Last week on a panel discussion in New York, ABC’s Albert Cheng described how his network was syndicating its content on YouTube – to paraphrase Mr. Cheng, “we supply them with meta data for our shows, but the actual ABC streams themselves still originate from our servers at ABC.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m looking over some recent numbers from nielsen online and I’m struck by something: while hulu may indeed be a big fish, long-form internet video is still a pretty small pond.  Consider:

Of the four major broadcast networks, hulu partners Fox and NBC saw the largest month-over-month increases in October 2008:  Fox was up 165%, while NBC (helped by Tina Fey’s triumphant if temporary return to SNL as America’s favorite eye-winking, Russia-seeing hockey mom) saw a whopping 312% increase (by contrast, ABC was up 105% and internet video laggard CBS was only up 38%.)

312 % and 165 % increases over the course of one month? Let’s celebrate – professionally produced long-form video has finally come into its own, right?

Wrong.

From that same Nielsen report, here’s another statistic: during October, YouTube had almost 82 million unique visitors to hulu’s 6.3 million – that’s a factor of fifteen (even with Tina Fey’s Palin sketches driving users to hulu).

A direct comparison between the two by total streams delivered would skew unfairly towards YouTube due to the shorter running time of the average user-generated video – but what the heck, let’s do it anyway, just for fun…  because the difference between those Nielsen numbers is even more stark than you might imagine: YouTube delivered almost 38 times the total number of streams delivered by hulu.

That’s thirty eight times more streams from YouTube than hulu.

Granted, hulu is one well-executed website.  Yet clearly, long-form premium video over the internet still has a long way to go.  What’s the takeaway here?  In my opinion, the answer is somewhat obvious: people don’t want to sit alone in front of their computers for a half hour or more at a time to view long-form video – in other words, the effectiveness of the personal computer as a video-viewing device is inversely proportional to the program length of the video being viewed.

The numbers in this report clearly put Hulu and YouTube in stark contrast against one another in terms of actual usage.  However, it would be a mistake to fail to take into account the fundamental differences between the short form/long-tail (user generated) and long form/short-tail (professionally produced) video viewing experiences – or the fact that we don’t have a truly compelling lean-back device for delivering long-form internet video viewing just yet.  Therefore, it would be a mistake to infer from reports such as this that internet video will remain primarily a short-form UGC medium.

For long-form premium video over the internet, it’s going to take a new generation of device that offers content directly from the couch before we can make any such comparisons.   The user interface on these devices will not be a web-browser, instead it will be simpler and optimized for lean-back media. Companies such as boxee (at left) and Yahoo/Intel are working on just such user interfaces. While I’ve already written a bit on the Yahoo initiative here, Boxee is more recent development. Right now it’s just a Windows/Mac application that aggregates disparate video sources (including Hulu) into a cohesive whole. While that’s pretty cool in itself, what makes Boxee really interesting is that the company plans to bring dedicated set-top Boxee hardware to the market within the next year or so – and in ther meantime, the software can be installed on the Apple TV device today. As I’ve said before, I think the prospect of Boxee on – well, a box – changes everything.

We shall see – but in the meantime, a quick reality check is in order: while well-suited to workplace video snacking, the computer and web browser are inappropriate (and ultimately intermediate) solutions for viewing long-form video – no matter how well-implemented a given website (such as Hulu) happens to be.

If there’s one widely agreed upon fact of life in the still nascent long-form (short-tail) internet video space, it’s that consumers will not tolerate anything close to the advertising density they will for traditional broadcast television:

• A current NBC show on hulu carries roughly ¼ of the advertising that same show broadcast on a terrestrial NBC affiliate carries.

At the same time, online CPM rates are substantially higher than traditional broadcast rates, based on the internet-given ability to target online ads to individual users:

• NBC and hulu can charge over twice the CPM that NBC can charge for broadcast television.

It’s often taken for granted that these two characteristics are both inherent to internet video and even somehow compensatory – yet imagine if we could challenge the first assumption (the relative intolerance for online advertising ): in other words, imagine online video advertising density more in line with that of broadcast video, yet maintaining the higher CPM rates charged for target online advertising…

Now there’s a business model.

How to get internet video consumers to tolerate the amount of advertising tolerated on television, though? To me, the (somewhat obvious) answer is to solve the problem of making the internet video experience itself more comparable to the television experience.

In other words,

I would submit that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of advertising online premium video consumers will tolerate and the fact that (until now) they happen to have been sitting alone in front of a computer at the time– in other words, increase the comfort, ease, and sociability of the experience, and (for better or worse) you can increase the advertising.

Now that’s finally happening, as CE companies start rolling out TV hardware with embedded network interfaces this week in Las Vegas.

Today I read with interest a Will Richmond VideoNuze article questioning whether the current online advertising model will support this new generation of internet-enabled television hardware, and how it might have to change.  What I feel Will misses, though, is that as a result of all this new couch-centric hardware changes the fundamental viewing experience, there will be a commensurate increase in tolerance for advertising on the part of the average internet video viewer.

So as the density of long-form premium internet video advertising approaches that of traditional television yet the online CPM rates remain higher than the effective traditional broadcast rates (because of the internet-only value-add of ad targeting), I feel that the advertising-supported long form short-tail internet video sector has a bright future indeed.

OK. I admit. I am pretty psyched about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

Psyched because it seems much more than a simple “move-over-radio” battle cry; more than just postulating the World Wide Web as the latest of many presidential (one-way) bullhorns available.

For one, the “YouTube”-ization of the weekly Democratic radio address means that a rather arcane political messaging system is coming of age.

In other words, the good old weekly radio address (finally) preps to going (legitimately) video and viral and social, in the same way as anyone’s video blog out there could.

In a way (unknowingly) echoing this season’s ABC and NBC marketing slogans, Barack Obama and team invite us to “start here” and “chime in” – but this time outside the very TV broadcasting system that for so long determined what we would see, when, and for how long.

It is certainly nothing new that a publicly elected official is unafraid to engage in a form of political messaging that – once out the door – is no longer in his control.

That’s how traditional TV (or radio and print media for that matter), works. In this the Web is no different.

But it is major that aforementioned politician whole-heartedly embraces the collaborative Web and the truly conversational two-way nature of online video given that this is past his election campaign, and that he is none less than the next President of the United States going social on his entire constituency. 

Recently asked by CNN’s Sunday talk show host Fareed Zakaria about what advice if any he would give the incoming president, Al Gore’s response was simple: “Make more expository speeches. … [the] people are downloading”.

The presidential radio address as a viral video message for all to engage with plays right into that, ups the ante for you and me, the White House versus traditional media.

Let’s see if and how this will pan out.

Have you pinged the president-elect lately?