Metrics Point to Maturation of Online Video

We’ve seen some interesting benchmarks over the last couple of days that point to the maturation of the online video space. Some consumers are saying they’d be willing to pay — pay! — for web video if it were ad-free. A leading vendor of premium video is seeing its stats take off. And a research firm taking a hard look at the movie business has decided that video on demand will never make enough money to pay for the cost of a traditional big-budget movie.

First up, 11 percent of respondents said “they’d be willing to pay a little for ad-free viewing of video online,” according to an IBM survey. The report, it should be noted, is titled “The End of Advertising Survey,” but regardless, people are taking this to mean that a paid YouTube has promise. The E-consultancy.com news blog estimates,

Google-owned YouTube pulls in something like 50m unique users a month; let’s assume it can charge ‘a little’, a couple of dollars a month maybe – let’s round it up to $24.99 a year for a ‘premium user’ service. Now let’s assume that 11% of users sign up. That’s a revenue stream worth $137m annually…

Next up, Move Networks, which provides high-quality streaming video platforms to media companies like ABC (DIS), told us via email that less than halfway into November, more than twice as many people are using its platform than in August (of course the fall TV season has something to do with it). In absolute terms, more than six million people watched long-form video using Move in October of this year, and Move is currently adding new viewers at a rate of 100,000 per day.

But finally, a note of caution: digital distribution doesn’t look like it’s going to generate enough revenue to replace what it’s displacing. Research firm Screen Digest said this week that the movie business is increasingly unlikely to recoup the cost of producing, casting and advertising its craft. With U.S. DVD sales down 12.5 percent from 2006 in the first half of this year, video on demand is not going to fill the gap, the firm said. Something’s gotta give.