In a new report on digital trends in 2010
When it comes to premium video on the Web, Hulu still rules. In the fourth quarter, the U.S. online audience watched 19.4 billin minutes of video on Hulu, which was twice as much as the how much viewers watched on the websites of the five major TV networks combined. Viewers watched another 9.7 billion minutes of online video on the websites of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW. The chart above comes from a new Digital Year in Review report from comScore.
While Hulu still dominates, the individual network sites are growing faster. They grew 82 percent in terms of time spent watching video online, compared to 17 percent growth for Hulu. Taken together, Hulu and the five top networks, saw 33 percent growth in minutes viewed. → Read More
When it comes to getting people to watch online videos from media sites, Google is still the largest source of outside traffic. Search drives views. But the second largest source of traffic is not Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. It is now Facebook. According to a report on Online Video & The Media Industry put out jointly by Tubemogul and Brightcove, Facebook passed Yahoo in the third quarter to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites).
In the third quarter, Facebook shares accounted for 9.6 percent of online video traffic. Google still towers above Facebook with more than 50 percent of the referring traffic coming from search, but that is down from the second quarter when it was above 60 percent. In fact, across all search (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), referral traffic to videos on media sites is down. → Read More
Editor’s note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats.
Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike.
1. Connected TV Platform Wars
The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences.
Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the CEO of WatchMojo, a producer and distributor of premium video content.
Last week, Erick posted an article on TechCrunch titled “Industry Insiders Say Online Video Advertising Is Reaching A ‘Frenzy Point.’” It was a surefire way to get online video entrepreneurs excited, right? Not so fast.
The article quoted two CEOs of large online video businesses—namely Keith Richman of Break Media and Jason Glickman of Tremor Media—whose basic argument was as follows: It very well may just be the big ad networks and properties like Hulu that are seeing the vast majority of new ad dollars.
While one might think that the top 10 firms in a given industry will prevail, it’s important to think of legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s rule that a company should be either No. 1 or No. 2 in a particular industry, or else leave it completely. Online video frequently draws comparisons to search, which today has become a two-horse race between Google and Microsoft. Considering that the high-profile and defunct Veoh was a perennial top-10 competitor in video, one wonders: is anything other than No. 1 or No. 2 in video really a winning a strategy? → Read More
With the flood, comes the feast. Advertising dollars are pouring into online video. Some of the largest online video ad networks are seeing revenue growth accelerating this quarter, and expect the fourth quarter to be even bigger. “Last year we grew 40%, this year we are growing 90%,” says Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media. He expects Break’s total revenues in the third quarter, which include more than just video advertising, to be well above $10 million for the first time.
Tremor Media, which is one of the largest video ad networks and second only to Hulu in the number of video ads it serves, is also seeing a doubling of ad revenues. “It has reached a frenzy point over last three quarters.” CEO Jason Glickman tells me. “We see television dollars moving to online video,” he declares. The fourth quarter “is lining up to be a monster,” and next year Tremor’s revenues are on track to top $100 million for the year. → Read More
You can hardly run into a media site these days that no longer includes online video (even we are getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV). But which kinds of media sites are getting the most views? In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. Newspaper sites are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth.
In terms of how people are finding these videos, a little more than half (51.75 percent) are navigating directly from the publisher’s main site. Following that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic (38.92 percent), followed by Yahoo (5.58 percent), Bing (2.29 percent) and Facebook barely registers (with only 0.40 percent). Twitter is even smaller, but people who find videos are more engaged than any of these other sources of traffic, on average watching videos longer across different media categories. → Read More
Are you a cord-cutter, or do you want to be? Have you had enough of paying your cable company through the nose for 800 channels, when all you really watch is maybe 20 or 30? With an increasing selection of high-quality TV fare coming online, more people are experimenting with ditching their TVs (or more accurately, their cable and satellite TV subscriptions) for online options such as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes. The numbers are still small, but an estimated 800,000 U.S. households cut the cable cord altogether in the past two years, according to a new report by the Convergence Consulting Group. By the end of next year, that number is forecast to double to 1.6 million.
Cord cutters don’t yet represent a serious threat to the $84 billion cable/satellite/telco TV access industry, which counts an estimated 101 million subscribers. But they are a leading indicator of the shift to TV viewing on the Web. The cord-cutters make up less than 3 percent of all full-episode viewing on the Web. The rest comes from people who are only beginning to watch occasionally online. An estimated 17 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watch at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online. Last year, that percentage was 12 percent, and next year it is forecast to grow to 21 percent. → Read More
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. → Read More
Party like it’s 1999?
Online video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the digital media ecosystem is desperately looking for a business model and a leading ad format. We know what happened in search, while the early leaders ditched search-as-a-business for portaldom, Google stayed the course and built a $200 billion company.
Search captures intent, video captures interest. Intent offers advertisers a short-term benefit, interest a more long-term value. Perhaps that is why it is taking longer for online video revenues are materialize in a major way.
Yet, over the past year, online video consumption has soared threefold and it appears that this might be the year that the medium grows up and sees its revenues take off too (fingers crossed). This explains why in boardrooms large and small, everyone is trying to crystallize their online video strategy.
This guest post is written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 105,000,000 streams since 2006. Today, WatchMojo streams nearly 10 million videos each month and reaches 20,000,000 consumers online and offline. → Read More
CG reader Shaila was kind enough to send in some early impressions and info about the Neuros LINK box that we reported a couple of weeks ago. Keeping in mind that Neuros is currently in a gamma testing phase and is offering a generous four-month, no questions asked return policy on the $300 pre-production units, it seems that the system currently consists of little more than a small form factor PC running Ubuntu off of a USB drive and using Firefox for the interface, according to Shaila. → Read More
Here comes yet another set-top box that connects to the internet and streams web video. Thankfully, this one looks pretty cool. It’s called the Neuros LINK and it’ll leverage the Neuros.TV interface to stream shows to your TV from sites like YouTube, Hulu, NBC.com, CNN.com, CBS.com, and Fancast. Oh, and it’s an open platform. It appears that the Neuros.TV part of the equation will do most of the heavy lifting associated with getting you what you want to watch with the least amount of resistance, which should be a welcome and refreshing change, as you won’t have to download or convert stuff first. Hallelujah. The box itself costs $300 and includes a wireless “keymote,” HDMI out, and 1080p support. It’s currently in a pre-production “gamma” phase, so Neuros is offering a four-month, no questions asked return policy in case you run into too much trouble while all the kinks get worked out. This will all be interesting to watch, as Neuros is calling it “the most open platform around.” Gamma Launch of Neuros LINK Device and Neuros.TV Service [Neuros] → Read More
Here’s an interesting Q and A session with a panel of experts in the rich media industry — mostly online video – that took place last Tuesday at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado. The members of the panel: Ron Bloom, CEO, MEVIO Mike Hudack, CEO, Blip.tv Steve Liddell, CEO, Panther Express Joy Marcus, General Manager, DailyMotion U.S. Perry Wu, CEO, BitGravity → Read More
According to the LA Times, Sony “is preparing to launch an online video service through its game console PlayStation 3 as early as this summer” and “the service would include movies and television shows flowing from the Internet…” The service is thought to be similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live or Apple TV, although it’d be somewhat more open in the sense that it would be available on a myriad of Sony devices beyond just the PS3, like the PSP and Sony computers. → Read More
Hulu, which has been throwing me the above 500 error all morning as I try to log in with my beta credentials, will be open to the public tomorrow. It’s tallied up about five million viewers in the past month, which is impressive for a site that hasn’t been open to just anyone yet. It’s got a pretty broad swatch of content partners, too, including Fox, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. Television, Access Hollywood, Bravo, CNET, E! Entertainment Television, FEARnet, Fox TV Studios, FX Networks, G4TV, Gamespot, Gamespy, IGN, Lionsgate, National Geographic Channel, NHL, SciFi Channel, The Golf Channel, The Onion, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Universal Pictures, USA Network, Versus, and World Wrestling Entertainment and a bunch more. Looks like a solid lineup so far. Hulu → Read More
Ah, that’s nice. YouTube users will now be able to download and install software that allows them the ability to upload multiple files at once — Windows-based YouTube users, that is (Mac version coming soon) — but more importantly in my eyes is the new video file size limitation. It’s gone from 100MB to 1GB. The length of your videos is still capped at 10 minutes but you can say goodbye to the days when your rendered video ended up being 110MB and you had to render it all over again. I don’t know why but for some reason that happened to me all the time. Might this also be a sign that YouTube is getting ready to start using higher-quality videos? That’d be real nice since the ones up there now are all compressed at 320×240 and then blown up a bit. Multi-Video Upload Arrives [YouTube Blog] via Read/WriteWeb → Read More
Big fan of music videos? Of course you are. So you’ll be extremely pleased to know that Warner Music will be offering its entire catalog of music videos online for free. The label is working with digital services provider Premium TV to create online media hubs where viewers can watch clips and videos of their favorite artist. Warner is using video advertising as well so that they can cash in on your pageviews. But it gets a little better. You’ll be able to download music videos after viewing them for a small fee. Now, if these videos are DRM-free and not encoded in some crappy Windows Media Player format, then Warner Music is basically taking on both iTunes and YouTube with its selection of videos. The possibilities are there. Let’s see if Warner makes the right move, which, chances are, it won’t. Warner to put ad-supported video archive online [Reuters] → Read More
San Francisco, CA
