VideoNuze Posts

The tone of last week's Cross-Platform Video Measurement Summit in NYC, was set upfront, as first speaker Patti Wakeling, Unilever's Global Media Insights Director, plainly stated that a "measurement crisis" is upon the research industry. Noting the wide diversity of devices that now deliver video, and rapidly changing consumer behaviors, Ms. Wakeling concluded that "consumers are way ahead of the research community."

These simple truths are no doubt what packed 300+ attendees into the Time Life Auditorium for an afternoon of discussion about how confusing the video landscape has become for traditional TV advertising and what the ecosystem - advertisers, agencies, content providers and measurement service providers - should be doing to address the situation.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 121st edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for Feb. 17, 2012. In this week's podcast we puzzle through Aereo - a new broadcast TV over IP / DVR-in-the-cloud provider, which this week announced a $20.5 million financing led by IAC's Barry Diller, plus a March 14th launch date in New York City.

I happened to be in NYC this week, and aside from "Linsanity," Aereo seemed to be the hottest topic around. But talk about a lack of consensus on its prospects! Some believe Aereo is going to be a major disruptor to the existing broadcast and pay-TV ecosystem, while others see it as a total non-starter, whether because broadcasters will succeed in shutting it down or because consumers won't be compelled by its proposition.

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Please save the date for the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit, on Tues., June 19th in NYC. This event takes the place of last year's ELEVATE: Online Video Advertising Summit, which VideoNuze co-hosted and which drew 400+ attendees. Similar to last year, the Video Ad Summit will be an action-packed day of high-impact industry education and networking for executives at brands, agencies, video content providers, technology companies and other stakeholders in the ecosystem.

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Everyone knows that online and mobile video consumption is soaring, as tablets, mobile devices and connected TVs proliferate, but new data from Ooyala helps quantify things. According to its Q4 2011 Video Index report, released this morning, viewership on these devices doubled from Q3 '11 to Q4 '11. This is being driven by users clicking "play" more often when presented with video choices and then watching longer as well.

Tablets led with 22% growth in quarter-over-quarter growth in time watched per play. Connected TV and game consoles led in engagement (as measured by completion rate per video viewed), with viewers completing 47% of videos. Tablets were second with 38%, followed by desktop and mobile. Videos longer than 10 minutes added up to 57% of the viewership time on connected TVs and gaming consoles, while on desktops it was just 25%.

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Technology provider RAMP is announcing this morning that ABCNews.com and CNBC.com are now using its web closed captioning solution, and that it has made a number of enhancements in order to better meet the needs of customers. For those not familiar with web closed captioning, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act signed in Oct. 2010 mandates that by the end of 2012, all video originally aired on broadcast or cable TV networks, which is then delivered online, must include closed captions.

As RAMP's CEO Tom Wilde explained to me last week, the act has created huge new challenges for TV networks because when captioned on-air video is passed from the broadcast team to the digital team for online delivery, there's no adequate workflow to keep the caption file in synch with the video. The situation becomes even more complicated when a full-length video is sliced up into shorter online-only clips.

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Online video and social media have become Super Bowl advertisers' new best friends, extending the ROI of expensive game buys to new levels. Helping quantify the impact, a new study by Kantar Video reveals that over $11.1 million in "earned media" (essentially incremental free online views) has been generated by all Super Bowl advertisers in the first 3 days following the game, from over 148 million total views. Viewership of this year's Super Bowl ads is up 267% vs. last year.

The top 10 ads alone accounted for $8.6 million of the total, providing an average of $862K in earned media per ad, or about a quarter of the $3.5 million each ad cost to run during the game. Viewership of the top 10 ads for the first 3 days is over 95 million views. Honda's Ferris Bueller spoof, "Matthew's Day Off," has gained the most earned media, approximately $2.3 million, from over 14.7 million online views.

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 120th edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for Feb. 10, 2012. In this week's podcast we discuss Nielsen's new Cross-Platform Report for Q3 2011 and its implications for the broader TV industry.

Among the key findings in the report are that pay-TV households dropped slightly overall from Q3 '10 to Q3 '11, with cable homes decreasing to the benefit of telco and satellite. This has been happening for years as newer providers enter the market with aggressive offers. Nielsen also found that the number of "broadcast-only" with broadband homes increased significantly. In addition, a NY Times analysis of Nielsen data found that for viewers in the 12-34 age range, TV viewership per day decreased from Q3 '10 to Q3 '11 by six to nine minutes per day.

This and other Nielsen data underscore what we all know intuitively and from our personal experiences and anecdotes: individual behaviors are changing as new video alternatives and other choices for how we spend time (e.g. social media, video games, etc.) have exploded. All of this contributes to changing perceptions of pay-TV's value. Beyond Nielsen, Colin cites TDG's own data about Netflix users' interest in downgrading their pay-TV service, which jumped from 16% in 2010 to 32% in 2011. Colin believes this shows that for some, online is viewed as a bona fide alternative to pay-TV. Between the Nielsen and TDG data, it's clear that the TV and video landscape is in the early stage of significant change.

Listen in to learn more!



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A+E Networks will use FreeWheel's Monetization Rights Management system to manage video ads running against its content consumed on Apple iOS mobile devices, the companies announced this morning. A+E will be able to deploy video ads on its own mobile properties as well as those of third-party syndication partners. FreeWheel gives A+E the ability to manage ad sales rights, forecast inventory, determine ad loads in specific commercial breaks, and monitor performance, among other things.

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