Stats
Smells Like Teen Media Usage (They Stick With TV)
Nielsen put out its How Teens Use Media report today, which, the research firm says, dispels some myths about the ways teenagers are using media. Bottom line: The kids still love their oldteevee.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, teens are not abandoning TV — in fact, they are watching it more than ever. Nielsen says that television viewing among teens is up 6 percent over the past five years.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, 92 percent of teens viewed live TV, 5 percent DVRs, and 3 percent online video streaming.
StatShot: True Blood Sinks Its Teeth Into Twitter
OK. I give up. Why do people like True Blood so much? In a brutal experiment, I watched all of season one to see what the big deal was. It’s got horrible acting, it’s poorly conceived, and pays no attention to itself. So why are so many people buzzing about it on Twitter? The folks at Trendrr created a separate graph for the show because it was so much more popular than the competition.
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Elsewhere on Twitter, David Letterman had some bite (ha!) following the “Fire David Letterman Rally” last week. Mainstay So You Think You Can Dance got a nice bump midweek, and the Showtime series Weeds got some micro-messaging love.
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Vid-Biz: WonderWheel, Mobile Vids, MovieIQ
YouTube Adds WonderWheel! Search tool graphically shows other video recommendations; site also introduced improved search, and downloadable MP4 files of your work. (YouTube Blog)
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U.S. Mobile Video Revenue to Hit $350 Million This Year; up from $300 million in 2008, with growth spurred by increase in smart phone adoption, according to SNL Kagan. (Video Business)
Sony Launching a “Pop-Up Video”-Like Trivia Service for Films; MovieIQ lets you call up information related to the exact scene you are watching on net-connected Blu-ray devices. (VentureBeat)
Dollhouse Had Highest Percentage of DVR Viewers for the 2008-09 TV Season; 32 percent of all viewing was done on a DVR; followed by The Office, Heroes, Lost and 90210. (TV by the Numbers)
Justin.TV Adds DVR Features; “Continue Watching This Later” button lets you will record a video so you can come back to it. (TechCrunch)
D’oh! Homer Simpson’s Voice on GPS Device; TomTom navigation devices now offer directions voiced by the famous animated father. (The Hollywood Reporter) Sample some directions here.
France-Telecom Orange Rolling Out VOD Site; “Welles” to offer ad-supported streaming of TV shows, movies as well as some consumer-generated content. (Variety)
Over-the-Top Consumption and Revenue Will Rocket: Report
More than 100 million households in the world will have an Internet-connected TV by 2011, according to The Diffusion Group (TDG). That’s way more than current estimates, including one for GigaOM by Dan Rayburn. TDG says game consoles with lead the way with 20 million of those households using their Xboxes and the like to get online. What’s more, in a report prepared for GigaOM Pro (paid subscription), TDG analysts links together these estimates to paint a picture of tripled web video usage and significant revenue.
By 2013, U.S. broadband users will consume about 32 minutes of web video per day, up from 10 minutes per day currently, according to TDG. At the same time, users will watch 4.2 hours of TV per day.
That online video usage, both on the TV and the PC, will bring in more than $10 billion in revenue in the U.S. by 2013. These numbers aren’t exactly parallel, since they’re for separate years, but the rest of the world is supposed to account for $5.5 billion in ad revenue by 2012. Over-the-top revenue is expected to come primarily through subscriptions at first — until a market builds big enough for advertising — with movie rentals worth $4 billion before the end of 2011. Niche content services like Kylin.TV (Chinese TV), &TV (Korean TV) and SkyAngel (Christian family-centric TV) will bring in $1 billion by the end of 2011.
TDG concludes that over-the-top delivery is a significant threat to payTV, especially if net neutrality can be maintained. More than half of adult Internet users surveyed by TDG said they are somewhat likely to cancel their existing payTV service in favor of an over-the-top replacement.
At this point cord-cutting is far too partisan a topic for anyone to believe projections that don’t align with their preset notions of reality. But as time goes on, we’ll see whose vision turns true.
Vid-Biz: DirecTV, Fred, VOD
DirecTV to Provide Local Ads; satellite co. using INVIDI software; advertisers can dynamically target by household, street, political district and more; ads are pushed out to and stored on set-top boxes and then served when they are supposed to run. (MediaWeek)
Fred Commands “Seven Figures” Six Figures on YouTube; According to Eileen Naughton, director of media platforms for Google, the hyperactive character has generated “5 to 10 million” ad-supported views on the site and is “the most valuable real estate on YouTube.” (MediaPost) UPDATE: Naughton evidently misspoke yesterday, Fred is making six figures (thanks, Daisy!)
Rentrak: VOD Orders Went up 21% Percent in 2008; operators processed 3.8 million VOD orders last year, consumers ordered an average of 17.8 VOD assets per month. (Multichannel News) Rentrak is also partnering with Concurrent for a service that measures video audiences across TV, broadband and mobile. (Video Business)
Aspera Eyeing the Consumer Space; company behind the FASP protocol used for video transfer in discussions with device manufacturers and service providers (though it’s still very early). (VideoNuze) See Aspera CEO Michelle Munson speak at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure 09 Conference!
Iran Protest Footage on YouTube; site says it is not censoring these videos (unless they violate community guidelines). (YouTube Blog)
TheKnot.com Launching Live Show Today; The Knot Live will run every Wednesday and will feature wedding news, tips and even calls from the online audience. (MediaWeek)
Kyle MacLachlan Wants to Reprise Twin Peaks Role on the Web; actor wants to bring the FBI agent character back in a series of 5-minute episodes — though he says series creator David Lynch won’t be involved. (IMDB)
Nielsen Video Stats A Jumble; Viewers Up 13% from Last Year
Sometimes, irregularity in video stats is just confounding. For April, Nielsen said unique U.S. video viewers were down 2.5 percent in the last year. For May, Nielsen said viewers were up 13 percent year-over-year, to 133.8 million. Today, Nielsen led a press bulletin with the impressive figure that minutes spent watching video in May were up 49 percent in the last year, to 188.7 minutes per viewer per month. But that’s actually down from 205.7 minutes per viewer in April.
Last time we took note of changes like this that we had trouble explaining, it took a full two weeks for Nielsen to reply to us that the dip was simply “due to minor fluctuations,” so heaven help us if we try to parse this out. But here’s a shot at the takeaways from this month.
Hulu had been mad last month that Nielsen said its unique viewers dropped to 7.4 million; this month it may be happy to learn that Nielsen thinks they’re back up to 10.1 million. (comScore. of course. thinks the site’s unique viewer count is more like 40 million).
Snapstream’s TV Trends Charts TV Mentions
Snapstream launched a free, online analytics tool called TV Trends yesterday, which allows users to track the number of times particular words were mentioned on television. Type in up to five words, and TV Trends will scour the major broadcast and cable news networks, then graph the number of times those words were spoken. For example, here’s a chart listing comparative mentions of “Facebook” and “Twitter.”
TV Trends is an off-shoot of the company’s main product, Snapstream server, which is like a DVR on steroids, capable of recording up to 10 channels at once, either at a specific time or 24/7. The software also grabs metadata from programming as well as the closed caption feed, allowing users to search through all the recorded content to pluck out video clips of interest. Rakesh Agrawal, Snapstream’s founder and CEO, says TV Trends is used by shows like E!’s The Soup, and was used by the presidential campaigns last year as they wanted to track mentions of their candidate as well as certain issues.
Vid-Biz: Joost, Firefox 3.5, Cabonauts
Joost Gets 12 New Content Partners; web TV service to get content from Marvel Enterprises, Speed Racer Entertainment, and TOEI Animation, among others. (release) In other content partner news — Metacafe Adds TV Hub; section will be feature clips from television programming from CBS, TBS, TNT and the CW. (The Wall Street Journal)
Firefox 3.5 Makes Video More Like Web Pages; the browser’s user of open-source video standards open up new interactive possibilities. (TechCrunch)
Erin Gray to Be Casting Director for Hayden Black’s Cabonauts; former Buck Rogers star will bring the roster of celebrities she reps as part of her Heroes for Hire booking agency. (release)
Boomers Spending More Time Surfing Web than Watching TV; new research from Changewave finds the older set are spending 12.9 non-business hours each week surfing the web and 11.8 hours watching TV. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Is a TV “Family Hour” Dead? TV execs gather to discuss how DVRs and new technology platforms have made the idea of families gathering at one time to watch television a thing of the past. (The Wrap)
StatShot: Conan Flexes His Tweet Muscles; BitTorrent Is Into You
Conan O’Brien’s debut on The Tonight Show made him the talk of Twitter last week, spiking with more than 3,500 Tweets on June 2, according to Trendrr. Elsewhere, Burn Notice, well, burned up the charts as the summer programming season kicked into high gear. And speaking of kicks, So You Think You Can Dance performed nicely as well last week.
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Evidently, pirates are into He’s Just Not That Into You as the Rom-Com jumped five spots to top TorrentFreak’s list of the Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent. Friday the 13th scared up the No. 2 spot, joined by other newcomers The Pink Panther 2, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and camera footage of Terminator: Salvation.
| Rank | Last Week | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | He’s Just Not That Into You(R5) |
| 2 | … | Friday the 13th |
| 3 | 2 | Push |
| 4 | 1 | Coraline |
| 5 | 2 | The Pink Panther 2 |
| 6 | … | Confessions of a Shopaholic (R5) |
| 7 | 3 | X-Men Origins: Wolverine (R5) |
| 8 | 4 | Fired Up |
| 9 | … | Terminator: Salvation (Cam) |
| 10 | 9 | Crank: High Voltage |
NOTE: TorrentFreak data is based on http downloads of .torrent files from various BitTorrent sites. The data is collected by TorrentFreak and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently, DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted. The “back” designation means that the title was in the list before and has reappeared, possibly in a new format.
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