Big Marketers Shifting Online Budgets to Video Sites

About 57 percent of advertisers surveyed by Advertiser Perceptions say they are shifting spending from television to online vide sites, said Randy Cohen, Advertiser Perceptions president.

The study suggets that 70 percent of big ad spenders, those budgeting $10 million or more,  were likely to move money from TV to online video.

Whether any political fallout was a factor, 70% of marketers more commonly preferred to target based on demographics, vs. 59% who more commonly used behavioral metrics.

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Small Cable Operators Think Dumb Pipe Might be a Better Business Model

Not every cable operator thinks over-the-top video is a worse business model than providing cable TV. In fact, some believe providing what might be wholesale services to third parties might actually provide better profit margins than cable TV now does.

"Our video margins are going down year after year," said Colleen Abdullah, the CEO of WideOpenWest Holdings.

Wave Broadband COO Steve Friedman also agreed that the profits from an over-the-top model might be better than the current cable TV business, especially if the new model simply substituted a bandwidth usage model for the current monthly subscription model.

While the dumb pipe model may in fact be better for small operators, that probably is not the case for larger providers.

Probably the worst of all possible outcomes is over-the-top competition from firms such as Comcast, where Comcast sells the video content directly to broadband users, and the local cable modem provider is not able to charge for the additional bandwidth consumed. That is one reason why the dumb pipe model would not work unless some form of consumption-based charging were adopted.

"Over-the-top video will eventually emerge as a challenge to the current model of large, expensive bundles of programming," said Blair Levin, the executive director of the FCC's Omnibus Broadband Initiative. Levin thinks such a move is "inevitable."

The basic tradeoff is that cable operators would essentially trade current linear video subscription revenue for higher broadband access revenues. That essentially was the business decision Qwest Communications made years ago, when it concluded it was better off outsourcing linear entertainment to DirecTV, and building its optical access infrastructure in a way that ultimately is conducive for over-the-top or on-demand video.

"The final inevitability is mobile broadband," said Levin. "We know it's coming. We know it's going to be very, very big."

"In 1994, you could envision as inevitable the Internet replacing existing platforms for communications and entertainment," Levin said. "And based on numerous metrics, that transformation is well underway."

Levin also warned that consumer anger over the cost of cable TV now reminds him of similar sentiment leading up to the 1992 cable act, and that there will likely be "some kind of response, either from the market or from the government," to address those concerns.

Any such move would further limit the upside from linear video and likely propel more movement towards an over-the-top approach.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=190749&site=lr_cable&f_src=lightreading_gnews

HD Voice Increases Call Duration, Says Skype

Jonathan Rosenberg, Skype chief technology strategist, says high-definition call quality can increase the length of a voice call 45 percent. That, in turn, could theoretically lead to higher revenues for application or service providers whose services are sold "by the minute." Call duration might have no revenue implications at all if the endpoints are talking on a "no incremental cost" basis, though.

Skype's studies suggest, as you would expect, that audio quality is higher on a high-definition call. The Skype survey suggests there is a correlation between call audio quality and call duration.

With the lowest quality, approximating mobile call quality, the average call lasted about 21.5 minutes. At the highest quality it went about 31 minutes.

It's difficult to say whether the relationship is correlational or causal, though. One variable might be that users on the highest-quality codecs are predisposed to use Skype for conferencing sessions, which would have call duration parameters quite different from a casual voice conversation between two people, for example.

All Online Advertising Does Not "Suck"

No, all mobile or Web advertising does not "suck," as Apple CEO Steve Jobs says. But Jobs probably is right about rich media being an easier way to make ads engaging. Good creative helps, too, as shown by this Google spot for Chrome.

Why Most Advertising Will Continue to "Suck," Despite iPad

It's easy to lament the relative "ineffectiveness" of banner advertising, or for Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, to argue that mobile and online advertising "sucks."

Online banner ads have click through rates of perhaps 0.03 percent, even when lots of people are exposed, some would argue.

Though improving, it remains difficult to match an actual user's present interests, location and spending intentions with a relevant and compelling message, most of the time. So targeting will help.

But even targeting won't entirely fix the problem. Some say rich media is part of the answer, and that makes intuitive sense, as it is easier to create an emotional bond or reaction using rich media, compared to most other forms of messaging.

Rich media banners, on the other hand, might get a three-percent to 10-percent "roll over" rate. If the creative is good enough, users actually will spend time playing around with the content. That can be a game-like experience, video or even compelling content that doesn't use video.

But really-interesting rich media takes time and money to create. And that is going to be the biggest problem. Most campaigns will not support the creation of truly-compelling creative. Think of the ads developed for the Super Bowl and you'll get the problem. If it were financially possible to create that sort of content routinely, marketers clearly would.

There is another angle as well. Much advertising works, even when largely falling on "deaf ears" and "inattentive eyes." Sure, there's lots of waste. But enough eyes and ears are reached, even with simple messages, to justify the marketing expense. Targeted is better, but even minimal targeting, with everyday, run of mill creative, will produce results sufficient to justify the investment.

Not every movie ever produced is a "hit." In fact, most are either flops or modest successes. That will hold for most advertising as well.

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To the Extent that Housing Instability Slows Cable and Telco Sales, Look at This

You can draw whatever conclusions you want about this chart showing a wave of option adjustable rate mortgages coming up for resets already and peaking next year, not to mention another wave of sub-prime mortgages that is building and will peak at just about the same time as the option ARMs have to be reset.

I'm not suggesting anything, one way or the other, about the potential for a double-dip recession or anything of that sort.

It does suggest that any company making a business out of services and products sold to consumers probably should assume the post-recession economy we now are in will be difficult.

Is Multitasking the iPad's Opportunity?

About 55 percent of users interviewed by the Yankee Group say they frequently surf the Web while watching TV. Slightly fewer say they use email while watching TV.

And if a new product category develops for devices such as Apple's iPad, that is the use case: people who want a convenient way to use the Web and email while watching TV, using the Wi-Fi connection in their homes.

That isn't to say some people might be able to use a tablet to replace a PC when out of the home, but that might be a subset of the tablet user audience.