TV shows to fight (Neilsen Net) ratings wars

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?



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This is the personal website of Mark Payton, digital editorial director at Haymarket Consumer Media.