Suddenly, our family was not sitting together in the living room watching television — except for the occasional DVD movie — but instead scattered around the house. My wife and I watched our shows on our office computers, and our kids watched theirs on a laptop in the kitchen. Within a few days, the diaspora driven by digital content already made the house seem, well, less homey.
Apparently, TV has never been the center of this family, but nevertheless, the fact that everyone all of a sudden watched „TV“ at their preferred PC-location changed everything.
Plus: watching live sports online is apparently impossible. This will be one of the only things left for programmed television: Sports, elections, ceremonies such as the Oscars or Royal Weddings. Things you have to watch live. Everything else can be customised, downloaded, and watched whenever you want.
The role of TV will have to change to keep up. And there will be some social implications when this media usage is shifting. No more common TV room. No more watercooler discussions about show xyz from the evening before (unless it’s one of the exceptions named above). TV will be in the same corner as any website or even a book. People will watch it a all different times and under different circumstances, TV programmers (and advertisers) will not know any more, in which personal context people will watch certain shows.
Robert Lemos concludes:
As for my family, we’ve decided to remain cut off from cable television, and live with the net as our entertainment lifeline. Before the Wired assignment came along, we were already headed toward paring our television consumption down to a few shows a week and the experiment showed that the internet could do that much.
In the end, getting videos from the internet is not the same as live television programming. However, in a few years, I believe it will be better.
People can upload videos to Youtube and find it through a PSFK tag that the video should be tagged with. Easy market research and publicity for PSFK, well done. I will looking into this quite frequently, I guess…
I must admit I hadn’t seen most of these. And I just wonder, how „The Viral Factory“ measured these figures?
Interesting is one reaction of TV companies:
Television companies, losing viewers to the net, are now launching channels to show “viral videos�.
And apparently they need to react, since:
A BBC Online survey has found that the online video craze is eating into the time that young people spend watching television, with 43 per cent of those who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week saying they now watch less normal television as a result.
Men’s lifestyle magazine Maxim is now offering specialized content for mobile devices found at mobile.maxim.com, including jokes of the day, forums, and even streaming videos of „Girls of the Day.“ To do this they’ve partnered with fast food giant Burger King as sponsor.
And Mastercard:
MasterCard Worldwide has partnered with Fox to create a series of 26 short episodes for mobile devices based on the television series „Bones“ with mobile episodes entitled „Bones: Skeleton Crew.“ In addition to sponsoring what it’s calling Mobisodes, MasterCard will also be incorporated into the storyline.
Slowly, brands are moving into this space, gaining knowledge with this new channel. I appreciate it, because mobile is the future, no matter how small the displays of our phones and PDAs are today – at some point a majority of grown up teens with SMS-thumbs and 2.5 square inch wide eyes will resemble a non-ignorable base.
PVR Wire has a good analysis of the YouTube acquisition by Google.
Google itself is already the 3rd busiest site on the internet, and now that it owns YouTube the company has control over a tremendous number of internet users, probably a higher percentage than anyone else!
Here is an Alexa comparison of Google Video and YouTube:
So Google has bought themselves a few eyeballs, since Google Video didn’t perform quite as well:
Putting criticisms aside you need only look a the amount of users and growth of YouTube to see why Google bought them. 20 million regular users, the Top 10 site on the net, and 100 million video views a day.
According to PVRWire there are three main things Google can do now with the new pool of content:
Video adverts in YouTube videos: selling adverts within or rather after the clips of users, preferrably context-sensitive.
Selling premium video, just like on google video.
Licensing content to TV stations like Blib.tv. Actually, a colleague of mine suggested to me today, that Google could start or at least support an extensive TV Network with channels broadcasting those thousands of clips clustered by topic, user votes, relevance, etc. per channel.
Regardless of these benefits, there are two winners these days, and they may look like your average around-the-corner geek, but take care, they’re multi-millionairs now, with only about a year or two worth of work:
The quality is a typical average user quality, with the little mishaps at the end – true user style, I like that. It has been viewed 560,859 times in the last two days, which makes it not top-video (yet), but I am confident they’ll make the top ten of their own site.
Wo ich sonst so bin...