Online video viewers numbers

Read an article on online video viewership numbers of Channel 4, thought to the share the link: Television by internet gets under our Skins

Some of the key numbers in the news article for the program series "Skin" :

• First episode attracted 283,000 online viewers versus 1.35million TV viewers. A 17.3%. The usual for other Channel 4 programs is 5%
  
• Attracts a CPM between 7 to 40 GBP, a comparable to broadcast television in the UK

If the online runaway success like Skin receives "a comparable CPM", that means the usual programs are not attracting any good ad spend. In the absence of online viewers paying for the content, the UK online market is lagging behind US and continental Europe, where the Online TV Ad revenues make a good portion of total online TV revenues. UK makes about 47% of a total £102 million online TV revenues for 2009 (mostly contributed by BBC iPlayer). May be, killing the Kangaroo wasn’t that great at all, as the question remaining open – who will attract the ad spend (content , brand or the platform?)

(Total Online revenues of £2.8b accounts 15.3% of the UK’s total Ad Spend)

Good, Bad and Ugly of Kangaroo

Finally there’s a news about Kangaroo. As Ashley Highfield may have foreseen before his departure last year, the Kangaroo has been finally stopped by UK Competition Commission. This is a bad news for ‘the trio’ - BBC, ITV and Channel 4; however is mixed one for the industry.

Viewers are confused about the various applications and platforms they required to download and install for VoD services. The TV-Over-Broadband experience lacks the ease & seamlessness of TV entertainment. The Kangaroo might have addressed this and may have created a single platform for consumers view/download. For the advertisers, this would have meant measurable online video market through a single window. Something analogous to the Digital Ad Networks that are on rise today. The success of the BBC iPlayer and UK's inventory of digital content would have driven a rapid adoption of the platform.

With a absence of such a single platform it would be difficult to exploit the brand or content or individual platforms basis (e.g. Joost) and will not give full potential to advertising companies.

UK government should look at establishing and funding the VoD platform like FreeView or a video aggregator similar to Google. May be BSkyB or BT/Virgin Media could fancy the new channel to reach through subscription or ad-funded models.

If government keeps its promise of 2Mbps for all the UK homes by 2012, (Digital Britain) it makes sense to leverage such a geo-reach by establishing a platform for new media content delivery. Alternatively, the government could fund/help funding a private startup which can create a new media aggregator and delivery platform; a platform that is open to UK and US content, subscription and free content, ad funded and pay-per-view. Its technical and new media opportunity – it’s good that Kangaroo has failed, otherwise just the content owners would have heavy handed the future platform.

Now UK CC should take a critical look at BBC Video Local plans as the publishing industry needs the opportunity to revive itself through its online ambitions.

Web 2.0 - machine's learning

I saw this video recently that beautifully explains the how web is allowing machines to learn the content, context and interconnection.

With explosion of user participation using Web 2.0 technology/tools, there are growing types contents, that are being linked and interlinked. Text was linear, in digital world now its hyperlinked with various forms of content, especially the rich media.

With growing capabilities of search, soon the machines will be able to connect the text with face on the picture or snippet of a speech in video segment. This capability will build up exponentially in coming years, it wouldn't take decade. The future will bring about the platform connecting this data and user interests with new set of web applications or logic bots which are self contained, defined, discoverable, interfaceable with web agents requiring some sort of processing. Such an ability of net will require some sort of smart-linking or discovery mechanism so that machine can find the existence of the application that will process the given data and provide the best action. This whole thing should be as intuitive as creating a hyperlink to a text or a image and sharing a URL through email or over phone.

In such scenarios, the browsers will continue to play a prominent role and hence no wonders the online technology company like Google released its first desktop application Chrome.