Cue the Strangelove Moment: Media & Entertainment Year in Review
The study’s main point, however, was that most viewers will attempt to find content legitimately before attempting to find it by other means. In interviews with viewers throughout the year, the logic of Akamai and Vobile’s model showed through.
"My DVR cut off the end of the American Idol finale," one viewer told me, after watching the DVR'd content a day later. "So I went to the network site and it wasn’t there. I then went to YouTube and found it was posted there hours before it was posted on the official site."
Akamai’s study was interesting on another front, as it showed a trend in uptake of unauthorized content. According to the study, the unauthorized consumption of a popular TV show is relatively low in the first 12 hours, but then it swings into high gear. Whether this is because of the water-cooler effect or just having a faster broadband connection the next morning at work, unauthorized consumption mushrooms dramatically within 24 hours. Akamai ends the study by noting "in 72 hours, unauthorized consumption can erode nearly 20 percent of the online audience for an average primetime TV show."
"Speed of distribution matters to preserve revenue and audience," said Vobile’s CEO, Yangbin Wang.
These numbers seem to hold well with a few experiments in programming that took place late in the year. At AdobeMAX, Disney.com’s VP of interactive, Bud Albers, noted that some of the content now on Disney.com is shown there prior to it being broadcast on television. He noted two examples: the Camp Rock movie and The Suite Life On Deck series. Camp Rock, which aired on June 23 using Flash technology, increased Disney.com traffic by 37%. The Suite Life On Deck, a spin-off of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody series, had its first episode shown on The Disney Channel, but then additional episodes were available online before the next week’s showing, raising viewership levels by an almost 3-1 ratio over previous weeks.
Eye on Content
On the content front, H.264 also had a sizeable encore, with Adobe’s use of H.264 in Flash being followed by Microsoft’s announcement midyear that it was supporting progressive download H.264 files via an IIS Media Pack, regardless of the format wrapper. This means FLV, F4V, and QuickTime H.264 files can be delivered by Windows Server 2008 with the IIS module, which also includes bitrate throttling to limit download speeds to a level just above that of the progressive video playback.
To add more fuel to the H.264 fire, Microsoft also announced in late 2008 that it would be supporting H.264 in an upcoming version of its Silverlight plug-in, guaranteeing a consistency of encoding and delivery across the major players and computing platforms.
Shortly after the Olympics, the democratic process kicked into high gear, with Silverlight and Flash being used to stream the political conventions to an increasingly engaged electorate. Beyond just the 3–4 night conventions, the use of online video in the political process grew dramatically: YouTube was used as a secondary PR arm for both the Republican and Democratic nominees, and third parties used streaming video as a primary marketing arm. YouTube went as far as to mimic CNN’s iReport user-generated-video content service offering with a YouTube election map of the U.S. tagged with a variety of filters for highly engaged participants, including voter intimidation, celebrity voting sightings, polling issues, and the like.
Some sites are still playing with timing, however, and FOX’s House experiment was one of those that raised as many questions as it answered. Episodes on FOX.com for the popular series starring Hugh Laurie are not available until 8 days after airing. Not only does this fly in the face of the direction other content owners are moving, but it also makes for a frustrating experience, since missing an episode means that a viewer can’t catch up on the previous episode before the next one airs.
Figure 3. Flying in the face of conventional wisdom, FOX didn’t offer episodes of House online until 8 days after they were broadcast on TV.
England’s Approach
On the other side of the pond, BBC Worldwide’s Claude London talked about the success of the iPlayer at Streaming Media Europe and hinted that 2009 holds the possibility of allowing the iPlayer to be viewed internationally.