Latest in Streaming Film and TV

Chinese streaming video service iQiyi, which is owned by the internet giant Baidu, is planning an initial public offering in the U.S. next year, according to multiple reports. The IPO will value the company at $8 billion-$10 billion, both Reuters and Bloomberg reported, citing unidentified sources. A report in the Sout…

AT&T might follow this Thanksgiving weekend by cooking the pay TV industry’s golden goose. On Monday the telco formally unveils DirecTV Now, a streaming service that CEO Randall Stephenson has said will offer more than 100 networks for an astonishingly low price of $35 a month. And although the topic is much debated…

Time Warner’s Turner unit is joining corporate cousin HBO in the direct-to-consumer subscription video on demand business — and in a way that should please fans of classic films — as well as those of the Beatles. Turner’s launching an ad-free streaming site, FilmStruck, this fall featuring what it calls “an eclectic…

It seems that most people who watch TV aren’t really watching, and increasingly it isn’t on a TV set, according to the 10th annual Digital Democracy Survey  out this morning from the media and entertainment specialists at consulting firm Deloitte. An online survey of 2,200 people the firm commissioned in November…

Forget the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Netflix said today at the International CES consumer electronics confab that it will start to endorse TV sets “to help consumers identify televisions built for a superior Internet TV experience.” “We’ve created the Netflix Recommended TV program to help consumers identify…

Looks like we’ll have to keep waiting to figure out how HBO CEO Richard Plepler can offer a direct-to-consumer streaming service — planned for next year — that doesn’t upset the pay TV ecosystem. NBC’s Willie Geist tried to get an answer from Plepler today in an appearance at the Paley Center. But the HBO chief…

Major studio and network owners’ decision to sell shows to Netflix might go down as one of the biggest strategic blunders they’ve ever made, if Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger’s compelling report today is correct. Like a lot of analysts, he’s alarmed by what he calls the “unprecedented” drop in C3 ratings across…

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may have thrown a lifeline to nascent online video services this afternoon by proposing a rulemaking proceeding to classify them as Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs).  “The result of this technical adjustment will be to give MVPDs that use the Internet (or any other method of…

EXCLUSIVE: Major League Baseball’s online streaming service set a viewing record for a single game last night with the New York Yankees captain’s final game in pinstripes — where, in a moment almost too dramatically perfect to believe, he drove in the game-winning run. Fans accessed 641,000 streams, beating by 18% the…

2ND UPDATE 2:16 PM: The NPD Group today issued a “data clarification” about its Monday press release that said its study found that streaming services are gaining while premium cable channels are losing subscribers. A day after Showtime refuted those findings, NPD Group said it should not have called our declines for H…

Changes are coming Monday as Disney/ABC Television Group launches its new ABC Family authenticated streaming service, limiting the 24/7 availability of streaming content and bringing the network’s multi-platform offerings in line with the nets and HBO. Effective Monday January 6, viewers will have to log into the…

The network will launch its new “WATCH ABC” live-streaming service on Tuesday during upfronts, available first to users in NY via WABC-TV and in Philadelphia via WPVI. Owner Disney launched three successful branded services last summer — WATCH Disney Channel, WATCH Disney XD, and WATCH Disney Junior — yielding nearly…