All Things Digital
Nielsen’s 2012 Social Media Report is now available. Among the highlights, the rise of Social TV is evolving how consumers use social media, while also transforming TV-watching into a more immediate and shared experience.
Full report available here
The Nielsen company said that one in three people using Twitter in June sent messages at some point about the content of television shows, an increase of 27 percent from only five months earlier. And that was before the Olympics, which was probably the first big event to illustrate the extent of second screen usage.
Social networking is becoming so pervasive that the study found nearly a third of people aged 18-to-24 reported using the sites while in the bathroom.
An estimated 41 percent of tablet owners and 38 percent of smartphone owners used their device while also watching television at least once a day, Nielsen said.
That percentage hasn’t changed much; in fact, 40 percent of smartphone owners reported daily dual screen usage a year earlier, Nielsen said. The difference is that far more people own these devices and they are using them for a longer period of time. The company estimated that Americans spent a total of 157.5 billion minutes on mobile devices in July 2012, nearly doubling the 81.8 billion the same month a year earlier.
“There are big and interesting implications,” Bannon said. “I think both television networks and advertisers are onto it.”
The social media can provide networks with real-time feedback on what they are doing. The performance of moderators at presidential debates this fall was watched more closely than perhaps ever before, because people were instantly taking on Twitter to provide their own critiques.
It also makes for some conflicting information: Twitter buzzed with complaints last summer about NBC’s policy of airing many Olympics events from London on tape delay, yet ratings for the prime-time Olympics telecast soared past expectations.
The increase in people watching television and commenting about it online would seem to run counter to another big trend this fall: more people recording programs and watching them at a later hour. Those contrary trends both increase the value of live event programming like awards shows or sporting events.
The Nielsen study also found that 35 percent of people who used tablets while watching TV looked up information online about the program they were watching. A quarter of tablet owners said they researched coupons or deals for products they saw advertised on television
As rapid as the use of social media while on television is growing in the United States, it already lags behind other countries. Nielsen said that 63 percent of people in the Middle East or Africa report using social media while on TV, and 52 percent of people in Latin America.
Source: The Washington Post
49% of the consumers surveyed in Accenture’s Pulse of Media Consumer Survey are watching OTT video through a broadband connection on their TVs in addition to the content they traditionally watch via cable or satellite. Accenture polled 2,010 consumers (1,003 in the US and 1,007 in the UK), ages 18 and up, for this study.
Younger consumers are leading the way in using new technologies to view video content, according to the study. In the US, 82% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 24 watch some OTT video, with 60% watching at least a quarter of their video over-the-top (compared to 32% of US consumers overall). Younger viewers are also more tuned in socially, with 35% of 18- to 24-year-olds showing an interest in “social newsfeeds of videos” that their friends have watched, compared to just 11% of consumers 45 and up. Other findings from the report include:
In the US, 27% of those surveyed subscribe to OTT services such as Netflix; 28% subscribe to satellite.
16% of US consumers subscribe to gaming console-based video delivery services and 4% subscribe to STB-based services such as Apple TV, Boxee, or Google TV.
While TV is still king for long-form content such as full-length TV episodes, consumers are also flocking to mobile devices to watch other types of video content: 24% of respondents do so to watch short videos and clips; 15% to watch user-generated content; 6% to watch live content; and 4% to watch full-length movies and TV.
There has been a sharp increase in out-of-the-box video viewing for over-the-top television.
With the growth of Netflix and other services, a new Accenture survey indicates that 49% of U.S. and U.K. consumers are viewing some over-the-top (OTT) video through a broadband connection via their TV sets.
The researcher says the 49% level represents a sharp increase in OTT video consumption from the 8% level that Accenture last measured among viewers in March 2011.
In terms of actual subscriptions for the likes of Netflix and other services, the research says in the U.S., 27% of those surveyed subscribe to OTT services, with subscriptions in the U.K. at 26%.
Young consumers are way ahead of older TV viewers. Eighty-two percent of U.S. viewers between the ages of 18 and 24 are watching some OTT video via broadband through TVs, and about 60% are watching 25% of all their video consumption via over-the-top, broadband means on TV sets. Looking at all U.S. consumers, 32% watch a quarter of their video via OTT.
The numbers are a bit lower in the U.K. — where 75% of young consumers watch some OTT, with 54% watching at least 25% of all their video. This compares with 28% of TV viewers in the U.K. who watch 25% of all their video via OTT.
When it comes to mobile devices, Accenture says 24% of consumers are using these to watch short videos and clips; 15% to watch user-generated content; 6% to watch live content; and 4% to watch full-length movies.
Nielsen has released its latest Cross-Platform Report, which measured the media consumption of Americans in the second quarter of 2012. In it, the company finds that close to 40% of Americans now use their tablets or smartphones at least once a day while watching TV, and twice as many (85%) do it at least once a month.
Considering that Nielsen also reports that Americans spent more than 34 hours per week in front of their television sets in the second quarter of 2012, this suggests ample opportunities for advertisers to reach plugged in consumers while they’re watching TV and interacting with a mobile device. Other findings from the report include:
25-34 and 55-64 year olds are the most likely age groups to use their tablets multiple times per day while watching TV.
Nearly half of 18-24 year olds use their smartphones at least once a day while watching TV.
36% of 35-54 year olds and 44% of 55-64 year olds use their tablets to dive deeper into the TV show they’re watching at that time.
29% of 25-34 year olds shop on their smartphones while watching TV.
YouTube is planning on reinvesting in only about 40% of the current original channels on the video site. This doesn’t mean that the channels that are cut off will be kicked off the site, just that they will no longer be an active part of YouTube’s original content initiative.
The new deals will most likely be similar to the original ones, in that YouTube will front up to $5 million to produce original content, will recoup that money via advertising, after which the site and the content owners will split ad revenues 50/50. According to AllThingsD, for all the channels that haven’t yet earned back all of the money YouTube invested in them, the video giant will continue to collect all of the ad revenue generated by those channels.
There’s also an understanding that any content that is produced as part of the original content initiative will be exclusive to YouTube for a year
CBS Interactive’s foodie site CHOW.com has unveiled its first-ever weekly video programming lineup, adding four new series, two of which will be available exclusively through CHOW’s YouTube channel.
The lineup of new shows, which join existing ones like Supertaster, CHOW Tips, and The Easiest Way, is as follows:
Sundays: MDRN KTCHN, in which hosted Scott Heimendinger of Modernist Cuisine discusses food and ingredients used in a modernist kitchen.
Mondays: Musical Video Recipes, one of the YouTube exclusives, the show offers instructional “CHOW-approved” recipes performed to original pop songs.
Tuesdays: My Food Thing, the second YouTube exclusive, this show follows a celebrity as they discuss their favorite a private “food thing,” such as a musician dishing on favorite places to eat on tour.
Fridays: CHOW Happy Hour, in which famed SF bartender Martin Cate teaches viewers new cocktail recipes.
According to new numbers released by YouTube: The top 25 original channels average over a million views a week; 800 million viewers are watching 4 billion hours every month; the number of subscribers has doubled year-over-year; and channel partners are reaching the 100,000 subscriber milestone five times faster than they did two years ago (this presumably includes partner channels before the initiative officially launched last year).
The video company now plans to expand the program globally by launching 60 new channels from media companies in France, Germany, the UK, and yes also the US. These new channels, which add to the approximately 100 that are already available, span categories from local cuisine to sports, animation, comedy, and news.
According to a recent Ericsson ConsumerLab report, there are more people in the US (21% of US-based pay-TV subscribers) who have either reduced or canceled their pay-TV subscription packages than there are those who have increased their spending (12% of US-based respondents). Of those Americans who have reduced or canceled their TV packages, 56% cited “wanting to save money,” 16% pointed to “using free internet services,” and 12% named “no suitable package” as reasons why. The global report consisted of 14 in-home interviews (10 in Chicago and 4 in Sweden) and 12,000 online interviews (1,000 per country), across multiple regions, including the US, UK, China, Spain, Sweden, and Germany.
Color this as unsurprising, but Twitter users like to share photos and videos. A recent eMarketer report took a look at July 2012 data from website analysis company Diffbot, which analyzed over 750,000 links posted to Twitter across the globe and found that 36% were of images, 16% led to articles, and 9% directed users to videos. On the video front, in other unsurprising news, Diffbot data found that YouTube accounted for 60% of all video links on Twitter. As a note, eMarketer forecasts that US adult Twitter users will hit 31.8 million in 2013, a 14.9% increase from 27.7 million in 2012.
Last night the 2012 Olympics came to an end with a spectacular closing ceremony. With the games complete and athletes heading home, let’s take a look at how the Olympics as a whole performed in social TV:
There was a total of 36 million social media comments made about all the Olympics telecasts across NBCU networks. That’s more than the Super Bowl, Grammys, Oscars, Golden Globes, and all 7 games of the World Series combined! (36.0M to 32.7M) 97% of these comments came from public Twitter accounts, 3% from public Facebook accounts. There was a lot of social TV buzz focused on the athletes, with Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, and Usain Bolt scoring top spots (and amassing over 1 million Twitter followers each!)
Here is an overview of the final social TV numbers from Bluefin labs:
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