The Great Online Video Migration

By Brad

Speaking of milestones, online video service YouTube has hit a rather big number. As USA Today reports:

YouTube says more than 1 billion people are now visiting its online video site each month to watch everything from zany clips of cute kittens to sobering scenes of social unrest around the world.

YouTube has always been popular, but a billion people a month is quite the achievement. It also highlights the major shift in viewing habits, with more and more people turning to online video — especially on mobile devices — for entertainment and information. Keeping up with this consumer migration will require a smart path forward from both providers and the government. As our own Jamal Simmons wrote yesterday:

As media companies look for new ways to deliver content directly to mobile devices, wireless companies and the FCC should find new ways to provide the broadband capacity for consumers to enjoy these choices. It is critical that we have a regulatory environment that encourages innovation like freeing up spectrum and exploring the transition to all-IP networks which holds great promise for satisfying consumer broadband demand.

Broadband & Basketball

By Brad

To coincide with the kick-off of March Madness — which is one of the most online-watched sports events in America — we’ve assembled the below timeline, which shows the evolution of online viewership of the Tournament. As you can see, the timeline begins in 1996 with a simple web page — the same year Congress passed a landmark Telecom Act that referenced the Internet just once.

Timeline: Evolution of March Madness Consumption

1996: The NCAA creates the first online computer page for the Final Four.

2003: CBSSports.com, CBS Sports, and the NCAA first partner to produce NCAA March Madness on Demand, the official online platform of the tournament offering basketball live feeds, as well as on demand video streaming.

2005: CBS begins a two-year deal with CSTV.com for exclusive Internet video streaming rights for out-of-market game coverage for the first 58 games of the championship.

2006: March Madness on Demand sees 19 million video streams and 5 million visits.

2007: Due to 2006 traffic, CBS Sportsline doubles its bandwidth capacity for March Madness on Demand, which offers free live Internet streams of each game of the first three rounds of the championship.

2008: CBSSports.com and March Madness on Demand launch a developer platform that allows more than 200 websites to carry live video of the championship online, including sites such as ESPN.com, Yahoo, SI.com, YouTube and Facebook. CBS allows users to watch all 63 games that it telecasts during the tournament for the first time, and sees the total number of unique visitors from first-round games through the regional championship games grow from 1.75 million to 4.33 million.

2011: Akamai’s global network is used to provide live and on-demand streaming video across broadband and mobile applications. Akamai delivers live games and on demand content to more than 1.9 million unique visitors per day on broadband sites and more than 680,000 daily visitors to mobile applications. By the event’s end, there is a 63 percent increase in total visits across the 2011 NCAA March Madness on Demand broadband and mobile products, and a 17 percent increase in online video consumption throughout the tournament compared to the previous year. This year, for the first time, live streaming video of every game of the tournament is available online.

2012: The Android phone is added as a viewing platform for NCAA March Madness Live (formerly March Madness on Demand). NCAA.com/March Madness Live, CBSSports.com, SI.com, TruTV.com, TNT.tv and TBS.com deliver over 220 million visits across online and mobile platforms. This marks an 11% increase from 198 million in 2011.

What’s in store for 2013? The timeline indicates that consumer demand to watch March Madness online, particularly via mobile devices, will likely continue increasing exponentially, so we’re crossing our fingers for Federal Communications Commission (FCC) action to accelerate the Internet Protocol (IP) Transition and competitive, open spectrum auctions that will quickly bring more spectrum to market. A move to next-generation networks and sound federal spectrum policy will be wins for consumers and the economy.

Number of the Day

By Brad

Over at Boy Genius Report, Todd Haselton highlights a pretty staggering number:

YouTube served up more than 20 billion video views during the month of October — 49.1% of all 42.6 billion video views on the web during the month.

Wow.

A Bright Forecast for the Internet

By Brad

Cisco has released its latest “Visual Networking Index,” a global Internet traffic forecast, and the numbers are pretty staggering. Among the findings:

In 2015, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every 5 minutes. Global IP networks will deliver 7.3 petabytes every 5 minutes in 2015.

Traffic from wireless devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2015. In 2015, wired devices will account for 46 percent of IP traffic, while Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 54 percent of IP traffic. In 2010, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic at 63 percent.

It would take over 5 years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2015. Every second, 1 million minutes of video content will cross the network in 2015.

Globally, mobile data traffic will increase 26 times between 2010 and 2015. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 92 percent between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015.

The full list of findings is available at Cisco’s website.

Two Billion

By Brad

That’s how many people the British government predicts will tune in to the April 29 Royal Wedding. At GigaOm, Liz Shannon Miller examines what such a major influx of users could mean:

In 1981, Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding was watched by 750 million people on television in 74 countries (the most viewed wedding of all time, according to Guinness World Records), and this ceremony could beat that record. British Cultural Secretary Jeremy Hunt is reported as saying he anticipates two billion people watching. And most of that viewing may be done online — a storm of streaming that could bring down networks and sites around the world.

Growing Pains

By Brad

At the LA Times, Dawn C. Chmielewski and Meg James offer an interesting look at online video site Hulu’s success — and how its explosive popularity is causing heartburn for the TV networks that created it:

Once hailed as the networks’ solution in taming the Internet, Hulu’s stunning success is now undermining the very system it was designed to protect, forcing the site’s owners to reconsider what Hulu should be.

“Technology is changing so fast, and, as a direct result, so is consumers’ behavior,” said Jordan Levin, chief executive of the TV and Internet studio Generate. “One of Hulu’s problems was that it accelerated changes in behavior faster than the companies were prepared for.”

Streaming Forecast

By Brad

How big is online video getting? Well, one of the biggest players in the game, YouTube, is expected to hit $1.3 billion in revenue this year, according to numbers from Citi (via GigaOm).

The Plugged In Generation

By Brad

A new report from the Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center finds that 23% of parents with children younger than five are letting their kids spend time online, with online video and video chat leading the charge.

(Via The Huffington Post.)

Online Video Appears to be Popular

By Brad

New numbers from comScore (via TechCrunch) find that an estimated 170 million U.S. consumers watched online video in the month of February, averaging over 13 hours of viewing per viewer. Even more impressive: U.S. Internet users totaled 5 billion — that’s right, billion — viewing sessions last month alone.

A Netflix Production

By Brad

According to new data from research firm the NPD Group, a whopping 61% of all online video is now being served by Netflix.

But even though Netflix is outright dominating the streaming video market, Brian Stelter of the New York Times reports the company is branching out — specifically, helping create content of its own:

Netflix may be on the verge of acquiring its first original television series, “House of Cards,” a drama to be directed by David Fincher.

The negotiations were first reported Tuesday afternoon by Deadline.com, which said that the two-season, 26-episode commitment would be valued at more than $100 million.

With Netflix’s runaway success not going unnoticed by other players — including the very content providers the company currently pays a hefty sum to stream movies and TV shows — this could prove to be a very smart move.

Moviebook

By Brad

From iTunes to Netflix to Hulu, options for watching movies online keep growing. And now a movie studio is tapping into one of the biggest online markets of all. From the New York Times:

Warner said on Tuesday that it would allow Facebook users in the United States to rent the film “The Dark Knight” directly on the social networking site, and pay for it using Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency. If other studios make similar moves, Facebook could tap a significant revenue stream, bolstering its Credits currency as it seeks to create a rival to PayPal and other payment systems.

Warner said it might make other movies available on Facebook over time.

“This is definitely a test,” said Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Brothers Digital Distribution, in a telephone interview.

Given the sheer number of Facebook users worldwide, this “test” could easily turn into a big deal.

The Internet and Disruptive Business Models

By Brad

Over at CNet, Greg Sandoval has an interesting piece detailing the tricky relationship Hollywood studios have with online streaming juggernaut Netflix:

On previous trips to Hollywood over the past two years, most of the studio executives I spoke with seemed to have a love-hate attitude towards Netflix. Many said they wanted to wait and see how Netflix’s streaming service fared. Some were skeptical that the service could ever draw a large audience without hit films and shows, which they doubted Netflix could afford. At the same time, even Netflix’s biggest critics at the studios were glad to have the company help bid up prices for content.

But since then, Netflix has proven it can acquire both sought-after content as well as a large audience. Netflix’s rapid rise stunned many at the studios and now even former supporters there are wary of Netflix’s growing influence. To make matters worse, Netflix is having some unanticipated impacts on the studio’s businesses.

Thirty-five

By Brad

That’s how many hours of video content is now uploaded to YouTube every minute — yes, every minute — according to official numbers released yesterday.

Meanwhile, new data from industry analyst comScore shows that Internet users in the U.S. watched an average of 15.1 hours of online video last month. That’s roughly 30 minutes of online watching each day.

Broadband Fact of the Week

By IIA

If 50 percent of the 2.5 billion DVDs and VHS tapes that consumers rent each year were delivered via videos on demand, it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 200,000 households.
— “Consumer Electronics Association. The Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Impact of Telecommuting and e-Commerce. July 2007.

Learn more facts in our ever-expanding Broadband Fact Book.

The Challenge of Measuring Online Viewers

By Brad

Online video has been called the future of television, but as the Los Angeles Times points out, providing a reliable measurement of online viewers is still a challenge:

The stakes for getting it right have never been higher. Advertisers are expected to spend $25.1 billion this year in online advertising in the U.S. alone, according to researcher EMarketer.

“The inconsistencies across methodologies and venders and the cacophony of numbers in the marketplace are clearly confusing,” said Sherrill Mane, a senior vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group that has been advocating for greater accountability in online measurement. “They’re truly hampering the growth of the medium.”

The three dominant measurement firms — ComScore, Nielsen and Quantcast — have been working since 2007 with an independent media auditing group to make improvements so the Web data they report don’t have a fun-house quality, in which the same site’s traffic can look emaciated or bulging, depending on the viewer’s angle.

“It’s maddening,” said Tim Hanlon, a Chicago digital media strategist. “You would think 15 years on, we would be in a better place. But we’re still talking about fundamental discrepancies in things like page counts.”

Online Video Roundup

By Brad

New numbers released put together by comScore show that online video continues grow by leaps and bounds, with 34 billion videos watched by people in the U.S. in the month of May alone. Leading the charge was YouTube, with Hulu coming in second at 1.2 billion streams.

Speaking of Hulu, the popular site owned by major networks like NBC and FOX, will reportedly begin testing a subscription service beginning this month. From the Wall Street Journal:

The service would initially be a “preview,” available only to invited users, said the people briefed on the matter. Those users would pay a monthly fee of around $10 for access to additional content on top of Hulu’s free offerings, and also get the ability to watch Hulu on Apple Inc.‘s iPad and possibly other devices, said one of these people.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting that one of those possible “other devices” could be Sony’s Playstation 3 console. Microsoft’s rival XBox 360 console has also been rumored.

A Streaming Future

By Brad

As online video continues to increase in popularity, one of the first companies to embrace the streaming trend is going all-in. From NewTeeVee:

Netflix expects its DVD-by-mail business to peak in 2013, at which point it believes its Watch Instantly streaming service will be driving its growth. That’s the gist of a slideshow posted on the company’s jobs site that details its plans to transform itself into the leading streaming subscription service for TV shows and movies.

Netflix reported 14 million subscribers in the U.S. during the first quarter, and expects to add another three million by the end of 2010.

Giving Up Hulu

By Brad

As the proposed Comcast-NBC merger continues to be mulled over by the FCC, one Senator wants the cable giant to give up one of its major investments. From Yahoo News:

Senator Herb Kohl, who chairs the Senate subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, told regulators he wants 11 conditions attached to the transaction.

One of those conditions is a requirement that Comcast divest NBC’s interest in Hulu within a year of the closing of the deal, Kohl said in a letter to the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.

“Should your agencies decide to approve this transaction, you should adopt conditions necessary to avoid the risk of injury to competition and consumers,” he wrote in the letter dated May 26.

Business Plans

By Brad

For the past two years, online video site Hulu has been giving content away to viewers. But as the Los Angeles Times reports, that business model is about to change:

Hulu, the popular online site for watching television shows, plans to begin testing a subscription service as soon as May 24, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

Under the proposal, Hulu would continue to provide for free the five most recent episodes of shows like Fox’s “Glee,” “ABC’s “Lost” or NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But viewers who want to see additional episodes would pay $9.95 a month to access a more comprehensive selection, called Hulu Plus, these people said.

Hulu currently ranks only behind YouTube when it comes to online viewers. It will be interesting to see what this new plan does to their traffic.

Cutting the Cable Cord

By Brad

Via TechCrunch, a new report from an outfit called Convergence Consulting Group finds that an estimated 800,000 homes in America dropped cable last year in favor of getting their entertainment needs online.