AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

HBO’s Hot for Hulu … in Japan.

Just another one of those reminders that life is unfair. Hulu’s signed a multi-year partnership with HBO to serve Entourage, Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Band of Brothers to its subscription-based Hulu Plus audience … in Japan. Shows will go live one season a month, starting in July.

Hulu content available in Japan has risen 300% since its launch in the country in September 2011. “There are now more than 800 films and nearly 6,900 TV show episodes from 24 content providers,” according to Johannes Larcher on the Hulu blog. “And we have continued to heavily invest in creating original subtitles for TV shows that have never before been available in Japan, including new series like Sons of Anarchy, The Office and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.”

Hulu acknowledges some homeland users may also want them a little HBO action. “As huge TV fans, we love all those HBO shows too, so we definitely understand your disappointment. We would still love to bring HBO content to the US Hulu service and will continue to work on it,” it promises.

Besides spreading Home Box Office glory to the Japanese, Hulu’s also yielded broader scope to local series and films, sporting inked contracts with about 10 Japanese and Korean content partners. Last spring it partnered with TV Tokyo, bringing Moteki, Suzuki Sensei, Yuja Yoshihiko to Maou no Shiro and Saijo no Meii to captive audiences in addition to next-day catch-up access to anime series Inazuma 11 and Danball Senki.

But it hasn’t all been sunny in the land of the rising sun. Hulu Plus in Japan saw a 33% price drop to court users when the market didn’t bow as readily as it hoped.

Sneak-Peek at YouView, the Messiah of Catch-Up TV

Think of it as British box-top Hulu, with TiVo’s smart’s tossed in for good measure. YouView is a joint venture between UK’s biggest TV and broadband firms: the BBC, Channel 4, BT and TalkTalk, to name a few. It’s faced a series of launch delays in the last couple of years, but its ultimate goal is to aggregate all catch-up TV services on one smart platform. It’s officially slated to launch at a press event next week.

According to TNW (credit to them for the photo above), YouView partners attending the event will unveil their YouView set-top boxes. TNW also has shots of the Humax YouView box, a good indication of its plans for IPTV service.

Many boxes have already fallen into the hands of testers, but they’re heading to market in the months to come, equipped with 70 digital channels from Freeview, catch-up TV from the last seven days, series recording capability and on-demand programming. The service is currently only limited to a select number of channels, but more are expected to join prior to launch, which was originally slated before the 2012 London Olympics. Backers, though, have expressed a preference for getting the product right versus rushing it to market.

See more photos at The Next Web. There’s currently no word on whether YouView devices will be “connected” (equipped with social features), but there is a “Beyond TV” feature that’ll enable developers to create apps and widgets for the service. In any event, getting all your catch-up TV from one place is a good place to start so such features can enjoy maximum reach.

TV one tipping point closer to total disruption No sooner had SAI Business Insider kicked up an internet storm the other day by claiming the “TV business may be starting to collapse”; numerous recent reports suggest on-demand, non-TV-set viewing is overtaking scheduled viewing; and the rumour mill is running full whack on what TV plans Apple has up its sleeves than traditional TV got another kick in the teeth, from IHS Screen Digest. The analysts’ latest report shows that Netflix has overtaken Apple’s iTunes in US VOD (video on demand) revenues. And perhaps the most arresting part is in the above chart: it has done so in just over a year! Netflix’s 2010 market share was 0.5%; in 2011, it had jumped to 44%, surpassing Apple in one fell swoop. Furthermore, the streaming firm is leagues ahead of its competition: Hulu, its closest - and major-backed - competitor, is ten times smaller than Netfllix in market share terms. But others are snapping at its heels: Vudu, Wal-Mart’s Netflix-like service, has seen its market share triple of late. No doubt the most exciting part of all this is the shift in media consumption we’re in the midst of right now. Download vs. streaming debates are currently rife in music too, and as they frequently point out, downloads - the iTunes paradigm - aren’t actually that different from selling DVDs or CDs. You pay once, you own the media, and the creator is paid once. With new models such as Netflix or Spotify, you constantly pay a flat rate, and creators are paid - albeit no way near as much - for every play. It’s a massive change, and, as Screen Digest’s report shows, it’s now become the dominant model. All eyes will as such be on Apple at its imminent developers’ conference. The TV app environment it is expected to unveil will at least grab the company back some content-distribution cred; but none of us will really be happy until we have our shiny new, all-in-one iTV. With a Netflix app, of course! Source: IHS Screen Digest, via StrategyEye

TV one tipping point closer to total disruption

No sooner had SAI Business Insider kicked up an internet storm the other day by claiming the “TV business may be starting to collapse”; numerous recent reports suggest on-demand, non-TV-set viewing is overtaking scheduled viewing; and the rumour mill is running full whack on what TV plans Apple has up its sleeves than traditional TV got another kick in the teeth, from IHS Screen Digest.

The analysts’ latest report shows that Netflix has overtaken Apple’s iTunes in US VOD (video on demand) revenues. And perhaps the most arresting part is in the above chart: it has done so in just over a year! Netflix’s 2010 market share was 0.5%; in 2011, it had jumped to 44%, surpassing Apple in one fell swoop.

Furthermore, the streaming firm is leagues ahead of its competition: Hulu, its closest - and major-backed - competitor, is ten times smaller than Netfllix in market share terms. But others are snapping at its heels: Vudu, Wal-Mart’s Netflix-like service, has seen its market share triple of late.

No doubt the most exciting part of all this is the shift in media consumption we’re in the midst of right now. Download vs. streaming debates are currently rife in music too, and as they frequently point out, downloads - the iTunes paradigm - aren’t actually that different from selling DVDs or CDs. You pay once, you own the media, and the creator is paid once.

With new models such as Netflix or Spotify, you constantly pay a flat rate, and creators are paid - albeit no way near as much - for every play. It’s a massive change, and, as Screen Digest’s report shows, it’s now become the dominant model.

All eyes will as such be on Apple at its imminent developers’ conference. The TV app environment it is expected to unveil will at least grab the company back some content-distribution cred; but none of us will really be happy until we have our shiny new, all-in-one iTV.

With a Netflix app, of course!

Source: IHS Screen Digest, via StrategyEye

8.3B Video Ads Viewed in March; Machinima Scores Highest Engagement Among YouTube Partners

comScore’s released its latest online video rankings report, which appears to bode well for major media players pushing content online. Over 83.5% of the US internet audience saw online video of some kind, the average duration of which was 6.4 minutes. Online video ads averaged about 0.4 minutes.

Video ads made up 18.5 percent of all videos viewed and 1.5 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Note that in the chart above, VEVO — which pushes mostly music videos in selected countries — ranks fourth, while Viacom comes up sixth.

The average viewer watched about 21.7 hours of online video content in March, with Google Sites (7.1 hours) and Hulu (4.6 hours) posting the highest average engagement of the top ten properties.

People also watched over 8.3 billion video ads, an all-time high. Hulu delivered record views: 1.7 billion, followed by Google Sites (1.2 billion) and BrightRoll (953 million).

Video ads hit about 51% of the total US population. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to viewers, averaging 51 per person, while ESPN managed to push 26 ads on average to each viewer.

Of partner channels, VEVO (49.1 million viewers) and Warner Music (30.3 million viewers) remained in the top two. Gaming channel Machinima came in third with 22.9 million viewers, followed by Makers Studios and FullScreen, which scored 14.6 million and 12 million, respectively.

Of the top 10 YouTube partners, however, Machinima showed the highest engagement (69 minutes per viewer), followed by VEVO (62.5 minutes).