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.

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.

This rise is thanks in part to Hulu, which launched its mainstream media blitz at the Super Bowl this year and has run a series of commercials featuring Hollywood stars like Alec Baldwin, Eliza Dushku and Denis Leary.

Driving much of this online video consumption is the young folk ages 18 – 24. Ipsos reports that in the past 30 days, 30 percent of them have streamed a full-length movie and 51 percent have streamed a full-length TV show. No wonder cable companies want to implement TV Everywhere plans now, before the kids get too comfortable with the cord-cutting.

Despite this growth, Ipsos is quick to point out that web video isn’t replacing TV. It says the average American currently watches 15 hours of television a week and just two hours on their computer.

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.

Additionally, the site has recently shifted to focus more on premium content, creating hubs for movie trailers, music videos, and sports highlights. Metacafe will still accept work from independent creators — they just won’t be getting paid.

Unfortunately, Metacafe couldn’t have picked a worse time to venture into the world of premium content. Hulu has content from ABC, NBC, and FOX locked up for the next two years. YouTube is making its own premium content moves with Disney clips, movies and TV shows from Sony, and music from Universal. Not to mention big media companies like CBS, Warner Bros. and Comcast all have their own premium content initiatives.

Metacafe still has a sizable audience. Quantcast pegs the site’s global traffic at a little more than 43.2 million people per month, but of those, only 12.7 million come from the U.S. Even with nice-sized traffic, Metacafe faces many deep-pocketed players that have massive traditional media outlets for promotion.

Metacafe has raised $45 million in funding and, according to a spokesperson, is not actively seeking additional financing at this time. We learned today that in addition to the 6 percent to 8 percent layoffs at its Tel Aviv office last spring, Metacafe went through an additional round of layoffs in that same office late last year. The Metacafe rep didn’t have the specific number, but said it was “under 10 percent” of the total number of Metacafe employees, which at last known count was 75.

Back in 2006, when the online video boom really started taking off, Metacafe, along with Revver and AtomFilms (disclosure: I used to work there), were among a handful of independent video sites paying creators. Metacafe has now halted its payment program; Revver was bought at a loss and has since faded even more; and AtomFilms was bought by Viacom though still continues its payment program. Ironically, YouTube, which built its massive audience by paying creators nothing, later implemented its own partner payment program.

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?

Unfortunately, the data points in many directions at once. The Nielsen study referenced above also shows that more people are watching video on the Internet, as well. And in a recent survey of its users, NBC found that not only were more full episodes watched online at its site year over year, but users were also setting up computers in the living room and “co-viewing” online video with other people. Not to mention the impressive growth curve that premium content site Hulu is experiencing.

Perhaps looking to burst a few web video bubbles, though, the Telco 2.0 Initiative put out a press release on March 24 with the attention-grabbing headline, “Online video not commercially viable, new report says.”

Even though it predicts the market for online video (including both services like YouTube and IPTV) will reach $28 billion in 2013, Telco 2.0 says that forecast is less than 10 percent of revenue earned by traditional TV and movies. The research firm envisions three potential scenarios for online video. The entrenched players traditional video reassert themselves online (a la Comcast and Time Warner’s authentication plans); piracy destroys the value of copyrighted content; or telcos and Internet service providers (ISPs) move from their current passive role to one in which they become more like FedEx, offering different distribution tiers.

But this whole online video vs. TV debate is fast-becoming antiquated, as the lines between traditional TV and online video continue to blur. Just about every network TV show can now be watched online. YouTube and other web video can now be accessed through TiVo and other set-top boxes. And televisions are increasingly plugging directly into the Internet to access new forms of content and interactivity.

The industry is going through growing pains right now, and no one is sure where it will settle out. At the end of the day, the audience just wants to watch something that entertains; those who create entertaining content will want it on as many screens as possible, and those who own the entertaining content will make sure they get paid for it.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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.

Of course, given NBC’s fourth place among networks, it makes sense that viewers would catch up online as they were probably too busy watching ABC, CBS or FOX during prime time (snark attack!). But watching with another real-life person means that online video could become a legitimate TV replacement.

There are debates right now whether cord-cutting among cable subscribers is a reality. But desktop viewing presumably means watching larger monitors, and moving from the bedroom to the living room means that viewers are creating 10-foot experiences. If NBC’s findings are indicative of a larger trend, then we may need to re-think how much of a myth cord-cutting really is.

Elsewhere, CBS announced today that with 21 million unique viewers according to comScore VideoMetrix, it was the most-viewed network web site.

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.

The Cisco study is based on a survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, which surveyed about 1,000 users in each of the four countries. The study isn’t too specific when it comes to the distinction between user-generated and professional content, but a Cisco spokesperson told us that “professional” encompasses studio-produced shows and movies, as distinct from consumer-produced videos.

This is the first time Annenberg and Cisco have done this survey, but it’s probably safe to assume that user-generated content would have been far more prominent in the years before Hulu. Also, professional content may be taking up more of the users’ time may simply because TV shows and movies tend to be much longer than your average YouTube video.

The study also covers the devices used to watch video and television programming, which again showed significant differences between the U.S. and the rest of the world. 42 percent of U.S. respondents own a DVR, whereas only 11 percent of all Germans surveyed time-shift TV watching in their living room.

The U.S. is also a front-runner when it comes to mobile video. About 23 percent declared that they watch video on their mobile phones, while only 8-12 percent do so in Sweden, China and Germany. Watching videos on iPods and other non-phone devices is also most popular in the U.S., but at 8 percent, far less prominent than one might think.

So, overall, where is online video most popular? No, it’s not the U.S., despite Hulu. It’s China. Chinese Internet users spend almost two hours per day watching video on their PCs, compared with 1.8 hours per day in front of their TVs.  U.S. (and German) users watch 1.5 hours of online video per day — far less than the 3.8 hours of traditional TV time U.S. respondents enjoy daily. This makes Chinese Internet users the only ones that actually watch more video on their PCs that on the TV — and they don’t seem to be bothered about this at all.

“When asked if they would be interested in watching video found on the Internet on their television set, most seemed apathetic, or perhaps they did not understand the question,”‘ the report notes somewhat condescendingly. Perhaps they just didn’t understand why anyone would ask them such a silly question.

Americans, on the other hand, love their big, flat-screen TVs. However, the interest in getting online content on that screen seemed somewhat muted, even stateside. The majority of users where up for the idea, the report notes without providing specific details, but “relatively large numbers (…) neither agreed or disagreed, suggesting that maybe they are unaware of the possibility.” I guess all those companies presenting new, Internet-enabled set-top-boxes at CES these days still have some convincing to do.

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.

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.’”

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.

From the copious use of the term “algorithmically,” it looks like YouTube is using its copyright ID system to analyze other forms of content on the site, though it’s not going so far as to remove offending content, just demoting it. Ironically enough, actively monitoring what goes up on the site and removing what’s deemed to be objectionable sounds an awful lot like what YouTube, in its ongoing legal battle with Viacom, is saying it can’t and/or won’t do.

Like the pimply-faced teen wearing his first tux for prom, YouTube is also cleaning up its act to persuade Madison Ave. that the site is advertiser-friendly. After all, the company needs to start monetizing those 344 million global uniques. The vestiges of the Wild, Wild West, video free-for-all that YouTube once was are disappearing, making room for professional content such as that of networks, full-length films, and a even a high-falutin’ classical music contest. Even the YouTube L!ve event a couple weeks back was a slickly produced event that was just as much (if not more) about Katy Perry as it was about Michael Buckley.

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.

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.

And the rise in PC watching is across all age groups.

The study also found that video watching is still a home-based experience for most. Teenagers had the highest use of a portable media device to consume video content, while the mobile phone continues to be the red-headed step-child of the video universe, nabbing just one percent of consumption (but that trend should change as those two devices continue to merge).

Because of this home-based watching Ipsos sees an opportunity for set top boxes like Apple TV and the Netflix Roku, which are trying to bridge the web to PC gap.

Hat tip to eMarketer.

In his post on last week’s launch of new video startup Independent Comedy Network, Chris Albrecht expressed doubts as to whether there’s room for another site built around funny video, especially in a market where even star-studded offerings on sites like FunnyOrDie and SuperDeluxe regularly go unnoticed. Having watched the first episodes of each of ICN’s initial five offerings, I’m not crazy about a lot of it, but there’s so far one show which seems to make the whole enterprise worthwhile. 2/8 Life, a spoof of the much-discussed quarterlife, is so smart and funny that it could easily render the target of its satire obsolete.

In a clear reference to My So-Called Life, creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s much-beloved 90s TV show,2/8 Life’s four main characters are named Angela, Brian, Rayanne and Jordan. This is maybe more of a substantial inside wink than it first appears to be. quarterlife often plays as though there’s been an attempt to show Angela Chase and friends “all growned up,” although as I noted in my review, it rarely strives for MSCL’s multiple levels of address. Angela is our precocious video-blogger, a self-possessed but barely self-aware smirker who insists that her video diary is about “making a difference.” Brian is the “best friend” who loves her, Rayanne is the slutty Craig’s List-sourced actress roommate, and Jordan is a moody musician — just like Jordan Catalano, but the young Jared Leto’s brown-eyed paragon of cool is swapped out for a chubby dude who is apparently really into that apotheosis of self-indulgent faux-bohemia, Rent.

2/8 works on a couple of levels. It’s a dead-on parody of the ways in which quarterlife seems to miss the point about contemporary youth culture –– particularly Internet culture –– but it also offers a corrective to quarterlife’s lack of self-criticality. Casual racism, economic Peter Pan syndrome, romantic solipsism –– it’s all there. Where quarterlife seems to aim only to mirror the lives of the young white people that it hopes to appeal to (which is why even the show’s minor gaps in realism are generally so infuriating), 2/8 starts by mirroring quarterlife, and goes on to intelligently skewer the selfish, hypocritical real-life types that quarterlife glorifies without critique.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke exclusively hosted Speechless, a series of short videos starring A-list talent that was produced and conceived by B-list talent and designed to promote United Hollywood’s position by dramatizing the impact of the writers’ strike on the art form.

“For the first time in the TV and movie industry, high-profile SAG actors are together taking their talents directly and exclusively to the Internet,” the press release boasted (somewhat erroneously — Speechless player Eva Longoria is one of many high-profile SAG actors who has previously taken her talents directly to FunnyorDie, just to name a single example).

Finke, who is usually brazenly critical of the Hollywood establishment and whose strike reporting has thus far been unabashedly WGA-friendly, claims her hosting of the project is not equivalent to picking a side. “In the interest of fairness and objectivity, I would be pleased to also debut a similar campaign conceived by members of AMPTP,” reads Finke’s disclaimer following every clip. “But, as a journalist with a journalism outlet, I couldn’t pass up any opportunity to have an exclusive.”

Speechless is obviously intended as pro-WGA propaganda, but when viewed through that lense, it doesn’t have much bite. The first video, starring Holly Hunter, runs with the joke (itself a riff on studio propaganda planted in Variety) that the studios might try to outsource writers from non-WGA territories. It’s the only real narrative of the bunch, and it has perhaps the best chance of getting the intended message across — uncomfortable improv has a way of making the absent screenwriter look really, really good.

Most of the other shorts are much more fun to watch, but they still don’t feel like political interventions. They’re too cute, too classy; the stars look too good. The clips work too well as a hybrid of glamour photography and silent dramedy. I can’t conceive of the line of dialogue that could improve on the final image of Episode 6, with David Schwimmer turning away from a forlorn Kate Beckinsale to smirk at the camera, or the little nuzzle that Felicity Huffman gives real-life husband William H. Macy at the end of Episode 8.

Moments such as these may have the unintended consequence of introducing a generation almost totally unfamiliar with silent film to the joys of the wordless image. Modern haircuts aside, the Sean Penn clip and the first half of the Eva Longoria/Nicollette Sheridan short have a classic silent film performance quality (and certainly, there are those who will cheer the silencing of Penn and the Desperate Housewives); Episode 5’s invitation to spend 30 seconds just contemplating the faces of the cast of Ugly Betty is pure Warhol. I like this aspect of the shorts a lot, but there’s an obvious irony to it. It’s a bit odd to think that the battle to monetize the future of media could so vividly call back to the viewing experiences of the past.

Ultimately, Speechless is maybe most successful as a manifestation of screenwriter Billy Wilder’s famous wink at the question of his own relevance, via the line spoken by former silent movie queen Norma Desmond in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” I can’t quite parse whether that bolsters the mission, or undermines it.

I love Midwest Teen Sex Show, the sassy and sharp-witted bimonthly sex education show produced by Britney Barber, Guy Clark and Nikol Hasler. In an era in which actual conversation about sex has been sanitized from both schools and Hollywood films, you’ve gotta love a video show that follows up a question like “Does anal play during masturbation mean you’re gay?” with the answer, “No, it means you have nerve endings.”

The first eight episodes largely blended dry yet funny lectures with illustrative skits, usually starring Barber, a raspy-voiced blonde whose versatility and fearlessness sets her apart from most Internet ingénues. But the most recent episode broke from that tradition. Released on Halloween, it’s an STD safety lesson in the form of a dead-on (no pun intended) spoof of the sexually-active-teens-in-peril horror genre. A teen couple meets at an empty house for a less-than-satisfying sexual encounter, only to end up having to fend off a hooded, chainsaw-wielding villain named Syphilis.

As a non-condescending, bona fide piece of sex education, MTSS is clearly on the cutting edge, of both online video and popular culture as a whole. But the general attitude of the show is that of a familiar wink; subject matter aside, most episodes don’t address the audience in a way that’s markedly different from most other web shows that incorporate a combination of talking heads and staged scenes.

In the Halloween episode, however, the violence escalates from scene to scene, ultimately reaching a point of intensity that I haven’t previously seen in a web show. In quantity and style of execution, I found the violence in this episode to be really shocking. Here, too, MTSS is breaking new ground: There just isn’t a lot of visceral violence in narrative videos produced for the web.

The violence in the Halloween episode disturbed me enough that I watched it several times in an effort to diagnose why. A throat-slitting early on is fairly tame, while a chainsaw vivisection is notably grotesque — a step above the usual low-budget splatter — yet still tonally closer to funny than frightening. But a strangling scene goes on for what feels like an unbearably long time. By my count, it’s only 12 seconds, spread across three shots, but it quickly passes the point of being laughable. The overall metaphor of virus-as-predator isn’t handled as smoothly as it could be, but this scene nails the primal fear that makes the teen sex/horror genre so effective.

Maybe it’s just that the level of performance in MTSS is higher than par for the medium — it’s certainly a credit to Barber’s acting skills that I actually, for a moment, believed her character might be in danger. Ultimately, I wonder if violence of this sort has been a rarity in web video because it’s just too difficult to pull off with untrained actors, small crews and low budgets?