Based on hours viewed, tablets saw their usage grow 110 percent in 2012. Mobile phone video viewing grew 87 percent in that same time period. However, both device classes together still only accounted for 8.25 percent of all video viewing hours in December of 2012, compared to 4.15 percent at the beginning of the year. In comparison: Desktop viewing was still just shy of 90 percent in December.

There are a few things worth pointing out: The data for the report comes from Ooyala’s 150 biggest clients. Ooyala’s client roster includes names like Rolling Stone, ESPN and Vice (and yes, also GigaOM, check the bottom of this post for a disclaimer), and it claims to reach 200 million monthly unique viewers.

However, the company doesn’t have any relations with Netflix or YouTube, which are two of the biggest video traffic sources on the internet. That means that Ooyala’s data may be more reflective of the way we use video from big web publishers, as opposed to video services like Netflix.

Still, even with that caveat, it’s interesting to see how mobile is growing, and when: Ooyala reported a temporary spike of 73 percent for tablets on Christmas day alone.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.

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Twitter officially introduced Twitter cards last summer as a way to embed media in tweets, so this isn’t exactly a new form of video distribution – but there were a few things about the announcement that struck me as noteworthy:

• This simplifies publishing videos via Twitter cards. Video has so far been a bit of an edge case for Twitter cards. Publishers need to be pre-approved before they can publish videos to cards, which Twitter justifies with the need to make sure that those videos actually work on all platforms served by Twitter. That’s still the case for Ooyala customers. But  the approval will be a lot faster, simply because Ooyala’s player has already been tested and certified by Twitter. Approval should happen within a day, promised Ooyala’s product leader Brian Theodore when I talked to him a few days ago.
• Those tweeted videos may need to be a lot shorter. Video publishers will have to experiment to figure out which media works best on a Twitter card, Theodore told me. ESPN for example tends to require authentication to watch its games online, so it wouldn’t have made much sense to tweet out live feeds. But brevity may also be key: “It’s not really the place that you are going to watch a full-length movie,” said Theodore. Instead, it could make sense to generate short clips specifically for Twitter users – and redirect them to a publisher’s site if they want to watch more.
• Twitter cards may need new ad formats. One of the nice things about Twitter cards for video is that it offers publishers a way to monetize their videos on Twitter and within its apps without sharing any of the revenue with the company. But again, brevity may be key. No one wants to watch 30 second pre-rolls in a world of 140 characters. Ads may have to be “very Twitter-esque,” suggested Theodore, and maybe even be as short as 5 or 10 seconds.

Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Mara008.

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Some numbers out from eMarketer (via Memeburn) seem to imply that up to now, advertisers have not ignored connected TV. But nor has interest in it grown:

Looking just at investment in just in digital video advertising (itself only a part of overall spend in digital ads), only eight percent of advertisers said they invested in connected TV video ads in 2011. That’s a modest number, and smaller than other mediums like mobile, where respectively 42 and 41 percent of advertisers said they would spend on iPhone and iPad platforms, and 31 percent said they would invest in ads for Android devices.

Perhaps more tellingly, that eight percent was flat on the year before — that implies that interest in the medium of connected TV seems to have stalled.

Publishers, meanwhile, seem to also be trying to play catch-up in this area: in 2011, 17 percent said they supported video advertising for connected TVs, while only 11 percent supported it in 2010. According to eMarketer’s numbers that puts connected TV video ads on par with video advertising support for non-Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) tablets, but still a ways behind iPhone and iPad (both 35 percent) and Android smartphones (28 percent).

Judging by announcements last week during CES, consumer electronics companies still laying the groundwork for how advertising on connected TV platforms might work in the years ahead:

– Samsung is forging its Smart TV strategy on its own, proprietary platform (complete with Kinect-like gesture recognition and lots of content options). And last week it also launched its own AdHub connected TV advertising services. Premium Interactive Advertising (PIA) is Samsung’s very first ad initiative for its Smart TV platform, and offers advertisers banner advertising on its home screen with functions like click to microsite (interactive multi pages), click to video, and click to application.

– And while Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had a mixed showing for its Google TV connected platform at CES, it continues to make headway into how it is helping more traditional broadcasters sell and manage their advertising inventory. (Their latest customer win: Cox Media.) As those broadcasters begin to consider how they offer advertising on connected TVs, I think it’s a safe bet to say that Google will step up to offer their services there, too.

– Sony’s music and media technology company Gracenote, meanwhile, launched an interesting-looking new service called Entourage, which uses “audio fingerprinting technology” to listen to short clips of content via a mobile device that can trigger the service to then look up content on a smart TV, be it a film to purchase or an advertisement. Gracenote, of course, will need buy-in from smart TV players to make this into an actual service; given that Gracenote is owned by Sony (NYSE: SNE), their might be the first TVs, mobiles and other products where you will see it work first.

– Meanwhile, Sony inked another interactive TV ad deal: Yahoo’s connected TV services, which serve content related to programs and advertisements on regular TV, will now be embedded in Sony Bravia sets. Like Gracenote, it offers an audio-based trigger to deliver advertising (its technology comes from its own subsidiary, IntoNow). Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) says its 180-odd connected TV apps already work on connected TV services from Samsung, VIZIO, Toshiba, Haier and HiSense. Yahoo is also starting to roll out new ad units around its these: it says that Toyota is the first company to use such a service, with display ads placed into Yahoo’s Fantasy Football TV app.

– Ooyala is another online video player that is linking up with a vendor, in this case Panasonic for its Viera line of connected TVs. Advertisers and content publishers now using its platform will now also be able to publish their content on Panasonic’s TVs as they are now able to do on mobile and Internet platforms. The Country Network will be the first broadcaster to use the service to offer selections of its content on-demand and live through Panasonic’s platform.

Considering this is CES we are talking about, it’s unsurprising to have a profusion of device- and platform-led announcements, although in the bigger scheme of things broadcasters will inevitably also be playing a role.

“I think traditional broadcasters want to be seen to be involved in new media today,” says Simon Murray, an analyst with Digital TV Research in the UK. “They were slow before and now want to be involved in new technologies and providing information and serving advertisers in different ways.” But he also notes that “Broadcasters have a bit of a dilemma. Obviously they want to diversify but they don’t want to alienate existing advertisers and traditional ways of advertising because it’s still their bread and butter. Puttng too many ads on to programs outside their traditional market might upset their ad base.”

But regardless of who controls the game, perhaps the biggest issue of all is that, unlike internet or even mobile penetration, we are still a long way from critical mass in connected TV services. Figures from Strategy Analytics estimate that by the end of 2011, there were only 12 million connected TV devices distributed globally by the end of 2011. The U.S. had a penetration of only eight percent while Europe’s connected TV device penetration was seven percent.

That, too, appears to be changing, though. Digital TV Research forecasts that it will take until 2016 for there to be a global penetration of 20 percent in connected TV services — that includes not just connected sets, but also other devices such as blu-ray players; games consoles; retail set-top boxes and pay-TV set-top boxes. Highly anticipated updates from the likes of Apple and its Apple TV could also advance the market.

While today games consoles are the most common way for making a TV internet-friendly, Murray says he thinks that connected TVs will overtake games consoles by the end of this year (2012) as the main route to accessing Internet services via televisions worldwide, driven by more widely-available

“The thing about advertisers is that they want traffic. Some will experiment earlier. It might appeal to advertisers selling highly priced items such as cars, where you might want to demonstrate features of, say, a new model of the BMW, but I don’t know how much P&G or Unilever would benefit TV interactive advertising today,” Murray told paidContent. “I think it will be a fairly minor and experimental feature for at least the next five years, until the market becomes more established.”

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Vidyard, which has been called “a YouTube for business,” has created a platform for enterprise clients that is designed to make it easier to manage, measure and monetize videos that they’ve distributed. It’s not dissimilar from existing online video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala, and has a lot of the same features — including real-time analytics and customizable video players — but it also has a few key differentiators.

For companies that already have videos hosted on YouTube, Vidyard can hook into their accounts and import videos, or serve them up with custom thumbnails and a customizable player. The platform also has the ability to add specific calls to action within the video, useful for marketers looking to boost sales within the player. And its platform has tools that allow content creators to review videos before they’re published and provide approval for distribution. That kind of feature is useful in creative agencies who send videos to clients for review.

The main difference between Vidyard and other companies in the space might be its pricing: The startup’s monthly plans start as low as $34 a month, although introductory plans are limited in the number of videos that can be served up.

The low pricing underscores a commoditization of the enterprise video market that forced consolidation and shutdown of a number of online video distribution platforms founded and funded three to five years ago. Despite that shakeout, Vidyard joins a number of new entrants into the space, which includes Vidcaster and a Pro offering introduced by Vimeo earlier this year.

Vidyard was part of the Summer 2011 class at YCombinator, and since its launch in August, has been ramping up personnel hiring and working on bringing in new clients. The startup has nine full-time employees, most of whom are focused on engineering, though Co-Founder Michael Litt told us in a phone interview that the company is also adding to its sales and business development team.

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DaCast offers a self-serve offering for broadcasters who want freedom and flexibility in serving up live streams of their videos, with a pay-as-you-go model without any contracts or monthly commitments. DaCast’s solution offers everything a broadcaster might want from such a platform, including an integrated player, Facebook embedding, transcoding, analytics and a merchant account for monetization. The idea is that if you make live streaming easy to do and inexpensive to set up, it’ll become more practical for broadcasters to take advantage of the platform.

One key to DaCast’s streaming-as-a-service business model is that broadcasters only pay for the amount of video that’s actually delivered, rather than paying a monthly license fee to use its platform. As a result, it offers an alternative to expensive video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala.

DaCast also provides more flexibility for first-time broadcasters than some free live streaming platforms like Ustream or Livestream. Stephane Roulland, CEO of DaCast, said in a phone interview that the platform is not only easy to use, but gives broadcasters the ability to monetize their live streams, either through subscriptions, pay-per-view options or the ability to add their own advertising to their streams.

DaCast, which has offices in Paris and San Francisco, believes that’s a message that resonates with customers, and so far has signed up more than 3,500 broadcasters to use its self-serve platform. The company currently has 11 full-time employees and has raised $1.6 million in funding to date, but is looking to add more with a Series A round of financing.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Esparta Palma.

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The announcement comes a day after Ooyala’s launch of new social features, which will allow its customers to publish video files to Facebook, enable group viewing sessions and receive payments in Facebook credits. Miramax is the first studio to announce its use of the new social tools, with its Miramax eXperience Facebook app.

The strategic investment also was announced while Motorola is in the midst of being acquired by Google in a deal worth $12.5 billion. That deal, which was announced a month ago, is still pending regulatory review but would put Google in the hardware business, making mobile devices and set-top boxes, while also providing some valuable patent protection.

Ooyala founders Bismarck and Belsasar Lepe, along with CTO Sean Knapp, are all Google alums, leaving the search giant in 2007 to create the video distribution platform. That said, Google bought competing online video platform provider Episodic in April 2010, although it’s been quiet on what has happened to those assets since.

Finally, the investment comes not long after Brightcove filed its S-1 registration statement, with plans to go public later this year. Brightcove’s filing showed revenues of $43.7 million in 2010, and $28.3 million in the first half of this year. It also showed continued losses from the company, to the tune of $9.7 million in the first half.

Disclosure: The GigaOM Network has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Refracted Moments™.

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Over the years, Vimeo has primarily been viewed as an alternative to YouTube. With a flashy video player and fewer restrictions on uploads file sizes, many users turned to Vimeo in part because it had a higher-quality look-and-feel to it, as well as a generally more artistic community contributing to the site. But in the last year or so, YouTube has narrowed that gap by improving the video quality of its player, putting fewer restrictions on upload file sizes and working to build a robust producer ecosystem.

With that in mind, Vimeo is looking to leverage the infrastructure it’s already built out for casual or semi-professional video producers and to extend it to small and medium-sized businesses that need video hosting but don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars a month for an online video platform like Brightcove or Ooyala.

Vimeo Pro videos won’t be part of Vimeo.com, but will be able to hosted at the customer’s own site. Vimeo Pro also offers features that aren’t available to free users, including customizable “portfolio” websites and players, review pages that can be shared before a video goes public, advanced reporting and analytics, social media sharing tools and advanced privacy settings.

The Vimeo Pro offering costs just $199 a year, and includes 50GB of storage and 250,000 plays. Users that need more storage can buy it in increments of 50GB for $199 each. And for those that need more video plays, they can be purchased in increments of 100,000 views for an additional $199. Brightcove’s lowest-price offering, which allows users to manage up to 50 videos and includes just 40 GB of bandwidth, is $99 a month by comparison.

While cheaper than other video hosting solutions, it’s important to note that Vimeo’s Pro offering doesn’t offer the same types of distribution or advertising tools that come with some other online video platforms. It’s primarily focused on businesses that want to build engagement with users or customers by adding a video component to their own websites, not publishing out to multiple distribution points.

That said, Vimeo’s announcement follows a trend of companies offering ultra-cheap — or in some cases free — video hosting to capture the small and medium-sized business market. LongTail Video recently made its Bits on the Run product free for entry-level users, although the amount of hosting and transfer that’s actually free — 1GB of platform usage and 5GB of video transfer — is incredibly small. Meanwhile, San Francisco-based VidCaster recently launched its video-hosting platform with pricing starting at $39 a month for 10GB of storage and 50GB of bandwidth.

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VidCaster’s big value proposition — and its competitive advantage against some of the larger online video distribution platforms, like Brightcove or Ooyala — is that it combines all the tools one might need to set up a video page and archive, without requiring all the usual necessary technical expertise used to deploy those sites.

Typically online video platforms really only provide the video player and distribution engine needed to get things started, but it’s up to the customer to actually create, develop and maintain the web pages that those videos show up on. VidCaster takes away that pain by providing an all-in-one dashboard for creating video sites, with customizable landing pages, archives and video player. It also includes built-in social sharing tools to integrate with a customer’s Twitter or Facebook campaigns.

Vidcaster is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, and those that want to use video for marketing but for which video distribution isn’t a core competency. A good example is Airbnb, which has used VidCaster to power its Airbnb TV site to explain what Airbnb is all about and what kind of listings are available in various cities around the world. (Think Cribs for online apartment rentals.)

It’s priced for the small and medium-sized business market as well: Its entry-level plan starts at just $39 a month for 10 GB of storage and 50 GB of bandwidth used each month. Price plans go up to $249 a month for a Pro account that includes 125 GB of storage and 750 GB of bandwidth, with a standard plan of $99 a month for 40 GB of storage and 250 GB of bandwidth. That’s well below some of its bigger competitors, and could provide a decent value for companies looking for a drop-dead simple way to jump into video distribution.

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