BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, today announced an extension of its relationship with social, online TV site Viki. On the heels of a strategic investment it made last year — BBC Worldwide participated in a $20 million Series B round that also included SK Planet, Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Neoteny Labs and others — and a content licensing deal, now BBC Worldwide will also working on advertising for Viki.
Through its BBC Advertising arm, the BBC will be pooling together ad inventory from its own BBC Worldwide operations with that of Viki, which is accessed in over 200 countries and offers TV shows, movies and other premium content in over 150 languages — with those translations powered by its user base. The deal will mean that BBC can add further scale to its own advertising operations to target a class of larger advertisers looking to reach that international audience on a wide scale.
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Looks like the final frame has been reached for Joost, the online video service originally started by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and then eventually sold to the Adconion Media Group: Adconion today announced that it would fold in and rebrand Joost Media into smartclip, a video advertising company that it bought in November 2011.
The company says it is making the move in order to better serve the U.S. market, where it is now launching services, and presumably believes that using one brand is stronger than using two.
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Eric Elia (@ericelia) is a member of the founding team at Brightcove, and is currently the vice president of TV solutions. Brightcove, a video and app solutions provider, went public on Feb. 17 on the NASDAQ and now trades with a market cap of $509.3 million.
When we started Brightcove seven years ago, we expected a five-to-10-year transformation period until we reached a world of purely Internet-based, on-demand TV, motion pictures and “long tail” content. Sometimes it’s hard to see change happen when we are in the middle of it, but amazing to look back and see just how far we’ve come. I look at the past seven years as driven by three waves of innovation. → Read More
The online video market in China is a fragmented scene led by national businesses where companies like YouTube don’t even get a look in; but today sees that market move one step closer to consolidation, with the news that the two largest video portals, Youku and Tudou, will be merging in an all-stock deal, to take control of nearly half the online video market in the country.
The merger caps off a period of intense rivalry between the two companies, which included spars over TV rights and the ability to index each other’s content on respective sites. Now, it seems all that is water under the bridge: the companies say that the new company will be known as Youku Tudou, and shareholders in Youku will own 71.5 percent, while Tudou shareholders will have 28.5 percent. → Read More
Online video service Brightcove will price its IPO between $10 and $12 per share, according to a new filing with the SEC.
The company first filed for the IPO back in August of last year, saying it wanted to raise up to $50 million. Now, $50 million is at the lower end of its price range. If Brightcove sells the maximum number of shares (it’s set to sell 5 million shares, plus an extra 750,000 if demand is high) at $12, it could raise up to $69 million. → Read More
Lately, we’ve been seeing more and more big television events come with an online streaming counterpart. Big sporting and televised events are showing up online, with the 2010 Olympics seeming to be one of the first big global events where both viewers and media publicly recognized the power and potential of carrying an event like that online.
For the first time ever, the Super Bowl is being shown online, for free. And it’s completely legal. I was going to say “in a brilliant move by the NFL,” but this should be default. Showing an enormously popular event like the Super Bowl online should not be a “brilliant” move. It should just be second nature. But, wishful thinking aside, the NFL and NBC both wanted to give home viewers options to watch the big game on the Web, without having to rub elbows with the riff raff at a local sports bar. → Read More
At this point, video is just a regular part of the web. But how is it gaining on regular TV watching. Just in terms of audience reach, Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population.
For all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. Yet when you drill down into the watching patterns on the biggest video sites on the web, a different picture emerges. → Read More
There are no shortages of “predictions” articles, here I look at a dozen things that won’t happen in the world of online video in 2012, even though they should.
1) We Will Have Standards and Definitions (No, we won’t)
By the end of 2011, the online video industry didn’t yet have a common definition and standard for a video view. It also wasn’t sure if the click-through-rate or completion rate would become the ultimate yardstick for success. A lot of experts are coming out and saying that 2012 will mark the year where we define these standards and agree on one. Personally, I think that is wishful thinking, 2012 is the year where we admit that we have this problem, but it won’t matter, as online video advertising continues to grow despite a sea of confusion, smoke and mirrors → Read More
Blip Networks, which operates Blip.tv, is raising more money. According to an SEC filing, the New York City company sold $6 million worth of stock beginning on December 22, 2011 in an offering that could expand to as much as $11.1 million. Presumably, this is part of a Series D offering, since Blip raised a $10 million Series C in May, 2010, almost 18 months ago.
Blip is trying to become a destination for indie online videos. But it is becoming increasingly hard for any video site that is not Youtube to carve out a niche for itself. → Read More
VC (TechCrunch contributor) Mark Suster published an article on his personal blog about one of his portfolio companies, Maker Studios. Other players in that space include The Collective and Fullscreen.
While Mark is clearly rationalizing his investment, his reasoning is worth understanding. However, I could not help but wonder if one of the excerpts in this piece will make any difference with his technology-loving peers: → Read More
Netflix and Hulu are the two leading video streaming services on the Web when it comes to mainstream TV shows and movies. More people watch Netflix online than Hulu, and have since about 18 months ago. In November, 2011, comScore estimates that Netflix.com attracted 26.6 million unique visitors, versus 20.2 million for Hulu
But a better metric to compare the two is how much time people actually spend at each site. And there Netflix trounces Hulu by two to one. U.S. visitors spent 1 billion minutes on Netflix.com in November, 2011, versus 480 million minutes on Hulu, according to comScore. (One caveat here is that people also go to Netflix.com to manage their DVD accounts and browse movie titles in addition to streaming videos, but the growth in time spent is most likely coming from streaming). Netflix has an edge over Hulu in that it streams more movies than TV shows, and those tend to be longer. But if that was the only factor, you’d expect to see the same ratio over time. Yet back in November, 2010, the two services were almost neck-and-neck in time spent, with Netflix users logging 750 million total minutes versus Hulu users logging 690 million. → Read More
Up until now, Twitvid has been the largest repository of videos on Twitter other than YouTube. It’s essentially been the TwitPic of video, and it’s done a good job with 40 million video views per month and 12 million unique visitors. But people mostly come to Twitvid from social links, they don’t stick around.
CEO Mo Al Adham wants to change that by turning Twitvid into a social network for sharing videos. He came by my office to show me a preview of the new site, which launches today (watch the video). → Read More
Online video is booming and the are tons of small video companies across production, advertising, distribution, and technology. Yet we have yet to see a serious attempt to roll up the industry. The reasons, I submit, boil down to egos and greed.
What is a Rollup?
Historically, large private equity firms have “rolled up” various small companies in a given market through mergers or acquisitions in order to reach economies of scale. A rollup is different than a simple merger in that it involves multiple parties, oftentimes taking place in a mature industry where growth can’t occur organically, but rather, through financial engineering or cost cutting.
This is partially why we haven’t seen that many rollups of Internet companies, because usually a merger is all it takes to reach considerable market dominance. Sometimes rollups make sense because building a product or business would take too long to build internally and grow organically. Ask Jeeves bought Interactive Search Holdings for $343M in March 2004 to double market share and then sold to IAC a year later for $1.8 billion. → Read More
Here’s some good news for web video publishers and producers. Online video advertising budgets are expected to jump sharply in 2012. Brand advertisers who purchased online video ads this year are projected to spend 47 percent more next year. These numbers were released this morning in the second annual “Video State of the Industry Survey” by Adap.tv and Digiday.
For advertisers that didn’t purchase any video ads so far this year, 84% say they will include digital video in their campaigns in Q4 2011 or 2012.
Advertisers say they are most likely to shift spending away from display and print ads to fund the increased online video spending. While some have feared online video might start replacing TV ad spending, the report claims television ad budgets, especially for cable, are safe for now. A majority of advertisers say online video ads are a direct compliment to TV, not a replacement for TV ads. → Read More
Livestream is unveiling a major upgrade to its live video service today. It won’t be fully rolled out until December, but you can see a preview of it here or watch the video below. The new player brings a few firsts to live video: an adaptive bitrate which can adjust dynamically based on the viewers bandwidth up to HD quality (720p); an instant playback DVR feature; a live blogging platform to add text, photos, and video clips underneath the main video; and social networking features.
One of the most noticeable changes is the DVR functionality. “Viewers can rewind while it is live,” says CEO Max Haot. One of the big issues with live video online is that it takes a while for an archive to be viewable. At the very least, you have to wait for the live event to be finished before an archive can be produced. But Livestream’s new platform allows for viewers to jump back to earlier parts of the live video while it is still being streamed. This feature will also allow producers to cut clips and embed them in the feed below the video stream.
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comScore’s online video stats for September are in, and in today’s non-news, Google Sites again ranks as the number one source of online video views. Google Sites, which derives most of its traffic from YouTube, served 18.6 billion videos in September, which made up 47 percent of the 39.8 billion videos viewed on the Web last month.
What’s more, Microsoft Sites and Viacom Digital both leap-frogged Facebook in the rankings, to take third and fourth place respectively, as Facebook dropped to fifth. (You can read our August coverage here and Erick’s coverage of Facebook assuming third place back in July here.)
On the advertising side of online video, comScore reports that, of the 6.8 billion video ads viewed by Americans in September, more than 1 billion of those ad impressions were served by Hulu. → Read More
In 2007, I published a post that aggregated a series of projections for where online video advertising would be in the future. One estimate, set in 2004, of the expected size of the US online video ad market by 2009 was $657 million. A year later, there was a 2009 estimate at $1.5 billion. According to the IAB, the actual number for video advertising in 2009 was $908 million (and grew to $1.4 billion in 2010).
If you go back to 2007, estimates for 2011 ranged from $4.3 billion (eMarketer, again) to $10 billion. The economic meltdown of 2008-09 made all previous projections moot, but its net effect was favorable for online advertising and video at the expense of print and television advertising. Despite that, eMarketer’s current $2.16 billion forecast for 2011 is half of what it projected four years ago. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.
The rise and proliferation of cable grew the total pie for television, leaving networks with bigger businesses even if their share of the pie shrunk. While the network-to-cable shift was evolutionary, the television-to-web transition is revolutionary. Nonetheless, TV’s Traditional Media Companies (TMCs) are betting that the Web is just another distribution outlet that adds reach and potential revenue to their assets and will grow their business when the dust settles.
Whether or not that strategy pays off remains to be seen. After all, the Web made the music business a more efficient one, but the industry shrank in terms of revenues and profits. In any case, while the TMCs have flirted with made-for-web programming (what I call “Premium content”), they have always gravitated back to made-for-television and theatrical content (what I call “Super premium content”).
Anyone who is surprised by the TMCs’ reluctance to focus on premium content is either being delusional or disingenuous: there is absolutely zero economic incentive or rationale for TMCs to experiment, let alone invest heavily, in premium content. Admittedly, this is an Innovator’s Dilemma at its best, but it’s one thing to question TMCs for hesitating to put their offline programming online to chase pennies, it’s another to actually wonder why they don’t invest in made-for-web programming that has zero existing franchise and traction. Why bother? → Read More
A new study by Yahoo (embedded below) shows that online video watching habits are shifting. People are watching longer videos and watching more at night during primetime. The chart above shows when people watch videos online. The blue line is today (2011) and the dotted line is two years ago (2009). The two lines show more than a 30 percent divergence during primetime.
So what changed? Peak online video viewing today is during prime time, between 6 PM and 9 PM. Only two years ago, prime time showed the biggest dip in online video viewing as people turned off their computers and turned on their TVs. But now, more people are streaming TV shows and movies from services like Netflix and Hulu, and they tend to watch those videos during the same time period they previously watched regular TV. While people may not yet be cord cutting, this data suggests that online watching does encroach upon regular cable and satellite TV watching. → Read More
Brightcove was issued a broad patent for the “Distribution of content,” which covers the basic features of a professional online video platform. Patent No. 7,925,973, which was applied for on August 12, 2005 by CEO Jeremy Allaire and CTO Bob Mason, describes some of the basic features of all professional online video players such as customizable players, digital rights management, and syndication. In other words, how video is experienced, and how it is controlled—essential aspects for professional video publishers.
Of course, Brightcove has done just fine so far without that patent. Brightcove is now streaming 700 million videos a month, I have learned, which it believes would place it among the top five online video platforms on the web. → Read More
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