U.S. TV series are giving French fiction programming a run for its money, having monopolized the Gallic small screen last year according to figures from French audiovisual promotion association the APA, released Monday.
French fictional programs took just 13 of the top 100 most-watched shows for 2008, while U.S. imports monopolized the list with 57 spots.
This marks a major shift from 2005 when French fiction took 56 of the same 100 spots and U.S. shows just four.
Despite Nielson and ComScore calculating much lower figures, Google has ‘fessed up that their YouTube service is the most popular its ever been, streaming an incredible one billion videos a day worldwide. Digital-Lifestyles reports.
... It’s a little unclear why Google has kept schtum about their success, although it’s been suggested that under reporting the viewing figures may YouTube Streaming One Billion Videos A Dayhave helped them in their various copyright infringement cases, or that they weren’t keen on analysts finding out too much about their costings.
According to VideoSurf CTO Eitan Sharon, there are 500 million videos on the web today, (VideoSurf has only indexed 25 million of them so far though it recently stepped up efforts by doubling the size of its server farm).
With so many more videos yet to be analyzed, it could be that much more or much less than 20 percent of all videos are spam. But it’s pretty daunting to think of so many irrelevant spammy videos out there, especially considering the costs involved with hosting and delivering them.
Fueled by the insatiable demand for Web-based video, global Internet traffic will get nearly four times larger over the next four years. Scientific American reports.
By the end of 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs worth of information will cross the Net monthly, according to a report issued today by Cisco Systems.
If this prediction holds true, it would take more than half a million years to watch all the online video that crosses the Internet in just a single month by 2013, the company reports.
Cisco forecasts that video files will be part of 90 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2013.
Cisco needed a relatively new term to quantify that traffic: A zettabyte is measure of computer storage or memory equal to one trillion gigabytes. One gigabyte can hold about 341 digital pictures or about 256 MP3 audio files.)
Related:
-- The Exaflood - Technology experts are calling it the exaflood, a massive wave of new video and other bandwith intensive traffic headed for the web.
Hundreds of thousands more Australians have turned to illegal download sites in the past year to save money on movies, music, software and TV shows during the economic downturn, new figures show. The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 per cent.
The figures, which do not include peer-to-peer software such as Limewire, are in line with a Newspoll survey of 700 Australians in April, which found almost two-thirds of respondents said they were more tempted to buy or obtain pirated products in tough financial times.
A study by Vodafone Netherlands revealed the rising use of television on 'demand', with old-fashioned, or linear, television seen not fitting in the Dutch lifestyle. Trading Markets reports.
About three quarters of Dutch people view delayed television, with 62 percent watching online and 35 percent saving the show for later viewing.
From those surveyed, 77 percent said they could not watch television during the normal broadcast times, while 34 percent prefer to determine personal viewing time.
Almost one third of respondants expect to watch more television outside the home in the next two years, with 28 percent forecasting more mobile viewing.Trading Markets]
This is wild. According to Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee, 40 percent 37 percent of Facebook video uploads come from webcams.
Facebook's Software engineer Chris Putnam, the lead video developer for the site, told Liz Gannes last week that Facebook receives some 260,000 video uploads per day, with an additional 155,000 of them daily video uploads directly from webcams.
British demand for online video sites has shot up over the past year, according to a new study by research firm Hitwise. It found that UK internet traffic to video websites was up 40.7%. The BBC reports.
In the first report of its kind on online video viewership of television shows, Nielsen reported today that “Lost” is the most popular TV show watched on the Web, followed by “Saturday Night Live” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” TVWeek reports.
“Lost” drew 1.4 million unique viewers in December, “Saturday Night Live” attracted 1.1 million, and the ABC medical drama lured 879,000 uniques, Nielsen said.
The measurement company tracks viewing on network Web sites but not on Hulu, which is a major player in the online television business.
These figures are for the US and from TV Networks. They don't include watching TV series on Megavideo, one of the 100 most visited websites in the United States, according to Wikipedia. And what about the rest of the world, where viewing TV online is our only option. If there was a handle on those figures, maybe something would be done to settle foreign copy issues and allows Europeans and Asians to access video content legally.
Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected. The New York Times reports.
... CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.
Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.
Though there were some complaints of people who could not access CNN, and CNN posted a note online saying they were in line to receive a working stream. I watched a full two hours successfully of live streaming from both CNN and Fox News (via Hulu). What a day.
Coveted 18- to-24-year-old consumers now spend more time watching Web-distributed video than broadcast television, according to a new survey released by online video ad network LiveRailMedia Post News reports.
We polled several hundred under-25-year-olds, and an overwhelming majority are now watching as much or more video content online as on regular TV," said Mark Trefgarne, CEO of LiveRail. "We were genuinely surprised by the results."
Rather than short-form consumer-generated media, Trefgarne attributes this trend largely to an increase in the availability of quality long-form content from sites like Hulu and TV.com.
Of these respondents, 53% stated that in an average month they spent "more time watching online video than TV." About 19% of respondents said they watched "about the same," while 28% said they watched "more TV than online video."
Internet users in the U.S. watched 12.7 billion online videos in November, an increase of 34 percent versus a year ago, according to numbers released Monday by market researcher ComScore. cnet news reports.
Thanks to YouTube, Google Sites retained the crown as the top U.S. video property with nearly 5.1 billion videos viewed--or about 40 percent of all videos viewed online--with the video-sharing site accounting for more than 98 percent of Google's traffic.
Fox Interactive Media was a distant second with 439 million videos watched (or 3.5 percent), followed by Viacom Digital with 325 million videos watched (2.6 percent).
The data also showed that 77 percent of all U.S. Internet users had viewed online videos in 2008, and that the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video.
YouTube delivered nearly 5.6 billion streams to nearly 85 million unique visitors in November, up from 5 billion streams served to about 83 million visitors in October.
Fox Interactive Media, dominated by MySpace, held onto the No. 2 ranking for online videos, delivering 244 million streams to 20 million unique visitors in November, about on par with October’s haul.
The third most-popular site, Hulu, served up about 221 million streams to about 7.5 million unique visitors last month, an increase from 206 million videos in October watched by 9 million unique visitors.
A new survey has found that "millennials," the generation of ages 14-25, watch just 10.5 hours of TV a week. That's compared to 19.2 hours a week for baby boomers.
Hulu is reaching farther into the mainstream with explosive growth in views in October, according to the latest video viewing figures from Nielsen Online, reports TV Week.
The site rocketed in October, delivering 206 million streams of video, up from 142 million in September. The number of unique visitors rose to 9 million in October, up from 6.3 million in September.
Overall, YouTube continues to be the biggest dog on the block, drawing nearly 83 million unique visitors watching 5 billion streams in October, compared with 82 million unique visitors watching a little more than 5 billion streams in September.
Fox Interactive, led by MySpace, was the second most visited video site in October, attracting 18 million unique visitors to 244 million streams, about on par with the month before.
According to the latest comScore report about the online video market, U.S. Internet users watched close to 13.5 billion videos online in October, which represents an increase of 45 percent compared to last year. Google's YouTube alone served almost 5.4 billion videos to 99.5 million viewers.
However, according to a report by AdAge, there was some negative news for YouTube in these numbers as well: the site's overall market share dropped almost 10% since July, as Hulu and other services are getting more attention from users than ever before.
According to new comScore figures, U.S. Internet users viewed 13.5 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 45 percent versus year ago.
Apparently some 18 percent of HDTV owners can’t tell the difference between high-def programming and standard-def programing when viewed on their screens. That’s what Leichtman Research Group concludes based on a survey of 1,302 households.
DVDs propel profits these days, and there is a creeping dread in the movie capital that buyer interest is plummeting as the global economic crisis worsens. The New York Times reports.
So far, total DVD sales are down by about 4 percent for the year, with most of that weakness coming in October, according to data compiled by Warner Brothers, the largest distributor of DVDs.
The independent tracking service Nielsen VideoScan paints a bleaker picture, reporting a 9 percent drop in overall DVD sales during the third quarter alone and a 22 percent decline in sales of higher-priced new titles, although its data does not include results at Wal-Mart.
Obama campaign-related videos garnered 14.5 million hours of viewing on YouTube, according to Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi. He estimates that amount of time would have cost $47 million to buy on TV or about half the amount the McCain campaign received in public financing.
... Just as the power of television, via televised debates, was credited with helping John Kennedy win the presidency over Richard Nixon in 1960, the panelists agreed with Web 2.0 Summit moderator John Heilemann that in 2008 the Web had at least as significant a role.
With 12 million users a day, Gary Wang's Tudou is the biggest video sharing site in China - and it's set to get much, much bigger. The Guardian reports.
Most commentators expect the moving image to dominate the next phase of the internet around the globe, but in China this trend has already begun in earnest.
Tudou - China's answer to YouTube - was started in January 2005 (a month before YouTube) by 35-year-old Gary Wang. Nearly four years later, Tudou has some 12 million users a day and 75 million unique users a month. It serves 100m videos a day, numbers that make it the biggest video-sharing site in China.
... Speaking to the Guardian at the recent Mipcom TV market in Cannes, Wang explains that of the 13m video clips currently on Tudou, somewhere between 30% and 70% are of a type acceptable to advertisers.
Wang says that so far only about 5% of Tudou's video inventory is being monetised with advertising; analysts estimate that YouTube is monetising only 3% of its total video inventory. The biggest hurdle for both sites is attracting advertisers to user-generated videos where the type of content is hard to predict.
UK sales of games will outstrip music and video for the first time in 2008, says a report from Verdict Research, reports the BBC.
A huge shift in consumer attitudes has turned video games into the UK's most popular form of entertainment, say the retail analysts.
In the last five years the video games market has more than doubled in value, while music sales have stagnated.
... The ERA's most recent figures for 2007 show sales of games software at £1.7bn(2$.7bn), compared to £1.4bn ($2.2bn) in music sales and £2.2bn ($3.5bn) for video revenues.
Another insightful article on Hulu today, this time from USA Today - with some interesting facts about what's hot(est).
Hulu's library includes more than 1,000 TV shows and 400 movies, but "Homer Simpson" and "Family Guy" helped put the service on the map.
"Family Guy" is Hulu's most viewed show. No. 2 is another Fox show, one that no longer airs and never saw Nielsen TV rating success: "Arrested Development".
In third place is FX's cult favorite," It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", and then two series from NBC -" The Office" and "Saturday Night Live".
Shows generally appear on Hulu a few hours after their network appearance, although this week the "30 Rock" season premiere has been online ahead of Thursday night's showing.
Measuring viewer “engagement” on TV is simple. You count how many people tune into a given show. It stands to reason that the most popular shows would also be the most popular ones on social networks. But that is not exactly the case. TechCrunch
"Gray’s Anatomy" ranked No. 8 in social network interactions versus No. 1 on broadcast TV. "Desperate Housewives", No. 2 on TV, doesn’t even rank on social networks, possibly because people don’t like to talk about their guilty pleasures.
More surprising is that "The Office" doesn’t rank in the social network list either, but "Criminal Minds" does (at No. 2).
Among the Top ‘Most Popular’ Shorts on Hulu.com, Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's appearance was very good for “Saturday Night Live,” bringing the show its best ratings in 14 years.
But the number of people who have watched the clips on the web is closing fast, and will soon surpass the 15 million that watched on TV, if it hasn't already.
NBC, the most ratings-challenged among broadcast networks of a live, prime-time viewing audience so far this season, is getting a boost in viewership for several of its programs. This is coming from Internet streaming videos, and to a lesser extent, VOD and mobile viewing, according to Total Audience Measure Index (TAMi) data released by the network. MediaWeek reports.
The show benefiting the most from viewership via media platforms other than TV is The Office, which through its first two episodes was downloaded 52,163 times via iTunes, Microsoft and Amazon and viewed by 48,879 mobile users; and had a total of 8.7 million Internet video streams. Six streams of a particular episode equal one show viewed, but those 8.7 million streams also include one-for-one episodes viewed on Hulu.com.
This is wild. According to comScore’s expanded search query report, Internet users now conduct more searches on YouTube (2.5 billion in August) than they do on Yahoo (2.4 billion).
Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez takes a long, investigative look at the entertainment industry's claim that piracy costs the American economy 750,000 jobs and $250 billion and discovers the truth: they made it up and repeated it until they forgot they had made it up.
Broadcast television will have 16 gay and bisexual regular characters in prime-time series this fall, more than double the seven of a year ago, a new study has found. Yahoo TV reports.
"The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said it was a positive sign of networks making their shows more representative, although more work needed to be done. These characters accounted for 2.6 percent of all the regular characters in TV series, up from 1.1 percent last year and 1.3 percent in 2006, according to the study, released Monday."
According to the WSJ, in a study of traffic on corporate networks to find out what employees really do online, it was found that nearly 10% of all network bandwidth came from sites like YouTube, Hulu, and even Slingbox, a program that lets people watch television from their computers.
“Employees are staying entertained,” Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto’s vice president of marketing, tells the Business Technology Blog. And often they’re doing it without the information-technology department’s knowledge.
“Nearly one-fifth” of American Internet households watch TV broadcasts online, double the viewership from 2006, according to latest research from The Conference Board and TNS Mmarket Research.
"In its study of 10,000 households, TNS and the Conference Board found that of those who watch TV online, 43 percent tune into the news, the most popular category. Thirty-nine percent watch drama shows, 34 percent sitcom/comedy shows, 23 percent reality shows, 16 percent sports, and 15 percent user-generated content."
For children ages 10 to 14 who use the Internet, the computer is a bigger draw than the TV set, according to a study recently released by DoubleClick Performics, a search marketing company.
The study found that 83 percent of Internet users in that age bracket spent an hour or more online a day, but only 68 percent devoted that much time to television.
Data from DVD and Blu-ray Disc sales and rentals show the home video business is holding up well despite the down economy, the high price of gas and any consumer shift toward the Internet.
Consumer spending on DVDs and Blu-ray in the first six months of the year, purchases and rentals combined, was up 1.6% from spending in first-half 2007, according to Home Media Magazine's market research department.
The first-half 2008 tally: $10.77 billion, compared with $10.6 billion a year ago.
User-generated video will account for 42 percent of streams this year, but only 4 percent of online video revenue, according to an upcoming study from The Diffusion Group.
Conversely, professional online video will account for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of revenue. Those trends are expected to hold for the next five years.
The Nielsen Company today released the first comparable U.S. figures showing video and TV usage across the 'three screens' - Television, Internet and Mobile devices. (pdf)
Nielsen's findings show that screen time of the average American continues to increase with TV users watching more TV than ever before (127hrs, 15 min per month), while also spending 9% more time using the Internet (26 hrs, 26 min per month) from last year.
At the same time, a small but growing number of Internet and mobile phone users are watching video online (2 hrs, 19 min per month), as well as using their cell phones to watch video (3 hrs, 15 min per month).
Two-thirds of college kids watch online video; at the same time, rates of TV ownership dropped to 79 percent this year from 82 percent the year before.
China Internet Network Information Center's latest report on China's online video sector shows that there have been 160 million online video users in China.
Internet users in the U.S. watched 11.5 billion online videos in March, a 64% gain from one year earlier, led by Google’s YouTube with more than 4.3 billion views in the month, according to research firm comScore.
The videos viewed in the month, up 13% from February, came from almost 139 million users, or 73.7% of the total U.S. Internet audience, comScore estimates.
The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
Like YouTube, Hulu users can embed their video player anywhere on the Internet.
Hulu videos have been embedded more than 100,000 times on more than 12,000 Web sites, CEO Jason Kilar said during a presentation Wednesday at the National Association of Broadcasters 2008 conference.
"The Dublin, Ireland-based firm predicts that 300 million such phones that can play audio and video and browse the Internet will be sold in 2008. Its new report, "Mobile Media 2008: The Third Screen for Entertainment," also found that half the world's population, or 3.3 billion people, now have a mobile phone subscription. "
U.S. TV series are giving French fiction programming a run for its money, having monopolized the Gallic small screen last year according to figures from French audiovisual promotion association the APA, released Monday.
Despite Nielson and ComScore calculating much lower figures, Google has ‘fessed up that their YouTube service is the most popular its ever been, streaming an incredible one billion videos a day worldwide. 
Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the 
With 12 million users a day, Gary Wang's 
Another insightful article on 
YouTube has premiered its first full-length studio film, "
