Legacy linear brands bring a sense of credibility and gravitas that will help drive viewers and subscribers to new streaming offerings, a panel of TV executives said at the Future-produced Virtual Next TV Summit event on April 27.

“Fundamentally, the value of a legacy brand or a well-known brand is simply trust,” PBS chief operating officer Jonathan Barzilay said during a panel session moderated by Broadcasting+Cable contributing editor Paige Albiniak. Barzilay added that when the broadcaster started making short-form content for the web, it collectively did so via the PBS Digital Studio name. “By putting the PBS name on all of these independently produced short form series, that conveys something to the audience. ... The trust that people have in the PBS brand and the awareness that people have in the PBS brand, maybe gave us a little head start.”

At The Weather Group, parent of The Weather Channel network, president Tom O’Brien said its streaming offering Local Now benefits from the more-established Weather Channel brand.

“The ability, the opportunity, is what you do with that brand. If you use it as an anchor, you use it as a basis of innovation,” O’Brien said.

At BritBox, a joint venture between British television icons the BBC and ITV, the focus has been trying to balance those two brands to establish a new digital identity in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

“It’s an interesting balance because we want to build our own brand equity, but do so leveraging that of our parents,” BritBox senior VP and commercial head Emily Powers said.

Ampersand senior VP, agency strategy Marion Hargett said legacy brands matter when launching OTT services because it gives potential viewers and customers a base on which to set their expectations. 

TiVo’s chief revenue officer, Matt Milne, said the company’s new consumer-grade streaming device, the TiVo Stream 4K, should hit the market in “the next few weeks.”

Speaking during a keynote session last Tuesday (April 28) during the Virtual Next TV Summit, part of Future’s Virtual NYC TV Week Spring, Milne said TiVo product developers have been working at home amid the pandemic to get the Android TV-based OTT device ready to market.

At CES in January, where TiVo introduced the $70 dongle and successfully created buzz for it, the company touted an April release date for the TiVo Stream 4K.

The TiVo 4K Stream will have access to all the apps available in the Google Play Store via Android TV. What will make it different from other OTT devices, Milne said, is its ability to tap TiVo’s sizable search and discover resources.

“We’re investing well over $100 million a year at a foundational level to help people with discovery,” he said. “This is a product built for the streaming wars. It’s built to bring all that content together.”

Users of streaming services, Milne said, spend an average of 11 minutes searching among an average of seven subscription VOD, AVOD and other OTT programming sources for a movie, TV show, or news or sports event.

The TiVo 4K Stream will allow users to navigate their apps through the traditional “Gemstar grid,” Milne said. But it will also offer a separate user interface based on TiVo’s proprietary search and discovery UI.

TiVo, he said, will become a “neutral third party,” with SVOD and AVOD platforms available to, in turn, anonymously monitor app usage through its platform.

TiVo isn’t totally neutral — it recently launched its own AVOD platform, TiVo Plus. Milne didn’t say whether or not TiVo Plus has any kind of priority status in terms of what search and discovery results users might get on TiVo Stream 4K.

“We see this as a merchandiser opportunity,” Milne said. “How do we connect the consumer to the content?”

Also at the Virtual Next TV Summit, a panel of programming executives talked about their services’ place in the streaming world and ways they are adapting. Craig Engler, general manager of AMC Networks-owned Shudder, the horror-themed subscription VOD service, said the disruption in the movie theater world prompted an April 28 “surprise drop” on Shudder of new original movie Blood Quantum that was originally supposed to debut in Alamo Drafthouse theaters. “That’s fun, because it creates excitement for people” who subscribe to the service, Engler said.

Rachel Brill, senior VP and general manager of B/R Studio, at WarnerMedia-owned Bleacher Report, said B/R is moving more toward integrating social and original programming within the app, notably with three days of NFL Draft coverage. The aim is to find shareable moments. “How do you truly create an all encompassing immersive experience for sports fans?” she said.

William Sager, chairman and CEO of The Preview Channel, said the year-old, OTT-delivered service plans to add new channels devoted to previews and trailers about video games and classic movies. “We are off and running” and serving passionate fans of games and movies, he said.

Brendon Thomas, VP of distribution at Viacom-owned Pluto TV, said at the ad-supported (free) VOD service “we do see ourselves a bit more as programmers than aggregators,” focused on optimizing the content it has used to create more than 250 “live linear-like channels” plus on-demand programming. 

Kent Gibbons contributed to this story.

Audience demand for series and season premieres is now split evenly among subscription streaming platforms and linear TV, according to Parrot Analytics.

The research firm has created a proprietary metric it calls “demand expressions,” which is an amalgamation of consumer signals indicating their intention to watch a show.

Visit Next TV to read more stories like this one. 

“It’s a holistic view into what people really want,” said Alejandro Rojas, director of applied analytics for Parrot, speaking during Friday's Virtual NYC TV Week Spring panel presentation, an event produced by MCN parent company Future.

Notably, among individual platforms, based on Parrot’s demand expressions metrics, Apple TV Plus has had the biggest demand increase during the pandemic viewing period, increasing its share by nearly 9%—more than even Netflix. 

Amid the thickening jungle that has become the over-the-top landscape over the past few years, it can be tough for an upstart streaming service to make a dent. But at Philo, a streaming service that launched back in 2017, head of advertising Reed Barker said success has been driven by three simple tenets -- good customer service, low prices and ease of use.

Philo offers 59 channels for about $20 per month, minus news, sports and local broadcast channels. Philo does not release subscriber figures (some estimates say they had about 50,000 customers in 2018). Barker said Philo grew customers last year at about a 10% monthly clip.

“This year it’s been an even larger explosion,” he said. “We had what we thought were very ambitious goals. Given what’s happened with current events and people streaming more... we’ve seen incredible subscriber growth that we’re hoping to continue with."

Speaking at an opening keynote session at the Future-produced Virtual Next TV Summit Thursday, Barker said strong customer service -- its customer satisfaction scores are in the 90%-plus range -- not charging for features like DVR and Look Back that other larger providers do and making content easy to find have led to success.

“We built a package that has everything included on it,” Barker told session moderator Paige Bilins, VP of product management at Telaria. “We’re not trying to charge extra for having what we think should be just the table stakes.”

Philo also serves as a complement to SVOD services like HBO Max, Disney+ and Peacock, Barker said.

“We don’t carry content from NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia or Disney/ABC,” Barker said. “It’s pretty easy to add a $6 Disney+ subscription to Philo.”

For advertisers, Barker said the Philo approach is similar.

Barker said the key is listening to what its DSP partners and advertisers say they need to make advertising relevant all the way up the chain.

“Addressability doesn’t work if you’re doing something different from everyone or if you’re not trying to lead,” Barker said.

About six months ago Philo started adding genre, rating and runtime in the content signals for targeting, and has been working to build first party data segments based on its customer usage patterns. That allows advertisers to target a consumer who watches a lot of do-it-yourself programming not just on home shows, but in any program they are watching.

“So you’re able to find those targets that are relevant, not only in the context of what they’re watching, but in the context of what they’ve watched in their watch history,” Barker said. “We think that really helps with relevance, making sure you’re seeing an ad that isn’t annoying.” 

The Virtual Next TV Summit, part of Future's Virtual NYC TV Week Spring, concludes May 1.

TiVo’s chief revenue officer, Matt Milne, said the company’s new consumer-grade streaming device, the TiVo Stream 4K, should hit the market in “the next few weeks.”

Speaking during a keynote session Tuesday during the Virtual Next TV Summit, part of Future Media’s Virtual NYC TV Week Spring, Milne said TiVo product developers have been working at home amid the pandemic to get the Android TV-based OTT device ready to market.

Visit Next TV to read more stories like this one. 

At CES in January, where TiVo introduced the $70 dongle and successfully created buzz for it, the company touted an April release date for the TiVo Stream 4K.

“It’s a testament to our whole team that we’ve been able to conduct the necessary product test and will have high quality product we can launch to market,” Milne said.

Related: TiVo Stream 4K: When Will the Big CES Buzz Product Finally Arrive?

The TiVo 4K Stream will have access to all the apps available in the Google Play Store via Android TV. What will make it different from other OTT devices, Milne said, is its ability to tap TiVo’s sizable search and discover resources.

“We’re investing well over $100 million a year at a foundational level to help people with discovery,” he said. “This is a product built for the streaming wars. It’s built to bring all that content together.”

Users of streaming services, Milne said, spend an average of 11 minutes searching among—also on average—seven SVOD, AVOD and other OTT programming sources for a movie, TV show, or news or sports event.

The TiVo 4K Stream will allow users to navigate their apps through the traditional “Gemstar grid,” Milne said. But it will also offer a separate UI based on TiVo’s proprietary search and discovery interface.

TiVo, he said, will become a “neutral third party,” with SVOD and AVOD platforms available to, in turn, anonymously monitor app usage through TiVo.

TiVo isn’t totally neutral—it recently launched its own AVOD platform, TiVo Plus. Milne didn’t say whether or not TiVo Plus has any kind of priority status in terms of what search and discovery results users might get on TiVo Stream 4K.

“We see this as a merchandiser opportunity,” Milne said. “How do we connect the consumer to the content?”

Also at the Virtual Next TV Summit, a panel of programming executives talked about their services' place in the streaming world and ways they are adapting. Craig Engler, general manager of AMC Networks-owned Shudder, the horror-themed subscription VOD service, said the disruption in the movie theater world prompted a "surprise drop” on Shudder of new original movie Blood Quantum that was originally supposed to debut in Alamo Drafthouse theaters. “That’s fun, because it creates excitement for people” who subscribe to the service, Engler said.

Rachel Brill, senior VP and general manager of B/R Studio, at WarnerMedia-owned Bleacher Report, said B/R is moving more toward integrating social and original programming within the app, notably with three days of coverage of the NFL draft. The aim is to find shareable moments, "how do you truly create an all encompassing immersive experience for sports fans.”

William Sager, chairman and CEO of The Preview Channel, said the year-old, OTT-delivered service plans to add new channels devoted to previews and trailers about video games and classic movies. “We are off and running” and serving passionate fans of games and movies, he said.

Brendon Thomas, VP of distribution at Viacom-owned Pluto TV, said at the ad-supported (free) VOD service “we do see ourselves a bit more as programmers than aggregators,” focused on optimizing the content it has used to create more than 250 "live linear-like channels" plus on-demand programming.

The Virtual Next TV Summit continues the rest of this week.

Kent Gibbons contributed to this story.

Legacy linear brands bring a sense of credibility and gravitas that will help drive viewers and subscribers to new streaming offerings, a panel of TV executives said at the Future-produced Virtual Next TV Summit event Monday.

“Fundamentally, the value of a legacy brand or a well-known brand is simply trust,” PBS chief operating officer Jonathan Barzilay said during a panel session moderated by B&C contributing editor Paige Albiniak. He added that when the broadcaster started making short-form content for the web, it collectively did so via the PBS Digital Studio name. “By putting the PBS name on all of these independently produced short form series, that conveys something to the audience. ...The trust that people have in the PBS brand and the awareness that people have in the PBS brand, maybe gave us a little head start.”

At The Weather Group, parent of The Weather Channel network, president Tom O’Brien said its streaming offering Local Now benefits from the more established Weather Channel brand.

“The ability, the opportunity, is what you do with that brand. If you use it as an anchor, you use it as a basis of innovation,” O’Brien said.

Local Now is The Weather Group’s local news, weather, sports and traffic streaming service. O’Brien added that the service has added new programming -- a series offering advice and mental health insights during the COVID-19 pandemic called with Canadian author and therapist Dr. Wendy Walsh called Dr. Wendy Walsh Is Here for You, has expanded its American Science Lab science show during the COVID-19 lockdown and is live streaming the May 9 Feeding America Comedy Festival, a fundraiser for charity Feeding America. 

At BritBox, a joint venture between British television icons the BBC and ITV, the focus has been trying to balance those two brands to establish a new digital identity in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

“It’s an interesting balance because we want to build our own brand equity, but do so leveraging that of our parents,” said BritBox SVP and Commercial Head Emily Powers. “The way we do that is, it’s a lot about focusing on a content proposition that is both taking advantage of the vast library of our parents, as well as starting to launch some of our own originals. We convey to our audience, through our marketing materials, a certain tonality and sensibility that is respectful of the parent brands but also reaching a new audience.”

Ampersand SVP Agency Strategy Marion Hargett said legacy brands matter when launching OTT services because it gives potential viewers and customers a base on which to set their expectations.

“Many of the legacy players have a rooted history of delivering news and delivering content with standards to that delivery,” Hargett said. “... I think having a heritage is not a bad thing and I think being able to bring that knowledge to bear in the television ecosystem is really valuable.”

Picking the right distribution strategy also is important when a legacy brand launches a streaming option. At PBS, which is made up of hundreds of individual stations across the country all with a local presence, it made sense for PBS.org and the app to have a geo-location function so when a viewer logged in they were asked to verify their local station, and received information on the offerings on that channel. When PBS launched on YouTubeTV, it used the national feed.

“We do hope to eventually get to a place where that gets geo-targeted or tailored individually, but for right now it’s more important for us to be on the platform with some sort of presence rather than to precisely mirror the local station,” Barzilay said. “We do that wherever we can and whenever we can.”

At BritBox, Powers said that the distribution focus was initially to be on a few key platforms.

At launch, BritBox was available on Apple TV, Roku and also through syndicated channels like Amazon Channels and Apple TV Channels.

“For us it’s important to balance the business between direct-to-consumer and these channels because the channel gets you into every household, but does so in a way that has a much lower barrier to entry.”

Phase 2, she added, includes getting access to smart TV. BritBox has agreements with LG and Samsung, and expects more such deals in the future. 

The Virtual Next TV Summit is part of Future's Virtual NYC TV Week Spring. 

The pandemic has signaled perhaps the final fatal disruptive blow to the structured release “windows” for movies, according to Tubi’s chief content officer, Adam Lewinson.

Speaking Monday at Virtual Next TV Summit, part of Future's Virtual NYC TV Week Spring, the veteran programming executive noted, “When I was at FX, windowing was very structured. If a movie premiered theatrically on a certain date, we’d knew exactly when we’d get it [in the pay TV window]. But I don’t know where windowing is at these days. It’s all out the window.”

Related: Comcast NBCU Bypassing Shuttered Theaters with Streaming Releases of ‘Trolls World Tour,’ ‘The Hunt,’ ‘The Invisible Man’ and ‘Emma’

It’s been widely reported that studios are taking new releases straight to transactional streaming platforms these days with theaters shuttered because of the pandemic. And in some cases, studios are bypassing other links in the release chain and going straight to SVOD, as was the case with Disney and Onward.

Without providing any examples, Lewinson said, “There are lots of movies that very quietly premiere on Tubi, some of which are in the TVOD window, some of which are not. You have to follow the money. At the end of the day, a Warner Bros. or a Lionsgate could care less about windows. It’s who has the best dollar.”

Before a short stint at Crackle, Lewinson spent nearly 11 years at Fox in various programming and production roles. In his keynote, he said he long believed, even before Fox’s just-closed $440 million purchase of Tubi, that the two companies match up well.

“Before this acquisition was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye, I used to spend a lot of time talking about how the Fox audience is our audience,” Lewinson said.

With archival seasons of the Fox reality hit The Masked Singer debuting on Tubi last week, he was asked if other Fox shows would soon wind up on the ad-supported video-on-demand platform.

“I think it’s fair to say that The Masked Singer is foreshadowing other things to come,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

Speaking on a broad range of topics, Lewinson conceded that while viewership is way up for Tubi amid the pandemic, the entire AVOD sector is in for a “rough” first quarter earnings report season given the suddenly soft state of the advertising market.

He believes, however, that recovery could occur as soon as the fourth quarter, and that viewership for his streaming platform and others will be permanently enhanced by new viewer habits being acquired during the pandemic.

“This won’t just disappear once the virus disappears,” he said.