There is a huge surge in the number of adults watching online video and studies show that there is a big explosion in mobile video.  Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any mobile application category.  A new Cisco study reports that nearly two-thirds of the entire mobile data traffic will be video in just 3 years.

CNN's iPhone App gives users access to mobile video.

Overall video is now one-third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40% by the end of this year. Cisco predicts that video will account for more than 90% of all Internet traffic in just 4 years.  A Pew Research report backs up those numbers. Pew’s survey shows 69% of all adult Internet users watch video online.  While there is a big jump in comedy clips, the number of people watching educational videos nearly doubled since 2007.  We are seeing online video move beyond skateboarding tricks and cats playing the piano to thoroughly embrace serious communications.

Video on the web is not a new phenomenon, nor is the hype around the impact that video will have. But we are now starting to see how video can play a role in social media. As my colleagues Kirk and Patrick like to point out, social media is more than just Facebook and Twitter. Social media is information designed to be disseminated by interaction. With that in mind, web-based video players are starting to enter the social arena. Here are some players with social features that I have interacted with recently. This is not meant to be exhaustive but provides an overview of players I know about.

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ABANow.org

Recently, our friends at the American Bar Association asked us to redesign their Media Relations and Communication Services website. There were many practical reasons for this: adding features, improving site navigation and usability, and making content easier to add and update.

But the primary reason for the redesign was in the social media realm. The Media Relations Division was evolving from communicating with the news media, to take on added responsibilities for communicating with members, the legal community and the public. In addition to timely web content, these readers like to get a well-rounded perspective on the news. They still look for traditional fact-based information, but also enjoy the perspectives offered by blogs and seek the reaction of others within their social networks. Continue Reading →

Americans continue to shift their video viewing habits in record numbers. New data from Nielsen report more than a 50% jump in viewer watching video on a mobile phone versus a year ago. Watching videos on a computer from the Internet also grew dramatically, up 13%. While most people still may prefer to watch video on the best device available – the research shows videos have a strong appeal on virtually any platform. The research reinforces that people want this video content at a time and on a device of their choosing. Even for those watching conventional TV – more than a quarter are time shifting using a DVR or other device.

The explosion of video on the web is taking a more central role in web development than simply added an embedded video player with a YouTube Clip. It’s hard to imagine creating a new, dynamic consumer-oriented site that doesn’t involve streaming video content in some way. Video is gaining prominence and importance over text content in many ways.

One of the best examples is the new Montreal tourism site. Montreal is going 100% online with its marketing this year. The tourism agency reports that 87-92% of all visitors are planning and booking their travel online – so it isn’t that hard to let go of traditional marketing.

The success of the Montreal campaign may raise questions for other marketers – to help them develop an e-marketing strategy. The answer may be to make 2009 a learning year for digital and online marketing because this technology is not going to go away.

Videos stand a much better chance than a text page of being shown on the first results page of a Google blended search, according to Nate Elliot with Forrester Research.  Their research shows, “…any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.” Continue Reading →

CBS Sports has enhanced their NCAA March Madness on Demand site by offering third party sites access to free applications that feed live scores and other information from games.

Additionally, the NCAA March Madness Developer site offers a selection of widgets that are more sophisticated than ever including applications dedicated to brackets, live scoring, and news on each of the Division I Men’s Basketball Programs. So, for example, we can feature this widget on our blog (just don’t tell our boss Doug, the die-hard hockey fan).

You can also provide a link to see games like Michigan vs. Clemson (Thursday at 6:10 p.m. CT) for free online in HD using Microsoft’s Silverlight player.  However, you’ll want to have Silverlight pre-installed, de-activate any pop-up blockers and in this case be a Wolverine fan.

CBS has said that they anticipate a 30% increase in ad revenue from their March Madness site this year reaching nearly $30 million.  Last year was the first that all games were available via the on demand site and revenue jumped 130%.

Once again the creative forces behind Monty Python’s Flying Circus proved themselves innovators.  Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars suing people for sharing their ground-breaking comedy online, they decided to beat them at their own game.  They created a Monty Python YouTube channel with high quality versions of their movie and TV work available for free!

And now for something completely different: their DVD sales on Amazon.com went up 23,000%!  That’s not a typo.  23,000%!  So the group has proven that instead of being bitter about new technology maybe it is better to always look on the bright side of life.

How do you capture the performance of a song without lights and a camera? This is the challenge that the British band Radiohead took on when they created their latest music video for the song “House of Cards.” They used rotating laser scanners to capture the 3D images. It’s way too techy for me to explain here, so you’re better off watching the “making of” video.

The performance close-ups kind of remind me of pin art.

Apparently, it wasn’t enough for them to cut out the music industry middle men with their 2007 “pay what you want” download distribution of their last album In Rainbows. Now they want to put camera crews out of work!

They get points for innovation, but see if you think it was worth the effort.

The Olympics are all about stats, so here’s some impressive numbers.

• 3,600 hours of coverage spread over 7 different NBC-Universal owned channels
• 2,200 hours of video users can watch on their computers live or on-demand
• 25 sports featured online only
• 24/7 coverage of the games via mobile access through NBCOlympics2Go
• 1 Billion dollar research lab for tracking users across all platforms

It’s an amazing undertaking. If NBC pulls it off it will be an incredible accomplishment. The number I want to see is how much productivity time is lost at work due to the online Olympics? And thank God I don’t live in Beaumont, Texas, where Time Warner is testing out pay-per-use broadband!