Category: Mobile

Smart Phones and Mobile Media

Online Video Viewership Continues Rapid Climb

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According to data from April’s comScore’s Video Metrix report:
181 million U.S. internet users watched nearly 37 billion online videos.
The top five digital video properties on the web were Google/YouTube (157.7 million unique viewers); Yahoo Sites (53.6 million unique viewers); VEVO (49.5 million); Facebook.com (44.3 million); and Microsoft Sites (42.8 million).

Of the 37 billion video views, Google/YouTube was responsible for 17 billion, while Hulu and Yahoo accounted for 901 million and 742 million, respectively.

The average viewer watched 21.8 hours of online video content, with Google/YouTube (7.2 hours) and Hulu (3.8 hours) earning the highest average engagement among the top 10 properties.

U.S. internet users watched 9.5 billion video ads in April, making it another record-breaking month for video ad views.

Hulu led the way with 1.6 billion video ads delivered, followed by Google/YouTube (1.3 billion), BrightRoll Video Network (943 million), Adap.tv (881 million), and TubeMogul Video Ad Platform (831 million).

Total time spent watching video ads amounted to 3.9 billion minutes, with Hulu once again leading the way as it delivered 670 million minutes worth of video ads.

Overall, 84.5% of the U.S. internet audience viewed online video.

New Viacom Study Reveals the three C’s of Social TV

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When Viacom  asked people about “social TV” in a new study, the most common responses involved the words “interactive,” “friends” and “Facebook “or “Twitter.” It was part of a research project to understand social TV through the eyes of the viewer. “One of the main goals of this research was to understand how to inspire social TV activity among our audiences,” said Colleen Fahey Rush, who headed up the study. It found the top three social TV activities can be boiled down to communicating, consuming content and checking comments:

Communicating: 56% prefer communicating through the social TV app/service, 53% through Facebook, 50% through individual or group texts and 38% through Skype or Apple FaceTime, the study found. For those that use check-in services, 71% check in to a show to let their friends know and 64% check in to let other fans of the show know. As far as devices, smartphones dominate the use of social TV apps at 82%, trailed by tablets at 18%. For services that are delivered via HTML websites and associated apps, 52% of usage occurs on smartphones or tablets, followed closely by desktop or laptops at 48%.

Content: The number one request for content is full-length episodes (88%), followed by sneak peeks of new episodes (75%), and behind-the-scenes extras (71%) and highlight clips (71%). The majority of TV socializers are interested in rewards with real value, like free merchandise or signed cast photos. When putting aside the material aspect, virtual rewards offer an emotional pay-off, described as being similar to the feeling when ‘liked’ on Facebook.

Comments: The number one source viewers want to hear from is a show’s cast and crew, followed by the people they know. Audiences are sensitive to the quality of comments from a show’s cast and crew – they look for authenticity and prefer the star(s) to be in character.

As you might expect, Viacom found that the activities were twice as likely to happen during live TV rather than time-shifted viewing. Social TV enthusiasts reported feeling “left out” of the conversation if they missed a live airing. Interestingly, the study found the leading source of discovery of social TV services is through search (38%), followed by social networks (26%) and ads run on shows (22%).

USA Networks launching six new second screen experiences

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USA Network will be launching six second-screen/Social TV campaigns tied to the summer premieres of six of its original series. They are as follows:

Covert Affairs: A video-based “branching narrative prequel” to the series called Sights Unseen, which will uncover an original story about a blind character on the show.

Burn Notice: The third volume of a digital comic book, titled First Contact, that tells the story of Michael and Fiona’s (two of the main characters) first mission together.

Necessary Roughness: An interactive video series, called The Nico Files, which allows fans to learn more about the character.

Royal Pains: Via USA’s Character Chatter or the Viggle mobile app, viewers can unlock behind-the-scenes video shot on location, as well as cast and producer interviews, outtakes, and more.

Suits: Suits Recruits, a multiplatform, real-time storytelling experience/game that lets fans join the law firm at the center of the show, where they are assigned their first case and can interact with characters through text, audio, and video.

White Collar: Neal’s Stash, a crowd-sourced treasure hunt in which fans are tasked with tracking down treasure that was stolen from the main characters.

USA Network says all of these digital programs will be complemented by the use of social TV apps such as Viggle, Shazam, Miso, and GetGlue, as well as continued use of its Character Chatter platform to funnel in a real-time feed of content from the major social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Multiscreen Viewership Growing

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A new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), finds that 63% of media-savvy consumers use a connected device while watching live TV and 66% do the same when watching recorded programming on DVRs.

There was a slightly bigger difference among respondents that use more than one device while watching TV, with 15% answering that they do so during live-TV viewing, and 23% when watching a recorded program. Other findings from the study include:

Smartphones (45% of respondents) were the multitasking device of choice when interacting online about a TV show, followed by the tablet (30%) and the computer (21%).

Multiscreen viewers are more likely to use their smartphone (37%) than tablet (16%) or computer (18%) to discuss TV commercials on social networks, blogs, forums, and/or over text/email/IM.

Overall, there are more multiscreen viewers who are watching TV but are performing activities on their devices that are not related to the TV content. However, the number of viewers that perform TV content related activies is substantial, according to the report.

Three Reasons why Video on TV is still better than TV online

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Google, Microsoft and AOL are hoping that their web video offerings and NewFront presentations will help them extract a healthy slice of the TV industry’s upfront money this year.

That all-too-familiar annual rite of spring is upon us. The trades are full of pre-negotiation rhetoric. Industry conferences are dotted with panels of shadow-boxing buyers and sellers. Every day it seems we get reports from industry equity analysts telling us which networks will see pricing growth and which holding companies are best situated to hold the line.

This year, however, we have a new dynamic. A group of would-be interlopers are trying to nudge their way into the TV advertising futures market, where advertisers and their agencies make billions of dollars in commitments to lock up the best inventory and, they hope, best pricing.

No, it’s not the cable networks. They’ve been trying to crash the party for years, and some have even gotten their own seats at the table. These crashers are the web folks: Google, Microsoft, Hulu, AOL and others hoping to reframe the upfront conversation from “just about TV” to “all about video.”

They have some strong arguments. Web video is growing, with hundreds of millions of streams a month in the U.S. Much of the higher-quality web video now carries interruptive video ads, not unlike the ads we get on TV. Web video delivers targeting and measurement, just like the web (it is the web) and; finally, it gives advertisers and agencies the cross-platform product showing up in everyone’s briefs this year as we all prepare for a multiscreen, multiplatform digital-media future.

The web guys scored a lot of good points with their presentations. They got some great visibility. However, they aren’t going to get cut into that action at the “adult” table that they so cherish, at least not this year. Here is why:

There’s not enough reach yet.
The upfront is a futures market where people buy things they need that are precious and scarce. For mass-awareness advertisers, massive reach accumulated quickly is scarce. That is why TV media is so in demand. That is why the biggest and best shows are bought in the upfront. Web video just doesn’t have that kind of scale yet. As Nielsen told us just last week in its annual Three Screen Report, 98% of video in the U.S. is viewed on TV. Only 1% is viewed on the web. Web video is not an alternative to TV when it takes a month to deliver as much national reach as two TV networks deliver in one night.

The best stuff will be bundled.
Advertisers do want web video, but the best stuff — the “premium” video associated with existing TV programming — is already being bundled and sold by the TV networks in packages. It is largely being sold with TV, not as a stand-alone web product.

Buying streamers means buying heavy TV viewers.
If you dig into the recent Nielsen numbers, you realize that the one quintile of U.S. consumers who stream 95% of the web video also consume four hours of regular TV each day. Advertisers buying TV are already buying the heavy web-video viewers. Thus, if you buy web video, you’re not buying incremental reach. You’re buying more frequency against heavy TV viewers.

Change is glacial.
U.S. viewers have been spending more time watching cable than broadcast programming for well over 10 years. However, according to Nielsen, last year was the first year that cable networks received more advertising than their broadcast-network brethren, despite now having twice the viewership of broadcast. In this industry, it takes a long time to earn your place at the table. The web folks won’t get entirely shut out. Some web video will be bought this year around the upfront. Digital planners created enough noise with the NewFronts that clients are going to demand they get something. After all, web video is this year’s bright shiny object. Plus, if nothing else, acquiring some will give the buyers something to use for leverage — even if it’s illusory — when the TV networks ask for the inevitable double-digit pricing increase. Yes, Google, Microsoft and AOL will get some of TV’s scraps. It’s progress, even if it’s not yet a seat at the table.

Watching TV? There’s an App for that.

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Sitting on the couch merely watching TV is so last year.

How about playing along with “Glee” on your tablet when, poof, the commercial appears and up pops a deep-discount Pizza Hut coupon? Or watching “Real Housewives” and, pow, a friend sends a slide show to your phone showing where you can buy the outfits they’re wearing on the show?

Turning television into an interactive experience across the couches of America, the nascent world of “Social TV” links the big screen and the small. It is helping determine which shows prosper and giving viewers a reason to watch television live again — as a shared experience — rather than via DVR.

“There’s suddenly this whole range of different types of experiences where people can do more than just view TV,” said David Markowitz, vice president of marketing at SecondScreen Networks, which builds interactive tablet ads for shows.

TV fans’ new best friend could be a collection of apps to help them jump into a show’s action. Start-ups such as Viggle, GetGlue, Shazam and Miso — and the channels themselves, USA, SyFy and HBO — to name a few.

Small as they are now, these projects have potential to turn the TV industry inside out — and give viewers dramatic new ways to enjoy their shows more.

SecondScreen Networks of New York built a system for the USA Network’s Character Chatter app. When a TV ad appeared during the sports drama “Necessary Roughness” touting the new Lincoln MKX, the system pushed out a special ad on tablets asking questions such as which character drove the sport utility vehicle in the show.

Twenty-three percent of people who had the app clicked on the ad to participate. “That’s off the charts compared to even a typical online ad interaction,” Markowitz said. “Then we did another with Toyota, and it was higher than that.”

* * * * *
The San Francisco-based Miso start-up built the app SideShow to help networks and viewers create their own multimedia projects for following along with TV shows — scrolling jokes, photos and posts, for example — then sharing them so the projects appear on phones and tablets of friends through Facebook.

A teacher and actor in St. Louis, Sarajane Alverson has made a dozen SideShows for her favorite shows. During one scene when Howard of “Big Bang Theory” lays out all his belt buckles on the bed for his friend to polish, her slide popped up: “Just how many belt buckles DOES Howard have?…. approximately 80. … (yes, I counted). That’s one belt buckle for every 1.3875 episodes.”

“We have one big fan of the show ‘Archer’ on FX,” said Shay Fan, a marketing executive with Miso. “During key moments, his SideShow pops up things that are really funny. It’s a real second-screen experience. … Even when you’re watching alone, you can share things with your friends and fans of the show.”

Miso has attracted more than 330,000 users and investments from Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media.

Twitter hashtags are familiar to TV viewers, but not like this: Marketers for the movie “Prometheus” ran ads in the United Kingdom promoting the tag #areyouseeingthis. The second time the ad ran, it displayed tweets the previous ad elicited from viewers. At one point, the hashtag was Twitter’s No. 2 trending topic in the U.K.

A slew of other start-ups are jumping into the mix.

GetGlue and Viggle, both from New York, developed systems similar to the popular Foursquare, with discounts and perks for people who check in with specific shows. IntoNow, backed by Yahoo, has apps that listen to TV audio, recognize a show and produce social media pages where fans chat via Twitter and read actors’ tweets.

Shazam, once just a music ID gizmo, is reaching deep into the biggest shows on television and has grown to more than 200 million users in more than 200 countries. The 2012 Super Bowl was “Shazamable,” so viewers could scan commercials for perks.

Channels such as Bravo, USA and SyFy use Shazam to bridge TV with the tablet and phone. Shazaming “Covert Affairs” on USA, for instance, produces a playlist of the show’s music and behind-the-scenes features on the show’s stars.

To keep track of all this, the new site Fans.TV lets viewers set watch lists of favorite shows and share lists with friends so they can all jump into social TV networks at the same time.

* * * * *
Advertisers, television networks and investors have reason to get into social TV.

Tablet sales topped 81.6 million last year and could hit 424.9 million in 2017, according to DisplaySearch. A whopping 85 percent of tablet owners use them while watching television, according to Nielsen, and tablet owners spend one-third of their tablet time in front of the TV.

Meanwhile, more TV shows are shifting to digital formats and away from TV altogether.

Amazon last week announced a plan to have producers of comedy and TV shows create programming for online streaming and tablets in return for a $55,000 upfront payment and a portion of revenue from toys and T-shirts.

Such social TV initiatives target a fast-developing frontier in technology. Many experts think Facebook already has won the battle to map people’s social relationships, said Ashwin Navin, co-founder of Flingo, which makes social apps for TV sets.

The next battleground is mapping people’s personal interests more deeply, spurring investors into projects that link people’s tastes in the vast TV entertainment market.

The need to measure the new interactions is giving rise to new businesses, too.

SocialGuide, based in Brooklyn, developed ways to scour the Internet for tweets, Facebook posts and other check-ins to compile a top 10 list of shows based on buzz.

On cable recently, that was the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals hockey match, with more than 121,000 comments and posts, followed by the NBA playoff between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Memphis Grizzlies with 102,000 mentions online.

“Sports turns out to be unbelievably social,” said Erika Faust, senior vice president of business development at SocialGuide. Sports accounts for a small share of all TV programming, but it generates more than half the online buzz while games are live.

“It gives producers a sense of the social conversation happening out there,” Faust said. “That can drive media spending” and determine which shows and actors prosper.

* * * * *
Coming full circle, you have Flingo building these kinds of social tools inside smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Vizio and others. It has placed its software in more than 8 million TVs. One new investor is Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a pioneer in streaming video and high-definition TV distribution.

“Say you’re watching ‘Modern Family’ or ‘Storage Wars’ and there’s a moment you think is great,” Navin said. “With one click on your remote, you can post on Facebook or Twitter that you’re watching it.”

Things are still shaking out in the nascent social TV industry, but one prospect is especially encouraging to cable and network channels: There’s a new appetite for live television with its commercials that viewers can’t skip past.

And that can mean more advertiser revenue.

Most social TV systems work best when viewers are playing along with their friends at the same time. Live TV rather than DVR maximizes this select audience and ensures no one learns too much from all the online chatter about a game or episode they missed.

“That risk of a spoiler from spotting a tweet,” Navin said, “is the visceral motivation to get back into live TV.”

Tablet Usage Occurs Primarily At Home

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Tablet owners in America use their devices inside the home 74% of the time, according to a study from Viacom covering Q1 2012, per an eMarketer report.

96% of those who use a tablet at home said they use it in the living room, and 94% said they use it in the bedroom; this supports the idea that the tablet is being used for entertainment purposes, such as watching content or playing games.

Of note, 75% of respondents indicated they use the tablet inside the home office. As for outside the home, the report found that the airport/airplane (80%), coffee shop (72%), outdoor public place and appointment (64% each), work (59%), and public transit (58%) were the most common places where tablet owners used their device. Interestingly, the store was only cited by 36% of respondents.

SocialTV Activity Jumps in April

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Social activity surrounding broadcast primetime TV in April 2012 increased by 194% over April 2011, according to the latest research from Trendrr.TV. In terms of monthly data, of the top five broadcast networks, FOX had the highest increase in broadcast social share, up 10% in April 2012 from March 2012.

Overall, broadcast was more socially active per telecast than cable was. On the cable front, ESPN edged out Nickelodeon as the top social cable network with 13% cable social share. Other data from the report finds that the NCAA Championship Game, WrestleMania, Bad Girls Club, the NBA Playoffs, and the Billboard Latin Music Awsards were the most social telecasts throughout the month. And in terms of genre, reality TV generated the most social buzz at 36%.

69% of Tablet Owners use their device with the TV on

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The ubiquity of the Internet and the normalization of device-based connectivity in all aspects of American life have been chipping away at the old presumption that younger demos were the most feverishly connected.

You can put aside most notions of age, gender and Internet use when it comes to tablets. According to Nielsen’s latest data drop from its State of the Media survey, the demographics of tablet use while watching TV are remarkably even. Overall, Nielsen finds that 69% of tablet owners are using their device with the TV on at least several times a week, with 45% working the two screens at once every day.

Email checking generally on tablets during TV time (61%) is the prevalent activity, but for the 35- to-54-year-old and 55+ segments it spikes to 65%. Sports score lookups (34% of all tablet owners) were also popular, with 44% of males and only 24% of females checking on games.

Nielsen’s stats suggest that the connection between tablet activity and the content on the TV screen is encouraging for programmers and advertisers. They found 22% of tablet users looking up coupons or deals they had seen on TV, with the highest amount of that activity (29%) occurring among the 18-34 segment.

The good news for advertisers is that 27% of tablet owners say they have looked up product information for an ad they saw on TV. Indeed, that behavior is higher (27%-29%) among the 13-54 range, falling off only among 55+ users (22%). Women are slightly more likely to do product look-ups than men (28% vs. 25%).

The prospects for tandem programming seem bright as well, with 37% saying they had looked up information related to the TV program they were watching. In fact, the second-screen experience was engaged evenly across demographics, with all of the age demos and both genders within four or five percentage points of one another. It seems that as of now at least TV programmer can count on more than a third of their target audience with tablets being willing to make the TV-to-tablet connection.

Finally, the energy around so-called “social TV” may not be undeserved. Aside from email checks, accessing the social network (47%) is almost a majority activity among dual-screen users. And here is where the demographic differences do still show. While 62% of the 13-17 segment check their social nets with the TV on, that drops dramatically to 50% of 18- to-34-year-olds and 47% of 35- to-54-year-olds. If TV networks and marketers want to reach audiences on the second screen during prime time, the social networks may be the most direct route.

Perhaps even more dramatically than we saw the smartphone disrupt the retail space last year, tablets and smartphones will fundamentally alter the way we think about the TV experience this year. The rapid adoption of mobile technology is something we have become accustomed to seeing in recent years. What is especially impressive about the tablet/TV combination is just how rapidly the tablet device has settled into a kind of ritualistic use during prime time.

For most tablet owners, prime time is tablet time. This is important because it opens up for programmers and advertisers the expectation of a live and interested audience on this second screen with the same kind of regularity that traditionally they expect from a prime-time audience.

While obviously the tablet is an interactive and highly personalized experience, it seems to me there must be opportunities to think about something like “appointment content” on this device in a way you can’t on smartphones or even the Web. Whether as a complement to the main TV screen or simply as a portable TV itself, this may be the interactive TV (ITV) everyone has been pursuing for decades.

The full Nielsen breakdown of tablet and TV tandem activity is in its new report.

Nielsen finds ‘second screen’ viewing enhances TV experiences

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When viewers watch a TV program with a tablet device, they tend to check their email, hunt for sports scores or seek additional information about the show or a commercial they were watching on the big screen.

A new report by Nielsen Co., underscores what network television researchers have been preaching for more than a year: that “second screen viewing” appears to augment the TV viewing experience rather than steal away viewers.

Nielsen’s State of the Media: Advertising & Audiences report found that men, when watching TV and using a tablet simultaneously, were more likely than women to look for information related to a TV program they were watching (39% versus 34%).

Women were more inclined to seek information related to a television commercial (24% versus 21%).

Not surprisingly, teenagers with tablets were far more apt to visit a social media site while watching TV than were older baby boomers and seniors (62% versus 33%).

The report also found cultural differences in TV watching and the use of digital video recorders. Nielsen said that white TV viewers use digital video recorders on a daily basis twice as much as any other group, while Asian Americans appear to spend a higher proportion of their overall TV time watching their previously recorded programs.

Adults age 25 to 54 appear to be heavily influenced by advertising. Nielsen said that demographic group was 23% more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to follow a brand through social networking sites, and 29% more likely to purchase a product online that had been featured on TV.