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20% of US Peak Bandwidth used by Netflix Instant

North America Network Downstream Traffic Profile Fixed Access According to a study by Sandvine, 20% of non-mobile internet traffic during prime time can be attributed to Netflix instant accounts during prime time usage periods in the US while streaming media accounts for 43% of peak period traffic. While Netflix accounts for almost half of the streaming bandwidth between 8p and 10p utilized by only 1.8% of Netflix subscribers.

While only 1.8% of Netflix subscribers are using the streaming capabilities, CEO Reed Hastings envisions Netflix as a streaming service. “In fact, by every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail.”

I happen to agree with Hastings as my video content viewing has dramatically changed from TV to Netflix Instant since I dropped premium channels such as HBO and Starz. In addition to the 1 disc in mail I tend to watch a movie or TV episode on the iPad at night and I’m watching less and less TV except for the few shows which I follow.

Content in the cloud (both audio and video) is the future.

Source: Wired

The Social Web gets its own set of movie trailers

We all really relate to movies, don’t we? We jump to see movie-versions of books and compelling news stories. Well how about a movie version of the origins of Facebook? Well, that’s actually coming to a movie theater near you this Fall. It’s called “The Social Network“. The trailer is after the jump.

But not to be left out, some other aspiring, comedic filmmakers have put out their own versions of ‘trailers’ for movies about YouTube and now Twitter!

YouTube helps you with your Vuvuzela withdrawal

Have you been watching too much World Cup lately? Football/soccer, that is. And now you can’t watch another sporting event without wondering why it doesn’t sound right? Missing the buzzing of the vuvuzelas?

Well the Google/YouTube pranksters have you covered. Some videos now have a little soccer ball icon that you click to recreate the sound of a South African stadium.

Try out Usain Bolt running with vuvuzela support.

HTML5 Video Adoption

As of May 2010, 26% of all web video is now available for playback in HTML5 using the H.264 format up from 10% on January 2010. This is a meteoric rise to adoption for a technology. Out of the sites that support HTML5, iPad users are detected and switched to an HTML5-compatible format. YouTube has even enabled that functionality on their embeds from other sites.

Apple iPad has forced rapid adoption of HTML5 video.

For most news type sites, only recent stories are available as most back library content has not been encoded to be used in HTML5. Another area lacking is that there is little HTML5 supported episodic content available from major TV networks. ABC has an app, but no full episodes are available from their website.

Source: Mefeedia Blog

YouTube launches online video rental store

YouTube LogoYouTube has just rolled out online video rentals similar to Amazon Unboxed. Prices for movies and TV episodes start at $0.99. and go to $3.99 for the most recent/popular movies.

So far, they don’t seem to have that many titles and their interface for browsing their catalog isn’t very good. Instead they depend on the search feature which can be easily confused with the generic search for the entire site.  The ‘rental store’ probably needs some separate branding and/or color scheme.

You can find the new rental site at http://www.youtube.com/store.

Internet traffic to reach 2/3 Zettabyte by 2013?

Cisco predicts that global Internet IP traffic will get to 2/3 of a trillion GB (a trillion GB is a zettabyte) per year by 2013. They also predict that video will constitute 90% of this traffic, which is not surprising.

Consider that a Google insider revealed that YouTube streams about 1.2 billion videos per day. Ahh, remember the good old days when getting a million hits to your website per month was considered ‘big traffic’? Now think a billion per day and it’s streaming video!

via Techcrunch

ABC/Disney partners with Hulu to show ABC shows

After months of negotiations, Disney (ABC) has agreed to take a stake in Hulu, NBC’s online video website and thus also air their shows on hulu.com. Fans of Lost Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and so on can now see full episodes online legally for free with an ad or two thrown in for revenue.

While Greg Sandoval at CNET seems to think this will hurt YouTube, I don’t think that’s about to happen just yet. Sure, this is an important deal as YouTube tries to reform its model to include more industry-approved content, but YouTube is a household name with over 10 times the traffic currently.

Article Recap for the Week Ending Apr 24, 2009

Here are some of our notable articles for the past week. First we pondered whether Twitter’s popularity would last. Google News now has a Timeline of Events – nice feature.

We noticed that YouTube were looking to accept full length and legal content, while Fuijitsu have developed some secure new memory sticks. Adobe announced their plans to integrate Flash technology with TVs.

Oracle is picking up where IBM left off, buying out Sun for around $7 billion. That’s a lot of Rubik’s Cube Clocks!

YouTube Looking To Accept Full-Length Content… Legally

YouTube and Sony in Talks

YouTube and Sony are currently in talks  to display full-length content from Sony Pictures on YouTube. About a week ago, a deal was closed between YouTube and Disney to do the same with some short Disney clips – but it seems that Sony Pictures may provide some longer content for YouTube.

This may be a case of YouTube are playing a game of ‘catch-up’ as service providers all over the world are allowing their shows to be watched online through their own websites which may be lowering the demand for YouTube slightly. Unknown to many, Sony Pictures owns Crackle.com which produces high quality video in-house for the sole purpose of being uploaded to that site.

If this deal goes ahead, we can look forward to a lot of quality content on YouTube professionally produced in addition to the excellent amateur movies out there. Nice.

Google and Universal to partner on music video website

The Universal Music Group and Google are getting together to start a music video website, called Vevo.

Reports are that they’ll share ad revenues, which implies that they will be monetizing the service via advertising and not charging viewers to watch the videos. However, it’s not clear yet. Chances are that’s how it will roll out, b/c by now, most of these companies understand that there are few things that Web surfers are willing to pong up for.

Universal is the largest of the top 4 record companies and of course, Google owns YouTube and Vevo is but another spin-off of YouTube.

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