Los Angeles Times

It’s a small price to pay for a company with more than $32 billion in cash and marketable securities — compared with about $1.2 billion for Netflix — to establish itself as a prime destination in the new age of TV, analysts say.

“Facebook’s business model has been built around driving users to access Facebook multiple times per day,” said Brett Sappington, director of research of consulting firm Parks Associates.

Nearly every time they come, users see ads — and each vide ...read more

Twitter is looking for ways to grow its video services and garner more video advertising dollars. It sees live news as a natural focus. In an internal document obtained by Bloomberg last year, Twitter co-founder and Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said he wanted his company to be “the people’s news network.”

About 29% of consumers say they get most of their news from social media, according to Parks Associates.

From the article "Twitter teams up with Bloomberg on 24/7 stream ...read more

The number of connected households that have smart thermostats more than doubled in the past two years, according to market research firm Parks Associates. With 36 percent of broadband-using households interested in a system that manages and monitors their home energy use, Parks Associates predict that half of all American homes will be smart homes by 2020.

Energy consumption starts with the overall heating and cooling equipment; thermostat watts are just a small portion of ...read more

Even if he is ultimately successful, O’Reilly probably will find that his podcast audience will be a fraction of the size of the crowd that faithfully tuned into “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News, which this year had been averaging about 4 million viewers an episode, according to Nielsen.

“As we saw with the failure of the Sarah Palin Channel, personality alone will not drive adoption,” said Glenn Hower, senior research analyst of the Dallas media consulting firm Parks Assoc ...read more

Amazon is estimated to be investing more than $3 billion in original content for shows like “The Man in the High Castle.” But even after it paid $970 million in 2014 to buy Twitch, a streaming video service popular among gamers, it has yet to make live content a key feature on its own service.

“This is Amazon taking the opportunity to show that it can broadcast live events at scale,” said Glenn Hower, an analyst for Parks Associates. “Amazon may see this as an investment, a ...read more

Surveys by consulting firm Parks Associates found that many people who signed up for Prime Video's free 30-day trial were not converting to subscribers.

About 34% of people surveyed by Parks Associates said they canceled their Prime Video service because their free trial expired. By comparison, about 19% of respondents said they canceled Hulu and Netflix subscriptions because their free trial expired.

From the article "Amazon Opens Prime Video To Monthly Memberships In A ...read more

Yahoo still commands a huge audience. Nearly 1 billion people visit a Yahoo website every month.

While content is a risky business, analysts believe it's a way to keep customers engaged.

"Verizon is looking to the future," said Brett Sappington, director of research of consulting firm Parks Associates. "It's about being able to create an audience, and increasingly that audience is going to mobile and moving away from traditional forms of media."

From the article "Thr ...read more

More than half of all U.S. households with broadband subscribe to Netflix, according to Parks Associates. Competitors such as Amazon video are in a quarter of broadband households and Hulu is in about 15%.

"We're at a point where there's so much video traffic going across the Internet," said Glenn Hower, a research analyst for Parks Associates. "It's constantly taxing the networks and at some point, someone's going to have to figure it out, whether it's paying to upgrade it ...read more