BBC America received a ratings boost when it aired this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special mere hours after the BBC did — a strategy that it plans to repeat for future episodes, as the BBC evolves its international distribution plans to match a technologically savvy audience. Read more »
The BBC’s iPlayer is on a roll, accumulating almost 1.4 billion media requests in the first 11 months of 2010. However, most of the video viewing happens on PC screens. Mobile phones, iPads and connected devices barely contribute a blip to the iPlayer’s overall usage stats. Read more »
Today, the BBC announced plans to create a global version of its iPlayer application for iPads, which may be available first in the U.S. on a subscription basis. For British television fans outside the UK tracking their favorite shows, this is very good news indeed. Read more »
Today on the Internet: Web companies including Google and Yahoo team up to protest the Comcast-NBCU merger, Paramount announces a digital-only follow-up to the latest successful Jackass installment, and the BBC is determined to count every view, including online and VOD. Read more »
Today on the Net: Samsung will announce their plans for Google TV devices in January, the BBC is working on a global version of its iPlayer, MLB is having YouTube take down videos, and more. Read more »
The BBC released the latest version of its iPlayer, with more social capabilities and integration with more connected TVs and other devices. The new design is aimed at making the player more personalized and driving engagement by allowing users to more easily interact with friends. Read more »
The BBC recently warned that the HTML5 standardization process is at risk of being hijacked by companies pushing proprietary implementations of the web standard. Now it is responding by hiring a “senior technologist” to represent the broadcaster in discussions with the W3C and other standards bodies. Read more »
Today on the Net: American cable subscribers dropped for the first time but execs say it’s due to the economy, Cisco’s Eos video platform is powering the London Olympics site and the BBC isn’t ready to back a 3-D technology quite yet. Read more »
Erik Huggers, director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC, cautions that HTML5 is not yet ready for primetime, and that certain companies — like Apple — could undermine the open nature of the standard by pushing an agenda through their own proprietary implementations. Read more »
The iPad kicked off a new vehicle for media consumption, and it is getting more commonplace as tablets rise in popularity. Publications can best leverage this information vehicle through tight focus on specific topics. This could be best served by making an app for that. Read more »
Today on the net: Qualcomm wants to sell FLO TV, Canada’s Netflix users will have a hard time with bandwidth caps, 7-Eleven’s branded web show gets two million views in three weeks, YouTube has selected the jury for its Play award and more. Read more »
Today on the Net: Hackers took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on YouTube over the holiday weekend, Comcast raised its rates for California residents by an average of 3.8 percent and the BBC spent £199.3 million on its online service, according to its annual report. Read more »
As the data landscape changes, so must the databases used to gather, store and analyze the rich information within them. Consumer-facing Internet companies are able to scale by using NoSQL data stores, and CIOs can learn from what’s worked for hugely successful web sites. Here, we offer a number of recommendations for enterprise decision makers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Today on the Net: Shakira is taking questions from YouTube, Current TV is overhauling in hopes of a sale, the trust overseeing the BBC approves its involvement with the to-be-renamed Project Canvas and Microsoft forsees strong ad growth. Read more »
Wimbledon 2010 kicked off this morning, and if you’re a tennis fan, there is no doubt that you’ll want to watch the tournament live. However, the matches take place during work hours — luckily, there are once again ways to watch all the fun online. Read more »
The Numbers Behind the World’s Fastest-growing Web Site: YouTube’s Finances Revealed; Viacom releases YouTube’s finances from before the Google acquisition. (MediaMemo) Hulu’s Ad Sales Team Is Undercutting Its Parent Companies; Hulu’s sales team is “actively subverting” the ad sales of its parent companies, which are also […] Read more »
Four out of five adults surveyed in more than 26 countries around the world said they believe that Internet access as “a fundamental right,” according to a new survey sponsored by the BBC. The survey asked more than 27,000 people about their attitudes towards the Internet. Read more »
British TV fans have long been jealous of Hulu.com. Granted, the BBC’s excellent iPlayer offers lots of on-demand programming for U.K.-based online video fans, but it only serves up shows from the last seven days, and it doesn’t have any content from the BBC’s competitors. Enter […] Read more »
BBC Signals an End to Era of Expansion; The BBC will close two radio stations, shut half its website and cut spending heavily on imported American programmes in an overhaul of services to be announced next month. (Times Online) Did Chatroulette Just Launch the Interactive Video […] Read more »
The British Broadcasting Corporation’s online video iPlayer continues to set records for viewership, essentially doubling its audience over the course of the past year. The BBC reported that iPlayer viewership increased to 120.3 million requests in January 2010, from 61.5 million requests in January 2009. That […] Read more »
Mobile phones and connected devices are gaining ground among users of the iPlayer. Phones, game consoles, set-top boxes and connected TVs now make up for 14 percent of the BBC’s immensely popular online TV service, according to new numbers from the broadcaster. The iPlayer is now […] Read more »
The BBC Trust today gave the provisional go-ahead for the BBC’s Project Canvas, opening the way for more Internet video being delivered directly to UK TVs. The project, which seeks to create a standard that would allow broadband users to connect their set-top boxes and other […] Read more »
NHL.com Benches Inaugural Video Player In Favor Of Sleeker, More Social Model; the NHL VideoCenter is a less-cluttered, higher quality, more social contender with expanded content. (paidContent) Search Captions on Hulu; new Hulu Labs projects searches captions for hundreds of TV shows. (Hulu Blog) Rovi Works […] Read more »
The EU-funded P2P Next project has started to stream BBC content in true 1080p HD via BitTorrent. The project posted an episode of the BBC’s R&D TV on its technical trial web site this week, with the option to stream it either in regular 480p or […] Read more »
BBC Launches Projectcanvas.info; the site was built as a hub for Project Canvas partners — like the BBC, ITV, BT, and Five — to host information about the project. (BBC Internet Blog) Is Netflix Wooing Comcast?; CEO Reed Hastings claims that the company’s streaming service can […] Read more »
Over the past three years, the Internet has become a major secondary distribution platform for free-to-air broadcast programming. Whether through network programmers’ own sites, such as ABC.com, or through aggregators like Hulu and TV.com, ad-supported broadcast programming today is generally available online shortly after its initial airing at no cost to the user. However, programming such as ESPN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, which originates on pay-TV platforms (i.e. cable, satellite and telco TV services) has been a different story.
Cable system operators and other multichannel video program distributors (MVPDs) are loathe to see the programming for which they are charging subscribers hefty monthly fees made available “over-the-top” without a subscription. Over time, they fear, consumers would be tempted to drop their expensive cable service if they could access their favorite programs online.
Cable networks, for their part, collect hefty fees from MVPDs for the right to retransmit their programming, from a few cents per subscriber per month, to as much as $3.75 per subscriber per month, for the most popular channels like Disney’s ESPN. In aggregate, cable networks collect about $25 billion per year in “affiliate fees” from MVPDs, about the same amount as they generate collectively from advertising sales.
As a result, much of the original programming on pay-TV networks is not currently available online, and that which is often doesn’t appear until well after its original air date. The popularity of portals like Hulu (not to mention illegal sources of TV content), however, has accustomed consumers to expect access to their favorite shows online, putting pressure on the industry to respond. Network programmers and marketers, meanwhile, are also anxious to extend their programming franchises by tapping the broad, online audience.
TV Everywhere, which aims to make subscription programming available online exclusively to current pay-TV subscribers, represents an effort to square that circle. In this report, we look at the players, potential costs, and emerging opportunities of these efforts. Read more »
TV on the iPhone isn’t anything new, but a new web site makes it much easier, more direct, and less expensive for iPhone users in the UK. Just by visiting the site and logging into the new beta web app from TV Catchup, you can access […] Read more »
Trading of Stock in Pirate Bay Bidder Halted; regulators question whether Global Gaming X has the money to complete the transaction; CEO of Peerialism, which was also to be acquired by GGX, says it has not received any money from the company. (CNET) How YouTube’s Content […] Read more »
Voicemail transcription startup SpinVox is in a bit of a fix, after a BBC investigation found that the majority of messages the company claimed were converted to text by an advanced speech-to-text algorithm, were in fact “heard and transcribed by call center staff in South Africa […] Read more »
Twitterers Have Longer Video Attention Spans; Twitter-referred videos are watched on average for one minute, 58 seconds, compared to 1:14 for Facebookers, and :58 for Digg users, according to TubeMogul. (MediaPost) Crowd-sourced Animated Short Getting Theatrical Release; Live Music was created by animators around the world […] Read more »
