Related news roundup - 09 May
A few noteworthy news items from the world of VoD and IPTV from the last couple of weeks:
- 08 May - YouTube is said to be looking to offer content owners a mechanism whereby they can charge for access to their videos in a self-service manner (CNET article). Understandably it will only initially be available to those who are already content partners.
- 04-06 May - Some of the latest stats around VoD consumption: Virgin Media saw 200 million VoD views across 2.1 mill homes (TechRadar); time-shifted TV consumption is at 6.9% of all Tv viewing (& 13.7% in households with PVRs) says TV marketing body Thinkbox (MediaWeek); Five served 51mill total VoD viewers online in 2009, with 1.3mill long-form videos per month (PaidContent UK); ITV served an avg 16.4 million views per month to 8.7 million unique viewers per month over Q1 (ITV release).
- Not directly related to VoD yet, but Sky announced record growth in its HD boxes - adding almost half a million of them in Q1 (Broadband TV News). This is important because the Sky+ HD box has the ethernet connection that will allow for Sky’s true-pull VoD offering to be launched to the entire HD install base later this year.
- 04 May - Robert at PaidContent UK has a post showing some of the BBC iPlayer’s socialised aspects out in the wild (on Twitter). ‘Version 3′ of iPlayer has long been touted by Huggers & Rose as the social version, but as far as we are aware, there’s not been any publicly discussed launch/roll-out date.
- 27 April - Hulu has reportedly ‘abandoned’ plans to launch in the UK. Emma Barnett at the Telegraph has this article. We say reportedly however because - like all the past Telegraph pieces about how close a Hulu dea/launch was claimed to be, there is still no official statement from any party including Hulu - just the “sources close to…”. For the record, the reasons for Hulu’s withdrawal are the oft-repeated ones: ITV is not syndicating it’s VoD content, and C4 and Five want to sell ad inventory around their content in any syndication deals they’re striking.
- Bill Scott at Easel.tv has a piece on what a good app store could mean for TV.
Related news roundup - 12 Feb
So, as the saying almost goes, it’s been a long time between IPTV/VoD drinks here at the blog. Below are some news clips to do with all things VoD & IPTV from February so far. Over the weekend we’ll post a backlog of related news items (from the ‘not so fresh’ bookmarks, all the way back to Dec), and we’ll be back early next week with all the coverage of the DTG’s submission to the BBC Trust - where they claim Canvas is being developed as a ‘parallel standard’ to the DTG’s own work (if you’re not aware, this could have big implications - it is the DTG after all who is supposed to be helping the Project Canvas group develop the Canvas standards).
- 9 Feb - Tubefilter has a look at the possible reasons why Hulu is getting involved in original web series (Simon Fullers’ ‘If I can dream’)
- 10 Feb - Freeview’s upcoming ad campaign will focus on the HD part of Freeview HD, and not mention the internet connectivity of the Freeview HD boxes, nor any specific connected TV opps like Samsung’s iPlayer syndication - Broadband TV News. And a survey commissioned by Freeview suggests that 360,000 Sky+ HD households are “likely” to switch to Freeview HD - Guardian article. Lastly, Freeview is solidly entertaining the possibility of 3D channels being available on its platform in the future - possibly in 5 years. Broadband TV News.
- 10 Feb - VAST is a new template for video adserving that aims to standardise video ads around on demand content online & boost advertiser adoption. It’s backed by the IAB, both in the US and here in the UK - and the IAB Video Council here has all the big adservers (except Atlas) and most of the big video content providers (4, ITV, Sky, et al). BrandRepublic blog.
On a related note, the IAB UK Video Council also have a pretty active community over at their site here. - 10 Feb - On a related note, New Media Age reports that ITV & Channel 4 have cut their online video rates to boost uptake - perhaps by as much as half.
- 5 Feb - Channel 4 is wanting to start selling pre-rolls alongside its contet on BT Vision, the IPTV offering from BT. IPTVNews
- 4 Feb - In the US, Hulu’s ‘ad selector’ ad placement - the one where the viewer gets to select which brand they’ll see ads from during the program - has been chosen as best online video ad unit, by Publicis unit VivaKi. MediaWeek article
- 3 Feb - TellyLinks is a new consumer offering that attempts to capitalise on second screen interest, by showing viewers, on the TellLinks site, links that are relevant to the program being watched on the TV screen . It’s run by Jeff Henry a former ITV Consumer MD. Guardian article here. Its first public trial - an episode of Numbers on Five - didn’t go so well, with the site crashing (one blog post on that night here).
- 1 Feb - Views of Virgin Media VoD service increase 50% year on year, to a total of 750m for 2009. VoD is used by 59% of Virgin’s 3.9mill TV customers. Media Guardian.
Channel 4 & Talk Talk both join Project Canvas
11. 15am: This just in: Channel Four and Talk Talk have are both joining Project Canvas as partners - brining the total number to 6.
Right at the moment, Project Canvas.info, the official Canvas site, is down (the error msg says “projectcanvas.info is being upgraded”), but it looks like the news/announcement page should be here when the site is back up.
There is also a Broadband TV News article here, and a Media Week article here.
One huge benefit to securing two new partners is that the cost of involvement will fall from £24m for each partner, for the first 4 years, down to £16m.
4oD introduces recommendations…
… of a sort.
We left this out of yesterday’s related news roundup, but wanted to cover it.
A week ago Channel 4 released a little service (in beta) that makes use of Facebook Connect (the service that lets users login to external sites using their Facebook credentials) and applies it to the 4oD video content. The site is called Test Tube Telly, and you can find the full C4 intro blog post here.
Part of the functionality of Facebook Connect is that actions on the Test Tube Telly site can be fed into your Facebook news feed, and you can also see what your Facebook friends have been watching (if they are in fact using Test Tube Telly).
Why is this important? Because content/video recommendations is something that is becoming increasingly important as more and more archive video content becomes accessible on demand. The BBC iPlayer team have repeatedly publicly said the next major version of iPlayer will have a heavy focus on recommendations, revolving around knowing what your (explicit or implicit) friends are watching. Test Tube Telly from C4 is a (albeit arguably crasser, but more immediate, present) version of this same feature.
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