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Nielsen: Online Video Usage Significantly Up YOY

Glass-half-full and glass-half-empty types, prepare to be split.  New stats from Nielsen indicate that February of 2010 was a great month for the online video industry compared to February of 2009.  Last month was a little bit rotten compared to January of 2010, however. The chart below shows how the big-picture data categories played out.  "Unique Viewers" and "Total...

24% Of Households Have a TV Connected To The Internet

Nearly a quarter (24%) of all U.S. households have a television connected to the Internet, according to a new report from the Leichtman Research Group (LRG). The report found consumers connect to the Internet via variety of devices including a video game console, a Blu-Ray player, or a compatible TV.  While Internet connectivity has become a common built-in feature in many devices, consumers are...

Hulu To Lose Comedy Central’s Stewart, Colbert

Two of the most popular shows on Hulu will be pulled off the site after March 9th.  Hulu announced late yesterday that it and Comedy Central have been unable to reach an agreement concerning the distribution of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. This doesn’t seem to signal a complete estrangement between the two companies; in fact, Hulu’s Andy Forssell wrote on the corporate blog,...

Baidu Receives $50 Million To Build Video Site

The creation of the Chinese equivalent of Hulu is now officially underway.  Providence Equity Partners, which invested $100 million in the original American video site, will give Baidu $50 million to create Qiyi.com.  Qiyi should similarly offer premium content and rely on ad revenue. Qiyi will indeed be a completely by-the-book operation, judging from an "About Us" section that’s...

Professional Online Video Views Climb In 2009

Professionally produced online media and entertainment video views increased by 18 percent in 2009 to 49.1 billion, according to a new report by AccuStream Research. Internet brands (counting online entertainment destinations owned and operated by major media companies such as Comcast, CBS, Fox Broadcasting, NBC, ABC that include Fancast.com, Hulu.com and TV.com) grabbed 52.1% of total professional...

Online TV Shows May Get More Ad-Heavy

For the most part, online video has been much less ad-heavy than television programming. It is this very fact that has likely been a large part of the medium’s popularity. Things may be changing, however. According to Advertising Age, Nielsen is planning on making data available about the viewing of commercials that run in particular shows , whether they are viewed on TV or online. The data...

Clicker Partners With UCLA On Online Video Site

Online video guide Clicker said today it has partnered with UCLA on a new service bringing online entertainment and university video content to students via the school’s Web portal, MyUCLA. The partnership between Clicker and UCLA will give students access to content from sites and networks like ABC, MTV, PBS, Hulu and YouTube. The content will feature television shows, music videos, movies,...

Hulu (Again) Considers Monthly Fee

How much is the experience of watching certain old shows online worth to the average person?  Well, Hulu’s hoping the answer is "at least $5 per month."  A new report indicates that the site might try to charge a monthly fee for access to episodes that aired a while ago. Dawn C. Chmielewski and Alex Pham wrote this morning, "One plan being considered would allow users...

Google Increases Lead In Online Video

There may come a point at which Google’s popularity maxes out, but we haven’t reached it yet.  A new report from comScore concerning online video sites indicates that the search giant’s properties attracted considerably more eyeballs in November than the previous month. In October, comScore counted 126.3 million unique viewers in connection with Google’s sites.  In...

Hulu Investor May Help Launch Similar Site In China

An investment group with significant ties to Hulu may now be ready to help a similar site launch in China.  A report’s connected Providence Equity Partners to both Baidu and a new online video destination. Let’s start with a little history.  Once upon a time (or in mid-2007, to be more exact), Providence Equity Partners invested $100 million in Hulu, giving it a ten percent stake...

Hulu CEO Shares 2009 Stats

Hulu had a good 2009, and to celebrate the end of it, the company’s CEO, Jason Kilar, has decided to share some stats.  Here’s a quick hint as to just how successful his organization was: to describe Hulu’s growth, the word "double" often doesn’t cut it. In a post on the Hulu Blog, Kilar started off by relaying some data from comScore.  It seems that "[m]onthly...

Hulu Falls Short In Comparison To Blockbusters

If you massage the stats enough, Hulu’s an entertainment giant, hanging neck and neck with this year’s most popular movies.  If you adopt a more objective perspective, however, it becomes pretty clear that the video-centric site hasn’t exactly achieved blockbuster status. In a report released this afternoon to NewTeeVee, Buzzpoint put Hulu just behind The Twilight Saga: New...

Hulu Captions Search a Preview of General Video Search to Come?

Hulu has a new captions search feature available via Hulu Labs. The feature allows Hulu users to search the captions of videos across hundreds of different shows. Show and video pages now have a "Captions" tab, and search can be found there. "Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers...

Hulu Adds New Options to the Queue

Popular online video destination Hulu has added a new default view for the user’s queue. The new view groups all videos within the queue by show. In the past, users could only sort everything by show by clicking on the title and information column. "As we’ve added more content and as users’ queues have grown in size, grouping by show as a default was a logical update,"...

November Online Video Trends A Mixed Bag

The latest numbers regarding online video viewing are in from Nielsen, and they reveal some interesting trends.  In effect, things are looking good on a year-over-year basis, but stacked up against October, November didn’t go so well. Let’s hit the positive aspects of the Nielsen Wire report first.  Unique viewers, total streams, and time spent per viewer are up year-over-year...