open-caching idea.

“Hopefully that will solve some of the latency issues and improve the end-user experience for content delivery for both VOD and for live,” Thibeault said. “All of these players recognize that this is what consumers want and this is the next generation of the television experience.”

Bishop agreed. “Being close to the edge matters more and more now,” he said. “Consumers are expecting lower latency and high data rates. All of that needs to be served as close to the end user as possible.”

Bishop and Akamai are also strong advocates of shifting OTT video to the User Datagram Protocol, an alternative system known for delivering lower latencies and being less “chatty” than Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

Bishop sees TCP and UDP as coexisting for a long time to come, but expects adoption of UDP to “start small and then quickly ramp up” over the next 36 months.

Much of that work will need to happen on the client side of the streaming equation — laptop browsers, tablets, smartphones and connected-TV platforms. Google Chrome already has native support for UDP, but other devices, such as the iPhone, will need a software development kit to receive UDP content, Bishop explained. Akamai is making an SDK available for free that can pull UDP-based content off its platform, he said.

Dan Rayburn, executive vice president of StreamingMedia. com and a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, has a different view about the big issues being confronted by live OTT. Some providers are playing it too close to the edge to keep costs in check, he said, which in turn exposes them to unnecessary outages.

Others, like Twitch, the Amazon-owned company behind the popular live-streaming video game service of the same name, rarely run into buffering and capacity issues. Rayburn calls MLB Advanced Media the “gold standard” for live OTT streaming, and a big reason why PlayStation Vue and online video services from the WWE and the National Hockey League use that platform.

“They understand the importance of live. They understand that you get one chance to do it right,” Rayburn said, noting that MLBAM recognizes that underspending on streaming infrastructure and backend workflow systems can harm its reputations and brands.

“Some of the biggest challenges [with live streaming] aren’t technical; they’re business-related,” Rayburn said, pointing out that the vast majority of OTT TV services aren’t adding subscribers rapidly enough to make scale much of an issue — yet.

Some of the newer OTT TV players won’t be able to survive without being subsidized by a well-funded parent, Rayburn added.

Sling TV “wouldn’t be in business if they weren’t owned by Dish,” he said. “They wouldn’t survive [because] their subscriber count is too low.”

And as for DirecTV Now, the new OTT TV service from AT&T? “DirecTV Now couldn’t roll out on its own, because the model doesn’t make sense,” Rayburn said, noting that OTT providers have to pay more in capacity as more and more customers stream content from them.

To its credit, AT&T is nailing up enough capacity to support 1 million simultaneous DirecTV Now users a year from now, he said, citing his sources in the online video industry.

“AT&T is being realistic, internally, in saying, we don’t think we’re going to get that many subs in the first year,” Rayburn said.

AT&T has not made any subscriber predictions for DirecTV Now, other than to say it will be targeted to the 20 million U.S. homes currently outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem.

The company appears confident that it will be able to deliver a high-quality, stable experience for a service that will be streaming more than 100 live TV feeds.

AT&T: WE’RE CONFIDENT

“We do scale at AT&T,” John Stankey, CEO of AT&T Entertainment Group, stressed at the company’s DirecTV Now press event on Nov. 28 in New York. “When you bring a product in, it needs to be scaled.”

Stankey said the new video platform, which DirecTV Now is riding on, will serve as “the foundation for how we’re going to do things in the future.”

Rayburn said it’s important to remember that OTT and broadcast TV are different animals. At a base level, the Internet is open and public, made up of myriad networks and systems. Broadcast television is a closed, standardized and private system that is largely based on fixed costs. “From a cost and infrastructure standpoint, it’s night and day,” he said.

“People always connect capacity with streaming,” Rayburn said, but problems that occur aren’t always with the video itself. Often the problem is an issue with the player, the authentication system or a bad API. “There’s all kinds of steps in the process that have to work perfectly and tie into one another. If any of those don’t work or get hung up, you can’t even get to the video.”

Fox Sports’s Poolman agreed: “Different systems have to work well together. Invariably, there are different failure points or choke points. We spend a lot of our time on how to mitigate that and also have the redundancy and more efficient paths to get to the end user.”

OTT TV providers such as Sling TV need to have a good sense of the average audience to prepare for, but remain agile enough to add streaming and sign-on capacity if, for example, a big breaking news event occurs.

“We have to prepare for normal traffic and we need to prepare for spikes in that traffic because of unexpected events, and we need to prepare for new people coming into the service at the same time,” Weinberger said. “A lot of that has to do with the entire ecosystem that we put in place. There’s only so many things that we can control.”

SIDEBAR: fuboTV Forges a Build-vs.-Buy Path

fuboTV, the self-proclaimed “sports-first” virtual MVPD that launched in January 2015, faced a big challenge in July when FC Barcelona squared off against Real Madrid — a match between popular and rival La Liga soccer clubs that’s known as “El Clasico” whenever it occurs.

fuboTV, which delivered the game via its distribution deal with beIN Sports, ran into some technology snafus: Some subscribers had trouble signing on and others reported different streaming-related issues.

The troubles were temporary, but they happened during a major sporting event and fuboTV made the decision to offer s $15 credit (applied in three monthly $5 increments) to affected subscribers.

It turned into a valuable lesson for the OTT service, which decided it made sense to rebuild its platform in-house rather than relying on one that was largely based on outsourced products.

“When I took this job, I expected very heavily to buy systems from other vendors and put them together,” said Jason Solinsky, a former Google engineer named chief technology officer of fuboTV in August.

“In fact, we’ve gone the opposite direction,” he said, noting that an enormous amount of the software that powers the service’s platform, including its account management and package management systems and code, have been rewritten and developed internally.

“That’s the only way to achieve reliability that’s on par with a cable system,” he said.

fuboTV is about halfway through with replacing its infrastructure, Solinsky said, and expects to complete the job by the end of 2017 if not earlier.

The service now better understands what’s required to develop and scale an OTT TV service and “where the pain parts are,” cofounder and CEO David Gandler said.

Live-streaming, particularly with sports, “requires someone that has access to the full chain of problems that can take place,” he said.

And fuboTV’s internal handiwork is being parlayed into a new, complementary line of business as a streaming platform provider for other services.

“I think we’re a cross-breed between a Sling-type service and BAMTech,” Gandler said, the latter a reference to the tech services and video streaming operation launched by Major League Baseball’s MLB Advanced Media, which recently nabbed a major investment from The Walt Disney Co. “We’ll be focused on building out a fully automated end-to-end solution.”

SIDEBAR: OTT by the Numbers

A recent sampling shows live sports streaming is driving sizable audiences to the OTT world, but those numbers are still dwarfed by traditional TV viewing audiences.

15.2 million: The number of unique viewers who tuned into Yahoo’s global live stream of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars-Buffalo Bills game on Oct. 25, 2015. Yahoo streamed that game to most regions of the world, but the game was also available on regular TV (via CBS) in the local Buffalo, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla., markets. The game generated 33.6 million video streams, and more than 460 million total minutes of video consumed, with 33% of the audience — about 5 million viewers — originating outside the U.S.

3.96 million: The number of unique viewers who accessed CBS’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers across desktops, connected TV platforms, tablets and smartphones. CBS said viewers consumed more than 402 million total minutes of coverage, and watched for more than 101 minutes each on average. By comparison, the CBS Super Bowl telecast averaged 111.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

2.1 million: The number of unique viewers worldwide who watched Twitter’s first Thursday Night Football live stream on Sept. 15 between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills. The feed’s average audience was just 243,000, and each viewer watched an average of 22 minutes of the matchup via Twitter. By comparison, 5.4 million television viewers tuned in to watch the game on CBS or NFL Network.

911,000: The number of Sling TV subscribers at the end of third-quarter 2016, according to the latest estimate from MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett. Dish Network no longer breaks out how many of its 13.64 million pay TV subs take the OTT TV offering.

180-plus: The number of live TV feeds offered via Comcast’s TV everywhere app. The MSO said nearly 50% of its subscribers are using its TVE platforms, up from 30% of subscribers last year, and that customers are viewing 10 hours a month of TVE content on average.

SIDEBAR: Struggling to Keep Popular Streams Stable

While OTT TV service stability has been steadily improving, the struggles have tended to pop up during premieres of popular shows or big sporting events.

Among some examples, Sling TV buckled under the strain last August during the AMC premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, and last year during the TBS telecast of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s Final Four round due to a rush of signups and the resulting spike in streaming demand. In June, HBO Now, the premium programmer’s standalone OTT TV service suffered a temporary outage when streamers swamped the system to watch the a new episode from season six of hit series Game of Thrones.

Notably, that hiccup occurred after former HBO chief technology officer, Otto Berkes, resigned in late 2014 after the programmer opted to shift gears and work with a third-party streaming infrastructure partner, MLB Advanced Media, after its TV Everywhere service, HBO Go, melted down multiple times during the premieres of GoT episodes and other series. HBO confirmed last week that it has developed its own technology stack for HBO Go and works with BAMTech for HBO Now.

Last week’s DirecTV Now launch got off to a bit of a rocky start. While the speed and consistency of the service seemed to vary device to device soon after DirecTV Now’s debut, the service’s first evening saw subscribers head to Twitter to lodge complaints about login troubles, browser compatibility problems, long waits for customer service representatives and error codes, including false messages that customers had reached their streaming limit. (DirecTV Now allows up to two concurrent streams per account.)

Three new studies dramatically emphasize the rapid adoption of "non-traditional" viewing and the decline of the "TV-centric living room."  At the same time the research underscores how second-screen usage, especially during special events such as the Super Bowl, are attracting more viewers than the naysayers want to believe. 

In the U.K., for example, only 50% of adults online "consider the TV set as the focal point of their living rooms," and 70% of adults routinely used a connected device while watching TV, the Internet Advertising Bureau UK found in a recent study. Among British viewers aged 16 to 34, 87% are using a second screen while in front of a TV set.

Although the data represent the current British experience, the numbers are comparable to North American usage. The situation should also spur programmers and operators to develop multiscreen approaches to content and advertising.  

“Second screening is ingrained to such a degree that all screens are now equal; there’s no hierarchy, only fragmentation of attention – actually switch-screening is a much more accurate term,” said Tim Elkington, the IAB-UK’s chief strategy officer.

“Connected devices have changed the living room and will continue to do so, and advertisers must plan for the living room of tomorrow,” Elkington added. “This requires a rethink about how to command attention in the living room because the opportunity to do so is far more limited, fragmented and competitive than ever before.”

The IAB UK analysis also tracked  viewers' various activities during commercial breaks. They most frequently turn to other online activities via their connected devices (35%). followed by talking to someone in the room (15%), leaving the room (13%) and changing the channel (8%).

To emphasize the U.Kk study, two reports on U.S. Super Bowl viewing attested to the non-traditional viewing patterns -- despite some problems with the streaming video delivery of the big game.

Think With Google,an advertising research unit within the media giant, monitored the ways in which U.S. TV viewers interacted with Super Bowl 50 and found that 82% of ad-related searches conducted during the game telecast were done on mobile phones, compared with 7% on tablets and 11% on desktop computers.  

Separately, Localytics tracked the average number of apps launched during the Super Bowl by mobile users. It found that app usage ran high throughout the game, with multitasking viewers using an average of 3.2 social networks and 1.9 sports apps.

Significantly, the distraction-seeking second-screen users also launched 2.4 music apps and 2.2 entertainment apps while they were tuned in to the Super Bowl, according to Localytics' research.  It found that the great length of "time in app" (measured by average app usage within each hour period) occurred at just before the actual start of the game. The peak average time in app was 8.7 minutes with a spike in usage during Lady Gaga's performance of the National Anthem.

The Localytics data showed that after 7 p.m. ET, fans began to spend less time in apps, "likely to focus on the fast-moving game."

Although these studies, from both sides of the Atlantic, are merely the latest entrants in the ongoing war of dueling data about multiscreen engagement and platform preferences, they add new evidence about the shifting preferences and screen savvy of a growing audience sector.

Big Data. This there anything it can't do? 

By now, we’ve pretty much had our fill of which ads from Super Bowl 50 received the most attention during the big game, but  Canvs has mined social networking data to reveal how viewers felt about those super-expensive spots.

Canvs, the New York-based startup that uses Twitter data captured by Nielsen (the game generated nearly 17 million tweets and nearly 4.5 million “emotional reactions”), said it has analyzed that info around those Super Bowl spots, enabling it to interpret the emotional response of the TV viewing audience.

Through an analysis that applied 56 different emotions to its post-Super Bowl study, Canvs found that Mountain Dew’s strangePuppyMonkeyBaby ad came away with the highest rate of “crazy” reactions (38.5%), edging out Beyonce’s “Formation World Tour” (28.6%).

The ad that drew the most reactions across all emotions was Doritos’s “Ultrasound” spot (38,823 reactions out of 85,736 tweets – 34% of them loved the spot, and 48% found it to be funny.). Doritos’s spot also came away with the most “funny” reactions (18,489), soundly beating out T-Mobile’s “You Got Carriered” ad (9,553 “funny” reactions).

However, T-Mobile’s ad got the most “love,” generating 17,450 such reactions, ahead of Doritos (13,056 “love” reactions), Esurance (11,110), Heinz’s “Weiner Stampede” (7,344) and the NFL’s “Super Babies Choir” (7,083).

But does any of data actually mean anything? Canvs believes that it does, because it shines some emotional light that can’t be culled from more traditional viewing metrics. As company  CEO Jared Feldman explained to me earlier, an audience that is emotionally charged is more likely to remember or be more receptive to a commercial.

And advertising is just one part of it. Canvs, a bit more flush following a $5.6 million “A” round, believes its analysis provides valuable insight into how the audience feels about TV shows, and provides  valuable feedback for producers and  writers as they maintain and tweak story lines.

Perhaps the same could be said for marketers, which no doubt are already thinking about what kind of advertising magic they can conjure up for next year’s big game.

Super Bowl 50 was a big day for Von Miller, Peyton Manning and the rest of the Denver Broncos, but it was also a big day with respect to the amount of data that fans consumed at the game’s venue – Levi’s Stadium.

Comcast, citing networking partners and industry experts, said that more than 10 terabytes of data (up and down) traversed the stadium’s Aruba Networks-powered WiFi network that day as Super Bowl attendees tweeted, streamed video and shared photos to their heart’s delight. (RELATED: CBS set streaming marks for Super Bowl with nearly 4 million unique viewers.)

“That’s a staggering amount of data, equal to streaming 6,000+ hours of HD video (more than 8 months worth) or almost 1.2 Million 2-megabyte images,” John Guillaume, vice president, product management at Comcast Business noted in this blog post. “A lot of that volume was generated by the free Super Bowl 50 Stadium app – which allows fans to order food, watch the Super Bowl commercials and replays, and check lines.”

Comcast is tooting its horn about that because it played a key role behind the network scenes. In 2014, it announced a ten-year deal partnership with the San Francisco 49ers and its new home that spans video and voice services, dual 10 Gbps connections, and free WiFi for the fans.

Broken down further fans used 9.3 TB of data during the game while logged on the “SB50FREE” network at the venue, while media (data gluttons that they are) gobbled up 453 gigabytes on their dedicated network. The cumulative data figures for the game were compiled from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. PT.

Comcast noted that the amount of data transferred during Super Bowl 50 outdid the previous high last year -- 6.2 TB at the University of Phoenix for Super Bowl XLIX.

Among other stats, the venue also set a Super Bowl record by registering 27,316 unique WiFi users and a peak of 20,300 concurrent users (at 5:55pm PT), toping last year’s respective 25,936 and 17,322.

WiFi usage during Super Bowl 50 peaked at 3.67 Gbps (at 3:25pm PT), passing the previous venue record of 3.55 Gbps for the NHL Stadium Series between San Jose and Los Angeles on Feb. 21, 2015.

Per Comcast, the 10 “moments” that generated the most traffic at the stadium during the game included:

-The introduction of the 50 Super Bowl MVPs

-Lady Gaga singing the National Anthem and the Blue Angels flyover

-The opening kickoff

-The first coach’s challenge

-Von Miller’s forced fumble and the first touchdown of the game by Malik Jackson

-The halftime show with Coldplay, Beyonce and Bruno Mars

-Von Miller’s second forced fumble and C.J. Anderson’s game-sealing touchdown

-Peyton Manning exiting the field and Gary Kubiak’s Gatorade shower

-The Lombardi Trophy presentation

-Using apps to get back home and to hotels

Despite some technical glitches that impacted some a batch of viewers during the early phases Super Bowl 50 on Sunday, CBS said its live stream of the big game drew 3.96 million unique viewers across laptops, desktops, tablets, connected TV devices and mobile phones.

CBS added that viewers consumed more than 402 million total minutes of coverage, and watched for more than 101 minutes each on average.

Among other stats, viewers consumed more than 315 million minutes of coverage during the game window, with an average minute audience of 1.4 million.

By comparison, the CBS Super Bowl telecast averaged 111.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s fast nationals, and peaked at 115.5 million between 8:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET.

CBS’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 was offered at CBSSports.com (for PCs and tablets), the CBS Sports app for iPad, Android and Windows 10 tablets, the CBS Sports app Amazon Fire TV devices,  Android TV, Apple TV, Roku players and Roku TVs, the Google Chromecast adapter, and Xbox One. Verizon also offered it on smartphones via the NFL Mobile app.

NBC Sports Live Extra’s live stream of the New England Patriots’ 28-24 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in last year’s big game averaged 800,000 viewers per minute, 1.3 million concurrent users, and 2.5 million uniques. Yahoo’s live stream of last October’s regular season matchup between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Buffalo Bills drew 15.2 million unique viewers. Yahoo streamed that game to most regions of the world, but the game was also available on regular TV (via CBS) in the local Buffalo and Jacksonville markets.

Some Apple TV users trying to live-stream Super Bowl 50 reported issues during the early part of the game. The CBSSports Help Team Twitter handle acknowledged at the time that it ironing out streaming issues for the third-gen Apple TV platform.  

C.J. Anderson’s TD plunge late in Super Bowl 50 that extended the Denver Broncos’s lead over the Carolina Panthers was the “top moment” during the game, according to TiVo Research’s analysis of second-by-second data culled form 30,000 anonymous households.

On the ad front, the  Doritos – Sonogram spot was tops, according to that same data.

TiVo based its viewing interest findings by measuring the percentage of the TiVo audience watching in "play" speed.

“The most engaging ads are determined by looking for spots with the biggest increase in viewership relative to the viewership in the surrounding 15 minutes of programming, offering a true reflection of audience engagement,” the company noted.

Based on that data, here were the “top moments” from  Super Bowl 50:

1.10:04 p.m. ET, when Broncos running back C.J. Anderson plunged  into the end zone, giving the Broncos a 22-10 lead with three minutes remaining.

2.Super Bowl MVP Von Miller strips the ball from Cam Newton's hand with four minutes remaining in the 4th quarter, with the Panthers down by 6.

3.The replay showing Cam Newton backing away from the scramble for the lost football.

Here’s how the top ten commercials from the game stacked up when viewed through TiVo’s data lens:

1.Doritos – Ultrasound

2.Mountain Dew – PuppyMonkeyBaby

3.Quesalupa – Bigger Than Everything

4.Cascada – That Convertibles’ a Buick

5.Pepsi – The Joy of Dance

6.Marmot – Fall in Love with the Outside

7.Apartments.com – MovingOnUp

8.Bud Light – Raise One to Right Now

9.Skittles – The Portrait

10.Prius – Prius 4

Showtime used its first-ever Super Bowl ad to promote its standalone, over-the-top service that launched last July.

The ad, featuring “Unstoppable” by Grammy nominee Sia, touted the OTT offering and applied the spotlight on Showtime original series, including House of Lies, Homeland, The Affair, Shameless, Ray Donovan, Dexter, Penny Dreadful, Masters of Sex, and Billions.

The ad also played up that consumers can sign up for a free, 30-day trial of the service, which includes Showtime’s live East and West coast feeds, and is supported on several platforms, including Web browsers, Android TV devices, the Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast adapter, iOS and Android mobile devices, Roku players. It’s also available through distribution partners spanning Hulu, Sony PlayStation Vue, and Amazon Prime Video.

Here’s the ad:

Showtime corporate cousin CBS also ran an ad during Super Bowl 50 to promote its OTT subscription service, CBS All Access.

Comcast, meanwhile, ran a new ad showcasing its X1 platform in several local markets during the game.

Staffers at Denver-based The Cable Center are very much ready for Super Bowl 50 this Sunday, pitting their beloved (but underdog) Denver Broncos against the powerful Carolina Panthers in a matchup of younger (Carolina's Cam Newton) and older (Denver's Peyton Manning) top-gun quarterbacks.

Cable Center CEO (and head coach) Jana L. Henthorn, a member of the 2016 class of MCNWomen to Watch, led the celebration of "Bronco Friday" at the center, which is the nonprofit educational hub celebrating the cable industry.

Here's who's in the photo.

Back Row, L to R: Matt Hollingsworth, Brian Kenny, Nic van Dessel, Bethany Friday, Diane Christman, Jessica Weimer, Emily Gibson (hat tip to Emily for sending the photo).

Front Row, L to R: Luke Woodruff, Steve Luiting, Sarah Clausen, Jana L. Henthorn, Joyce Alden-Schuyler, Monsi Vazquez (Intern and 2015 TLC Say Yes to the Prom participant).

Super Bowl Sunday will have no shortage of promos and marketing tilts all aimed at grabbing our attention.

So, here’s one more you might want to know about, especially if your TV is getting a bit long in the tooth.

TV maker Hisense said it’s giving away some 50-inch 4K TVs to some lucky people who tweet the #RetireMyTV hashtag before midnight on Super Bowl Sunday. Per the fine print, Hisense will give away 50 H7GB1 Series TVs (retail value: $650), and potential winners will be notified via Twitter by midnight ET February 10.

And if you don’t have any rooting interest in the outcome of the game, perhaps you’ll want to pull for Peyton Manning to hang ‘em up soon after the big game. If Old Man Peyton retires within a week of Super Bowl 50, Hisense will “give away 50 more in his honor.”

Happy tweeting. And, go Broncos! 

Cox Communications and Nexstar Broadcasting Group ironed out their problems with time to spare before the kickoff of Super Bowl 50 this Sunday, reaching a retransmission consent deal that will return 13 TV stations in nine markets to the cable operator.

The Nexstar stations went dark to Cox subscribers at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 29.  Among the darkened broadcasters were CBS affiliates in Las Vegas (KLAS-TV) and Springfield, Mo.(KOLR), which will carry the Super Bowl broadcast this Sunday.

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Nexstar said in a statement that programming on all of the affected stations will resume as soon as possible.

Cox had earlier claimed that Nexstar was demanding a retrans fee that was three times its previous rate, a clam Nexstar said was false.  

“Nexstar’s top priority is providing exceptional programming and service to local viewers, hometown businesses, and public organizations in the local communities it serves across the United States,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “Nexstar is delighted that Cox subscribers in its markets will have restored access to leading network content from ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CW and MyNetworkTV as well as local news and other programming produced specifically for local communities.”

In a statement, Cox confirmed that a deal had been reached. “We appreciate our customers' patience and support as we sought to reach an agreement on behalf of our customers,” the cable operator said.

With Super Bowl 50 just around the corner, Facebook presented fresh data in tandem with Nielsen suggesting that activity on the social network is a “strong estimator” of TV tune-in during the first minute of NFL games.

“Just as the crowd inside a physical stadium is abuzz about the game ahead of kickoff, sports fans on Facebook are, too,” Dan Reed, head of global sports partnerships at Facebook, wrote in this post about the study. “Nielsen looked at the volume of Facebook activity in the 15 minutes prior to the start of the game, and found that Shares and Posts were a strong estimator of the first-minute TV audience. Shares and Posts were the two types of Facebook interactions with the strongest statistical relationship to TV viewership in the first minute, according to the study.”

Per the chart above, he said Nielsen found that an increase of one post within the 15 minute period before the kickoff correlated to about 250 additional viewers in the first minute, while an additional Share correlated to 1,000 viewers in the same time frame.

Among other findings, presented following the recent launch of a Facebook Sports Stadium (an area dedicated for social interaction during live sporting events), that association was greater following the first 25 minutes of an NFL broadcast on Sunday night. “In other words, Shares on Facebook correlated with tune-in even after kickoff,” he noted. 

With the Super Bowl 50 faceoff between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers just days away, football fans are gearing up for the big game. The most ardent ones will dole out thousands of dollars for a coveted seat at Levi’s Stadium. Most viewers, though, will tune in from their living rooms.

In today’s evolved content-consumption world, sports are one of the last vestiges of live content viewing. Apart from sporting events and the occasional awards show, today’s consumers dictate both consumption time and method. Whether recording programming on a cable box, watching on-demand or turning to a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu, appointment viewing programs are a relic of a bygone era. Sports, and by extension sports viewing, is unique, as it inspires a sense of community and cameraderie — whether in-person or via social media — and the conduit for this shared experience is watching in real-time, usually through traditional TV networks. However, as the ways viewers consume content continue to evolve, Super Bowl 60 in 2026 could see viewers tuning in in a variety of new ways.

The popularity of streaming services has ushered in the era of “cord cutters,” or viewers who don’t subscribe to a traditional cable package. While cord-cutting can be an enticing solution for many, especially millennials, sports content is often an element that keeps viewers tied to a cable subscription, as most streaming services don’t offer many options for sports content viewing. However, more and more consumers are demanding choices when it comes to sports viewing on the go.

To meet ever changing consumer demand, both traditional TV-networks and OTT providers have an opportunity to create or further their market dominance by innovating when it comes to personalized options and channel dissemination.

Introduce the skinny bundle: Today’s consumers not only want a personalized content-consumption experience, they’ve come to expect it. Skinny bundles offer more customized content packages that match viewing preferences. They aff ord cable operators the steady revenue and consumer relationship of a modern subscription, but packaged in a way that’s more attractive to consumers. Individual networks and streaming services have already begun to explore potential customizable bundles. For example, Sling TV has an entire sports tier that allows fans to follow their favorite teams for a fraction of the cost of a traditional cable package.

Enable cross-channel viewing: While many sports fans still want the big-screen HDTV experience in their living room, fans increasingly seek out methods to watch games on the go. Cable operators have an opportunity to weave multichannel viewing into traditional cable packages — for example, making tablet and mobile streaming standard as part of a consumer’s subscription offerings.

When it comes to the future of sports viewing, TV networks have the upper hand. They are the only ones, at least right now, willing and able to commit to multibillion-dollar TV contracts with sports leagues.

To avoid a fumble in fending off the threat from streaming and keep tomorrow’s sports fans engaged, cable operators must innovate with personalized offerings and multichannel viewing.

Brice Clinton is senior sales engineer at CSG International in Englewood, Colo.

Cox Communications, which had a relatively uneventful New Year on the retransmission consent front, stands to lose access to Nexstar Broadcasting Group stations in several key markets – including Las Vegas and Phoenix – if it can’t hammer out a deal with the broadcaster by Jan. 29.

Nexstar did not reveal which markets were affected, but a check of its station websites revealed that the stations in question were located in Las Vegas; Phoenix; Baton Rouge, La; Lafayette, La.; Roanoke, Va.; Panama City, Fla.; Ft. Smith/Fayetteville, Ark.; Joplin, Mo.; and Springfield, Mo. Those areas could go dark at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 29 unless a deal is reached. The stations include affiliates of the four major broadcast networks – NBC, CBS, Fox and ABC – which could mean that Cox customers in Las Vegas (which includes CBS affiliate KLAS-TV) and Springfield, Mo. (home of CBS affiliate KOLR); may miss the Feb., 7 broadcast of Super Bowl 50 if a deal is not reached.

Nexstar, the second largest station group in the country, said in a statement that it has been in negotiations with Cox for more than five months and continues to try to work out a deal.

The dispute comes just after Cox ended 2015 with most of its deals in hand. The Nexstar dispute comes at a time when the Federal Communications Commission is mulling whether to apply stricter oversight of retransmission consent agreements. It also comes as Nexstar attempts to purchase broadcaster Media General in a $4.7 billion deal that will bring it closer to the federal station ownership cap of 39%.

(UPDATE, JAN. 27: The $4.6 billion Nexstar-Media General deal is a go after Meredith Corp. withdrew its offer for Media General.)

In a statement, Cox said the dispute is over higher fees.

"Cox is committed to keeping our customers connected to what they care about most and ensuring they receive the most value from any of our services,” Cox said in the statement. “Nexstar Broadcasting Group is threatening to withhold its signals unless Cox agrees to pay three times the current rate. Cox has always been willing to continue providing significant compensation, but we feel three times the current rate is unreasonable. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this matter quickly.”

Nexstar countered that Cox and other cable and satellite distributors pay as much as $8 per subscriber per month for ESPN and $1.65 for TNT. The station group said broadcast stations and station groups generate about 35% of household viewing, but receive an average of about 12% of the total distribution revenue from cable, satellite and telecom providers.

Nexstar added that it has reached agreements with hundreds of cable and satellite subscribers and has not had a material service interruption since 2005.

“Nexstar will continue negotiating with Cox to try and reach a fair agreement to allow viewers to continue receiving its programming on an uninterrupted basis,” the company said in a statement.

While there is still a week to go before the deadline and deals like this usually get decided in the final minutes, Nexstar added it will continue to apply the heat to the cable company if a deal isn’t reached by Jan. 29.

“Nexstar remains hopeful that a resolution can be reached before the Jan. 29 deadline, but should Cox fail to come to terms with Nexstar, Nexstar intends to actively educate consumers in affected markets on how they can continue to receive their favorite network programming, in-depth local news, other content and programming relevant to their communities, and critical updates in times of emergencies,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

For the third year in a row, U.S. audiences will have a choice of channels on which to watch the National Football League’s title game — they’ll just need to know how to speak Spanish.

Through a sublicensing deal struck with rights-holder CBS, ESPN Deportes will simulcast Super Bowl 50 in Spanish on Feb. 7. The Spanish-language channel has simulcast English-language sibling ESPN’s NFL games, including Monday Night Football, since 2006.  

The deal, which came together in late December, means the biggest event in U.S. television will have a Spanish-language home for the third consecutive season. NBC simulcast its coverage in 2015 with co-owned network NBCUniverso; Fox did the same in 2014 with its Fox Deportes network.

CBS, which doesn’t own a Spanish-language TV network, worked with the NFL to reach terms with ESPN Deportes.

“We’re excited to partner with CBS and ESPN Deportes,” NFL executive vice president of media Brian Rolapp said. “We are committed to delivering our games in customized ways to serve our growing Hispanic fan base, and look forward to connecting with our fans on Super Bowl Sunday on [both of these networks].”

ESPN Deportes already airs postseason games, having televised the Jan. 9 AFC Wild Card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans, simulcast in English by The Walt Disney Co. corporate siblings ESPN and ABC. It will also pair with ESPN to telecast the Pro Bowl on Jan. 31.

The rest of the NFL playoffs are televised exclusively by English-speaking networks, with Spanish audio available via SAP.

This approach has its limitations. For instance, during Jan. 9’s CBS broadcast of the Pittsburgh Steelers’s Wild Card victory over the Cincinnati Bengals, the SAP feed didn’t match what was seen on-screen, including a pre-kickoff interview conducted by CBS sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson.

CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus didn’t want to take such an approach with the big game.

“As the broadcaster of Super Bowl 50, it was a priority for us to find a Spanish-language partner to reach the NFL’s Hispanic fan base,” he said. “The ESPN Deportes presentation will be a great complement to our broadcast.”

ESPN’s game coverage of Super Bowl 60 will begin at 6 p.m. (ET) from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., with the Monday Night Football Team of play-by-play announcer Alvaro Martin, color commentator Raul Allegre and sideline reporter John Sutcliffe. A 90-minute pre-game show will start at 4:30 p.m. (ET); postgame coverage will also follow.

The NFL has made great strides in seeking to best connect with Hispanic sports fans. According to the 2010 ESPN Deportes Poll, in addition to research conducted independently by Experian Marketing Services, the NFL had a lower passion score than Spain’s first-division soccer league among all U.S. Latinos.

Single out bilingual Hispanics, though, and the NFL is among the most popular sports properties. Among English-speaking Hispanics, the NFL ranks No. 1 among all professional sports leagues, according to Experian.

Securing domestic Spanish-language TV rights to North America’s premier sporting event reflects ESPN Deportes’s commitment to growing the NFL’s Hispanic fan base, vice president of programming and business initiatives Freddy Rolon told Hispanic Television Update in an exclusive interview.

“There has been a long-term commitment to building the fan base, and this is just a continuation of that commitment,” he said. “Hopefully we can continue having the big game in the future.”

In years past, excitement and anticipation about Super Bowl commercials was perhaps more fervent than for the game itself. As ESPN is now an option and with no 360-degree sales opportunity (as their was with Fox and NBCUniversal), what does this say about the evolving Super Bowl buy?

“Our sales team is out in the market with a package that includes Super Bowl programming across ESPN and ESPN Deportes,” Rolon said. “We can offer both the game on ESPN Deportes and game content across our other platforms.”

ESPN Deportes Radio will broadcast the Super Bowl for the third consecutive year, as part of a separate media-rights deal.

Was there concern from media buyers and planners, advertisers and/or agencies about a viewer dip in CBS’s ratings due to viewers shifting to ESPN Deportes? Or were media buyers excited about a new opportunity to reach Hispanics who prefer to consume Spanish-language media?

“We are adding to the overall audience of the Super Bowl,” Rolon said. “We are reaching a broader audience, and we are serving an audience that hasn’t really been served before. The Super Bowl is a cultural event, and now we are giving Spanish-speaking fans the option to watch the event on a platform that is directed to them.”

Rolon continued: “There’s a demand for fans to watch sports in a fully immersed environment. They want to see the facts, teams and results in a targeted way. Their experience is a hundred times better when all of the graphics align to what they see.”

Rolon declined to disclose financial terms, saying only that CBS and ESPN Deportes “saw a great opportunity on working together to offer the game in Spanish. With the NFL’s input, we quickly agreed to find a way to make a deal.”

ESPN Deportes has obtained the Spanish-language rights to air Super Bowl 50 in a pact with CBS and the National Football League. The telecast begins at 6 p.m. ET on Sunday, Feb. 7, live from Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

This is the first Super Bowl telecast for ESPN Deportes, and it will feature the announcing team that has called Monday Night Football contests since 2006 (and Sunday Night Football games before that): Alvaro Martin on play by play, Raul Allegre doing analysis and sideline reporter John Sutcliffe. 

While Fox Deportes had the first Spanish-language Super Bowl telecast in 2014, alongside Fox, and NBC Universo had it in 2015 (renaming itself from mun2 on the same day) alongside NBC, CBS did not have an in-house Spanish-language sports partner to call on. In a release from CBS, the NFL and ESPN Deportes, CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said "as the broadcaster of Super Bowl 50, it was a priority for us to find a Spanish-language partner to televise this historic broadcast and reach the NFL’s Hispanic fan base.” ESPN Deportes lists its distribution at 6.1 Hispanic homes, with total distribution of about 20 million homes, a smaller base than NBC Universo (43 million homes) but similar to Fox Deportes (22 million homes). 

ESPN Deportes is planning multimedia coverage leading up to the big game starting on Monday, Feb. 1. On Super Bowl Sunday, the network's coverage also will include a pregame special at 4:30 p.m. and a postgame show. ESPN Deportes Radio will broadcast the Super Bowl in Spanish for the third consecutive year under a separate agreement with the NFL.