Archive for Video
TV shows to fight (Neilsen Net) ratings wars
September 20th, 2007 • Internet, Television, Video
Tags: publishing, Video
This one’s a little beyond my simple mind, but I get the gist. NewTeeVee delves in a possible near future for the television and movie industries, taking recent predictions of an exponentially expanding online video market and converting it into a new currency for TV producers:
Using today’s encoding techniques, an hour of video content equates to around 850 megabytes of data. According to the Cisco report, by 2011, Internet video will consume more than 17 exabytes of data a month (an exabyte is 10 to the 18th power). Divided by 850 megabytes, that 17 exabytes works out to some 20 trillion hours of video delivered over the Internet each month. Given that volume of video, it seems likely that some piece of content –- as an episode of Heroes or Desperate Housewives, perhaps — will garner a million simultaneous viewers and add a Nielsen ratings point to the viewing audience. In fact, it seems contradictory to think otherwise, 20 trillion is 20 million million hours per month — surely one popular piece of video content will generate this audience.
Can Internet Video Deliver A Nielsen Ratings Point? « NewTeeVeeMakes sense: creators and funders get a metric they can work with, building a foundation for popularity and sales. The only issue beyond there is measuring quality of audience (so making a big difference to advertising revenues): is there an argument here for YouTube working a lot harder at profiling and promoting its channels?
Prince plans to end YouTube’s reign
September 12th, 2007 • Internet, Music, Video
Tags: publishing, Video, YouTube
The artist formerly known as Good is gearing up for an attack on YouTube, according to Reuters. He is less than chuffed at the distribution of his tunes through the video portal, and shrugs off arguments that YT is merely the product of its audience:
“YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” a statement released on his behalf said. [From Prince to sue YouTube, eBay over music use - Yahoo! News]
‘Get famous - don’t upload to YouTube’
September 9th, 2007 • Internet, Social, Video
Interesting take from Business Pundit, where the team have been running checks on the popularity of their videos across several of the major video portals.
The results? Blip performed best for resulting views on their site (a whopping 50% returns), with Metacafe and Revver coming a relatively lowly second and third. And the joint holders of the Wooden Spoons? Yahoo, and… YouTube. The latter pair delivered a paltry 7% and 3% respectively.
Considering YouTube’s current sky-high equity with the mass media (if you’re a regular reader of the tabloids, you’d be forgiven to believing that YT held a monopoly), this is something of a shock result. But Business Pundit has a theory as to why…
“So if you produce video content, the way to get the most people to watch it is to submit it somewhere other than the most popular video site on the web. Counterintuitive for sure, but on closer examination, it makes sense. When you are a needle, and you want to get the word out, don’t start by jumping into haystacks.”
XBox to become your TV and cinema?
September 9th, 2007 • Technology, Television, Video
Tags: TV, Video
You can understand why the television and movie industries are in such a fluff. Their businesses are changing in front of their very eyes, and the film and TV execs are not necessarily in control of their own destinies.For example, who would have imagined five years ago that games consoles could eventually outstrip cable and analogue as the main means of movie and show delivery? Yet this year, Microsoft plans to unleash its on-demand video service on an unsuspecting Europe, using the XBox 360 as its Trojan horse.There’s absolutely no reason (bar dumb pricing and marketing) why this shouldn’t succeed: there are an awful lot of 360s under an awful lot of HD-ready tellies in the UK. And thanks to the huge popularity of XBox Live, a lot of those consoles are already connected to networks. As Bink.nu points out, Redmond is already courting the content suppliers:
MICROSOFT is courting the BBC as it plans to launch its digital television and video service in Europe. The software giant is intent on turning its Xbox 360 video-games machine into a digital entertainment hub offering films, TV shows and high-definition programmes. It already offers video content in America via its Xbox 360 video-games console.
Google’s winning the online video war
September 5th, 2007 • Internet, Video
According to new research from Compete, Google is now an obscene 42% ahead of the pack when it comes to online video.
You could see that as a massive victory (MySpace accounts for 15%, Yahoo for a measley 12%), but that’s an awful lot of streaming - and as anyone who has ever funded bandwidth knows, that kind of pipe extracts a hefty financial toll.
Let’s hope those recent inset YouTube ads start paying the bills.
And the future of video advertising is… overlays?
August 28th, 2007 • Advertising, Video
Big buzz today. YouTube has finally decided on its advertising format of choice, and it appears to be transparent overlays.
This is major news. YouTube now accounts for 10% of all internet traffic, and is costing Google the earth. And until today, there was little way to guage how the search company would see a return on its $1.65 billion investment.
The challenge has been made all the greater by apparent public resistance to pre-rolls (ads that run before the video begins), with complaints in research groups that they ruined the experience.
But after much soul-searching, Google has finally gone for a semi-transparent overlay. Read more »
Google News: now with video
August 20th, 2007 • Media, Video
Google News came one step closer to the BBCs and CNNs of this world yesterday, with the addition of video to many of ‘its’ stories.
I’ve yet to find any examples in my Google News, but the search giant says that the service is already running in the US, UK and Ireland, with video news from the likes of Reuters and CBS.
Add the recent announcement that the company would give a right of reply to people featured in Google News stories, and it looks as though the site is on a major offensive.
File-sharing’s bad boy is back in town
August 17th, 2007 • Music, Social, Video
It goes up, it goes down. Earlier this week, one of the web’s original file-sharing baddies, LimeWire, announced that it was going legit - tracks would be for sale, and deals were being struck with labels left, right and centre.
But for every white hat, there has to be a black. One of the other P2P originals, Supernova, has been chased from the scene by the copyright lobby. Everyone assumed that it had gone forever. Wrong. It’s back - the all-new Supernova.org launched today, with support from the people behind Bittorent giant The Pirate Bay.
Has Supernova cleaned up its act? Doubtful, judging by a two-second delve into its main channels. And when one of your first forum posts is a 600-word instructional guide entitled How to lie to people: achieving anonymity through disinformation and data poisoning, you begin to build a picture of the intended audience.
AOL relaunches picky YouTube rival
August 16th, 2007 • Best sites, Video
I’d mentioned the Mullet Strategy a while back. Its principle is simple: business up front, party at the back.
In practical terms, it means letting the world lose on contributing to your site (the party), but making sure you have a gang of crack editors ensuring that only the mavellous makes it to the top-level pages.
Where now for video ads?
August 11th, 2007 • Advertising, Video
No-one’s quite sure what to do with advertisements in video, according to today’s Wall St Journal.
The issue is intrusion: as previous research has shown, people focus hard when watching online videos (more so than they do when watching TV), so anything that kicks the flow into touch is disliked.
As the WSJ explains, one new format that’s proving popular is the ticker, an advertising message running across the bottom of the player. Elsewhere, the likes of Heavy are betting the house on skins, wrapping the video in one big message.
Me? I’ve never seen the problem in the first place. I grew up as an online video consumer watching the likes of DiggNation and Rocketboom: the issue to my eyes was always tone andc context, never the existence of the ad in the first place. I know of GoDaddy.com, purely because it sponsored the hell out of the start of DiggNation for heaven knows how long. If that’s advertising working, then it works.
paidContent.org: No Holy Grail For Online Video Ad Model, But Various Formats Find Their Converts
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