This week is shaping up to be an important one for the world of streaming video as two services launch, each seeking to chart a new course for live sports.

HQ, which until this point has not had ads or sponsors, last week turned on the advertising spigot. Just as the show tries to turn an app into a nightly event, the company's monetization strategy is similarly event-driven.

Under the terms of the agreement, TiVo's linear TV viewership data-which includes more than two million households-will now be available in Tru Optik's OTT Marketing Cloud platform.

Last week the rapper Drake logged on to the Amazon-owned videogame streaming site Twitch to play "Fortnite" with one of the platform's most-popular gamers, a man named Ninja. The duo drew viewership that many cable channels might well envy, with 628,000 concurrent viewers. The surprise gaming session was also a proof of concept: with viewership heavily focused on hard-to-reach young male consumers, esports is a prime opportunity for content creators and marketers.

Sling has tapped The Martin Agency as agency of record, leading marketing strategy, creative development and production efforts for the streaming service.

It's still early in the game, but the company's potential in the video business is becoming clearer every day. While Netflix is focused on on-demand entertainment content, and Facebook and Snapchat prioritize both slickly produced evergreen and amateur content, Twitter has focused its video ambitions on live, premium video. "Live" is the key word here.

Among the few ubiquitous TV show formats is the home renovation genre, which helped define HGTV, and is now commonplace on a slew of traditional cable channels like DIY Network and FYI. So it was surprising to Candis and Andy Meredith-who hosted the series "Old Home Love" for HGTV and DIY Network-when they discovered that the genre was largely absent on digital and social platforms.

Four years ago, the WWE wrestling league launched a curious new product: WWE Network. The network was streamed over-the-top to consumers, featuring all the company's pay-per-view events live. It was a bold move, and a disruptive one.

The company, which now has more than 17 million subscribers in the U.S., lost approximately $920 million last year, according to SEC filings from its owners, and received $1 billion in investments from its corporate parents. Both of those numbers were up significantly from 2016, when the company received $733 million, and lost $531 million.

The study, which was conducted by the media research group Kagan (owned by S&P Global Market Intelligence), found that 85% of executives surveyed from OTT providers, pay-TV providers, content owners and advertisers said that third-party data will be an important driver of the OTT ad market.