Amazon and Nielsen signed a three-year measurement deal for Prime Video’s exclusive NFL Thursday Night Football (TNF) telecasts, saying it’s the first deal of its kind where a streaming service will be included in Nielsen’s national TV measurement service. Starting with the 2022 NFL season, measurement will include pregame, in-game and postgame programming on Prime Video and Twitch, over-the-air stations in teams’ local markets and out-of-home viewing, they said. According to Nielsen’s ratings, NFL games and shoulder programming, such as pregame and postgame, accounted for the top 27 live telecasts in 2021, and 47 of the top 50. The collaboration will allow Amazon to provide advertisers with “familiar campaign measurement to make apples-to-apples comparisons across their multi-channel media investments,” said Srishti Gupta, Amazon Ads director-media measurement. Nielsen is to begin measuring TNF on Amazon starting Aug. 25 with a preseason game between the San Francisco 49ers and Houston Texans.

The largest pay-TV providers, covering about 92% of the market, lost 1.93 million video subscribers in Q2, up from 1.24 million lost the same quarter a year earlier, Leichtman Research Group said Friday. Those providers combined have about 72.2 million subs, including 39.5 million among the largest cable companies, 25.5 million among other traditional pay-TV services, and the top publicly reporting virtual MVPDs have about 7.2 million, it said. It said the cable providers lost about 950,000 subs in the most-recent quarter, compared with a year-over-year loss of 590,000, while vMVPDs lost about 265,000 subs compared to a gain of about 55,000 a year earlier. It said telco and DBS losses for the most-recent quarter were about 710,000, about the same as they were in Q2 2021.

U.S. consumer spending on home entertainment content topped $17.9 billion in 2022's first half, an 11.3% increase from January-June in 2021, reported the Digital Entertainment Group Wednesday. Subscription VOD spending led all categories, rising 17.3% to $14.56 billion, said DEG. Sell-through of packaged media fell 16.3% to $793.2 million, it said. “The surge in theatrical new releases” did benefit 4K Blu-ray, where spending increased 33%, said DEG. “High-profile catalog classics,” including The Godfather trilogy, also contributed to 4K Blu-ray’s better performance in the half, it said.

Pirating of live sports streaming is booming, with major and lesser sports franchises entering over-the-top licensing deals they might once have avoided just to protect traditional TV exclusivity, Intertrust said Tuesday. As more sports producers more to live streaming, there's a growing threat of increased losses to thriving, sophisticated online piracy operations, it said. The onus is on streaming sports licensees to have a broad-based anti-piracy strategy that includes multiple digital rights management operations, identification of pirate sources and disruption of their operations in real time without adding latency to live viewing, it said.

There’s “much work to be done” in Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans to roll out HBO Max and Discovery+ as a “new combined offering under a single brand,” said Jean-Briac Perrette, president-CEO, global streaming and games, on a Q2 earnings call Thursday. “We are determined to get it right, which will take a bit of time,” he said. His team has developed a clear road map to migrate HBO Max and Discovery+ “onto one tech stack” that overcomes the “shortcomings” of both services, he said. HBO Max “has a competitive feature set, but has had performance and customer issues,” while Discovery+ “has best-in-class performance and consumer ratings, but more limited features,” he said. The combined service will launch in the U.S. next summer, and Latin America will follow later in 2023. European markets with HBO Max will launch in early 2024, with “key Asia Pacific territories” coming later in 2024, he said. “This idea of expensive films going direct to streaming, we cannot find an economic case for it,” said CEO David Zaslav on the decision to cancel this year’s HBO Max release of the $90 million feature film Batgirl. “We’ve been out in the town talking about our commitment to the theatrical exhibition and the theatrical window,” said Zaslav. “Our focus will be on theatrical, and when we bring the theatrical films to HBO Max, we find they have substantially more value.”

Increased VOD service competition is leading to an ongoing decline in average daily playtime per user per service, NPAW said in a streaming video industry report Thursday. Playtime was down 11% in the first half of 2022 vs. the same six-month span in 2021, and that came after a 9% drop between 2021 and 2020, it said. In North America, average daily playtime per user per service went from 90 minutes in first half of 2021 to 75 minutes in that time frame this year. Linear TV consumption per user per service was down 18% in 1H of 2022 vs. 1H 2021, with the drop particularly pronounced in Latin America and the Pacific, it said. In North America, the average daily linear TV playtime per user per service went from 76 minutes to 72 minutes, it said. The streaming linear TV decline also seems to be the result of increased competition, it said. It said such events as the Winter Olympics and the closing of the season for some major sports leagues juiced streaming sports viewing. H1 2022 saw a 12% jump in average daily playtime per user per service for VOD over the same period last year, while linear consumption was up 13%, it said.

Despite its “precipitous share decline," FuboTV is “focusing on the right things within its control,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter wrote investors Tuesday. The virtual MVPD's subscriber growth is continuing “at a rapid pace,” it raised prices to cushion itself against rising content costs, and marketing spend is “trending in the right direction” as the company focuses on “the lifetime value of customers acquired, rather than growing its subscribers at any cost." But factors outside the company’s control are likely to limit near-term growth, said the analyst, slashing Wedbush’s 12-month price target from $9 to $6. Shares were trading at $2.61 midday Tuesday. FuboTV’s full-year guidance of $220 million-$225 million is “at risk” due to macroeconomic headwinds, said Pachter, saying the company's average revenue per user target of $15-$20 could be “years away.” FuboTV reports Q2 earnings Thursday.

U.S. District Judge John Bailey in Wheeling, West Virginia, granted class-action status to a Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint against DirecTV. In a docket 5:17-CV-179 order Monday, Bailey said the plaintiffs’ claims "are easily susceptible to resolution on a classwide basis" and if any damages issues require individual inquiry, the damage issues can be bifurcated. The complaint claims DirecTV is vicariously liable for actions of telemarketing firm AC1, which was selling DirecTV subscriptions. Per the order, the class is anyone in the U.S. who had a telephone number on the Do-Not-Call Registry and who received more than one telemarketing call within any 12-month period at any time from AC1 to promote the sale of DirecTV. DirecTV didn't comment Tuesday.

Pivotal Research Group snipped $5 off its target price for Spotify, to $105, while reiterating a “hold” rating on the stock, analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak wrote investors Thursday. Wlodarczak sees “material user growth” left for the streaming audio company but said many investors question whether Spotify “will ever be able to generate significant lasting profitability,” given the power of music labels and that its "two main competitors are not necessarily focused on profitable growth.” Additional risks are possible content cost inflation; 90% of Spotify’s largest cost item -- music programming -- controlled by three or four players; “controversial podcast content could translate into lost subscribers or music"; recession; and “streaming growth could slow sooner than we anticipate.”

To help YouTube creators moderate comments on their content, the video hosting platform blogged Tuesday that it has given creators a new optional comments setting, "increase strictness," to help catch more spam or potentially inappropriate comments. It said those comments are held for review in YouTube Studio, giving creators the chance to approve, remove or report them. It said it has updated YouTube Studio so comments potentially considered more hurtful are put in a separate, hidden section of the held for review tab, letting creators ignore them completely if they choose. It said it also has started putting out channel guidelines letting creators communicate what is and isn't allowed in their comments section.