Online TV killed the traditional TV star? Or not?

As you can see from the title this post will be about another hot topic (besides mobile marketing and social networking) - online TV. To start off, here’s a few stats that will convince you how big this online TV is becoming. A single, video sharing site, YouTube, currently claims around 65,000 new video uploads a day!!! In August 2006, 110m users in the US watched video online, streaming approximately 7bn videos a month. Some other interesting stats from the US market show that referral percentage is very high - 76% of users tell a friend about the video they have seen. And what is even better is that 66% of video viewers have watched online video ads and 44% have taken action on what they have seen.

The way online TV appears on the net is in various “distribution channels”. Some brands, i.e. Budweiser have integrated video players and their own content on their websites or microsites - good way of engaging consumers but not that easy to keep the content fresh and interesting.

Then, there are many links where consumers upload content and share it amongst each other. For example, you can even watch the latest Matt Deamon’s Bourne Ultimatum which is still in cinemas in the UK. The problem with these links is that the quality of video stream can be low, or with subtitles in another language. But hey, its FREE!

Before I move onto a brief overview of the three major players on the internet TV scene, I would also like to mention Youtube channels. Some brave brands such as Chelsea football club, have already dared to enter this very cluttered, but high reach platform. The FC fans are probably delighted, still, the question is how will they hear about it? The imperative for making this successful is to ensure that traffic drivers will bring enough visitors to your Youtube channel.

Finally, some of the major competitors such as Blinkx, Babelgum and Joost, are still far from becoming mainstream. How do they actually work?

Bubelgum collects internet television content in one place to make it easy for viewers to access. Has focused on independent production companies and niche content that does not get screened on normal television. It’s a free on-demand TV over the Internet that lets you watch whatever you want, whenever you want as often as you want. You can also create your own ’smart channels’ of programmes that reflect your interests and tastes.

Blinkx allows users to search easily for film and TV clips on the internet, with so far some 7m hours of video indexed. Blinkx gets a share of advertising revenues, or a fee for directing traffic to the content site. Besides Blinkx, AOL Video and Yahoo! Video Search work on the similar principle. These video search engines implement various technologies, from traditional metadata indexing to more recent, advanced speech and & video analysis techniques.

Joost collects internet TV programmes into one place, with a focus on signing up mainstream content such as Viacom properties MTV and Comedy Central. It also shows more niche content. The cool thing about it is that viewers can interact amongst each other while watching the programmes, make comments, etc. Unfortunately, Joost is still in beta testing stages and not everyone is able to subscribe to it yet.

Considering that the traditional TV is also changing its shape I don’t believe that online TV will overtake completely. For example, I doubt that watching big football matches on internet will replace good old telly in the local pub :-). But its definitely worth start talking about it with clients.