With AT&T (WarnerMedia) ramping up the buzz for the 2020 launch of its HBO Max OTT spin-off service, the equities research team at UBS created a nifty chart for organizing the relative positioning and price vs. ad market models of the major SVOD and AVOD services to date. Like HBO Now, HBO Max clearly is going after the ultra premium part of the marketplace and for the broadest possible subscriber base.

Time spent by the average American with digital media continues to climb, mostly as a result of increased access via mobile devices, according to a compendium of digital media usage stats released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau as part of a stage-setter for the simultaneous release of its first half Internet Advertising Report.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands may seem to come out of nowhere for many of the establishment brands they compete with, but new data from media tracker MediaRadar indicates they're also creating incredible volatility and disruption among themselves. Four of the top 10 D2C brands -- DoorDash, Poshmark, Touch of Modern, and Third Love -- in its most recent report, representing D2C brand spending during the second quarter of 2019, weren't in the ranking last year.

Adding out-of-home media to a campaign's mix boosts weekly audience reach by as much as 100% or more depending on the medium, according to a study being released Monday by the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America. The study, which was conducted by MRI-Simmons and included results from its massive Winter 2019 National Consumer Study, as well as a custom online study of 2,400 respondents, found modest incremental audience reach from adding out-of-home to ubiquitous media such as mobile to more than doubling the reach of newspapers.

The amount of violence and profanity present in "youth-rated" TV shows airing on broadcast TV networks during prime time has substantially increased over the past decade, according to the latest edition of an ongoing tracking study released today by advocacy group Parents Television Council. The research, which analyzed all TV-PG rated programming airing during major Nielsen ratings sweeps periods, found an average of 28% more violence and 44% more profanity present during the 2017-18 season vs. the 2007-08 seasons.

In light of TiVo's launch today of an ad-supported streaming service, Research Intelligencer is republishing a study conducted by OpenX and The Harris Poll examining U.S. OTT consumers, including their elasticity for various business models. The study not surprisingly found that many OTT consumers prefer SVOD services that contain no advertising, but the majority (54%) actually prefer ad-supported models, depending on the price point of the service.

Amazon continues to expand its share of the search advertising market, taking in nearly 13 cents of every dollar spent by search marketers in the U.S. this year, according to an updated forecast released today by eMarketer. "The U.S. search ad market overall will grow nearly 18% this year to reach $55.17 billion," eMarketer's statmasters write in the report, adding, "Google will obtain a 73.1% share, translating to $40.33 billion. But, while Google will remain the dominant player for the next several years, its share is dropping. By 2021, it will capture 70.5% of the market."

With so many program choices available during this current era of "peak TV," it often takes viewers longer than ever to even become aware of a new show, much less start watching it. While this increasingly is a big problem for ad-supported linear TV networks, the hit machine for streaming services functions very differently. In this week's edition, I analyze how viewers discover the next-new-OTT-thing, and what that portends for its most dominant player, Netflix.

Consumer concerns about their personal information falling into the wrong hands has increased dramatically over the past several years, especially in the U.S., and particularly among the youngest Americans. That's one of the key findings of a global survey of consumers conducted by GfK as part of its "Consumer Life Insights" study. Globally, personal data concerns climbed to 12th place this year from 13th place in 2016, the last time the study was conducted.

While live-plus-same day and/or live-plus-seven days of time-shifted viewing are the coin of network TV's advertising realm, Nielsen has published an analysis making the case for much longer windows of playback viewing -- upwards of 35 days.