TubeMogul

TubeMogul was the first dedicated online video analytics firm, enabling content creators to track the performance of their videos over a number of online video services.

But that clearly wasn’t enough for the company, which has now launched Play Time, its video advertising platform. And the firm is already seeing results from the year-long beta.

Play Time

According to MediaWeek, TubeMogul is using its experience in video analytics to its advantage with Play Time. The company is aiming to be “far more open and effective than other video networks” and “the largest video ad network in the world.”

Which are big ambitions indeed, but TubeMogul is confident that by using the data from its analytics platform it can target video ads at exactly the right people.

Beta Testing Results

TubeMogul has been testing Play Time over the past year, running campaigns for the likes of 20th Century Fox, Coca Cola, Nestlé, and Kmart. Which are very big names with some very big advertising bucks to play with.

According to NewTeeVee, the company is already reporting higher revenues from this new part of its business than the analytics service it has been specializing in for the last few years. So expect this to become a larger part of the company’s business than it is currently is.

Indeed, Tubemogul has reportedly already started buying “inventory from the top 250 comScore sites.”

Conclusions

Rivals are seeing TubeMogul’s move into video advertising as a conflict of interests, but i really don’t see why. The company is merely attempting to use its experience and the data it has gained from one part of its business to its advantage in another field. And if the results from the beta period are anything to go by, it’s proving a successful strategy.

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Online Video In The U.K.

Online video is veritably booming in the U.K.

The country already has the fantastic BBC iPlayer, my personal favorite 4oD from Channel 4, ITV Player, and Demand Five. And that’s just the catch-up services for the free-to-air terrestrial channels.

There is also Sky Player (for BSkyB subscribers), and the likes of YouTube, SeeSaw, and the MSN Video Player catering for people after older shows online. And Hulu is still endeavoring to kick-start its service in the U.K. as it breaks out of the U.S. and pushes into Europe.

MSN Video Player

Microsoft announced the MSN Video Player in July 2009. The beta version of the fledgling service then launched in August 2009 with an initial 300 hours of content, mostly from BBC Worldwide and All3Media.

Shows on offer from the start included Hustle, Mock the Week, Dead Ringers, That Mitchell and Webb Look, How to Look Good Naked, 10 Years Younger, and Peep Show. All of which were offered for free with advertising support.

Positive Changes

The MSN Video Player has now left beta and fully launched, and many improvements have been made since I reviewed the site over six months ago.

• The site has been redesigned, and is now much easier to navigate.
• As well as TV Shows, there are sections dedicated to TV Clips, Movie Trailers, and even the best Viral Video clips.
• There is a lot more content available now than during the beta. It’s still all archive content, but that was always going to be the case.
• Video quality has been vastly improved, with a shift away from Adobe Flash to Microsoft’s own Silverlight technology.
• The Video Player has a Dim Lights feature, as well as the option to share the clip on a number of social networking sites.

Conclusions

Microsoft has clearly used the extended beta period to improve the MSN Video Player considerably. And it has therefore moved several places up the league table. Although there’s no guarantee that there’ll be content on the service you’ll want to watch, the chances are high. And the user experience now makes watching that content more of a pleasure than a chore.

EyeView

The Web offers a whole new platform for advertisers to sell their wares. But as with every other medium, there are ways of increasing the success of campaigns.

EyeView offers video solutions for advertisers, having spent the last three years working for and with big names such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, HP, and eBay.

EyeView wants to know how much you know about works and what doesn’t in the realm of video advertising, and has created a Video Marketing Quiz which everyone can take.

Video Marketing Quiz

EyeView’s 2010 Video Marketing Quiz contains eight questions pertaining to the way video advertising can be used on the Web.

The questions cover the following elements, as well as many more:

• Whether auto-playing a video advert is more effective than letting the viewer decide when to start the promo.
• Whether video adverts are more effective than static banner ads.
• Whether the gender of the video voiceover person affects engagement.
• Whether the way the video advert is presented really affects click-through rates.
• Whether a lengthy video – more than two minutes – is a big no-no.

I took the quiz myself and only scored four out of a possible eight points. Mainly because as a consumer rather than marketer myself, I answered intuitively, and not all the answers proved to be so.

Conclusions

EyeView’s Video Marketing Quiz offers an intriguing glimpse at a world which most consumers and Web users will know little about. Which is why companies such as EyeView exist in the first place: to help companies and brands maximize their use of video advertising.

Online Video Viewing Figures

Online video viewing figures are generally on the up. To a vast degree. As more and more people start turning to the Web for new ways of watching movies and television content, the big players are generally picking up new viewers left, right, and center.

But it isn’t exactly plain sailing, especially for everyone other than YouTube who is currently fighting to maintain or steal second place behind the Google-owned site.

January 2010 ComScore

ComScore today revealed the online video rankings for January 2010. After declaring after the December figures were released that online video is “showing no signs of slowing down in growth,” the inevitable happened: a slowing down in growth.

Overall viewing figures dropped by around 2.5 percent, from 33.2 billion views in December 2009 to 32.4 billion views January 2010. Unique viewers also dropped, from 177.9 million to 173.4 million.

YouTube, listed as Google Sites, is still number one, and by a huge margin. The site accounted for 39.5 percent of the total views in January 2010, although that was down on its total for December 2009.

Hulu & Vevo Suffer

Hulu’s sweet victory last month was only short-lived. While it hit one billion video views in December for the first time in its history, that figure dropped back massively to 903 million in January. The obvious explanation is a lack of must-see episodes as shows such as Glee take mid-season hiatuses. And the loss of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report won’t help Hulu recover in the future.

Vevo actually gained video views in January, rising from 28.1 million in December to 32.4 million. However, as the site didn’t launch until December 9, this actually constitutes a drop in real terms. And that’s despite comScore including YouTube music videos in Vevo’s numbers.

Conclusions

Is this merely a short-term glitch or a sign that the growth of online video has suddenly and inexplicably hit its peak? The fact is that the same sites are dominating and until a new venture rises up the charts a certain amount of leveling off should be expected.

Movie Piracy

Movie piracy has been with us for decades. The advent of home video made piracy a huge problem for Hollywood, and DVD and Blu-ray have continued that trend. But it’s the Internet that truly made piracy mainstream and something everyone does.

That is if you believe sharing media files on the Internet is piracy, of course. The law says it is, naturally.

File-sharing sites are probably more numerous now than ever before, with both well-known and underground options available to anyone who wants to acquire a media file – be it movie, TV show, game, computer program, or whatever – for free online.

And The Piracy Oscar Goes To…

TorrentFreak recently compiled data pertaining to the ten movies nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the 2010 Academy Awards. The real winner of the Oscar is expected to come from Avatar and The Hurt Locker. And yet these two films play second (and third) fiddle to District 9 in the piracy stakes.

TorrentFreak’s Piracy Oscars

1. District 9 – 12,639,000
2. Avatar – 11,326,000
3. The Hurt Locker – 7,930,000
4. Up – 5,437,000
5. Inglourious Basterds – 5,376,000
6. Precious – 4,922,000
7. Up In The Air – 4,855,000
8. A Serious Man – 3,836,000
9. The Blind Side – 1,845,000
10. An Education – 683,000

It’s important to note that these films range in age considerably, and so high quality torrents have been available to download for varying lengths of time. Had they all been available for the same length of time then Avatar would undoubtedly take the number one spot.

Hollywood’s Fightback

Hollywood, the movie studios, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have collectively tried to nip movie piracy on the Web in the bud. And they must have thought they were getting somewhere when they won their case against The Pirate Bay.

But nothing has really changed. The Pirate Bay as merely one conduit for movie piracy. And there are plenty of other options open to people willing to break the law and download movies online.

Conclusions

The point is that Hollywood hasn’t yet got a handle on Internet piracy. It isn’t going anywhere, whatever efforts are made to that end.

The key for the movie studios is to both utilize the technology to their own advantage and make sure there are legal, low-cost alternatives which could help discourage people from taking this route. Until then, all the Oscar hopefuls will be heavily-pirated ad infinitum.

But as the $2 billion box-office takings of Avatar prove, it’s not like Internet piracy is really harming Hollywood anyway.

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Google’s YouTube

Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion in October 2006, just 18 months after the domain name was registered. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has since stated he thinks the company paid way over the odds for the startup, but that it was a necessary purchase.

What Google got was a YouTube that’s very different than the one we see today. Piracy was still rife, with unauthorized clips all over the site. Although these were eventually removed it took a lot longer than it does these days.

YouTube Revenue

YouTube has likely never made money for Google, at least if analysts’ previous attempts to estimate the incomings and outgoings of the company are to be believed.

However, according to MediaMemo, Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney has a different view. He estimates that YouTube made around $727 million in revenue in 2009, will make $945 million in 2010, and $1.1 billion in 2011.

He doesn’t mention the expenses YouTube carries with it, which are likely to be vast. However, with those sorts of revenues there’s a strong chance that YouTube is either already turning, or about to turn, a profit for Google.

Mahaney’s methodology was simple: transpose MySpace’s revenue-to-page view ratio with YouTube’s. Which is hardly scientific but is as good a method as any with Google continuing to keep official figures confidential.

Google Vs. Viacom

Today has also brought new news in the continuing legal battle between Google and Viacom. The latter sued the former for $1 billion in damages way back in 2007, alleging “massive intentional copyright infringement.”

Viacom’s complaint is that Google profited from the 160,000 unauthorized clips on the site before new methods were introduced to combat uploading of pirated video clips.

According to CNET, both sides are filing motions for summary judgment. In essence, this means that the talking is over with both sides now confident enough to put their case forward. It’s now up to the judge to decide the next course of action but the case is likely to come to a head very soon.

Hulu Loses Big Names

Two of the most popular shows on Hulu are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Unfortunately, neither will be available to watch on Hulu after March 9 as Viacom has decided in its infinite wisdom to pull all Comedy Central content from the site.

This is a big deal when you consider The Daily Show is only behind Lost and Family Guy in terms of the number of viewers it gains on Hulu. So if even those kinds of viewing figures aren’t making it worth Viacom’s while what about the less popular shows?

Hulu’s Big Problem

This sums Hulu’s problem up in a nutshell. While it’s the most popular TV catchup service on the Web in the U.S., it is wholly reliant on the networks and content creators for its product. If that disappears then Hulu is left with nothing to sell. Or at least no content to sell advertising against.

The same is true for any content aggregator, of course, but Hulu is slap-bang in the middle of an emerging market which could still evolve in a number of ways. And it could turn out that Hulu is crowded out of the market by initiatives such as TV Everywhere.

Viacom Threatens To Sue

For viewers this news won’t mean too much. Both shows will still be viewable online (in the U.S. only, naturally) on their own Web sites. However, the art of embedding is going to be affected.

While Hulu has the whole show and allows users to crop whichever section they want to, Comedy Central only makes certain clips available. Which is bound to lead to unauthorized clips being uploaded on sites such as YouTube.

The Hollywood Reporter quotes PR rep Tony Fox in saying, “My feeling is if (websites) are making money on our copyrighted content, then that is a problem.” he also answered, “Yes, we intend to do so,” when asked if Viacom will now target sites and bloggers who post clips from the shows in question.

Ars Technica got spun a different story, but it’s clear the company will be closely monitoring online video sites after The Daily Show and The Colbert report are removed from Hulu.

Conclusions

Viacom and Hulu were reportedly discussing a deal right up until the last minute, but one which pleased both sides couldn’t be found. My guess would be Viacom was after a bigger slice of the revenue pie, and Hulu cannot really afford to give up any more at this time.

Maybe when Hulu starts charging Viacom will have a change of heart. In fact, I’d suggest it’s inevitable.

Netflix Mobile?

Netflix has grown in popularity massively over the last few years as it shifts from physical mailings to offering movies and TV shows via instant streaming over the Internet. And yet despite now being on a huge range of CE devices, it hasn’t yet made the move to mobile.

But that could be about to change, with a survey question from the company suggesting it’s at least toying with the idea of a Netflix iPhone app. And that same app would also be compatible with the Apple iPad, the oversized iPod Touch launching soon.

Netflix Asks The Question

The survey question comes via Hacking Netflix, which received it from a reader. It asks Netflix users:

“Imagine that Netflix offers its subscribers the ability to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on their iPhone. The selection availability to instantly watch includes some new releases, lots of classics and TV episodes. There are no advertisements or trailers, and movies start in as little as 30 seconds. You can fast-forward, rewind, and pause or watch again. The movies & TV episodes you instantly watch are included in your Netflix membership for no additional fee.”

“Whenever you want to instantly watch content on your iPhone, your iPhone must be connected to a Wi-Fi network (such as one you might have at home or at work, or in public places like coffee shops, book stores, hotels, airports, etc.)”

“If this functionality were available, how likely would you or someone in your household be to instantly watch movies & TV episodes on your iPhone via a Wi-Fi network?”

If you believe the source, and there’s no reason not to, then the implication is clear; Netflix is seriously considering developing and releasing an iPhone app which would allow users of the Apple smartphone to access ‘Watch Instantly‘ content.

Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ is already available on home devices such as Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and home consoles, the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3. As well as set-top boxes dedicated to streaming online video.

Apple App Apparent

While a survey question is in no way a confirmation of an app being on its way, similar survey questions were asked about Netflix integration on the Xbox 360 and Wii. And both those devices consequently secured the service. Which suggests this is very real possibility.

If it does happen it would be a change of strategy for Netflix. In September 2009, CEO Reed Hastings stated that the company was focusing on home devices for now, with no plans for a move to mobile (including the iPhone) “in the short term.”

It could be that Netflix is now available on enough home devices to warrant a move to mobile as the next stage of a continuing strategy to be available in as wide a variety of ways as possible.

Conclusions

I think this will will happen, and soon. And I would bet that the iPad was the ultimate cause for this bringing forward of the mobile strategy. Although the Apple tablet isn’t mentioned by name, it is bound to figure in any mobile streaming plans.

Unlike Hulu, which is also rumored to be considering a mobile app, Netflix doesn’t need Adobe Flash, using Microsoft Silverlight instead. Making this even more likely to happen.

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YouTube Redesign

YouTube began testing its new redesign as part of TestTube, YouTube’s ideas incubator, last December. And while not all of the features and changes of Feather made it through to the final redesign, most have.

The redesign proper began in January, with all extraneous and unnecessary elements removed in favor of a more minimalist look and feel. Those first changes of a month ago were mostly aesthetic, but the newly-unveiled changes are a little more nuts-and-bolts.

Playlists Galore

Playlists have been given a makeover, with a new interface making the whole idea more seamless and a more integral part of YouTube as a whole.

There is, thankfully, an option to turn AutoPlay on or off, but the default is to have one video queued up and ready to play as soon as the one you’ve chosen to watch ends. This could increase the number of videos each user watches on YouTube considerably.

Video Queuing

The queuing of videos is now possible within search results. So when you search for a topic from the video page, you’ll now be able to select the video which will follow the one currently playing.

This should mesh well with the new playlist options to keep people on the site and watching videos for longer periods. But it’s a feature which has been on most Web-based music players for a long time, so Google is really just catching up.

Integrated Video Comments

Lastly, the comments section will now include text and video responses as standard. The text comments on YouTube are where arguments and insults occur on a daily basis, although that does mean they’re never dull.

The inclusion of video comments as an integrated feature should break up the conversation in a good way.

Conclusions

The YouTube redesign is still very much a work in progress, and I’m sure some features will prove more popular than others. All in all though, they’re so far improving YouTube in a big way. And I hope there is a lot more to come.

Rickrolling Phenomenon

Any regular Web user will no doubt be aware of the phenomenon that is Rickrolling. In fact, everyone has probably been Rickrolled on more than one occasion.

Rickrolling began on the 4Chan message board back in 2007 but soon spread to the rest of the Web. In essence, you post a link to something you describe as interesting, cool, or must-see, when in fact the link leads to the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, a Rick Astley track that sums up 1980s cheese in one three-minute package.

Rickrolling became so big that Google used it as one of its April Fool’s Day pranks in 2008, linking all the featured videos on YouTube’s front page to the Rickroll video. And then Rick Astley himself turned up during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November of that year lip-syncing the lyrics to the millions of people watching at home.

Although according to Pete Waterman, the song still didn’t make a fortune, despite its new-found fame.

Original Video Removed

As first noticed by Neowin, the original Rickroll video, which has been up since May 2007, disappeared on Wednesday morning, with a “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation” message displayed instead.

A collective gasp then went round the blogosphere and social networking sites as people reacted to the news. Could the art of Rickrolling really have been killed off? And why, after nearly three years on the site, had the video now been pulled?

Original Video Restored

It was a mistake, pure and simple, with YouTube spokesperson issuing the following statement while restoring the video to its former glory.

“With 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, we count on our community members to know our Community Guidelines and to flag content they believe violates them. We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour. We also have a team that is dedicated to identifying and removing spam from YouTube.”

“Occasionally, an account flagged by users or identified by our spam team is mistakenly taken down. When this is brought to our attention, we move quickly to take appropriate action, including restoring videos that had been mistakenly removed and channels that have been mistakenly suspended.”

Conclusions

After the absurd decision by Italy to convict three Google executives over a UGC video which had nothing to do with them, maybe YouTube is being a little overcautious and overzealous in its take-downs at the moment.

Whether that’s the case or not, I’m glad the Rickroll video is back. It’s one of those Web phenomenons that is sure to fall in and out of favor but never truly disappear. Unless YouTube removes it again, and for good next time.

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