Rebecca Day

YouTube’s announcement last week that it will cap the number of times viewers see an ad on YouTube and third-party networks addresses repetitive ads, “a well-known problem that has plagued the advertising industry for years,” said eMarketer analyst Jeremy Goldman Monday.

Though custom integrators remain busy, their customers are “becoming more cautious,” Snap One CEO John Heyman said on the company’s Wednesday Q3 earnings call. Residential integrators' “discerning end buyers” tend to be more insulated from economic downturns and inflationary cost pressure, he said, but “we are starting to observe some changes in their buying behavior, such as project descoping, project delays and product trade downs to manage the overall cost of an installation,” he said.

Vizio Chief Technology Officer Adam Townsend cited “a general conservatism” in the market, on a Wednesday earnings call, referencing “pockets of uncertainty out there.” Vizio’s Q4 projections for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were below analysts’ expectations at $15 million to $19 million, compared with adjusted EBITDA of $16.7 million in Q3.

Bowers & Wilkins and Marantz are “holding up well” in a challenging macroeconomic environment, said Masimo CEO Joe Kiani on the medical device company’s Q3 earnings call Tuesday.

Livestreaming is a highly desired offering in over-the-top video, but numerous complications stand in the way of providers risking the effort to successfully deliver real-time events, said presenters on a Wednesday Stream TV session on livestreaming at scale.

Streaming media companies are “fighting for the TV screen” against social media video, said Darren Olive, Crackle Plus executive vice president-advertising sales and partnerships, on a Tuesday StreamTV World webcast. In eyeball share and attention share, “social media video certainly is grabbing and keeping a lot of the younger audiences,” Olive said, citing his own household where teenagers watch their phone concurrently with TV, if they’re watching TV at all.

Some 190 products have received Matter certification or are in the queue for testing and certification, said the Connectivity Standards Alliance on a Thursday launch webcast from Amsterdam. CSA CEO Tobin Richardson called the event a “major inflection point” for the nascent standard, which promises to bring setup simplicity to the smart home, along with the ability to mix and match products from different ecosystems.

Semiconductor supply shortages remain, though there are some improvements, said Universal Electronics Inc. CEO Paul Arling on the company’s Thursday Q3 earnings call. “The semiconductor shortage problem is not going to just go from a big issue to the next quarter completely resolved,” Arling said.

Despite reports of sluggish Q4 advertising in the streaming world, FuboTV remains optimistic, management said on the virtual MVPD’s Q3 earnings call Friday. Ad revenue grew 21% year on year in Q3 to $22.5 million. Some 94% of Fubo content was viewed on a big-screen connected TV in Q3, and 88% of viewing was live content, said the shareholder letter: “This represents a highly engaged audience that advertisers will pay a premium to reach.”

The National Retail Federation forecast 6%-8% sales growth for the Nov. 1-Dec. 31 holiday shopping season, to a total $942.6 billion-$960.4 billion in stores and online. Last year, retail sales -- excluding autos, gasoline and restaurants -- grew 13.5% vs. 2020 to a record $889.3 billion, NRF said.