Speaking to world leaders at Davos last week, Bill Gates gave television five years to live, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets. “Because TV is moving into being delivered over the Internet –and some of the big phone companies are building up the infrastructure for that- you are going to have that experience all together,” Gates said.
In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.
"Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it," he said.
"Internet presentation of these things is vastly superior."
"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.
At the same gathering, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said that the impact on advertising would be profound, with future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer’s profile.
Super Bowl Ads once again
Super Bowl means best commercials of the year. And since the pre game and the game is endless, is there a better way to watch them that having them on demand? Enjoy
YouTube and Google have 51 % of all visits to the top 20 video sites
Compete.com released a list of top twenty video sites. If you add Google and YouTube together (10.2 percent of the market share and 41.1 percent), they are half of the online video market. Break and Metacafe have tiny shares. One notable site missing from the list is Revver.
The top five sites account for 80 % of the online video market. 58 million people viewed at least one video in December 2006.
Brightcove to chase the consumer side
After having closed $59.5 million of funding, Brightcove is widening its focus from commercial and professional video to chase the consumer side. This week the company launched Brightcove Personal, allowing users to set up channels to post their own video. For now, this free channel creation service is quite raw, and has some glitches.
