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

Viacom to Launch TV-Viewing Apps by Year’s End

Imagine having Jon Stewart in your hands.

Hoping to make its own mark in the annals of the “TV Everywhere” movement, Viacom plans to unveil TV apps for tablets. 

“We are rolling out apps in partnership with several of our distributors,” said CEO Philippe Dauman during an earnings call yesterday.

Partners include pay-TV operators like Time Warner Cable, with whom it will work to produce tablet apps that include its library of programming. It hasn’t yet revealed what channels will be available, but the programmer owns popular cable networks Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central. It notably also has distribution agreements with online streaming providers like Netflix.

BusinessWeek points out this marks Viacom’s first major step into the “TV Everywhere” phenomenon, which enables viewers to watch programming they’ve paid for on multiple devices. Time Warner was among the first programmers to leverage the strategy with its HBO Go app.

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).