No matter how challenging, if given the choice, Jason Kilar, founder of Hulu and current CEO of WarnerMedia, says he would willingly disrupt the way television and film was distributed, all over again.
Listen to Kilar's account of building a business during the burgeoning days of the internet, the early, tumultuous times at Hulu, his predictions about where media and entertainment are heading — and a missed opportunity he wishes he had captured.
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Here are the latest headlines regarding how the novel coronavirus is impacting the Los Angeles startup and tech communities. Sign up for our newsletter and follow dot.LA on Twitter for the latest updates.
- Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey donates $10 million to COVID-19 fund launched by Sean Penn
- Americans slash costs with record unemployment, chief among them cutting the cord
- L.A. County retailers open doors; as people head to trails and golf course this weekend
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L.A. County retailers open doors; as people head to trails and golf course this weekend
<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fcountyofla%2Fvideos%2F170505974293878%2F&show_text=0&width=560" width="560" height="315" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe><p>Retailers across the region opened up their doors for the first time in weeks on Friday as Los Angeles County readied to open up <a href="https://parks.lacounty.gov/covid-19" target="_blank">trails, golf courses and parks over the weekend</a>. Traffic trickled into downtown early in the morning after weeks of empty streets as Gov. Gavin Newsom eased stay-at-home orders. Retailers including clothing, toy, book and music stores can now operate with curbside services and with Mother's Day around the corner, the city's downtown flower district pulled in brisk business not seen for weeks.</p><p>"I am already feeling a renewed sense of hope and excitement," said county Supervisor Kathryn Barger during a mid-day briefing. The first phase of easing stay at home orders came as the Los Angeles County's public health department <a href="http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/mediapubdetail.cfm?unit=media&ou=ph&prog=media&cur=cur&prid=2365&row=25&start=1" target="_blank">logged</a> 883 new cases and 51 deaths. So far, 30,296 people in the county have tested positive and 1,468 have died.</p><p>And the region is far from returning to normal. On Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to send every registered voter in California a mail-in ballot for the November presidential election. Although the election is not set to be a vote-by-mail only, those that want to vote in-person can. Guidelines on how in-person voting will work have yet to be hammered out.</p><p>Dining establishments remained pickup or delivery only. </p>Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey donates $10 million to COVID-19 fund launched by Sean Penn
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzI2Njc5NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxODAzNTUwMH0._Z0w4PYNQgHQQ_oqrcyqRBZlWnRbjOnjCUs6P4RvzBA/image.jpg?width=980" id="5dba8" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="48ac5b355d13c02cb58093e789d9a30c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Sean Penn is co-founder of CORE
<p>Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to the Community Organized Relief Effort (<a href="https://www.coreresponse.org" target="_blank">CORE</a>), the non-profit disaster relief group co-founded by actor Sean Penn a decade ago to provide relief to hurricane-ravaged Haiti. The donation came via Dorsey's Start Small initiative, which is bankrolling more COVID-19 testing across the U.S. and Navajo Nation. CORE stated it has set up a dozen COVID-19 test sites across California over the past five weeks and completed 100,000 tests for free through its partnerships.</p><p>"CORE is an inspiring force for good. Not only in what they're doing by increasing our testing capacity, but also by how they're doing it," Dorsey said in a statement. "The open-source approach and work to be a model for others is exactly what this country and world needs right now." Co-founded by CORE CEO Ann Lee, the nonprofit's testing sites have launched in Atlanta, Detroit and will soon serve New Orleans and the Navajo Nation, focused on serving underserved communities, as well as first responders and essential workers, the nonprofit stated.</p>Americans slash costs with record unemployment, chief among them cutting the cord
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzI2Njg1MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTU5NTcwNDYyNX0.VuPvp635CJIFw80lCljKYmjFPc59jgAI3pdv7Yfd_k8/image.jpg?width=980" id="5909c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1c5bb02a1302aa6b551087aab6774a2a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /> <p>With unemployment on the rise due to the economic fallout of COVID-19, American consumers are slashing costs -- and that starts with cutting the cord. The pandemic has led to a new quarterly record when it comes to pay-TV subscriber losses, according to research firm MoffettNathanson in a report released Friday.</p><p>"In the context of over 30 million unemployment claims and estimates for minus 40 percent gross domestic product, it would be unseemly to resort to hyperbole to describe the carnage in pay TV in the first quarter," analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in the report. "Better that we simply report the numbers. Traditional pay TV subscriptions fell by a record 1.8 million in the first quarter, the worst quarterly result on record, bringing the annual rate of decline to 7.6 percent, also a record."</p><p>What's worse, the numbers are expected to drop off steadily in the coming months as sports programming is likely to all but vanish from television screens. Professional and college sports have been sidelined with most states not allowing stadiums full of fans, and leagues considering teams playing in front of empty seats. The report said the "tsunami of unemployment just beginning to hit as the quarter ended, all these numbers will get worse in the second quarter." The U.S. Department of Labor reported earlier in the day that unemployment is now at a record since being tracked in 1948, with payrolls plunging 20.5 million due to the pandemic. </p>Related Articles Around the Web
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Bring on the bird puns! On Wednesday, Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal's streaming service, Peacock, takes flight. Initially available to a subset of Comcast cable and broadband subscribers, Peacock will reportedly spread its wings across Comcast's footprint by the end of April before expanding on July 15 to other cable company customers and web and streaming platforms.
The new service will hatch with up to 15,000 hours' worth of content. Peacock's library will include a flock of NBC favorites like Parks & Recreation, 30 Rock and Law & Order: SVU; movies from Universal Pictures and Dreamworks Animation such as Jurassic Park, E.T. and Shrek; and news segments, talk shows, original series and content from Telemundo. Peacock will also offer a selection of live sports (once those migrate back), and in 2021 will have exclusive rights to The Office.
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Pricing will be tiered. Comcast customers will have full access with ads for free, or ad-free for $5/month. The behemoth has already forged a deal with Cox, another communications company, to provide their customers preferential access to Peacock, and is reportedly negotiating terms with others. Non-Comcast customers will have three options: limited content feathered with advertisements will be free; double the content with ads for $5/month; or no ads for $10/month.
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Peacock will find itself perched alongside feisty competition. Yet whereas most of its streaming market competitors have zigged toward offering subscription-based video on-demand (SVOD), Peacock's advertising-based (AVOD) platform represents a bit of a zag.
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"One thing that helps Peacock stand out is that it will feature some content for free," said Ross Benes, analyst at eMarketer.
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In such a crowded field (see below), Peacock's relatively strong content slate should help, too.
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<em><strong>Select Streaming Services</strong></em><br/>
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*Most common plan
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**Expected to launch in May 2020
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The coronavirus complicates the picture. On one hand, demand for streaming is up. Comcast has touted a 50% year-on-year increase in video on-demand viewing among its cable customers in March.
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But countertrends abound. With most filming halted due to physical distancing, Peacock had to push a "significant" number of its original show releases to 2021, per a company press briefing earlier this week. The absence of live sports has increased demand for some other forms of content, but it also weakens what would have been a competitive advantage for Peacock. The postponement of the Olympics hurts, too, as NBC can no longer use the event to goose subscribers nor promote the service on its other assets. And a weak economy threatens to squeeze disposable incomes and tighten advertising spend; Magna Global, a research firm, recently cut its 2020 U.S. ad sales forecast from 6.6% annual growth to a 2.8% decline.
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Add it up, and it's no wonder Peacock executives wrote earlier this week that "we are viewing 2020 as a runway to 2021."
</p><h2>A Strategic Bird<br/>
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That runway metaphor looks apt on a broader timescale, too. Several industry sources told dot.LA that Comcast's strategy is to use Peacock to hedge its business units. </p><p>"The overriding initial purpose of Peacock," said media analyst Bruce Leichtman, "is to add value for Comcast's 28.6 million (and growing) broadband subscribers." </p><p>Sources also told dot.LA that part of the strategy is to retain Pay-TV customers while also guiding a controlled move toward streaming.
</p><p>Few companies have as much to lose from cord cutting as Comcast. According to analysts, the firm would be wise to accommodate this seemingly inevitable trend, while trying to limit the rate at which one of its cash cows is cannibalized.</p><p>
Indeed, several of Peacock's features cater to an audience still attuned to the ways of pay-TV. That starts with offering them free access, which will nevertheless bring in streaming revenue from the ads. And, in contrast to customers who've grown used to ad-free offerings like Netflix, a cable TV audience will not likely find Peacock ads much of a deterrent to using the service. Yet perhaps neither will other potential customers, given that Peacock reportedly plans to limit ad loads to five minutes per hour, and experiment with new kinds of advertising, such as interactive ads, meant to be more user-friendly than the typical spot.
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<strong></strong>Analysts appear split as to whether ad-supported customers will bring in more revenue than subscribers paying a higher price.
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"In general, programmatic advertising doesn't necessarily add a lot" of incremental value, said Brian Wieser of GroupM, an advertising firm, referring to Peacock's ability to target ads to viewers based on data.
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But others have reported that Hulu's AVOD customers do in fact bring in more revenue than their ad-free counterparts, and insiders at NBCUniversal anticipate the same, per a source familiar with the matter. Also encouraging on this front is eMarketer's forecast from 2019 of 103% growth in streaming ad spending from 2019 to 2023.
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Plus, flying alongside Comcast should help.
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"Comcast already has all these relationships with advertisers, so that's a big advantage," one NBCUniversal employee told dot.LA.
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Other potential differentiating features include the numerous Peacock "channels" that will carry pre-programmed linear content aligned under certain themes (such as Saturday Night Live, NBC News, and Unsolved Mysteries); the high volume of familiar shows and movies; and the automatic playing of content upon opening the service, much like turning on the tube.
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Although Peacock has reportedly locked in several 18-month advertising commitments, analysts and investors doubtlessly await clues on company plans and expectations in the April 30th first-quarter earnings call. But it may be difficult to find them. Since Peacock is not its own company, its performance will not be broken out in financial reports. And, as with many streaming providers, the numerous subsidies that boost subscriber numbers mean not every figure can be taken at face value.
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"Because Comcast subscribers will get it for free, pure subscription figures won't tell the entire story," said Benes. "The more pertinent behavior to look at is whether people are actually spending time watching it."
</p><p>---</p><p><em>Sam Blake covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Find him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA </em><br/></p>
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