NewTeeVee Live: PBS Is Not Just Your Grandma’s Network
PBS isn’t just about Antique Roadshow anymore, PBS Interactive SVP Jason Seiken told the audience at our NewTeeVee Live conference today. But he’s the first to admit that PBS isn’t really the hippest brand around. The average age of PBS television viewers is “pushing 60,” he estimated. Consider that countless Elmo-addicted toddlers actually bring that age way down, and you start to understand that PBS has a bit of an age issue.
That’s a problem that the network wants to solve with an online video platform it launched this spring, and Seiken was happy to report that these efforts are starting to pay off. Forty-eight percent of PBS Video visitors are under 35, he said, and the youngsters seem to dig PBS programming as well. Viewers tune into a stream for 26 minutes on average, which is far longer than many commercial platforms. PBS is clocking 12 million uniques a month for its video site, and video views are growing 80 percent month to month.
One of the more interesting aspects of the site is that it’s also a content repository for PBS’ 357 local member stations. These stations can take shows like Frontline or NOVA and combine them on their own sites with small-town news and other local programming. PBS wants to make this relationship a two-way street next year with the launch of the site’s next version, which will automatically syndicate locally produced content and present it to a national audience.
So what’s the secret of the site’s success? Failure, actually. Seiken said that performance reviews at PBS Interactive now track the times an employee failed at their job, with the goal being not to punish, but to reward failed experiments. “Our engineers actually really love this,” said Seiken.
TV and Movie Streaming Soared in the Last 6 Months
A new study from Ipsos MediaCT shows that the number of people streaming TV shows and full-length movies has grown dramatically in the past six months.
According to Ipsos’ MOTION report, in the past thirty days, 26 percent of online Americans have streamed a full-length TV show, and 14 percent have streamed a full-length movie. This is more than double the amount Ipsos measured in Sept. 2008. This follows a recent Forrester report that found 25 percent of online consumers surveyed watched TV online, up from 20 percent last year, and a Pew report that found more than 35 percent of U.S Internet users have watched a television show or movie online.
Metacafe Kills Off Producer Rewards Program
Independent creators hoping to make a buck off their videos have one less outlet to do so. Metacafe announced yesterday that it will terminate its Producer Rewards Program June 30.
In a corporate blog post, Metacafe said:
While we have worked to maintain the Producer Rewards program during the past year, we are now faced with a market environment that requires us to focus on profitability in the near term and are not in the position to continue to subsidize the program.
The move to halt payment for UGC isn’t surprising. In October of last year, the site chopped producer payments by more than half to just $2 for every 1,000 views that came from within the United States.
Is Online Video a Threat to TV?
Two headlines from this week sum up the state of the online video/TV world nicely: “Free Online TV a Threat to Industry,” proclaimed one. “Death Greatly Exaggerated: TV Key To Media’s Future,” countered the other.
The first is from a Variety article recapping the view, espoused by TV industry types at Screen Digest’s PEVE Digital Entertainment Conference, that more viewers will move from broadcast and cable TV to ad-supported online video. But not everyone shares this doom-and-gloom about traditional TV. MediaPost, author of the second headline, recapped a panel at Online Media, Marketing and Advertising’s Global Hollywood Conference, “How Online Is Reshaping The TV Advertising Marketplace (and Vice Versa).” Speakers at this conference said they believe that traditional TV will continue to play a huge role in how we consume video, pointing to a recent Nielsen study that showed TV watching was at an all-time high.
So which is it? What does the future hold for traditional TV and online video?
So Happy Together! NBC Finds People Are “Co-Viewing” Online
Not only are more people catching up on episodes of missed TV programs online, but they are also “co-viewing” those shows online, according to findings from a new NBC intercept survey of its full-episode player, NBC Rewind.
We’ve know for a while that people use network web sites to catch up on missed episodes or even as an outright replacement for TV, and NBC found visitors used Rewind more heavily in the fourth quarter of 2008 vs. the same time period a year prior. And 94 percent of visitors said they “always or usually watched” the entire episode of a show on Rewind.
More interesting, however, was data about what went on outside of the computer. More than half of visitors surveyed during the fourth quarter of 2008 co-viewed an episode at some point. Of those co-viewers, 30 percent “always or usually watch” with someone else. Part and parcel with that finding, visitors in the fourth quarter of 2008 were also more likely to watch shows on a desktop computer in their office, den or living room. That’s a shift from the third quarter of 2008, when they said they watched on laptops and in their bedroom.
Cisco: Professional Content, Not YouTube, Leads U.S. Online Video Boom
YouTube has almost become a synonym for online video in recent years, but professional online video platforms like Hulu.com are dominating YouTube’s dancing babies, according to a new Cisco study. The company just announced the results of its Visual Networking Index Survey (PDF), which compared TV and online viewing habits in the U.S., China, Germany and Sweden. The survey finds that U.S. Internet users spend 2.5 times longer watching professional content as user-generated video clips on their PCs.
Video viewing devices used by U.S. Internet users. Chart courtesy of Cisco.
These results should be music to the ears of Hulu’s management, but the survey also shows that content owners have to play catchup when it comes to licensing their catalogs for overseas audiences. Germans spend twice as much time on their PCs and laptops viewing user-generated videos as opposed to professional content, most likely because there just is no Hulu.de yet. However, Cisco and other devices makers still have some work left to do, as well: Many Internet users around the world don’t seem to be too excited about the prospect of online video on their TVs.
Adobe Continues March Onto Your TV
Adobe and Broadcom Corporation announced today that Flash will be integrated into Broadcom’s latest digital television and set-top box system-on-a-chip platforms. The partnership will make it easier to watch web video on your TV, and comes one day after Adobe announced a similar chip partnership with Intel.
Why the sudden push into chips? Stacey over at GigaOM does a god job of explaining:
Software companies have to port their programs to a variety of processors to keep up with the expansion of heterogeneous computing. Witness Adobe’s efforts to get Flash released on PCs (x 86 chips) and mobiles (ARM architecture) at the same time. And Adobe has to address embedded efforts too, especially since electronics makers want to turn the TV into a web-connected device.
Flash is the dominant video platform on the web, and Adobe wants to keep it that way as more televisions start receiving online video. ABI Research predicts that, thanks to more Net-connected TVs, the number of people watching online video will boom to 941 million in 2013, up from 563 million at the end of 2008. Getting in on the chip level with biggies like Intel and Broadcom is one tactic to ensure Flash’s dominance.
Broadcom’s Flash-supporting chips are expected to be available to manufacturers in the first half of this year.
Update: And the chips just keep comin’. Sigma Designs announced that it will be integrating Flash into Sigma’s system-on-a-chip products for digital televisions, set-top boxes and other devices.
TVs to Help Boost Online Vid Viewers
ABI Research released its Broadband Video and Internet TV report today, in which it predicts that, thanks to more Net-connected TV devices, the number of people watching online video will grow globally to 941 million in 2013 from 563 million at the end of 2008.
Online video in this particular case has a pretty wide definition in that it includes any video that’s delivered via an Internet connection (excluding IPTV services). So Netflix streaming, Apple video, Hulu, etc.
This coming online video viewer boom will be a result of the growth in all forms of content (premium and UGC) and devices that plug into your TV and as such, becoming capable of delivering all this content, a trend we’ve seen pick up steam over the past year (have you seen how sweet YouTube’s HD streams look on an HD TV?). Netflix embodies both elements of this report’s finding, offering streaming movies on a wide range of boxes — from the standalone Roku, to the TiVo, to Blu-ray DVD players, to the Xbox game console.
I spoke with Michael Wolf, who covers the digital home space for ABI, and he had some further predictions. “I feel strongly that these new boxes are not going to be the big winners,” he said. “There will be smaller hits — Apple TV, Roku — but consumers are going to want to use existing boxes.”
“There’s a traffic jam in the living room,” Wolf went on to say, and he believes consumers won’t want more than three devices under their TV. He thinks they’ll keep their cable or satellite box, some kind of DVD player and a game console. “Beyond that, ” said Wolf, “it’s hard to get a consumer to say ‘I’m going to invest in a new box.’”
New Rules Mark New Era for YouTube
YouTube, in an effort to tame and restrict some of the naughtier bits of content that make it onto the site, announced new community guidelines today. –Sniffle– Our little YouTube is getting all growed up.
Accordng to a YouTube Blog post, the new rules are:
- Tightened standards for what is “sexually suggestive.” Anything deemed as such will be not viewable by those under 18 (good luck with that).
- Sexually suggestive videos and videos that contain swearing will be “algorithmically demoted” on the Most Viewed, Top Favorite and other browse pages.
- Thumbnails will now be selected algorithmically. You can choose from three different options, but the images will not be automatically picked from the quarter-way, halfway, and three-quarter-way points in the video.
- Stricter enforcement of video information. No more gaming views by creating misleading video description, tags or other metadata.
TV Tops, But PC Video Watching Grows
While oldteevee remains the top video-watching dog for most people, the PC is gaining ground, according to a recent study by Ipsos MediaCT. Ipsos found that, among U.S. video downloaders and streamers, the amount of video consumed on a TV set dropped to 70 percent in February 2008 from 75 percent in February 2007.
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While oldteevee was dropping, video watching on PCs grew to 19 percent in 2008, up from from 11 percent in 2007. According to Ipsos, of the 52 percent of Americans 12 and older who have ever streamed or downloaded video content, roughly one out of every five hours of video content is watched on the PC.
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