Michael Healey

The Open Capacity Marketplace is a very exciting development in the streaming space. Built on the SVTA Open Caching specs, IETF CDNi work, and other open-source primitives (like TreeDN and blockchain), the marketplace proposes to make it easier to find and select capacity in a more frictionless manner. What's cool is that Blockcast and Vecima Networks Inc., one of the OCM founding members, will be giving a live demo at IBC 2025 on Saturday, September 13th at 4:30pm at the Vecima booth (1.B15). If you are at IBC and want to understand more, this is a great opportunity to see the marketplace in action and have discussions with Blockcast, Vecima, and other attendees about how such a marketplace can really benefit the entire industry.

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A few takeaways from Connected TV World Summit: The industry is "consolidating while audiences fragment," and operators are doubling down on QoS, partnerships, and live sports to stay competitive. The "set-top box isn’t dead yet", even as younger viewers shift to apps and AI drives up chipset costs. Meanwhile, sports piracy (>$30B annually) is surging and increasingly linked to organised crime — making solutions like EZDRM’s Precision Envelope Management (PEM), with DRM-agnostic dynamic key rotation, more important than ever. DM me to schedule a conversation to learn more. #CTVWS26 #ConnectedTVWorldSummit #DRM #DRMaaS #Piracy

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Game on. Sports video creation just got the AI Treatment. Minute Media, powerhouse behind sites like Sports Illustrated and The Players’ Tribune, just closed its biggest deal ever, acquiring VideoVerse, the AI engine behind Magnifi. Magnifi’s AI, built on computer vision, NLP, and machine learning, instantly turns games into short-form video gold: think multilingual subtitles, auto thumbnails, metadata, and digestible clips. It’s basically automatic highlights at scale. Minute Media is also integrating creation, distribution, and monetization, powering everything from league rights holders to publisher partners around the globe. And with Magnifi, Minute Media is enhancing its STN Video platform, making it faster to launch TikTok-style highlight reels, hyper-personalized by team, player, or fan behavior. Yes, Minute Media is positioning themselves as a platform operator and not just a storyteller. Distribution + monetization across 1,000+ sites and millions of fans. Platforms that own the tech, the content, and the flywheel will own the audience and their wallets. Huge move by Minute Media, a laser focus on owning video’s value stream without the fluff. #SportsMedia #AIinVideo #MinuteMedia #VideoTech #StreamingStrategy #ContentTech https://lnkd.in/gCxs284i

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Mediation is critical for publishers to maximize yield, streamline ad delivery, and ensure premium viewing experiences. Magnite's SpringServe brings mediation to the forefront by unifying demand, data, and decisioning to power the next era of streaming. Read more here: https://magnite.smh.re/1a0

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Most podcasters ignore MP3 filenames. That is a mistake. Your MP3 filename becomes part of your public URL. Once it is in your RSS feed, it is permanent. If you publish: Episode 12 FINAL v3 (new mix).mp3 That name is now baked into your feed, cached by apps, and distributed everywhere. Rename it later and you risk broken downloads. Best practice is simple: Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only. Example: myshow-episode-012.mp3 No spaces. No special characters. No version labels. And do not rename files after publishing unless you fully understand redirects. I have seen show migrations get messy fast because of inconsistent file naming across hundreds of episodes. This is a small detail. It becomes a big one later. I deal with podcast feeds and migrations every day. Clean filenames save real support time. Your MP3 filename is infrastructure. Treat it that way. Facebook Version. Shorter. Straight talk. Podcast tip that prevents future headaches. Your MP3 filename becomes part of your permanent public URL. If you upload something like: Episode 5 FINAL NEW FIXED.mp3 That exact name goes into your RSS feed. Apps cache it. If you rename it later, downloads can fail. Keep it simple: lowercase hyphens numbers no spaces no special characters Example: myshow-episode-005.mp3 Set the pattern on episode one and never rename published files. I work with podcast feeds every day. This small detail prevents a lot of unnecessary problems later.

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Walmart+ is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a bold move 📺 Starting September 15, members can switch between ad-supported plans of NBCUniversal Peacock Premium (a net-new streaming partnership) and Paramount+ Essential, every 90 days at no extra cost. This new streaming perk is more than just entertainment. It’s a strategic play to deepen consumer while unlocking richer insights for brands. Curious how this shift impacts Walmart’s retail media ecosystem and what it means for brands? Watch the full video with Flywheel's Bernie Che below ⏬ #Walmart #STV #StreamingTV #retailmedia

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Roku & AI: The Quiet Disruptor Hollywood Isn’t Watching Closely Enough! Hollywood remains fixated on: Netflix, Disney, WBD, Paramount, Amazon. That's understandable, those companies dominate the headlines, the awards conversation, and the subscriber wars. Yet, Roku has just posted results that should make the industry take notice, because it is scaling quietly in the background with a very different business model. Roku reported: - 2025 net revenue of $4.737bn (+15% YoY). - Platform revenue of $4.145bn (+18% YoY). - Net income of $88m, compared with a net loss of ($129m) in 2024. - 145.6bn streaming hours (+15% YoY). In a market where attention is the currency, those are serious numbers. The real story, however, is the forward trajectory. For 2026, Roku is forecasting $5.5bn total net revenue, platform revenue of $4.89bn, and continued platform growth at roughly 18% YoY. In the current media market that's exceptional. This matters because, Roku is not a studio, or a prestige content machine, and isn't competing on “best originals” in the Netflix sense. Roku is a platform company, built around one core factor, scale. This is where Roku’s earnings call messaging becomes more disruptive. Roku has been increasingly explicit about where it sees future leverage coming from, AI. Not AI as a novelty, or to improve workflows, but as an economic tool, accelerating efficiency, lowering friction, and scaling output across advertising and content ecosystems. That should be a flashing red light for the production supply chain, because the disruption is not simply “AI will create quality content more cheaply,” but on the basis that, AI makes cheap content viable. Not “high-quality content at lower cost.” Cheap content, period. Disposable content, fast-turnaround programming produced at volume, refreshed constantly, tested endlessly, and optimised for engagement. If the economics work, the incentives shift. The risk for writers, crew, and producers is not only that budgets shrink. The bigger risk is that the market becomes flooded with content designed to be efficient rather than meaningful. At that point, the competitive battlefield stops being creative excellence, and becomes purely industrial output. The question is what's the source material, and is it litigation-proof? Netflix disrupts studios through premium scale. Roku may disrupt the entire ecosystem through volume economics. Netflix still needs great content, whereas Roku simply needs more content, and AI is the tool that makes “more” possible, at scale. #Roku #AI #Streaming #Hollywood #FilmProduction #TVProduction #CTV #FAST #Media #Advertising #ContentStrategy #GenAI #FutureOfMedia

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Thrilled to announce NCM’s new partnership with TransUnion, bringing cinema exposure data into cross-channel attribution for the first time. This unlocks measurable outcomes, clearer performance insights and real proof of how the big screen drives results across the full media mix. Today’s marketers need clarity, accountability and innovation. NCM is meeting that challenge head on by redefining cinema as a modern, data-driven channel that delivers both brand impact and measurable performance. #DemocratizingCinemaData https://lnkd.in/eQuBshHe

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Culture Happens on Roku. In the digital age, cultural moments drive search behaviors. And CTV is no exception. Here are two recent examples of how Roku consumers responded to major TV events: Late Night Shakeup Creates Search Surge 📈🌙 - In the week following The Late Show’s cancellation, searches for all late-night talk shows grew by +122%. - Searches for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in particular grew by +172% day-over-day once the news was acknowledged on the program, and searches for The Daily Show grew by +95% over the same period. South Park Makes Waves🏅🔥 - Following South Park’s much-talked-about season premiere, it was the top-searched TV series on Roku last week (unseating perennial search leader Bluey!) and the fastest-growing searched title by far. #RokuInsights #StreamingInsights #TelevisionTrends #LateShow #SouthPark

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The premium video space (led by CTV) is hot and unsurprisingly, so is the competition for adspend. It’s the reason Dominic Finney and I decided to conduct a snapshot survey on the market from the buy-side. Because that’s where the rubber hits the road. I know from experience that it’s too easy to get caught up in your own bubble and build tech products and services that are not aligned with the market. A bit like buying a new car and before you know it all the optional extras boxes have been ticked and the costs and timelines have gone crazy. At Unruly we built an analytics product – leadership loved it, but it generated £0 revenue. And it took up a big chunk of time, resources and investment before we called it a day. Getting the ground truth on the market is incredibly valuable but more challenging today than ever as the access to decision makers has become harder for a number of factors. This means it’s too easy to go to our trusted industry friends who generally soft ball us. Good for the ego – bad for market fit. What came out of our recent research is that there’s a gap between the sell-side and the buy-side. Opportunity but also risk. We’re going rerun the study again in September because it’s important and we have no doubt that AI will have an impact on some of the challenges raised and lastly, because the market overall is moving so fast. The survey was just a snapshot – there are other questions we’d have liked to ask and as we’ve discussed the results with the industry plenty more have bubbled up. With the market moving at such a frenetic pace we expect there will also be things we might miss and that means we’re looking for input from you to make sure the next report does an even better job of representing where the market really is and where it’s going. In short, we want the hard truth. #video, #YouTube, #CTV

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Huge thanks to Beet.TV for hosting me and to Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan for the fun and insightful conversation! 🙌 In our chat, I talked about how contextual targeting is finally gaining real traction in CTV — because viewers choose what they watch and advertisers are now prioritizing relevance over identifiers in a privacy-first world. 👉 “In normal consumption of CTV, viewers are selecting the shows they’re passionate about — and it’s no secret that buyers prefer to target that way as well.” Check out the full video — thanks again to the Beet team! 🎥

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The conventional wisdom in the streaming TV industry - especially among the journalists covering it - is that it is nearly impossible to quantify who is watching shows and why. I recently spoke with Ron Cohen, SVP of Practice Leadership at Claritas LLC and Mike Bloxham, EVP of Global Media and Entertainment at Magid about their new SubScape Streaming Segments partnership and I learned that in this case, conventional wisdom is very, very wrong. https://lnkd.in/guARTrTD

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In this week's column, I ask again if we in the TV industry are focused on transforming our core business. As I wrote previously, initiatives like datacasting are real and will provide meaningful revenue opportunities to transform how revenue is generated from broadcast spectrum. However, what about our core business? Creating and airing content that connects audiences with advertisers. Will streaming content on FAST services and apps transform the business? What about the audiences who are still viewing content on linear TV? Will these audiences still be of interest to advertisers? Shouldn't we be advancing the technology to ensure 100% of our audiences can drive the greatest value for broadcasters and advertisers? https://lnkd.in/gfMy6Cuh

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I spoke with Rachel (Eisenberg) Gantz from Comscore, Inc. about their new Certified Deal ID, why it's necessary to bring order to the chaos that programmatic often becomes, why they chose Magnite as their launch partner and what's next as the Certified Deal ID gains wider adoption. You'll note the word "quality" keeps coming up again and again around CTV advertising, as buyers look to maximize their ad spend and the industry realizes that not all impressions are created equal. That said, it is worth remembering that quality is in the eye of the beholder, that some impressions may qualify as quality impressions for some brands and not for others. Which is why having standards is so important. Read on! https://lnkd.in/eagkiHAF

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In my opinion, the biggest problem in CTV isn’t fragmentation. It’s pretending fragmentation can be fixed. In the words of expert Mike Shields, TV advertising is a “web of walled gardens” and that data fragmentation now directly impacts ad dollars. At CES, a panel suggested the fix would be a single, universal CTV identifier for everyone to plug their data into. Sounds elegant, but that’s never going to happen. Data is the moat. Every major platform invests heavily in proprietary identity, measurement, and optimization. No one will walk away from that, especially in markets where scale and margin matter. Fragmentation isn’t the problem. Unusable data is. So how do we work with what we have now? For example, in Latin America: ✔️ Our markets are still driven by the healthy reach of TV, while CTV, FAST, AVOD, and social video scale unevenly by country. Advertisers operate with constrained budgets and high pressure to prove outcomes. They don’t want more dashboards, more IDs, or more complexity. They want proven performance. ✔️ We need to shift the conversation. Data needs consistency, not one universal identifier to unlock value. It needs outcome-based KPIs across linear, CTV, digital, and social video. Interoperability versus uniformity. ✔️ For ad sales teams, interoperability presents a massive opportunity. The winners in LATAM will be those who deliver simple solutions to advertisers: clean data in simple layers, and using AI to plan, optimize, and measure across ecosystems. With less friction, dollars move faster. ✔️ The same applies to creators. Creator-led content increasingly lives across social, FAST, and CTV environments. The value we bring is understanding how creators drive reach, engagement, and conversion across the full video stack. AI can do that, but only if we start focusing on usable signals at scale. ✔️ For content owners and broadcasters in LATAM, this is a moment to lead. We sit at the center of premium IP, local storytelling, creators, and mass reach. We can’t wait for the market to standardize itself. That will never happen. We need to build intelligence above the walled gardens, simplifying activation for advertisers, and proving outcomes across platforms. Thoughts?

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The future of CTV is creative—but it needs structure to scale. I had the chance to speak with David Kaplan from Beet.tv at the Omnicom Leadership Summit about what I see as the next major unlock for our industry - standardization. We’ve seen this before—early digital advertising couldn’t scale until we aligned on formats. We’re now at a similar inflection point in streaming. Non-standard ad experiences are full of potential, but inconsistent specs and execution are holding back real progress. At Index Exchange, we’re proud to be working with the IAB and others to help define the next generation of ad formats—formats that don’t limit creativity, but enable it at scale. Check out my full interview here: https://lnkd.in/ePVvyufD

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One (good) thing that AI might spur is creation of MORE news, broadening the definition of “news”. News has become very narcissistic and obsessed with stories that grab attention (clickbait), to the detriment of coverage of items like what is discussed at town council meetings, how many potholes are out there - or what is going on in the rest of the world. A handful of topics dominate to the exclusion of all else…politics chief among them. This is also where opinions, narratives and polarization come into play. But a lot of what we could call “news”, information relevant to various people, is data-driven. It lends itself to discovery (just the facts), analysis and exposition, sans opinions, by automated AI agents. Coverage of a myriad of ignored but relevant niches that are not commercially viable on a standalone basis, but possibly now will be in aggregate. #AI #journalism #news

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The Streaming Wars just dropped its Top 10 articles of 2025, the pieces that shaped conversations across media, streaming, and advertising. These were the articles execs forwarded, teams debated, and leadership adjusted strategy around. If you want a clear snapshot of what mattered in the streaming business this year, link's live! TL;DR 1. Attention has already moved. 2. Clarity beats scale right now. 3. Infrastructure matters more than storytelling alone.

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