Over the course of Wednesday, millions of people signed onto Google's petition by clicking on a thick black censorship stamp across its colorful logo. [via CNet]
"The last number we released was at 4:30pm ET," said Google spokesperson Christine Chen. "At that point we were at 4.5 million signatories and counting."
Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.
According to FutureSource Consulting via PaidContent, paid video revenue in the U.S., UK, France and Germany will reach $3 blllion in 2011, having tripled from last year.
Korean consumers are rapidly adapting to new online technologies such as social and mobile TV, in a trend that is reshaping the nation's media landscape. Warc reports.
According to a new report from Motorola Mobility, which looked into the video consumption habits of online consumers across 16 markets, the Asian nation shows consistently high engagement levels with new media platforms.
Use of social TV, defined as online applications allowing TV viewers to interact with the content or chat with other viewers, had increased from 31% of Korean respondents in 2010 to 76% this year.
Over the same period, the proportion of Koreans that had viewed TV content on a smartphone also rose seven times over.
Moreover, South Korea was the only nation in the region in which a majority (71%) preferred to use their mobile phone, rather than a laptop, to watch TV.
Other mobile platforms are rapidly gaining traction, with 14% of Koreans saying they had watched TV on tablet PCs such as the iPad in 2011. Last year, just 1% said the same.
According to Nielsen Media Research’s annual “Television Audience” report that was released this week, the number of households with a TV set will decline for the first time in the company’s survey history (which extends back to 1970). Entertainment Weekly reports.
The rising trend of TV ownership has been leveling off in recent years, and now the number has dropped from 115.9 million homes in 2011 to an estimated 114.7 million in 2012. As TV Barn pointed out, that’s a 1 percent decline despite the number of households rising.
Long-form video viewing online might soon become mainstream. Nielsen reported Wednesday that over the last three years, the number of online viewers has grown 26 percent, which is a pretty sizable shift. But the amount of time spent streaming has more than doubled in that time. Check out the graph from GigaOM for a more granular look into how things have grown.
This is a shocker, according to a new report from market research service Strategy Analytics via VentureBeat, game consoles - and not computers - have become the most popular device in the U.S. for watching online content on a TV screen.
While the PC remains the dominant screen for viewing online content overall, delivering content to the big screen is becoming increasingly popular, according to Strategy Analytics’ new report, “Multiscreen Connected TV: Assessing Device Usage and Ownership.” Twelve percent of U.S. households (about 15 million) use gaming consoles to watch content online.
The report also found that 65 percent of U.S.-based weekly Xbox 360 users under the age of 25 watch more TV shows and movies online through the console than their desktop or notebook PCs.
More than half of broadband Internet users watch television content that's streamed online or on an alternate platform every week, according to a new study from Horowitz Associates that you can purchase for $10'000. BroadcastEngineering reports.
The study, "Multiplatform Content & Services 2011," found 54 percent of broadband Internet users turn to streaming or alternate platforms weekly for TV content and that nontraditional viewing totaled 10.8 hours a month, or 7 percent of total viewing time.
Thought online video would never match the audience numbers of traditional TV? Think again: The top five channels on YouTube get the same number of average daily viewers as the top five U.S. cable channels, I was told by a YouTube spokesperson this week. GigaOM reports.
And Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report shows that YouTube is especially making a big dent in mobile, where it is now responsible for 20 percent of all downstream traffic during peak times.
The Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University partnered with The Pirate Bay earlier this year to carry out the largest survey among file-sharers in history. 75,000 people from all over the world participated in the study, and today the researchers revealed some of the initial results. Girls don’t fancy The Pirate Bay, most pirates download movies, and they are increasingly worried about their anonymity. Also:
-- The majority of the respondents are young men between the ages of 18 and 24.
-- More than 80 percent of all respondents say they’ve downloaded movies.
In the coming weeks the researchers will delve deeper into the data and the full results are expected to be released in November. Aside from the lack of girls, some interesting patterns should emerge from the file-sharers’ brains.
A new study shows that over a third of respondents are now regulalry watching online content, alongside standard TV broadcasting. WorldTVPC reports.
The study by Ericsson ConsumerLab called ‘TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2011′ was taken from over 13,000 viewers in Countries around the world including the US, UK, Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and South Korea.
The study confirmed online TV is growing as now 33% of TV viewers are watching TV on-demand at least every week, up from the figure of 30% last year. And the figure is now higher than the number of people watching DVD says the report. Watching DVD and Blu-ray is falling though, down from 30% last year to 29% now.
In a report released today by online measurement firm comScore, Facebook ranked as the third largest website for viewing videos online in the month of July, with Google Sites and Vevo ranking as the first and second largest. VentureBeat reports.
... Interestingly, while Facebook ranked third on this chart, it still has a lot of catching up to do in terms of the amount of time each viewer spends on the site watching videos.
The company averaged 17.9 minutes per viewer, while Vevo almost tripled that with 66 minutes and Google Sites had a whopping 353.7 minutes.
The difference makes sense because YouTube and Vevo revolve around video as their main content, while Facebook features multiple types of media, including photos.
Illegal downloads of some Fox Networks TV shows like Hell's Kitchen and MasterChef have increased since the company established an eight-day delay before its TV shows are made available on Hulu and Fox.com, according to TorrentFreak, reports Cnet.
It’s been a week since Fox stopped offering free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch their shows live and thus make more revenue. TV-viewers, however, are outraged by the decision and have massively turned to pirated sources to watch their favorite shows.
During the first 5 days, the number of downloads from the U.S. for the latest episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% compared to the previous 3 episodes. For MasterChef the upturn was even higher with 189% more downloads from the U.S. For MasterChef.
TIME Magazineon Japan's booming porn industry - for elders.
Japan has seen a surge in demand for pornography that has turned adult videos into a billion-dollar industry, with "elder porn" one of its fastest-growing genres.
Director Gaichi Kono says the eroticism of elders is captivating to younger viewers. "I think that, as a subject, there is this something that only an older generation has and the young people do not possess. It is because they lived that much more. We should respect them and learn from them," says Kono passionately.
... Japan's adult-video industry is believed to be worth as much as $1 billion a year, according to industry insiders, with the largest video-store chain Tsutaya releasing about 1,000 new titles monthly, while the mega adult mail-order site DMM releases about 2,000 titles each month.
Although films featuring women in their teens and 20s are the mainstay of the industry, a trend toward "mature women" has become evident over the past five years. Currently, about 300 of the 1,000 adult videos on offer at Tsutaya, and 400 out of the 2,000 at DMM, are "mature women" films.
Image left of a DVD box of a pornographic film, starring 74-year porn star Shigeo Tokuda.
Chinese video sharing website Tuduo plans to raise $174m at a valuation of $3.2bn when it becomes the latest internet company to make its Wall Street debut on Wednesday. The Guardian reports.
Similar to YouTube, Tuduo shows user-generated videos as well as licensed and in-house content. Tuduo's bigger rival, Youko, raised $203m when it floated on the New York Stock Exchange in December.
According to a new report from Nielsen, about half of Netflix users are watching through their Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, showing that the service has a firm hold among gamers. The Washington Post reports.
The study also confirmed some things that you might expect: Netflix users are most likely to watch a movie on their TVs, while Hulu users tend to watch television shows on their computers. Even those who do watch Hulu on the big screen do so by hooking up their computer to the TV.
With his TED Talks series, the former magazine mogul Chris Anderson has racked up 500 million web video views for speeches by academics and technological experts. But that, he says, is only the start of an educational revolution. The Guardian reports.
Is TED a new religion?" asked someone on the floor. "I can answer that," he said quickly. "Absolutely not."
TED has brought back the concept of the sermon – 18-minute talks delivered by absolute experts in their fields. Five years ago, when YouTube started out, it was assumed to be where you went to look at cats that looked like Hitler, or people falling off skateboards, but TED Talks, with its short disquisitions on everything from neuroscience to creativity, has just celebrated 500m views on the site.
By the end of next year, that figure is expected to reach a billion. In the month when the News of the World folded, Anderson has demonstrated that there is an enormous and still largely untapped appetite for actual news of the actual world.
Hadopi, the French agency charged with implementing France's stringent "three strikes" copyright enforcement program, has released new statistics that shed light on the logistical challenges of getting a nation of 65 million people to stop sharing infringing content online. arstechnica reports.
The volume of alleged infringement is even higher than earlier reports suggested. More than 18 million complaints have been submitted so far, and Hadopi hasn't been able to keep up. So far, only 470,000 initial warning e-mails have been sent to French Internet users. Only a small fraction of those—about 20,000—have received second notices, and around 10 French Internet users have received their third "strike" and are now facing possible penalties.
Television viewing habits are changing rapidly in North America where people are flocking to video and game streaming services such as Netflix, which is now estimated to account for about a quarter of all US internet traffic. stuff reports.
Netflix has signed up more than 23 million members, who get unlimited access to a wide range of movies and shows streamed to computers and broadband-connected televisions for a flat rate of US$7.99 a month.
The number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years, new figures suggest, reports the BBC.
That research, from internet consultancy firm Envisional, indicates that the top five box office movies were illegally downloaded in the UK a total of 1.4 million times last year.
Film industry bosses say it is costing £170m every year and putting thousands of jobs at risk.
The research also shows a big rise in TV shows being pirated online.
Dr David Price led the the team which conducted the research and said there are four main reasons for the increase:
-- "We've seen increases in technology like faster broadband," he said.
-- "The methods of piracy have become easier, with quicker downloads and easier to find content.
-- "We have a generation online now who aren't really bothered about downloading things illegally.
-- "Finally it's an issue of availability - there's a lot of American content which a lot of people are desperate to download that they can't get hold of legitimately."
With nearly 1,000 videos from various events posted to the site, TEDTalks has attracted a large — and growing — audience. In just five years, it has racked up more than 500 million views and counting. GigaOM reports.
TEDTalks videos are designed to make you think. Talks can run up to 18 minutes, which shows viewers are actually engaged with the videos they’re watching.
That hasn’t stopped the organization from reaching critical mass online.
... While no one single talk has attracted the type of view totals as, say, a Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber music video, the 500 million view milestone also shows the importance of the long tail. The most popular video on the site (below), Sir Ken Robinson’s “Schools kill creativity” talk from 2006, has less than 10 million views by itself. But with nearly 1,000 videos to choose from, TEDTalks ensures that there’s always something of interest for viewers looking for brain food.
Now, as online audiences grow, networks see an opportunity to make more money. The AP reports.
A recent episode of "Hawaii Five-O" carried six and a half minutes of ads online. That's less than the 16 minutes on TV but double what an hour-long show carried on CBS.com a year ago.
CBS shows twice as many ads per show on its website as it did last year. The CW network shows four times as many. Dozens of shows from major cable networks now carry as many ads online as they do on TV. More shows will follow soon.
According to a study published Tuesday by Sandvine Inc and reported by the AP, Netflix movies and TV shows account for nearly 30 percent of traffic into homes during peak evening hours, compared with less than 17 percent for Web browsing.
The number of Netflix customers is growing quickly, to 23.6 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada as of the end of March.
Internet service providers are increasingly placing monthly limits on each subscriber's data consumption and charging extra when the limit is surpassed.
About 56.5 million people watched Barack Obama's surprise TV appearance Sunday night announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden, more than double the royal wedding. It was the president's biggest TV audience since he was elected, according to Nielsen Co.
For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the US with television sets has dropped. The New York Times reports.
According to Nielsen Company, 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.
There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: the new digital sets and antennas are just too expensive. The other reason is that young people are watching TV on the Internet.
A new report in the US by Nielsen says that almost half of all U.S. citizens - 143.9 million - viewed some video online in January this year. Newsline reports.
Overall, online video viewing came to an average of four hours and 39 minutes for the month; and mobile video viewing is now 41% higher than it was a year ago.
Nielsen also says that in January 2011, 49% of all social networking and blog site visitors also visited TV network and broadcast media sites. Twitter had the biggest overlap with broadcast media sites at 76%, while Facebook was at 50%.
With 23.6 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, Netflix has more subscribers than the largest cable TV service in the US: Comcast has 22.8 million subscribers. 7% of Americans subscribe to Netflix.
Beyond videos of cute babies, how-to videos are extremely popular and some of the creators are actually making serious money. There are hundreds of people who make more than $100,000 a year on their videos with instructional videos on the rise.npr reports.
... Geoff Dorn knows this market well. He's the man behind a series of videos on how to tie a tie.
In the video, you can't see Dorn's face — just a close-up of his neck, his white dress shirt and pale blue tie. With a monotone voice, he carefully describes the mechanics of the four-in-hand knot.
"That was shot in my kitchen," Dorn says. "I think I tacked a white sheet up against what was a red wall."
That incredibly dry video has been viewed six million times.
YouTube has revealed that its music partners, which range from Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI to independents and individual artists, have doubled and in some cases trebled their monthly revenues over this time last year. [via The New Zealand Herald]
Patrick Walker, senior director of content partnerships for YouTube in Europe, Middle East and Africa, said that after a slow start, the labels saw the site as an important revenue stream. "A few years ago the cheques were pretty small," he said.
"We laugh about that now." There are currently 3 billion "monetised" video hits a week, 50 per cent higher than in May.
According to a study, obtained by Advertising Age but not publicly released, Nielsen claims that people exposed to iAds in the study were twice as likely to remember the ad than people who watched a television ad. In addition, five times as many people reportedly remembered the Campbell's brand from the iAd.
In what is surely an important factor for advertisers, the rate that iAd viewers reported intent to purchase the advertised products was four times that of television viewers.
TV watching isn't as "social" an experience as you might assume, writes Media Post.
Indeed, just 25% of consumers express an interest in sharing what they're watching with friends, according to a new study from SideReel.
The company, which helps users find content and TV shows online, surveyed 1,800 users and found that, among social apps, only Twitter made a significant appearance in the results, with 29% saying they used Twitter as part of sharing their TV watching socially. "None of the check-in services ... including GetGlue, Miso, Clicker or Foursquare have significant usage among SideReel's TV watchers," according to the report.
SideReel found that 70% of users who do stream video via the Internet to their TV do so using Netflix, whereas the other 30% use other sources.
Overall, "People are mixing new technologies with familiar ones to get a personalized TV experience that includes all of their favorite shows," said SideReel CEO Roman Arzhintar. "For many, traditional TV watching is starting to supplement online watching, rather than the other way around."
180 million US visitors watch videos every month. That comes to 85% of all Internet consumers, 200 videos per person and around 13 hours per month, reports MediaPost via DigitalTrends.
Key for some major TV networks and their TV shows -- also known as "premium video" -- Dan Piech, senior product management analyst of comScore, says there has been a shift of regular TV networks' customers viewing video online on a consistent basis: 4% in 2009, now 8% in 2010.
Seventy percent of people say the biggest reason for watching a TV show online is to watch a missed episode. The next reason -- for 57% of Internet customers -- is convenience. In third place, 56% of digital viewers want to see a past episode.
Most revealing is the fourth reason. Piech says 42% of people watch online because there are less ads versus on traditional TV.
According to Pingdom, an Internet monitoring service, In 2010 there was a staggering rise in video use online with the advent and growth of new smartphones that can view and record video.
People watched 60 billion videos on YouTube each month — that’s 730 billion videos throughout the year. And the average Internet user watched 186 videos each month, although I’m sure the 2- to 24-year-old set watched far more.
According to US News, the gap between television as the number one source and the Internet is shrinking.
Internet news is giving television a run for its money. The percentage of Americans who say they get most of their national and international news from the Web has increased 17 points since 2007, and the gap between TV viewers and mouse clickers is even more narrow for people ages 18-49.
Women in this age bracket prefer TV news to the Internet 62 to 52, while men 18-49 actually prefer surfing the Web for updates over TV news, 56 to 55 percent.
Video rentals from iTunes represent just a tenth or so of those recorded by Netflix, suggests Gleacher & Co. analyst Brian Marshall. [via iPodnn]
Apple recently revealed that people are buying or renting about 150,000 movies and 400,000 TV shows through iTunes each day.
Assuming that 75 percent of movies and 90 percent of shows are rented, says Marshall, Apple should be serving about 475,000 rentals a day versus Netflix's 5.1 million.
According to In-Stat, home video retail revenue has fallen precipitously over the past five years.Worse yet, double-digit declines in annual retail sales of physical discs are expected, resulting in a drop of $4.6 billion from 2009 to 2014.
To replace retail DVD revenue losses, digital paid video download and streaming segment, either purchase or rental, is expected to show high revenue growth. Annual revenue is forecast to grow from $2.3 billion to $6.3 billion within five years.
The average U.S. consumer now spends as much time online as watching television, according to new research by Forrester.
To technophiles, it might seem strange to think of people ever watching TV more than they surfed the Web. But the stat marks a big shift for the country at large; this is the first year in Forrester’s survey that people have reported spending equal amounts of time on the two activities — 13 hours a week.
Videos from artists like Rhianna, Eminem and Justin Bieber have the potential to rake in millions for the major-label owned video distribution platform VEVO, according to estimates from YouTube app maker MYU2B. GigaOM reports.
The Ohio-based start-up just launched a new site that tracks the view count of 13,000 YouTube channels, complete with daily revenue estimates.
Rhianna is currently the top earner, and her 4 million daily video views translate to roughly $3300 of revenue per day, which would add up to $1.2 million per year. She is followed by Eminem and Justin Bieber, who both bring in $2700 per day (close to $1 million per year each).
According to the YouTube Blog via Search Engine Watch, the amount of video uploaded to YouTube has increased to 35 hours per minute.
Hunter Walk, Director of product management, said, "That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day. If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.
As the media landscape changes and viewers flock to shows they like wherever they air, series on basic cable are still a junior circuit compared with the networks, but their universe keeps expanding, attracting better talent and growing in vibrancy. The Wall Street Journal reports.
Once the province of reruns and sports, basic-cable networks will spend an estimated $23 billion on 1,462 original programs (including reality shows and specials), compared with $14 billion on 863 shows in 2005, research firm SNL Kagan reports.
Many of these shows were rejected by the networks, often because they weren't broad-based enough to appeal to more than a niche audience. Now cable, with its narrower demographics, is trying to turn this to its advantage.
Read full article. Photo illustration by Ian Keltie; Everett Collection (8); TNT (Hutton)
Data from the European Union shows that cable subscribers there have already decided to stop paying for cable TV services en masse. NewTeeVee reports.
Strategy Analytics reports that in the European Commission’s latest household communications survey, there’s evidence that consumers there are transitioning away from pay TV services and opting for free alternatives instead.
Read full article. Interesting, no mention of viewers watching TV Online as one of the alternatives.
Netflix has released some statistics about its users, showing that more than one percent of its customer base has rated 5,000 shows or more, and a few hundred users have rated over 50,000. A reporter for The Atlantic tracked down a few of those extreme users to find out why they do it. Read on.
Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.," the petition reads. "Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.
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Television viewing habits are changing rapidly in North America where people are flocking to video and game streaming services such as 
With nearly 1,000 videos from various events posted to the site, 
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TV watching isn't as "social" an experience as you might assume, writes 
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Videos from artists like Rhianna, Eminem and Justin Bieber have the potential to rake in millions for the major-label owned video distribution platform 
