IDTV

Hulu's 924 million monthly streams: what do they mean?

Much has been made of the fact that - according to Hulu's blog - the number of monthly Hulu viewers grew to over 43 million in December 2009, a 95 percent increase over the previous year. Monthly streams grew to 924 million over the same period. Sounds a lot, doesn't it - but what do these figures mean, exactly?

To be able to gauge what inroads online video is making on the traditional, broadcast variety, we really need to talk in the same terms - for instance, what share of total TV viewing this represents. But Internet content companies always measure their performance in terms of users, streams and downloads - because it sounds good and (I suspect) because comparing apples to apples would cast them in an unflattering light.

Well, let's try and convert some oranges to apples: the most recent data from Comscore (the measurement company responsible for the figure mentioned in the Hulu blog) says that "The average Hulu viewer watched 20.1 videos, totaling 2 hours of videos per viewer." So Hulu's 43 million viewers would have racked up 86 million hours of viewing.

How much does the 'traditional' US TV audience watch in a month? Recent Ofcom research put the average figure for viewing in 2008 at 4.6 hours a day, so that gives a monthly total of close to 140 hours of viewing a month per person. 

Nielsen, meanwhile, reports that for the 2008-2009 season, there were nearly 290 million TV viewers. Multiply the two figures together, and you get 40.6 billion hours of viewing across the US TV audience as a whole per month. The Hulu figure, if you do the math, is about 0.2% of that. 

Is that good or bad? That's a matter of opinion. What I do know, however, is that Hulu's CEO would be unlikely to boast about that figure on his company blog....

FetchTV opts for HbbTV - like Sky?

My friends at Broadband TV News are reporting that FetchTV, the UK hybrid DTT platform, has contracted ANT to integrate its technology into the European HbbTV platform.

As I reported yesterday, the first retail HbbTVproducts have begun shipping to Germany on the back of a collaboration between ANT and Humax.

The move is an interesting one given that Fetch TV is the only UK hybrid DTT platform to which BSkyB has licensed its Sky Player technology. Given BSkyB's complaints about the rival Canvas platform (supported by the BBC, ITV, BT and now others), it does rather look as if BSkyB is backing HbbTV - if only at one remove. After all, Sky must surely have known about Fetch TV's plans for HbbTV when it did the deal.....

Humax ships first HBBTV boxes to Germany

There had been a lot of scepticism about the timetable in some quarters, but I have just received a press release from Humax and ANT that the first set-top boxes using the newly-defined European hybrid standard HbbTV began shipping to German retail outlets earlier this month. 

The new Humax box is the iCord HD+, and it integrates the ANT Galio HbbTV platform. At IBC, ANT told me there would be a pre-Christmas HbbTV launch in Germany - and though I await details of numbers shipped - it does indeed appear to have happened.

HbbTV is seen in some quarters as a European rival to the UK's Canvas standard (apparently about to be green-lighted by the BBC Trust) - although not everyone agrees.

Not all TV ad leakage to the Internet is substitutional

Just going through my notes from the Future TV Advertising Forum, and saw this point from Tess Alps, CEO of Thinkbox, the UK commercial TV networks' marketing arm (she was addressing the trend according to which advertisers are pulling money out of TV and spending it on the Internet instead). "A lot of what you call 'online' advertising in the statistics is going to video online - it's really TV advertising [by any other name]." Alps went on to say that advertising against online video was in fact the fastest-growing element of online advertising. 

It would be interesting to see the research which shows that. Can anyone point me to a source?

The iPhone effect

AT&T - Tighter Control of Cell Data Usage Ahead - NYTimes.com

Just 3% of smartphone users are consuming 40% of AT&T's capacity - mainly as a result of video and audio streaming.

An argument for adopting a one-to-many mobile broadcast TV model, perhaps? Trouble is, the dedicated broadcast networks required are too expensive to build - cf DVB-H's travails in France.

Two straws in the wind: Orange's backing of the GSMA-endorsed IMB standard (a mobile broadcast technology which re-uses existing licensed 3G frequencies); and the launch of a Solaris Mobile test DVB-SH network in Paris (which uses a single pan-European satellite slot and re-uses existing 3G masts for terrestrial re-broadcasts in the S-Band - adjacent to 3G).

No accident that both developments involved the French, whose DVB-H platform remains dead-locked for want of support.