VideoNuze Posts

At the recent VideoSchmooze, Noah Levine, Senior Manager, Product Evangelism at Adobe Auditude delivered a short, high-impact presentation on the key technology and consumer behavior changes sweeping through the TV industry, and the business challenges these are creating.

He also provided a high-level overview of Adobe's Project Primetime, a suite of product and services to deliver, monetize and measure video across devices. Below is a video of Noah's presentation. If you'd like a copy of the slides, please contact Noah directly at his email address on the final slide.

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comScore released its November, 2012 ranking of the top 10 U.S. video properties yesterday and News Distribution Network (NDN) spiked to the number 2 position, with 55.7 million unique viewers, surpassed only by YouTube, the perennial 800-pound gorilla.

NDN has burst onto the online video scene over the past 8 months moving from the 10 position in April '12, with 27 million views, then dropping out of the top 10 in May and June, followed by 5 months of blistering growth, surging from the number 8 position in July, with 35.1 million viewers to the number 2 position in November. I recently caught up with Kevin Gentzel, NDN's chief revenue officer, who was previously publisher of Forbes, to learn more about the company's success.

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At the recent VideoSchmooze, Colin Dixon from The Diffusion Group interviewed Chet Kanojia, founder and CEO of Aereo in a case study focused on innovation. While much of this year's media coverage of Aereo has focused on broadcasters' copyright litigation against it, far less attention has been paid to the perfect storm of technology and consumer trends that have enabled Aereo.

In fact Chet says that even 2 years ago Aereo would not have been possible. In the interview Chet details how the striking reduction in costs / increase in performance for key enablers like bandwidth, storage, cloud computing and transcoding are driving the business. Chet explains how the entire computational industry is subsidizing these trends, which Aereo and others are capitalizing on. In addition, Chet discusses how shifting consumer perceptions are creating an opening for innovative new business models like Aereo.

The interview provides fascinating insights on today's technology trends from a world-class technologist that all media and technology companies - startups and incumbents - need to be paying attention to.

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A recurring theme in the video industry this year has been the proliferation of video-enabled devices and fragmentation of viewing. This has resulted in vastly increased complexity for content providers to prepare and deliver the properly formatted video efficiently and cost-effectively to all these devices. Recognizing this escalating challenge, online video platform provider thePlatform is announcing new "Smart Workflow" features in its mpx video publishing system this morning, to accelerate the formatting and delivery of video to multiple devices.

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Advertisers and content providers continue to grapple with how to optimize ads in online video, and contributing to the dialogue, this morning AOL is releasing research indicating that ads in short-form videos are more effective than ads in long-form. Based on research involving 800 participants, AOL and its research partner Qualvu found that ads in short-form video had a 25% higher brand recall, produced 42% higher purchase intent and were 26% more likely to be liked. Short-form video is defined as less than 10 minutes with long-form 10 minutes or longer.

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Another great example of how video syndication is continuing to deliver results: in November's comScore rankings of U.S. sports properties, Perform Sports edged out perennial leader ESPN in number of total monthly unique viewers. As the chart below shows, Perform had 24.532 million viewers and ESPN had 24.092 million. Yahoo Sports is a distant third with 9.988 million, followed by another syndicator, CineSport, with 8.367 million and NFL with 5.936 million.

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I'm pleased to present the 159th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon, senior analyst at The Diffusion Group. Today we count down and explain our picks for the top 10 online video stories of 2012, with a bonus of naming our top "non-story" of the year.

2012 was an incredibly busy year in online video, so choosing the top 10 wasn't easy. No doubt you'll have your own selections, and we welcome your ideas in the comments section. Next week we'll do our last podcast of the year, in which we'll look ahead to 2013 and make a few predictions about what to expect.

Click here to listen to the podcast (29 minutes, 40 seconds)

Click here for previous podcasts

The VideoNuze-TDG podcast is available in iTunes...subscribe today!

Comcast has announced that Xfinity TV subscribers who use the Xfinity TV Player app on their Android and iOS mobile devices can now download certain TV shows and movies, so they can watch when they're not connected to a broadband network. The download option closely mirrors TiVo's recently announced "Stream" device, which also allows downloading.

As I wrote in my review of TiVo Stream, I think the offline viewing use case is a killer app. Despite the proliferation of 4G services, the reality is there are still plenty of times when connectivity is sub-par or non-existent, particularly in transit situations (e.g. airplanes, cars, trains, etc.). Further, the elimination of unlimited data plans by wireless carriers makes streaming long-form content prohibitively expensive. As a result, the download option is very attractive, especially for travelers.

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