A great cultural shift on how people watch television
Watching television episodes on a computer screen is now a common activity for millions of consumers, says this week The New York Times . ”It has become a mainstream behavior in an extraordinary quick time. It isn’t just the generation Y-ers. It spans all ages,” NBC’s head of research explains.
One in four Internet users had streamed full-length television episodes online in the last three months, including 39 percent of people ages 18 to 34 and, more surprisingly, 23 percent of those 35 to 54, according by Nielsen Media Research. How many shows are being streamed is unclear because there is no widely recognized version of the Nielsen TV ratings for the Internet yet.
One piece of good news for the networks and advertisers is that viewers are more likely to remember ads on the Internet versions of TV shows, partly because the commercials are less numerous and more demographically aimed online.
Testing is over, Hulu.com starts its streaming-video venture
Hulu.com, the long-gestation joint venture between NBC and Fox, intended to beat YouTube, emerged on Wednesday. This streaming-video site displays free, ad-supported shows and feature films from NBC, Fox and more than 50 media companies, including Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (but not ABC and CBS). Their videos also appear on AOL, MSN, Comcast, MySpace and Yahoo, and all of them are able to be embedded.
Hulu’s mission is to have everything in terms of premium content. Two years ago there wasn’t any full TV episode or films legally.
Hulu was at first skeptically by many in the industry, but now it has received high marks from media and Web executives for creating an easy to use site with high-quality video and professional content attractive to advertisers.
Now Hulu is experimenting with giving viewers a choice in advertising, allowing select which commercial they want to watch. Some viewers will also be given the opportunity to watch a two-minute film preview before a TV show, and then skip all the other advertising breaks.
Pepsi starts the buzz online to promote a new fruit drink
Pepsi will take an unconventional approach and will rely entirely on new media to promote a new no-calorie fruit drink called Tava. The soft-drink maker will turn to banner ads, a new web site and other online promotions to generate buzz for the product.
Ads will be placed on Oprah.com, AOL, dailycandy.com, Evite and other popular destinations to reach men and women ages 35 to 49. There will be sampling at events and at popular shops, and the delivery of free samples to the employees of companies like Google, Apple and MTV. The experiment is meant to generate word-of-mouth buzz.
As The New York Times points out , the decision is another sign of the growing use of new media to introduce brands in mainstream categories, and are the reason that spending for ads online is increasing far faster than for any other medium.
YouTube opens its platform for outside developers
YouTube announced to open its platform for outside developers in order to make its name more ubiquitous. The new set of developer APIs will allow more direct access to the service. Developers will access into YouTube for video uploading and will allow for players without its traditional interface and branding. Also, they will be able to manage, search, and video playback on any number of devices for any number of purposes.
It means that YouTube will become not just a destination for videos, but a system that serve videos into other apps. YouTube will turn into an infrastructure play which, once adopted by a developer on a site, would be difficult to remove. It will also give YouTube an even more impressive library of videos, which can be used to serve up advertising.
Some early samples of usage: TiVo will use that API to integrate the video-sharing site into its set-top boxes. Electronic Arts will use it to to allow gamer to upload videos of personalized Spore creatures. UC Berkeley has created a system that will automatically post university lectures to YouTube.
YouTube experiments with different quality streams, depending on the user’s bandwidth
YouTube.com has begun experimenting with serving higher-quality video. For certain videos, the site will now detect your Internet speed and serve the video that your connection can handle.
A major flaw in YouTube until now has been low video quality. Video, Dailymotion and MySpace took the opportunity to add higher-quality and HD streams.
