Online video 'eroding TV viewing'

(from BBC News, published Monday 27/11)

Video sharing site YouTube has taken online viewing to the masses

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

And online and mobile viewing is rising - three quarters of users said they now watched more than they did a year ago.

But online video viewers are still in the minority, with just 9% of the population saying they do it regularly.

Another 13% said they watched occasionally, while a further 10% said they expected to start in the coming year.

But two-thirds of the population said they did not watch online and could not envisage starting in the next 12 months.

The success of sites such as YouTube over the past year has helped open the door for those who want easy ways to find, watch and share videos over the internet.

The UK is not yet as advanced as the US, where hit TV shows are routinely available from networks' websites and services like iTunes.

But it is catching up, with the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all planning to offer most of their shows on demand on the internet from the end of this year or the start of 2007.

In the survey, one in five people who watched online or mobile video at least once a week said they watched a lot less TV as a result. Another 23% said they watched a bit less, while just over half said their TV viewing was unchanged. Some 3% said online video inspired them to watch more TV.

Online and mobile video is far more popular among the young, with 28% of those aged 16-24 saying they watched more than once each week.

An average of 10% aged 25-44 were net video regulars, with that figure falling to just 4% of over-45s.

Earlier this year, media regulator Ofcom said the number of 16 to 24-year-olds watching TV in an average day had dropped 2.9% between 2003 and 2005.

Comedian Ricky Gervais, whose audio and video podcasts have become hits on the web, said amateur video would never replace TV - but broadcasters would harness the power of the internet.

"You can't knock up an episode of The Sopranos or 24 on a little handheld digital camera," he told the BBC News website.

"I don't think you'll ever be able to sidestep TV or DVD. But TV companies will embrace it."

The choice offered by new platforms was "exciting", he said, and any future developments depended on how many people started using the technology.

"I'm sure when the BBC first launched, they were going: 'Ah, not many people have got tellies. Who's watching this?'

"So it's good to get your act together. And then people catch up with the know-how and the means to watch it."

The first award ceremony for web-only video, the Vloggies, was held in San Francisco at the start of November.

Alive in Baghdad, a site featuring videos of real Iraqis telling their own stories, won the top award.

ICM interviewed a random sample of 1,008 adults aged 18+ recruited from the ICM online panel between 17-19 November. They also interviewed a random sample of 1,062 people aged 16+ by telephone.

Panellists were recruited from across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

CBS enhances TV ratings by measuring YouTube audience

CBS issued a release today with some of its YouTube clips viewing numbers, which while heartening in some of the numbers it portrays, is what I call “reductive speculation”. The way the release is structured it is meant to imply that since CBS clips officially went onto YouTube, the “Late Show with David Letterman” has added 200,000 (+5%) new viewers while “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” is up 100,000 viewers (+7%). Right.

Anyway, the news part in there: CBS clips are doing well on YouTube...it has uploaded
more than 300 clips that averaged about 850,000 views per day in the first month. About 20,000 users subscribing to CBS programming on YouTube since the channel launch last month. Good to hear and let’s just stick to that for now...

(posted on Paidcontent.org)

Watch video from CBS on how to get sponsored on YouTube by clicking the video below:

EMI admits apprehension over YouTube

EMI has revealed it will not rush into a deal with YouTube without ensuring proper copyright protection, following comments by EMI executives at yesterday’s financial presentation.

The company famously held back from striking a deal with YouTube before it was snapped up by Google for $1.6bn last month, even though Warners and Universal secured deals.

Industry speculators have since suggested EMI’s cautionary stance is a negotiating tactic to ensure a deal similar to Universal’s, which gives it a 1% share in YouTube’s equity and a payment of around eight-tenths of a cent every time a Universal song is played on the site.

Blinkx signs with Infospace

Binkx has signed a deal with Infospace that will see the video search service be used on Infospace sites, starting with recently launched Webfetchpro. The deal, which comes a month after Blinkx partnered with MSN to power some parts of its Live.com site, shows the importance that video is now playing in the sharing of information online.

Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx co-founder, comments:
"What we're going to see on the web now is this elevation of video search...
alongside the other main search verticals like 'web', 'news' and 'images'," said Chandratillake.

We may also ponder whether Blinkx's business model is increasingly to sell video search technology to sites rather than being an aggreagator itself:

Dominic Trigg, Infospace VP, confirmed that the partnership has come about through Blinkx's expertise in the video market: "The case with us is that we've always gone out and got best of breed, rather than going with whatever technology might work best," said Trigg. "This is a massively growing market and we understand the importance it's playing not just in entertainment, but access to news and current affairs as well."

Infospace has also announced that it's signed a deal to power search for the London Stock Exchange website over the next two years.

We watch this development with great interest. There will increasingly be need for powerful search mechanisms that are more sophisticated than the text metadata search function that most video sites uses today, especially as more and more rich data goes online... So, when will Google buy BlinkX? Or will Google launch a more sophisitcated video search developed inhouse? Let's see shall we...

YouTube in sports content deal?

YouTube Cuts First Major Sports Deal; Will Launch NHL Channel; Glimpse Of New Google Video Strategy?

From PaidContent.org

Posted by Staci D. Kramer
Wed 15 Nov 2006 11:29 AM

The NHL, still striving to overcome the labor dispute that shut down the league for the 2004-05 season, already has online deals in place with Yahoo, Comcast and Google. Now the league is hooking up with Google subsidiary YouTube to create a new channel on the video-sharing site, according to the SportsBusiness Journal. The league will provide game highlights and behind-the-scene video; YouTube will put the clips on a dedicated NHL channel supplemented with user-uploaded video. As has been the case with other YouTube content deals, the NHL will be able to remove copyright-breaching content from the site or can leave it and share in the revenue. (That particular form of sharing doesn’t include the user as best I can tell.) YouTube says more league deals are in the works.

In a way, this deal combined with the recent Google Video-NHL agreement displays what could be seen as Google’s new video strategy: the NHL offers downloads for pay at Google Video, clips to share at YouTube. The sites could cross promote the offerings easily—for instance, tell people who download a game video at Google to click on this YouTube link if they want to share highlights with their friends or tell YouTube highlight viewers the full game is available at Google Video. Whether they will is a different question.

Google audio-ad streaming

Google Radio Ramps Up; Google Audio Ads To Be Tested Publicly This Year

Posted by Staci D. Kramer Tue 07 Nov 2006 07:54 PM
in PaidContent.

Google Audio Ads will get a public test by the end of the year, allowing advertisers to buy radio spots online the same way they currently use Google AdWords for online search, Reuters reports. Earlier this week, Google announced plans to test an auction system for newspaper ads. Google’s radio plans—the public ones, anyway—began with the company’s acquisition last January of dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million cash in an earn-out deal that could cost more than $1.136 billion over three years. Google said then the goal was a new distribution radio ad distribution channel and has spent the intervening months setting that up.

As part of that, Google has been busy hiring a sales force. Google reportedly is paying about 50 percent more than a typical radio sales person might make, an exec from one competitor told Reuters. The same exec said he’s been told Google is on the verge of a $1 billion radio ad inventory deal with Clear Channels. No comment from Google on that. Thinking out loud here a little—if such a deal is in the works, it could be structured similarly to the one that guarantees MySpace $900 million over a period of time.

PodCast with RawFlow CEO Mikkel Dissing

RawFlow recently visited Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica and Streaming Media West in San Jose. While we were there, our CEO and founder Mikkel Dissing met with the PodTech News team and did a podcast discussing peer to peer and how to make the internet into a scalable broadcast medium. Dissing spoke with PodTech's Matt Kelly at Digital Hollywood, an entertainment and technology conference in Santa Monica, Calif., and discussed the benefit of his company's live streaming software.

Download the podcast by right-clicking here and select "save as".

Visit the PodTech site

Brightcove launches Free Internet TV service

From TvOver.Net

The big news today definitely surrounds Brightcove, who has finally launched their new service that allows content owners of all sizes to launch their own Internet TV channels for free and empowers them to generate revenue through advertising and video download sales.

Coinciding with the launch of the Brightcove Network, the company announced the availability of several new services designed to generate revenue and increase distribution for Internet TV channels. To make earning money from commercial content easier, Brightcove launched a new video advertising network and the ability to offer high-quality video downloads for purchase or rental. To help online video programmers reach new audiences, the company introduced the beta of a new consumer destination for discovering and interacting with Internet TV channels. In addition, Brightcove has partnered with AOL to give content owners the option to easily sell their pay-media downloads through the AOL Video portal using Brightcove.

"In the last six months we've seen explosive growth in the online video market, especially in consumer sharing, but this is only the beginning of the Internet TV era," said Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive officer of Brightcove. "Now content producers, from serious amateurs to major studios, are looking for an approach to Internet video that gives them commercial opportunities with their content as well as control over their distribution, and that's exactly what we're delivering with the launch of the Brightcove Network."

The Brightcove Network gives any content owner the ability to build a commercial Internet TV channel, launch it on their site, syndicate it to other web sites, and distribute it on Brightcove.com. The service is free to use. Content owners who use the Brightcove Network give Brightcove the right to sell advertising in their videos, and in turn they receive 50% of the revenue from ads that run in their channels. In addition, content owners can choose to offer video downloads for rental or purchase. They have the option to set any retail price they choose, with a $0.99 minimum, and they earn 70% of the sale price for each transaction.

To expand the revenue and distribution options for Internet TV producers using Brightcove, the company launched several new initiatives that support the Brightcove Network:

* Advertising Network -- Brightcove AdNet, the new Brightcove advertising network, aggregates online audiences across major and niche Internet TV channels giving marketers a more efficient way to reach consumers and offer online video programmers a way to more easily generate advertising revenue.

* Pay-Media Service -- The new pay-media service gives content owners using Brightcove the ability to earn revenue from the sale of online video by offer high-quality video downloads for purchase or rental at prices they determine.

* Syndication Marketplace -- Expanding distribution options for Internet TV channels, the company has introduced the first beta of a new online marketplace for discovering Internet TV channels that are available for syndication to third party web sites.

* AOL Video Distribution -- Content owners using the Brightcove platform will have the ability to distribute their paid video content through the AOL Video portal.

* Consumer Destination -- Finally, the company announced plans to make Brightcove.com a consumer destination for discovering and interacting with Internet TV channels. The first beta of the destination site was released today, and the company plans to add significant new features during the next six months.

For content owners that want greater control over their Internet TV business, including full control over the sale and delivery of advertising within their content, Brightcove will continue to offer the Brightcove Platform. The Brightcove Platform gives content owners a broad set of services for building online video businesses. Video programmers who choose to use the Brightcove Platform pay for it based on the volume of traffic that views their content each month. Moreover they have the option to use Brightcove revenue generation and distribution options including the advertising network, pay media, syndication marketplace, AOL Video, and the Brightcove.com destination.

brightcove.com