The Season 11 Finale episode of American Idol set an all-time record in social TV with 1.2M social media comments.
In fact, this wasn’t just the most social finale episode, it was the most social TV series episode ever. (TV series, meaning that sporting events and special events are not counted here.)
Details in the infographic below.
Smartphones and tablets are now responsible for slightly more than 20% of web traffic in the US and Canada, according to new findings from online ad network Chitika. Specifically, smartphones account for 14.6% of web traffic and tablets take up 5.6%.
Looking further into the tablet category, the report finds that the iPad has a dominant share of web traffic among tablet devices (95%). The report also finds that Apples share of web traffic in the smartphone category is 72%.
Microsoft still has a sizeable lead when it comes to desktop computers, as Windows accounts for more than 85% of web traffic (the Mac is responsible for 13%).
This week, Hulu announced a slate of 10 exclusive shows coming to its platform this summer—one of the most aggressive moves yet in a land grab that is taking place among the pioneers of Internet video. Netflix has now green-lighted five premium series, and earlier this month, Amazon unveiled Amazon Studios, its first foray into original video. At YouTube, Google is plowing $100 million into launching 100 channels, with the goal of creating more content than there are hours in the day to watch.
In the hypercompetitive community of TV creation, where fortunes are made and programs are killed without mercy, online is where the action is. “The phrase that I keep hearing a lot is that it’s the Wild West,” says J.D. Walsh, the showrunner behind the original Hulu series, Battleground. “And I think that it is the Wild West. What that connotes to me is that nobody really knows what the rules are, what’s going to be stable, or who is going to [emerge as] the leaders. But even within the Wild West, you did have some major cities—and that’s what you’re seeing with these platforms.”
Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube are all taking a unique approach to original programming on the Web. Their differing bets—on such questions as quantity, polish, advertising versus subscriptions, nudity, and more—provide a hint of what the future of “television” will resemble.
Hulu, which is jointly owned by the legacy television networks, is coming to resemble a broad-interest network with catholic tastes. Of the 10 series announced this week, three are wholly original to Hulu, and they run the gamut: there’s Spoilers, a kind of movie club hosted by Kevin Smith (Clerks); Up to Speed, a travelogue by Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused); and We Got Next, a “bro-mantic comedy” about a pickup basketball clique. The other seven titles, for which Hulu bought exclusive streaming rights, involve everything from teen pregnancy to the British clergy to a faux-gritty mockumentary set on an elementary-school playground.
Andy Forssell, the executive in charge of content—and a $500 million annual budget—says he has no idea how many titles Hulu will come to produce in the coming years. “We’re quality-gated,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no quota that I want to go hit. We don’t have a set number of hours to fill, like a lot of traditional networks do—that’s actually an advantage I want to jealously guard.”
“A year ago, it was difficult to have people audition for our show because they just thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be on the Internet.’ Now we don’t have that problem anymore.”
Jason Kilar, the chief executive officer of U.S. online video content provider Hulu. (Kyodo / Landov)
One thing Hulu’s original titles will never depict, though, is nudity. That’s in part because a significant portion of the company’s revenue comes from advertising.
That provides an easy point of comparison with Netflix, which has sought to reposition itself as the HBO of the Internet, home to premium dramas and comedies that viewers are used to finding on pay-tier cable channels. That includes the promise of gore—horror auteur Eli Roth is developing a werewolf series titled Hemlock Grove—and, when appropriate, boobs. In April, at an event in Las Vegas that offered a first look at Netflix’s original programs, much was made of the shower scenes to come in Orange Is the New Black, a comedy set in a women’s prison.
The first Netflix series, Lilyhammer, premiered in the United States in February, and four more will come in 2013, including the $100 million drama House of Cards, with a pilot directed by David Fincher (The Social Network) and Kevin Spacey in the lead role. While Hulu plans to release episodes of its programs week by week, as the broadcast and cable networks do, Netflix will make whole seasons available to stream at once, a competitive advantage in courting the most artistically demanding writers and directors.
Amazon is far behind Hulu and Netflix’s leads, having only just unveiled its Amazon Studios division in early May. But its model is intriguingly disruptive, and of a piece with the company’s dotcom and retail roots. While Hulu and Netflix are hobnobbing with Morgan Spurlock and Jenji Kohan, Amazon is crowd-sourcing its production process, soliciting pilot scripts from the general public.
After a 45-day option period, Amazon will offer chosen artists $10,000; if the series makes it to the Amazon Instant Video service, creators get $55,000 and up to 5 percent of the proceeds from toy and T-shirt sales. And for now, Amazon is taking the opposite of Hulu’s kitchen-sink approach to genre, asking for pitches specifically in comedy and children’s programming.
Then there’s YouTube, with the deep pockets of Google and a deeper commitment to the messy, anything-goes world of user-generated Web video. Its 100 subsidized channels will feature sports talk, family fare, self-help, and virtually everything else users expect of the YouTube jungle. These episodes will be Web-sized—a couple of minutes each, instead of the familiar 22-minute blocks that will be found on Amazon—and creators will get a cut of Google’s advertising.
Why are these online video giants all rushing into original content? A number of factors play a role. With more homes gaining access to broadband Internet—and higher quality feeds—the audience for streaming is reaching a critical mass. Viewers have more choices about where to watch video, too—Friday Night Lights is available on Amazon Instant, Netflix, Hulu, Apple’s iTunes, and other services. As these libraries get more similar, the streaming companies have only two options for differentiating themselves: either pay through the nose for exclusive deals, or put that money toward great original programming.
The talent is ready. “A year ago, it was difficult to have people audition for our show because they just thought, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be on the Internet,’” says Battleground’s Walsh. “Now we don’t have that problem anymore.”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
Lots of music celebrities were tweeting during The Voice the two-night Season Finale so were lots of other people…
While Justin Bieber drove a huge spike in social chatter, the announcement of The Voice‘s Season 2 winner drove the biggest reaction in social TV. Congrats to winner Jermaine Paul (@JermainePaul) and too The Voice for another great season.
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