Back in 1996 when I was involved in the UK launch of MSN there was an all-singing, all dancing event at the Royal Commonwealth Institute here in London. Programme
makers trouped along to hear MSN tout the Web as the next best thing
for watching TV-like content. Bear in mind this was in the days of 28.8
dial-up…

Obviously it never happened that way, and arguably there have been a series of online video false dawns. Just the other month a piece of research by Tube Mogul showed that most web TV series lose the majority of their viewers after episode one.

I mention this as a Media Post article
under the heading ‘Online Video Usage Dramatically Overstated’, talks
about a recent piece of research – the (US) Video Consumer Mapping
Study, produced by Sequent Partners and Ball State University.   The
project found that while a lot of people watch online video, as a
proportion of viewing figures it’s very low. Online video makes up less
than 1% of US viewing time, while the good old TV still has a 2/3
viewing share.

This is supported by a raft of other
research that shows, plainly, the Internet is somewhere where people
dip in and out of to watch short clips. By and large its not somewhere
where you can serve them lengthy content. Case in point, Comscore measures average US online video watching at ten minutes a day, and around fifteen minutes for the UK.

Indeed, one of the authors of the Video Consumer Mapping Study reckoned that people actually over estimated their online video usage and talked down the amount of time spent in front of the box because online video is seen as “cool.”

TV RIP? Hardly

The fact is that advertising-led recession woes aside, unlike the print industry, TV has actually held its own pretty well. As Nielsen showed last year, heavy Internet users are actually the most likely to also watch TV as they multi-task.

And
the past decade has seen a range of innovations introduced from the
(now) humble PVR onwards. Just this week Italian / Israeli start-up Bee TV received a cool $8 million in funding for what TechCrunch described as its ‘stunning’ personal TV recommendation system

According to the online demo, the founders fully intend to white label it to multi-channel TV content providers (like Sky and Virgin Media here in the UK) as a value added they can pass onto customers.

The
conclusion? Online video, definitely here to stay and a powerful
medium. But it supplements and doesn’t replace the main video viewing
platform. That’s still the telly.

Image Credit – ‘The Sofa’

Afternoon all, do you ever have days when you buzz off what you do ? I am having one !

We lost a pitch, so why am I happy you ask …. to be honest I don’t think we’d want to work with the client.  The team did a fantastic job however the client didn’t buy our approach to digital, they bought a 2% commission, we should do it cos we do the telly, approach. Now, its not an invalid argument however when the review is called because they were not getting a strategic perspective or quality of service and in his words had a “bunch of 21 year olds with calculators” on the account it doesn’t make a lot of sense to re purchase the same thing ( it stayed with the incumbent ) at an even lower price point invalidating the agencies’ ability to do a better job as the margin is squeezed further. I actually feel a bit sorry for them !

I am proud of the fact that we delivered a comprehensive, intelligent approach to digital - Each client values different things from an agency and there is no one size fits all solution so today I am happy because we stood tall behind our beliefs and I am glad we have a point of differentiation that polarises clients.

Wouldn’t life be very dull if we were all the same ?