• 50% of Internet users now watch online video weekly or more;
• That’s up from 43% in 2009;
• An additional 5 percentage points growth is expected in the next 12 months;
• Younger male viewers top the list as a category with 85% of males 18-24 watching online video weekly; and
• 38% are interested in the prospect of connecting their computers to TV to watch online video.

Android Wants In On the Mobile Video Rush — Granted, Apple’s getting on the lines, press (both good and bad) and attention recently on their video capabilities. But, when I saw this piece at Connected Planet on what Android is up to in video I thought I’d be contrarian and talk about that instead. To quote the article “While the latest version of Apple’s iconic device is designed for generating video content and communications, the Droid X’s powerful hardware core and new services gear the device toward consuming massive amounts of video content as well as producing it.” Verizon calls the device “a pocket sized home theater”. So, another example of a blur between computers, phones and TVs. Online video is everywhere.  So whether you’re a Apple or Android fan, the good news is they are both going after video if you’re an online video fan.

Happy 4th: And in closing, I embed a video from UStream.tv of fireworks at the Magic Kingdom. Happy birthday all you Americans!

The celebration of the 25th anniversary of the first domain name registration (symbolics.com) began in March with the Policy Impact Forum in D.C. I was on business travel that week so I wasn’t able to attend the event – which was a huge bummer for me because the keynote address was given by Dr. Fareed Zakaria and headlined by President Bill Clinton. Luckily for me, I wasn’t already booked so I was able to attend Wednesday’s dinner in San Francisco. The event was hosted by comedian Dana Carvey – but Scott McNealy gave him a run for the money to see who could get more laughs. Scott’s “top 10ish” list of reasons why he was surprised we were celebrating the 25th anniversary had me cracking up.

You can read more about the 25th anniversary and all the things VeriSign is doing to celebrate it here.

Internet Video Viewing to Eclipse Broadcast TV Viewing by 2020.
A forecast by The Diffusion Group (TDG) in one of their recent reports. According to Colin Dixon, senior partner and co-author of TDG’s new report, despite the fact that some people might find this news a bit shocking, there is good reason to believe that this estimate is realistic.

Dixon says, “Keep in mind that during this period, Internet and broadcast delivery of video content will become blended in such a way that consumers will be unaware of which conduit serves which content. Because so much of their audience will be consuming online, it is more important than ever that cable and broadcast channels increase their presence online.”

Online Video Ad Revenue To Top $1.3B.
This prediction is from Parks Associates, by way of Online Media Daily. They also say “The report attributes the healthy numbers to steady growth in online video viewership, combined with the ability to target specific viewers based on preferences and viewing history”.

Second; trolling the booths, attending the panels, and talking to the participants last week I was struck by how much is going on with video and how diverse the community is. Again, one knows that, but a conference like this brings it home. There are big video companies like Yahoo (a keynote speaker); down to smaller creators just starting out as well as representatives from universities and the government sector.

A panel on video e-commerce had some interesting education and statistics. Ogilvy shared that in their cause marketing campaign with Sears, video emails get three times the engagement compared to emails without video. Their word of advice is that you should pick a video that’s moving, emotionally engaging and not just a reused ad. They described their efforts with video and an IBM campaign. Using video got them the # 1 organic spot on Google for their collaboration software — another example of video helping search.

Shopping Western Style was there and had really embraced video, even producing a TV show to support their store and brand. They quoted a 50% conversion increase in product sales with video, a 25% decrease in returns and a 593% increase in ticket sales with video. They too mentioned the SEO benefits of video seeing 8 of 10 first page listings with video and 90% on Bing and Yahoo. Some words of advice from the panel were shorter videos work better (60 seconds or less work best for e-commerce), tagging your video appropriately is important and creating engaging video is key, an important point though it’s a bit subjective. I liked this quote: “the biggest competitor for any company is for people’s attention, and video helps you get that attention”.

Systems to measure video experiences seem in their infancy and was also a topic on many panels. Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3 noted that paid video placements can be bogus numbers since 30% fall below the fold, the sound could be off, or some other barrier to usefulness and exposure is in place. The panelist from Razorfish was less than complementary of YouTube’s analytics and suggested Clickable as a useful tool.

HTML5 got some play (pun intended) at the show. In the e-commerce session, someone asked if HTML5 was important and the panelist said it’s a must support, that 96% of his mobile traffic came from the iPhone. While that speaks more to Steve Jobs’ religious war on Flash than it does on HTML5 generally, it’s an interesting point.

At the panel on HTML5 and open standards, a more a technical discussion, it was obvious there is a big interest in the topic (it was standing room only with people pouring out the door). The ecosystem is obviously early with a lack of tools, analytics, security and DRM. One content owner from CNET said they used HTML5 for a iPad application without many of those things. Their thought was iPads are still a small number and while they’d love to have all the hooks and help they have in their current Flash products, it was worth doing and releasing in 10 days to get out there. The sense I got was that while those tools and work flows need to be built and worked out for HTML5, they will be eventually.

The question was asked “what do we get better with HTML5″. While the obvious topics of a lighter less bloated experience and mobile were mentioned, one participant paraphrased a former Secretary of Defense by saying “It’s so early we don’t know what we don’t know yet”. But there was optimism that the new road would be interesting and innovative for video.

Speaking of mobile, that panel said that mobile was in many ways an easier environment for getting paid for video since paying via mobile is easier and people are used to paying for phone service. The panelists also agreed that mobile video was an “and” for their video not just an “or”.

And I’ll close with the tag line from the CMO from Kodak — if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand pictures.

Below is a video from Beet.tv with Adobe’s Jen Taylor talking Flash players and innovations being made in bringing a high-quality presentation to streaming video.

Here at Watch.tv we’re proud to say that honor is reserved for the live streaming sites like Justin.tv and UStream.tv. YouTube has about 24 hours of video uploaded per minute. But, Justin.tv claims 30 hours and Ustream.tv claims over 53 hours per minute according to Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee.

That said, we’d like to give a shout out to YouTube.com today as it is their 5 year anniversary (I’m on record as being partial to such birthdays). YouTube announced today that they are now serving 2 billion (yes “B”) streams a day. While there is a part of me that’s reminded of McDonald’s with that statement, I’m very excited for online video, .tv, and our prospects for the future.

In my previous blog post, I discussed the new tag, its usage, and how we are going to have native tags on the web. It just so happens that there is a whole range of technologies, standards and market force that is driving this new native video technology and shaping its future. In order to understand this landscape, it is probably a good idea to have a quick understanding of the video technology, namely video containers and video codecs.

What are Video Containers?
A video container defines how to store video and audio streams in a single file. When you think of video files, you usually thing of “AVI” or “MP4″ files, but they are in reality called “container formats”. A close analogy for container formats is a ZIPfile.

Don’t forget that a ZIP file is a container format that can contain any sort of file within it. It does not really define the contents of the file. In the same way, a video container format defines HOW to store video things (video stream, audio stream, track information, synchronization information, metadata etc.) and not WHAT kinds of data to store. Well, I say that cringingly because not all video streams are compatible with all container formats. Shucks!

Anyway, there are several video container formats in the marketplace. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG4 - The Movie Picture Experts Group (MPEG4) video container files usually have an extension of .mp4 or .m4v. This is a specification from Apple and is based on Apple’s old QuickTime (.mov) container.

• FLV - The Flash Video (FLV) container files usually have an extension of .flv. This is a specification from Adobe and is of course used by Adobe Flash runtime, which also supports files based on MPEG4 container. This is very popular and is used heavily in the Internet.

• OGG - The OGG video container format files usually have an extension of .ogv. OGG is an open standard, open-source friendly format that is unencumbered by any known patents. So, clearly Firefox supports this natively and of course all major Linux distributions bundle support for this container.

• AVI – The Audio Video Interleave (AVI) video container files usually have an extension of .avi. This container format from Microsoft has fallen behind in technology and does not support the feature set of many modern containers. Over time many companies have tried to extend it and generally in incompatible ways.

What are Video Codecs?
A video codec defines what kind of data to store in the file. Imagine you’re watching a video; when you do so, there is a video codec (Coder Decoder) that has to interpret the bytes in the stream to display the video and synchronize it with the audio. Hence, think of a video codec as a data structure and an algorithm by which video and audio has to be encoded.

There are several video codecs in the market place. Some of the popular ones are:

• MPEG-4 ASP – The MPEG4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile) is developed by MPEG group and is a popular codec that can be embedded in popular containers such as AVI and MP4. This codec is patent encumbered and is licensed through the MPEG LA consortium.

• H.264 – The H.264 codec is also known as “MPEG-4 part 10″ or “MPEG-4 AVC”. This format developed by the MPEG group prides itself in having a single codec that can be used in cell phones (low-bandwidth, low CPU device) and desktops (high-bandwidth and high CPU device). This is licensed under the MPEG LA consortium too and is considered one of the best.

• THEORA – This is a codec developed by Xiph.org. It is royalty free and goes hand in hand with OGG container. It’s supported by Firfox 3.5+ and popular Linux distributions by default.

So, what is the standard?
HTML5 defines the tag, but does not specify the video container or the codec. The question is when we use the tag in our HTML page, which codec can we count on being present in all browsers and across all platforms including mobile devices. This is an interesting question and a challenging battle between the big players. H.264 is technically better than MPEG-4 and THEORA, with support for multiple profiles lo – low and high end profiles. It also has a good market share as it is currently embedded in many popular products including Apple’s iPhone, Apple TV, Adobe Flash, YouTube HD, and Android phones.

It so happens that Google acquired On2 technologies within the last year and gained rights to a codec called VP8. The VP8 codec is said to be superior to H.264 with more than 40 new innovations delivering outstanding quality at low bitrates and low complexity, thus reducing the cost of streaming video. Interestingly, there is a rumor that Google plans to open source this technology (this may be announced in the Google IO conference this year). Google is obviously interested in entering this space. Flash Video, the most popular internet video format, is feeling left out as Apple announces no support for Flash in iPod and iPad.

As you can see, the big boys are playing politics, but the reality is we will eventually have native VIDEO on the web. And, what does that mean to the average user and to video? It means we will finally have video with no plugins, it will simply work on all browsers and all platforms including mobile phones (and iPads…and that next thing we haven’t thought of yet). You think video is growing now. Just wait!

1. Right as I was entering the second floor session hallway on the first day, the giant twitter stream monitor showed a random user’s tweet recommending the video platforms quick.tv and overlay.tv – it’s always good to see .tv out and about!

2. I think one of the best speeches had to be Ben Huh’s keynote on “Becoming One with Internet Culture” which gave surprising depth and insight to the phenomenon of LOLcats. There’s a really great interview on WSJ with Ben on the difference of Internet culture and pop culture, and what the definition of a “meme” really is.

3. I liked Ken Shafer’s session on “My Name is URL” – it was truly a good bridge between domains and social media as Ken talked about the importance of identifiers, and the effectiveness created when you provide your users a holistic experience.

One of the truly great things about this event was the opportunity to meet so many awesome people – sometimes the hallway conversations can be a more enthralling discussion than the actual session! I guess that will have to make up for the fact that I felt like I missed something – either that, or next time I go I’m cloning myself to take more notes.

Google TV in the works? — The Wall Street Journal (and about everyone that guesses on these things) thinks so. They may (or may not) show it off at their I/O conference May 19 and 20 for developers in SF. It’s expected to be on Android and will leverage the wider development community for applications. Rumor has it Intel and Logitech will be partners. I’m informed by those geeks that follow this that the Intel CE4100 provides a platform to put fancy overlays on the screen or rescale the input signal and pass it through. You can basically have a custom sports ticker or stock ticker running at all times regardless of your channel. Another example of old fashion TV and the web merging. Thanks for the pointer on that Neel!

For Another Point of View — Mark Cuban — never one to be shy putting forth his opinion — says the future of TV is TV … the kind that comes in over a cable and isn’t the Internet. I’m completely with Janko Roettgers from NewTeeVee on this one. While it’s still early; 14MM Netflix customers aren’t likely wrong. I can’t guess the exact moment that online video and that black box in your room merge completely…but it will happen.

Justin.tv Gives Advice on Live Video — Michael Seibel, the CEO of Justin.tv has a nice guest blog post on TechCrunch today. We’re fans of Michael here at Watch.tv and have a video of him here. In today’s post he talks about how to fix availability problems (mobile helps a lot) and how to fix the getting viewers problem. Check it out.

Online Advertising Spending is Shifting to Video — eMarketer’s article from May 3 says that online video advertising is growing at 40% and 94% of agency executives planned to spend more on online video in Q1 2010 than the prior year. Thanks Tempy for that article.

Twitter held its first ever developer conference “Chirp” in San Francisco on April 14th and 15th, 2010. The conference was attended by 500 developers from all over the world. Twitter believes in an open ecosystem. Ever since Twitter was launched, their API and the platform has been open to the public and developers. Currently there are about 100,000 registered third party applications that were built using their API. The third party application development on the Twitter platform is growing at a rapid pace. Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced that 75% of the traffic comes from third party applications and 60% of the tweets come from these third party apps. Ev admitted that Twitter is too hard and gave an example: if you type in “I don’t get” in Google search box, then “I don’t get Twitter” is number 2 in the list. However, it is Twitter’s highest priority to make this experience “friction free” to users and developers.

For the first time ever, Twitter announced the roadmap of their platform during this conference.

Here are the highlights of the roadmap for 2010:

1) Location API – The current location API provides Longitude and Latitude only. Twitter is planning to allow you to associate city and places to tweets. So, not only you can read tweets from your followers, you can read tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city, whether you follow them or not.

2) @Annotations – Adding location to the tweets was a first step, now with the annotations you can associate any arbitrary meta-data to your tweets when it’s published and you can query back the tweets using the same meta-data. The new annotations open the possibility for making tweets and search much richer.

3) User Streams or Streaming API – So far we have been using their REST API for publishing tweets, searching tweets, following etc. The new streaming API allows the applications to receive tweets in near real-time. So, no more rate limitations, no need for waiting or polling for the tweets. The tweets will be pushed to you automatically as soon as they are received.

4) @Anywhere – The idea of @anywhere is to plug Twitter seamlessly into your own website with a few lines of Javascript code. So, when you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter account associated with that site without navigating away from that site. @anywhere is analogous to Facebook Connect.

5) Twitter launched http://dev.twitter.com/ during this conference. Twitter promised to keep this website up to date with the information. In fact, the documentation is generated out of the code itself so it will never be out of date.

6) Twitter also announced their long-awaited revenue model which is not about ads, it’s about promoting tweets. Promoted tweets are shown as the top tweets. However, there are still questions how promoted tweets will actually work.

Twitter is growing at a rapid rate, currently Twitter has about 105 million registered users across the world and the investors are expecting this number to rise by half a billion in the next 1 to 2 years. Twitter has about 175 employees, for such a small team their impact across the whole world is enormous.

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

Watch live video from Twitter Chirp Conference on Justin.tv

According to recent survey data from KPMG, few consumers see the need to bring 3-D into the home, with just 15 percent saying they expect to buy a 3-D-capable set the next time they shell out for a new TV.

According to the most recent KPMG Media and Entertainment Barometer, more than a quarter of respondents said they had viewed a 3-D film in the theater over the past 12 months, and those numbers are even higher for 18-24 year olds (42 percent) and 25-34 year olds (45 percent).

Comparatively, only 5 percent of those surveyed said they had watched a 3-D film on TV — and very few seemed to want to, with only about one in six respondents said they were likely to buy a 3-D TV for their next purchase. Only about a quarter of respondents said they would prefer to watch TV in 3-D if it was available, with a third saying they would prefer not to. A whole 42 percent were unsure if they’d prefer to watch 3-D TV, which signals unfamiliarity with the technology.

And, here’s my favorite stat “More than 40 percent said they believed 3-D was a gimmick.” While I’m certainly not a 3D technology expert, my feed-reader is filled with news about 3D and you couldn’t get away from it at CES. My quandary is those glasses. First, you have to find them in your living room (I don’t know about you, but I loose my remote at least once a day). Second, the glasses aren’t interoperable. You can’t use one brand’s glasses with another brand’s TV. So think about the Super Bowl in 3D. Only some of your friends who come for the party can see the event it its full glory. The rest of the party goers will see a screen that makes them feel drunk even if they are only drinking soda. And last, think about how silly you look in those glasses.

All that said, the change and growth in video generally is one of the things that makes this space fun.

What do you think about 3D and how that might play out – not just on the physical set in your living room, but online too?

Later Update: Hey…ask and ye shall receive. I saw this posting on companies that have 3D TVs without the “goofy” glasses. This article suggested that the glasses are what’s holding back the 3D flood waters. While none of these new technologies are without issues, and all are expensive, it shows progress towards something more mass market.