Video - The Beat Goes On!

Every time I ask a group who has recently watched television programming on the web, I get a substantial show of hands. A lot of them are thirty-somethings, so I don’t find it too surprising. I was, however, a bit surprised when I saw the headline in the WSJ Online recently saying that older viewers were being attracted to Hulu—long form video, especially entertainment programming. It turns out that “older” is 25-44 instead of the more traditional 18-24 video demographic, but it does point to a slightly different audience for time shifting by watching television programming on the Internet. Here’s a glimpse of today’s most popular on Hulu; it’s an interesting mix of program episodes and SNL snippets.
The growing power of online video is highlighted in ComScore’s December 2008 video report as published by Internet Retailer:

• 78.5% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

The networks post their own videos and Marketing Charts recently reported the online stats for top programs. Almost 1.5 million unique viewers for Lost—amazing!


I’m still chewing on the “older” part of the WSJ headline, so I looked at Quantcast. The demos for Hulu are fascinating. The 50+ boomer group is represented, but the 12-17 virtually not at all. Jeremiah Owyang, who tracks the social media activity of the boomers, has often repeated that while they do consume social media content, most do not create it. That makes it easy for social media marketers to miss the activities of boomers on their platforms, so care should be taken.

Back to long-form video sites; who can you reach? Profitable, “older” demographics seems to be the answer.

The even more provocative question is the one asked in the WSJ article. Does this represent the real convergence of the television and Internet channels? If so, what are the implications? More “made for the Internet” programming, perhaps with emphasis on audiences that are slightly older than the general “YouTuber?” A long, slow downhill slide for television, as it continues to lose desirable eyeballs to the Internet?
Or have we not seen the full implications yet? Stay tuned to your favorite Internet video channel to find out!

Ubiquity of Content--Producers' Perspective

Your attention may also have been caught, as mine was, by a headline in AdAge MediaWorks (subscription required) a few days ago; “Consumers to Watch 25% More Video a Day in Five Years: Viewing on Computers, Mobile Phones Will Drive Increase.” We all know that video has become an indispensible part of the Internet landscape. This incredible rate of growth has implications beyond video itself to all types of content.

Users expect content to be “any time, anywhere, on any device” more than ever before. And that’s putting strain on marketers to meet their demands in ways that advance marketing objectives. A recent study of media and entertainment executives by Accenture sheds more light on the issue. Their results point to the importance of multi-platform distribution, an open model of content sharing, the importance of digital royalty (revenue) management and a common understanding of intellectual property.
The concept of an open model of content distribution deserves attention. It’s an enterprise concept, not free provision of content. According to a 2006 white paper by PricewaterhouseCoopers, “in order to create shareholder value, companies in the content, technology, and distribution sectors must adopt an open business model, eliminating internal walls between business units and external ones between the company, its partners, and other strategic business allies.” This clearly refers to the creators of content who have already begun to distribute content to users through various channels. To better understand the strategic implications for enterprises, the entire 62-page PWC report is worth reading.

Consider these charts from Compete on two major content creators for TV--NBC and Fox--and the growing share of some of their programming on video-streaming site Hulu. Interesting, isn’t it, that the share of comedy viewing on the Internet is considerably greater than for dramatic programs. Wonder what that implies? Demographic differences, certainly, but probably more.
The Accenture study suggests capabilities that are necessary to accomplish media convergence within the enterprise. The point








being that unless the internal barriers can be broken down, the “anywhere, any time, any device” needs of the user cannot be met. The content companies in the Accenture study believe they have organizational capabilities in place to meet those needs. How many product or service companies can say that they have organization-wide understanding of intellectual property rights, the necessary IT architecture, integrated management of their digital assets, the necessary customer data and insight and a way to track the revenue produced by their content? Accenture believes that content companies are not as far along as many believe they are in this difficult organizational transformation. I’d suggest that even fewer product/service companies are dealing with issues of how to use content to best advantage.

I’ll conclude this segment with a quote from a US media executive in the Accenture report:

“You must break the innovators dilemma and walk away from old paradigms…you must have a keen focus on determining what consumers really need and what makes their lives better.”

I’ll continue with an installment on what consumers really do want.

Read Part 2 here.

Is Video a Maturing Market?

A report from Hitwise caught my eye today. Reporting on the video marketplace they find YouTube with a huge lead in market share and continuing growth, no surprise there. The surprises are two-fold: all the other leading properties had a decline in share and video sites overall lost share of total Internet visits. Their press release points out, though, that time spent by visitors increased during that period of time—March 07 through March 08.
That suggests some interesting hypotheses, so I went looking for data. YouTube is the 800-lb gorilla, but Gorilla Spot is a rapidly-growing newcomer (pun intended). As noted yesterday, Gorilla Spot is a “create/mashup your own” site. The press release mentions Hulu, the site for full-length TV programs. Here’s the growth comparison, and it may well suggest a change in viewing patterns.
Hulu is experiencing by far the fastest growth, although it should be noted that Gorilla Spot is so new it barely registers. Then add somewhat less recent data from the NYT that shows minutes spent, lots of them, on Hulu. It has quite a variety of video content, but if you watch, for example even a part of SNL, you’ve spent quite a few minutes.

I’ve seen the interpretation that this means that viewers are going more for expert/professionally-created content than for UGC. I don’t agree. It looks to me like time shifting—I missed SNL on Saturday night; I’ll watch it during the week when I have time. Gorilla Spot’s rapid growth supports that hypothesis.

But the larger hypothesis is a shift, if not yet a maturing, of the video market. It’s a shift of programming online—whether original content or access to content originally created for another channel. It does suggest, however, that viewers may well settle on a few key sites to satisfy their seemingly insatiable appetite for video of all kinds.
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