MostContagious2012.pdf - Contagious Magazine

screen grabs /
creating, sharing,
watching
YouTube’s evolution to a professional network through a
shiny new channel strategy, investment in content makers
(the Creators Hub and London studio space) and $100m
to production companies paid off. Seventy two hours of
content are uploaded every minute to the site, but usage
is changing. ComScore reported in May that people are
watching fewer clips (they peaked at 21.8bn in January,
going down to 15.3bn in April), but spending 57% more
time watching clips. In short, engagement is up – which
is great news for advertisers, 90% of whom agreed that
content marketing would become more important in the
next 12 months, according to an Econsultancy report
from October. The bad news? Only 38% said they had a
content marketing strategy in place.
www.redbullstratos.com
Going With the Flow /
Live streaming and socialising online around content
became more popular throughout 2012, a trend which
Contagious identified as Digital Live. In the news realm,
the Huffington Post launched a live, socially-led news
service bringing people into the heart of breaking stories.
Google pushed new social network Google+’s differentiator,
Hangouts, hard, enlisting celebs, most notably
President Obama, to appear via the service. Lots of
brands joined in too, including online UK grocery delivery
service Ocado, which streamed instructional cooking
videos (Contagious 32), and fashion e-tailer ASOS,
which let viewers quiz US fashion writer Indigo Clarke
and model, blogger and IT girl Cory Kennedy about fashion
and style.
Niche streaming sites gained serious traction too. ‘People
went from broad to narrow,’ senior YouTube exec
Robert Kyncl told fellow Googlers in January in a speech about the future
of TV and content, reported in The New Yorker. ‘We think they will continue
to go that way – spend more and more time in the niches – because now
the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.’ A case in point is
Twitch.TV, founded in 2011. The site lets videogamers stream their play
live to eager videogame voyeurs, and hit 20 million monthly unique views
in August. Average daily viewing time per user? A staggering 75 minutes.
www.twitch.tv
TV Everywhere /
Video content began to untether further from TV, and onto web tablets
and mobiles. A 14-country study from NPD found that tablet use for
watching TV had doubled in 12 months (to around 15% of total viewing),
and that 70% said they were watching video on devices that weren’t
TVs. That was a boon to VOD services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon
Prime. Despite downgrading forecasts, Netflix is projected to have added
between 4.7 and 5.4 million subscribers this year as more cable customers
cut the cord. And as LTE/4G mobile rolls out, expect broadcasters to
look to more so-called TV Everywhere initiatives as a way to keep viewers
watching.
Among the most progressive, ESPN this year announced it was going
‘mobile first’ with its content, while MTV’s Under The Thumb app from
AKQA brought paid-for mobile content to US Millennials (Contagious 30).
In the mainstream meanwhile, NBC’s streaming service for the Olympics
saw seven million households stream via web and mobile apps. HBO, a
groundbreaker with its TV Everywhere app HBO Go, even rattled cable
companies by going it alone in Scandinavia with stand-alone, over-the-top
streaming service HBO Nordic. See HBO case study in Contagious 31.
www.mtvunderthethumb.com
www.hbogo.com
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