VideoNuze Posts

I'm pleased to present the 154th edition of the VideoNuze-TDG podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon, senior analyst at The Diffusion Group. This week finds Colin in Copenhagen, in the middle of the Nordic region which is seeing a lot of OTT activity from Netflix, HBO Nordic and others. Colin provides an update on what he's learned.

In addition, we discuss YouTube's declining market share, which in September stood at 33.2%, down from 53.1% as recently as July. I delved deeply into all of the year-over-year data this past Monday. Colin adds another dimension to the analysis, saying that this reflects a shift away from viewing short clips, toward longer-form viewing.  

Click here to listen to the podcast (20 minutes, 8 seconds)

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It may be a fool's errand to question the thinking of an investor who's worth $14 billion, but after listening to Bloomberg's interview with Carl Icahn yesterday (embedded below) concerning his newly disclosed 10% stake in Netflix, it's hard not to conclude his understanding of the company is a mile wide and an inch deep. Unless he has some big vision for the company up his sleeve that he's not disclosing, Icahn seems more interested in a short-term bet on driving Netflix into a larger company's arms, than in positively influencing Netflix's murky strategic direction.

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In a brief interview in AdWeek yesterday, Mark Cuban said "if Apple released a set-top box that supported authentication for multichannel video programming distributors (like cable and satellite companies), it would be a huge success." I agree with him - and that's exactly why such a product won't see the light of day.

As I asserted in August ("Apple to Make Cable Set-Top Boxes? Not. Going. To. Happen."), if pay-TV operators invited Apple to make set-tops it would be like letting the proverbial fox into the henhouse. They would be turning over their user experience to Apple, allowing the company to drive the UI and therefore reshape the video experience as it determined, just as it has done in music with iTunes. While there might be some short-term benefits (e.g. lower capex, etc.), the pay-TV industry's ability to sustain its multi-channel bundle long-term would be undermined.

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Interactive video ad tech provider Jivox is announcing this morning that its platform can now deliver mobile ads on the iPad Mini and iPhone 5, without any additional work by publishers or agencies. Jivox uses a single ad tag that detects the type of device, browser and OS so that an appropriately sized ad is adaptively chosen and delivered. In addition, Jivox can detect which devices have higher quality Retina Display and will deliver high resolution ads to those.

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Yesterday comScore released its September 2012 Video Metrix data which showed YouTube accounted for approximately 13.1 billion videos viewed out of the monthly total of 39.4 billion. At 33.2%, that's the lowest market share YouTube has had since Aug. '10 when I started tracking this data. As recently as July '12, YouTube had a 53.1% share (with 19.6 billion videos viewed), though as I pointed out previously, in August, its share dropped unexpectedly to 36.5%.

In addition, the 13.1 billion YouTube videos viewed in September is the lowest in the 13 months since comScore changed its reporting methodology and is nearly 30% lower than the 18.6 billion videos viewed a year ago in Sept. '11 and almost 650 million lower than its Aug '11 total of 13.8 billion videos. (YouTube's record high was 21.9 billion in Dec. '11). See chart below for more.

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Univision has launched its ambitious UVideos online and via mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. Announcing UVideos, Univision cited Nielsen research that 60% of  Spanish-speaking Hispanic consumers like to share video clips with friends online, with 60% of them saying they want more Spanish-language digital video.

When visiting UVideos for the first time, Univision has helpfully posted the splash screen below with navigation cues called out to orient new users.

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Last Friday morning Comcast reported strong Q3 '12 results, including its 8th straight quarter of lower year-over-year video subscriber losses. For Q3 '12, it lost 117K subscribers, vs. 165K in Q3 '11. This pattern stretches all the way back to Q4 '10, when Comcast lost 135K subscribers, vs. the 199K it lost in Q4 '09. Obviously no business likes to lose customers, but Comcast's (and all cable operators') reality is that with the incursion of telcos and satellite operators, some market fragmentation was inevitable.

On its earnings call, Comcast executives didn't point to any one reason for the ongoing video subscriber improvement, except to point to solid execution and "competing effectively with our improved products and services." Of course it doesn't hurt that the economy and housing have both picked up recently. Comcast's performance is also likely coming at the expense of telcos and satellite operators, whose Q3 results have not yet been fully released.

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I'm pleased to present the 153rd edition of the VideoNuze-TDG podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon, senior analyst at The Diffusion Group. This week Colin and I review Netflix's Q3 '12 results and its bumpy path forward.

As I wrote earlier this week, by the end of 2012, Netflix will have lost 8 million, or half the DVD subscribers it had back in July '11. That loss of subscribers and cash flow come at an inopportune time, given Netflix's aggressive international expansion. Colin is slightly more optimistic about Netflix, citing its better-than-expected international subscriber results. We also share thoughts on where Netflix goes from here.

Unrelated to Netflix, Colin also just released a complimentary white paper called "Examining the Trend: From IPTV to Broadband IPTV, which is available for download here.

Click here to listen to the podcast (24 minutes, 46 seconds)

Click here for previous podcasts

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