Studios Split on Selling Content to YouTube

Hollywood’s major studios do not always march in lockstep over key industry issues. It appears they are divided over licensing of content to YouTube for its new movie on demand service.

Fox and Paramount have said they will “not move forward with any deal at this time." Disney hasn't said anything final, one way or the other, while Warner Bros., Sony and Universal have just concluded deals to license content to YouTube for rental.

Executives at the hold-out studios reportedly are not opposed to a deal, but want more assurance from Google that it will take a harder line on piracy, specifically linking to pirate sites in Google searches or selling advertising on such sites.

But it seems likely all the studios ultimately will want to work with YouTube. Its 130 million potential buyers represent a huge audience, and are especially interesting demographically. YouTube viewers skew younger, and probably are the sorts of viewers unaccustomed to buying video and might be only lukewarm about the theater experience.

In the online video business, it often is the content owners who dictate the pace of movement, even when other partners are willing.

Why Fox, Paramount, Disney Are Holding Out on the YouTube Deal | The Wrap Movies

iPad's Great, But How Good is It as a Blender?

300% Increase in Mobile YouTube Viewing in 2010

YouTube now exceeds 200 million views a day on mobile, a 300-percent increase in 2010.

YouTube Blog

Future of TV: One Investor's View

At some point, "over the top" video distribution is going to be a bigger financial force in the television business, but it won't happen as fast as many believe, simply because the amounts of business revenue at stake are so enormous. As hard as attackers will try, access to quality content still will be a key issue, as content owners will not be in a hurry to jeopardize their current revenue streams.

"Over the top" options will continue to proliferate, and device manufacturers will attempt to create ecosystems around their products to entice content owners to buy in. But it will take time to create the scale content owners will want to see before making adjustments in content relationships.

Also, existing distributors, such as cable companies, know exactly what is at stake and will work furiously to enable online video in ways that complement, rather than compete with, their current offerings.

Virtually all the contestants in the ecosystem will be looking at ways to "move up the stack" in terms of providing more value. Many of those attempts will fail.

Software and applications are not core competencies for many of the ecosystem providers, and that ultimately will limit the success of "up the stack" efforts.

Almost by definition, the real combat will take place over second and tertiary screens, rather than the large TV screen. Tablet PCs and smartphones will provide key examples, even though game consoles and other devices using the TV display also will fight for attention.

Perhaps the key issue is the future of content bundling. Nearly all the technology developments will create alternatives to the multichannel TV subscription. Perhaps an analogy can be glimpsed in the music business, where the "bundled" album or CD lost favor compared to purchases of discrete songs.

Also, the trend in video entertainment over the past several decades has been a shift away from linear formats and towards on-demand consumption. Digital methods are only the latest examples of a trend that began with the videocassette recorder.

Television originally was designed for a mass audience in a single country. But global content and its ability to develop a “niche” global audience now is a new trend. Think of about the rise of Japanese Anime, Spanish Novelas, Korean Drama or the rise of Bollywood entertainment from India. It’s not a mass, mainstream audience but I would argue that it’s “global torso” content that will be meaningful at scale. Websites like ViiKii, which have been launched to create realtime translations of shows by fan-subbers, have huge followings already. And I’m sure that this is what popularized the SlingBox in the first place. British, India & Pakistani ex-pats on a global scale want to watch cricket.

NetFlix might be winning the battle for distribution of movie content online. Linear television remains much more fluid. One app to watch is YouTube, which might graduate from user-generated video to a distribution mechanism for "linear" professionally-created video as well. Potential audience size always matters, and YouTube is aggregating an enormous potential audience.

That same argument goes for gaming consoles, which now represent an installed base of U.S. devices numbering about 60 million terminals. The issue is not simply the game console's ability to deliver online video, but the role gaming might ultimately play in building audiences for gaming-plus-TV experiences.

Content discovery will be important as well. In a universe of content, it is hard to find "the good stuff." In part, that is why some believe "social TV" is a growth area. People talk about video and movies they like. That will help with the "discovery" problem.

Another unknown is the way narratives are crafted. Hollywood is the master of the long-form story.Whether that will be the only, or even dominant narrative in the future is open to question.

What happens when content production & distribution is easy to professionally produce and distribute at mass low-cost scale? Will we still have predictable story lines? Or can we develop more fragmented content to meet the needs of fragmented audiences and interest groups?

What happens in a world where content producers have a direct relationship with the audience and can involve the audience directly in story creation? Or maybe even as wacky as involving the audience in the story itself?

read more here

YouTube Tests Sreaming Service Live

YouTube is testing its streaming service live on Sept. On Sept. 12 and 13, 2010, YouTube is running a live test of its live streaming service. Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood are providing content for the test.

The new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels. All broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB or FireWire camera.

Included in the test is a “Live Comments” module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community.

Based on the results of this initial test, YouTube will evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to its partners worldwide.

link

Hulu Serving 3x as Many Ads as YouTube

Hulu generated 783 million video ad impressions in the month of July, more than three times the 219 million impressions generated by Google sites like YouTube.

There are a number of reasons for the disparity. YouTube does not try to display ads on all its inventory, while Hulu tries to.

Hulu features professionally-produced, branded video content with high end user interest. Not all YouTube content is of sufficient quality or interest to create much of an ad opportunity.

Also, Google advertising on YouTube also leans toward banner ads and AdSense text advertising rather than video spots, as Hulu features.

Hulu Serving 3x as Many Ads as YouTube

YouTube Adds HTML5 Site

YouTube is launching a new mobile site optimized for HTML5, m.youtube.com, as well as a new mobile app pointed at the site.

The web app apparently has superior video quality when compared to native applications on the iPhone and will soon feature more content as well. Both iPhone and Android devices will get the new app.

Google Wins Copyright Suit Over YouTube Video

Google has successfully defended itself from a 2007 lawsuit filed by Viacom, alleging that Google's ouTube operation was guilty of copyright infringment by allowing users to post 160,000 unauthorized clips on YouTube, and that those clips had been viewed 1.5 billion times.

Viacom, the parent company of MTV, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures, filed the $1 billion lawsuit in March 2007. Google argued it was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the law that protects Internet service providers from the illegal sharing of copyrighted material among their users, if the service providers agree to take down offending material when notified by copyright holders.

The court granted Google's motion for summary judgment,  meaning that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

Not surprisingly, Google General Counsel Kent Walker says the ruling is a victory for consumers.

link

Users Now Spend 22% of Their Online Time With Social Media

Three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites, according to Nielsen.

This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24 percent over last year.

;The average visitor spends 66 percent more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.

link

Social Networks More Popular than Search Engines in UK

Social networks were visited more often than search engines by users in the United Kingdom, says hitwise.

About 55 percent of social network and forum traffic goes to Facebook, hitwise says. YouTube got 16 percent of traffic. Twitter leapt over Bebo and MySpace in May to land a distant third, with only two percent of UK social traffic.

Social networks more popular than search engines in UK, says Hitwise | VentureBeat

YouTube to “Live Stream?"

Max Haot, the CEO of Livestream, believes this screenshot provides”strong evidence that YouTube is about to launch a live streaming feature. The big issue most of us likely will have is how the service might be used, by whom, and what business model YouTube intends to pursue.

Ad support is one option, but it might make more sense to pursue a "carriage fee" option, where the provider would simply buy the equivalent of air time from YouTube.

Screenshot Hints At YouTube “Live Stream” Option

U.S. Users Watched 30.3 Billion Videos in April 2010

U.S. Internet users watched 30.3 billion videos in April, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 13.1 billion videos, representing 43.2 percent of all videos viewed online.

YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 958 million videos, or 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft Sites ranked third with 644 million (2.1 percent), followed by Viacom Digital with 384 million (1.3 percent) and Yahoo! Sites with 371 million (1.2 percent).

Some 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Recently launched in December 2009, Vevo (which includes viewing from the Vevo channel on YouTube) attracted 43.6 million viewers in April, representing a quarter of the U.S. online video audience.

comScore Releases April 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings - comScore, Inc

Broadcasters Are Serving Up Lots of Web Video

Aside from YouTube, online video offered by broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels, seem to be getting the most traffic, a new study by Brightcove and Tubemogul suggests.

About 51.75 percent of viewers are navigating to video directly from the publisher’s main site. Google search drives 39 percent of viewing,  followed by Yahoo at 5.58 percent, Bing at two  percent and Facebook at 0.40 percent.

In the first quarter of 2010, the broadcast TV networks sampled in the study streamed 380 million videos, with Web media brands coming up close behind at 326 million video streams. However, the native Web brands, which include both video-only and general entertainment and news sites, saw 300 percent annual growth of video views in the first quarter, compared to 44 percent growth for the broadcast sites.

For all of 2009, Web media sites grew twice as fast as broadcast TV sites (165 percent compared to 74 percent). At this rate, they will overtake the broadcast sites in video views later this year, the study suggests.

In the first quarter of 2010, magazine-affiliated sites streamed 190 million videos, up 90 percent. In fact, magazine sites are streaming as many videos as music label sites, which came in at 191 million videos, up 60 percent.

Newspaper sites aren’t doing nearly so well, streaming 136 million videos in the quarter and growing five percent.  Newspaper sites are trying to catch up, though, and had two billion video player pageloads in the quarter (pages which loaded with a video player, but were not necessarily clicked on), compared to 1.2 billion for magazine sites, 760 million for Web-only media, and 670 million for broadcast TV sites.

But newspaper sites are having a real problem getting their audiences to watch videos, the study suggests.

For every two billion videos they throw in front of users, only 136 million get viewed (6.8 percent). Broadcast TV sites are getting 380 million views for every 670 million attempts (56.7 percent).
Even magazine sites are seeing a 12.7 percent hit rate.

But newspaper videos get viewed "to the end" more frequently than videos on other sites. The completion rates for videos on newspaper sites are 41 percent, versus 39 percent for magazine sites, 38 percent for broadcast sites, and 29 percent for music label sites.

YouTube to Launch Movie Rental Store

YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing site that claims to serve an average 96 videos per person to 135 million viewers each month, is building an automated system that will let movie makers upload full-length movies to the site’s recently launched video rental store.

Some observers think that feature might be most valuable for filmmakers unable to get much distribution from other outlets, especially independent filmmakers who cannot gain distribution on Netflix or Amazon, for example.

The service “will give moviemakers the ability to upload and provide their streaming content for rent,” MediaPost writer Laurie Sullivan says. Rental movies will be available in 1080-pixel resolution, much higher than the TV and movie streams on Hulu. Payments will be made through Google Checkout, a Paypal-like service.

YouTube Consumes 10% of Business Bandwidth, Study Finds

YouTube now consumes about 10 percent of business network bandwidth, while Facebook represents 4.5 percent of all consumed bandwidth, a new study by Network Box finds.

Windows updates represent about 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used, Yimg (Yahoo!'s image server) 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used and Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used.

When looking at traffic, rather than bandwidth consumption, Facebook is the top site visited on business networks. Network Box's analysis of 13 billion universal resource locators used by businesses in the first quarter of 2010 shows that 6.8 per cent of all business internet traffic goes to Facebook, an increase of one per cent since the last quarter of 2009.

Google vists represent 3.4 per cent of all traffic, Yimg (Yahoo!'s image server) 2.8 per cent of all traffic, Yahoo 2.4 per cent of all traffic and Doubleclick about1.7 per cent of all traffic.

The company also found that, of 250 IT managers surveyed about their biggest security concerns over the coming year,  the top concern was "employees using applications on social networks" while at work, with 43 per cent of respondents saying this is a major concern.

"The figures show that IT managers are right to be concerned about the amount of social network use at work," says Simon Heron, Network Box internet security analyst says.

Such measurements always are a bit imprecise, not in terms of URLs visited or bandwidth consumed, but in terms of business or personal use. Business users increasingly are using YouTube business videos for work, while some Facebook use undoubtedly also reflects business purposes.

YouTube "Feather" Beta Seeks Lowest-Latency Connections

YouTube, or any video content for that matter, is tough to watch on a  low-bandwidth Internet access connection or even a computer with insufficient processing power, such as some netbooks.

So YouTube is in beta testing of "Feather," a way of optmizing latency performance on limited hardware or low-bandwidth connections.  Feather is said to work by “severely limiting the features" and "making use of advanced Web techniques for reducing the total amount of bytes downloaded by the browser."

The video playback page of Youtube Feather is fully transferred after downloading 52 Kilobytes of data compared to 391 Kilobytes that the standard pages require, some note.

Youtube Feather achieves the better performance by partially by removing standard YouTube features such as posting of comments, rating videos, or viewing all comments or customizing the embedded player.

The Feather beta suggests why strict versions of "network neutrality" might hinder innovation or end user experience. Feather works by blocking some bits and features. It is an opt-in feature, and that also is part of the danger over-zealous network neutrality rules represent. Users might want to selectively tune their use of some applications, blocking some features and bits, to optimize the experience.

YouTube Adds "News Near You"

YouTube is customizing its video feeds with a "News Near You" function that allows users to view clips related to their locations.

"News Near You" grabs video clips from sources within 100 miles of your computer’s IP address. YouTube promises to share revenues with TV outlets, but it’s a double-edged sword for local broadcasters, as is the case for print and other forms of news content.

The extra exposure and promotion, plus some possibility of increased advertising, will be helpful. What might not be helpful is one more reason for users to avoid broadcast outlets and rely on Internet mechanisms.

YouTube has deals with content sources such as ABC News, Reuters and AP. So far, about 200 news outlets have signed on to YouTube’s local video-casting initiative.

YouTube As Monetizable as a Newspaper?

"User-generated content" is proving to be a financial albatross, says Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist.

YouTube, for example, sells ads on fewer than 10 percent of its videos, according to analysts at Credit Suisse. But the costs of storing and serving up 75 billion video clips a year costs Google $360 million a year, the analysts estimate. Add in all other expenses, and the cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million. But YouTube will make about $240 million in revenues for 2009.

Oddly enough, YouTube loses more money on its content than a daily newspaper.

http://slate.com/id/2216162

You Tube Sensation Will Grab You

If this does not make you tear up just a little in joy, I'm not sure you have a heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBTVdnWj1hM&feature=bz301

Bandwidth is YouTube's Main Cost Driver

YouTube still hasn't figured out a sustainable business model. Ad revenue is the objective, but

most of YouTube's content remains outside the category of "inventory."  Credit Suisse analysts estimate that YouTube will bring in about $240 million in revenue in 2009, mostly provided by home page  placement ads and in-video overlays and adjacencies.

Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube generates approximately $86.7 million a year on homepage placement ads, or about $7 million per month.

In-video ads and banner adjancencies contribute another $87 million, according to the analyst estimates. Sponsored videos ($37.1 million) and sponsored links ($30.1 million) also contribute to YouTube's revenues.

On the cost side, Credit Suisse estimates that Google spends $711 million in operating expenses related to YouTube. Those costs include bandwidth, content acquisition, partner revenue shares, site overhead, and storage.

The biggest expense for YouTube is bandwidth, as you might guess, as YouTube streams about five million videos a month. That costs YouTube about  $360 million a year, or $1 million a day. Keep in mind that observers believe Google pays about half the the lowest "market" rate for

bandwidth.

And Google gradually is assuming some roles more analogous to a traditional network. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will pay $260 million in content acquisition costs in 2009.

And despite the estimation that YouTube buys its bandwidth at discounts as high as 50 percent of the lowest "market rates," bandwidth still is the biggest sunk cost.

General overhead represents about $24 million worth of 2009 cost. Storage costs $12.7 million a year.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/129505-google-may-lose-big-on-youtube-in-2009?source=feed