Portfolio

Nielsen has published its December 2011 rankings of the top online video destinations in the U.S. According to the data, 164.3 million unique U.S. viewers streamed over 22 billion videos, spending on average more than 5 hours each watching online video. YouTube was the top video brand once again with 131.4 million unique U.S. viewers. Other notable websites in the top 10 were Yahoo! (third place, with 36.7 million viewers); Facebook (fourth, 23.5 million); Hulu (eighth, 19.3 million) and ESPN Digital Network (ninth, 16.7 million). In terms of total streams, however, the rankings shift a little. While YouTube still is far and away the top destination with over 13 billion videos streamed during December 2011, Hulu came in second with 756.9 million videos streamed. Other notable streaming entities on this list include Netflix (sixth place, 251.8 million videos streamed) and Comcast (eighth, 216.5 million). And finally, when it comes to time spent per viewer, Netflix users in the U.S. spent an average of 10 hours and 7 minutes watching video content on Netflix in December 2011, ranking it first by a seven-hour margin over second-place Hulu.

Social TV analytics start-up Bluefin Labs has raised $12 million of funding led by Time Warner investments. The company’s flagship product, Bluefin Signals, analyzes and organizes social media conversations about what viewers are watching on television in the U.S. It enables clients to use Bluefin’s data about TV shows and commercials in order to inform TV media buying and selling. Bluefin’s client list includes CBS, FOX, Discovery Communications, MediaCom, MTV and more.

For the first time in U.S. history, marketers are projected to spend more on online advertising than on advertising in print magazines and newspapers.

According to a study released Thursday by eMarketer, online advertising is expected to generate $39.5 billion in sales this year — a 23.3% increase from 2011 — compared to a spend of $33.8 billion on print.

That’s impressive growth, especially since 2011 also witnessed a 23% jump in online ad spending, according to eMarketer’s calculations. Online ad revenues should continue to grow over the next half-decade, albeit at a more modest rate. Total online ad investment is projected to hit $62 billion by that time.

The forecast for print is foreboding. Marketers are expected to continue cutting their print advertising budgets for the next half-decade, spending $32.3 billion in 2016, 10% less than what they invested in print ads in 2011.

Spending on TV promises to be largely unaffected by growing online ad budgets, although the gap between the two is set to narrow significantly. U.S. marketers are expected to spend $72 billion in TV advertising in 2016, up 18.6% from 2011.

Overall, it looks to be a healthy year for the ad industry, with total U.S. ad spending forecast to grow by 6.7% to $169.5 billion. eMarketer attributes the bump to investment in campaigns ads and mobile advertising. Total ad spending is set to reach nearly $200 billion by 2016, of which online will account for a third.

Red Bull Media House will be launching a new action sport series on YouTube this month. The company says the shows will chronicle the daily lives of prominent action sports athletes, including urban mountain biker Danny MacAskill, snowboarder Louie Vito, action sports star Travis Pastrana, surfer Jamie O’Brien and pro skateboarder Ryan Sheckler.

Young Hollywood Network officially launched yesterday as part of YouTube’s original programming initiative. The channel’s programming lineup includes five original shows every week, with a new episode airing every day at 1pm ET. Airing on Mondays will be Studio Secrets, a celebrity interview show which premiered with Ewan McGregor as the guest; on Tuesdays, Quiet on the Set, a series that takes viewers behind-the-scenes, premiering with a backstage spotlight on ABC’s The Middle; on Wednesdays, The Power Players, focusing on influential people in Hollywood, starting with Morgan Freeman; on Thursdays, Guest List Only, which gives viewers access to popular locations around Hollywood; and on Fridays, Celebrity Trend Report, which discuses latest trends with celebrities like Taio Cruz and Victoria Justice.

Mississippi-based rock band One Like Band wanted to challenge themselves when they returned to the “studio” to record their third album after a 10-year music hiatus. So on Jan. 1, 2010, band frontman Stephen Poff vowed to spend the year recording a new set of songs solely with iPhone track apps.

“I feel this is one of our best sounding recordings,” Poff said. In the past, Poff recorded two albums the traditional way – in a studio using condenser microphones, hard disc systems, amps, cables, patchbays and other accessories.

According to Poff, recording tracks using only applications was much more difficult than he anticipated. His previous iPhone-recording experience only involved experimenting on basic four-track applications that allows users to record, then overlay four tracks of music to play together.

The four men involved in the recording of Start the Show were Poff (on vocals, guitar, bass and organ), Bill Rester, Perry Brown and Bryan Segraves. The artists were able to record music on their own iPhones and put the music together at a later time.

Just a quick tip for fellow musicians who may be tempted to use iPhone applications to record their next record — while it is cheaper not to use a real studio, it is more difficult to move the tracks and lay them together using your iPhone.

Start the Show will be available on iTunes and Bandcamp on Jan.17. As to being the only band zealous enough to record an entire album on an iPhone, Poff says he is surprised and not at the same time. Halfway through recording the album, the band knew they had an interesting hook to get music and tech lovers to talk.

“I think there are a ton of people that have been experimenting with it but at the same time there are a lot of easier ways to make a record than we did it,” Poff said.

The band primarily used iPhone applications such as FourTrack, MultiTrack DAW, AmpKit and ThumbJam. GuitarJack allowed the band members to record their music by plugging in real instruments and microphones to an iPhone.

Mashable

Stephen Colbert explains the science behind the net-killing SOPA in his typically genius fashion.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403465/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act

Los Angeles-based Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said Thursday afternoon that the company brought in approximately $420M in revenues in 2011, up 60 percent from 2010, and now has more than 1.5 million paying subscribers to Hulu Plus. According to Kilar, the firm now expects that Hulu Plus will account for more than half of the site’s overall business by later this year. Kilar disclosed the numbers in a blog post summarizing the firm’s 2011. Among other tidbits, Hulu said it saw that growth despite a soft advertising market, and now has over 1,000 brand advertisers signed up on the service. Kilar also said as a result, it is able to pay content owners approximately 50 percent more in content licensing fees per subscriber, compared to anyone else in the online subscription market.

See Full Hulu Report

Justin Timberlake presented his vision for Myspace TV this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“We’re ready to take television and entertainment to the next step by upgrading it to the social networking experience. Why text or email your friends to talk about your favorite programs after they’ve aired when you could be sharing the experience with real-time interactivity from anywhere across the globe? This is the evolution of one of our greatest inventions, the television. And, we no longer have to crowd around the same one to experience it together,” said Justin Timberlake at CES.

It makes sense, MySpace has always been about entertainment more than social media, and the MySpace Music part of the site is what it’s most well-known for. So their challenge now is to make MySpace TV the kind of real-time, social media experience that happens during a live TV event when people are using Twitter: the ability to have a “group” discussion of commentary with small groups of friends or the community at large who are all watching the event.

“From the big game, to the red carpet or just the latest episode of your favorite show, Myspace TV makes TV social. Find out what’s hot, what’s trending, what your friends are watching or even what your favorite celebrity just commented on. Why just ‘watch’ TV when you can experience TV? Myspace TV gives you more information about your favorite shows, videos and artists, and provides you real-time engagement with your friends to get you closer to the shows you love,”

It looks like a MySpace TV set (in partnership with Panasonic) like the Apple TV set or Google TV set offerings, as well as MySpace TV as a social media app that combines the type of real time social media experience you get with Twitter and Facebook and mixing it with the music and video experience we’ve always known on MySpace. They have a library of over 42 million songs and more than 100,000 videos. Bands often see their MySpace pages come up near the top of Google searches, even if they haven’t been active for a while. This will be an interesting story to watch as the Apple TV vs. Google TV fight rolls on … just how much of a dent can MySpace TV make?

“There’s a need for a place where fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect. Myspace has the potential to be that place,” Timberlake said, let’s hope their not too late.