streaming – Jason Toney

April 7, 2025 / 0 Comments

Your Event Has Ended

The South Carolina Gamecocks had just defeated the Texas Longhorns in the first Women’s Final Four game on Friday night. After Holly Rowe completed her post-game interviews, Ryan Ruocco announced that we would be sent to the post-game show with Elle Duncan, Andraya Carter, and Chiney Ogwumike for about 30 minutes while the UCONN Huskies and UCLA Bruins warmed up for the day’s closing semifinal. Instead of smoothly transitioning to that broadcast, which was delivered via the same linear feed, the ESPN app displayed a static image:

There was no on-screen promo pushing me to the next best program, no transition to the next game, and no reduction of the viewing window to show the homepage or a tile pack of suggested titles. As a long-time subscriber of ESPN+ and a user of the ESPN app, I found this experience frustrating. One can only imagine how a new subscriber, attracted to the platform for the first time by the NCAAW tournament, might feel.

I’m not picking on the Worldwide Leader, however. Every Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) service struggles with transitioning from live events to on-demand content.

In recent weeks, I’ve pondered the new sports subscriber experience. I’ve had discussions about a project to understand how to engage new customers of a premium streaming service who signed up during a major sporting event. I proposed a study exploring viewer appetite, interests, and behavioral patterns. This research could inform programming, promotional tactics, and merchandising. My goal was to identify and establish optimal routines for exploration, content diversity, and frequency that could be introduced before these likely single-purpose users canceled or became inactive.

 We weren’t on the same page.

“I want to know what they’ll want to watch three months later,” the potential client said.

“You won’t have the opportunity,” I replied.

Netflix might have the “champagne problem” of considering future viewing patterns for new subscribers gained from live events. According to Antenna, although they are relatively new to the live sports arena, its one-month retention for new subscribers from the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul fight night was better than the industry standard. Most of their competition, however, isn’t as fortunate. If your service has not encouraged sports subscribers to sample anything beyond the games or leagues they initially signed up for by the time that event concludes, your chances of re-engaging them later are slim.

These subscribers will likely cancel or disengage from your platform until the next season or event. You might win them back when the event returns, but trying to predict their consumption habits three months later without laying the groundwork during the initial onboarding is unrealistic.

Back to March Madness. ESPN provides at least four different ways to watch the Final Four games. You would only discover this by exploring the app. There was promotion for the Taurasi & Bird alt-cast during event programming and on socials, but not for the other options. I noticed fans on Threads wishing they could watch the game without commentary, just statistics. There was a feed for that, but they didn’t know where to find it, even while watching the game in one of the Disney-owned apps. ESPN never promoted their ongoing shoulder content on other channels after the games ended. ESPN frequently failed to recommend their women’s basketball programming library throughout the season.

No, most frequently, I get “Your Event Has Ended” or “Your Event Will Return Shortly” (and by shortly, they mean 10-15 minutes).

Linear live events pose challenges, but doing nothing shouldn’t be an option.

Do you have an “always-on” channel to transition viewers? What hinders smart switching from one live event to another relevant program in progress? Can you tease clickable alternate programming during events, especially during downtime? Would running house ads instead of the end card be feasible? Could you limit the time of end cards and eventually close the video window, redirecting viewers back to the homepage or displaying recommendations?

A static image or, worse, a complete blackout at the end of the program will not entice most users to continue watching.

You must train your audience to navigate your app and discover its complementary content.

Sports subscribers intentionally come for their favorite sport, team, or a specific game/match/event they find significant. Once that need is satisfied, it’s easy for them to unsubscribe. This is why every broadcast network uses sports to promote its other programming, and the Super Bowl often transitions directly into a show that is expected to appeal to the largest audience.

SVODs continue to neglect this issue at their own risk.

“Your Event Has Ended.”

Yup, and so could my subscription.

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore.

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time.

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here.

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash

October 1, 2024 / 0 Comments

Thank You, Paramount

A bit of a stream-of-consciousness gratitude list.

Shana Krochmal DM’ed me on Twitter. She was hiring for a managing editor position for ETonline, and though we had never met before, we had mutual friends, and she found my takes on pop culture thoughtful. I told her that while I could do that job, I had become enamored with data in digital media and thought I might be better suited for Audience Development. She walked me down to meet JD Crowley, and four months later, I started doing precisely that with CBS Television Distribution.

Being in New York or LA with Nina Mehta and Brian Moreno and feeling like co-conspirators as we plotted how to bring brands like Inside Edition, Dr. Phil, and The Rachael Ray Show even further into the digital age.

Cash Me Outside. The Royal Wedding. Backpack Kid.

So. Many. YouTube. Shows.

Relaunching StarTrek.com.

Going up to San Francisco to meet with Ladan Nafissi and the CNET Business Intelligence team for the first time. I joined them at an offsite where I worked with a group of analysts I didn’t know to develop data-driven pitches for the strategic direction of TVGuide.com, which we presented to Matt McMahon, the GM of that property at the time. I was shocked when my team’s pitch won.

ET Live was launching, and I felt out of my depth. I requested a meeting with Nathalie Bordes that lasted only ten minutes, but I could sense that she might change the trajectory of my career.

She did.

Hiring Joaquin Delgado. And then Jennifer Park. Eventually, I took over the CBS All Access BI team and grew a team of six analysts to over thirty at our largest. Kristen Silvestre, Naren Duraisaimy, Ashish Birajdar, and Nick Denaro would come together to be one of the most talented groups of managers I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

Working with Nat, Grace Mclean, Keric Donnelly, and Mitch Zayas in Ft. Lauderdale or NYC planning sessions to determine the direction of the Data and Insights Group.

Launch day of Paramount+ on March 4th, 2021. Returning to the office hadn’t happened yet, and, for the first time, I was participating in a major product launch from my at-home desk, looking out into the dark, waiting for the sun to come up and those SpongeBob SquarePants marquees to go live.

Why Women Kill. Disco. Lower Decks. Mayor of Kingstown. 1883. Strange New Worlds. Two Super Bowls.

The Subscription Analytics Continuum, SLAM, SLAM 2.0, SLAM 3.0, DVAAs (now DVoS), Audience Segmentation, PEARL, LTV, the product KPI Framework, and the Pricing and Marketing Offer Scenario Framework.

Amazon QBRs. 10 All Access Monthlies. Quarterly Performance. Weekly Highlights.

Dashboards. Dashboards. Dashboards.

Grateful for the memories. The experiences. The lessons learned. And, of course, the people.

Thank you.