Future of Video and YouTube
As a visual media strategist I am often asked what does the future of video look like? How will we watch video? Will the future continue with cord cutters?
These questions always give me pause. I always am constantly focused on what the landscape looks like for visual media. The fact is, it is in a severe phase of change currently. Traditional television is beginning a slow death to what print looks like today. Viewership will ship to a premium model. We will increasingly get our content from the Internet as our sole destination and not our secondary destination.
Why do I think this? Well in consulting a year over year graph of what Comscore says we find that overall useage has gone down. Last year they showed amount of minutes at The problem with strictly looking at these numbers is that there are several sites for online streaming that do not appear in them. Comscore is interested in tracking sites that track monetizing of video through ads. The problem with this is there is one large consumption site that is left out and that is Netflix.
According to Sandvine, a company that build monioring equipment and has published a report on Internet useage since 2008, has stated that this year Netflix accounted for an aggregate of 28.88% of overall traffic. Think for a second that almost a third of Internet traffic is devoted to Netflix. That is quite a bit of video being consumed for that high of a number. Comscore does not track this number in their equation.
Another number that does not show up because of the way that Comscore tracks views is Hulu. Hulu does not have enough unique viewers to show up in their top 10 so Hulu’s number does not enter into this year over year analysis which as of June 2012 showed them averaging 253.7 minutes viewed. This year this number is not even shown. If we assume flat growth this would put the Comscore minutes per viewer at 1501.6 minutes vs 1,315.3 minutes last year. I can assume at least flat growth as Hulu themselves announced in Q1 viewers streamed more than 1 billion content videos in a single quarter. This is a record for them.
With all of this talk about Netflix and Hulu though we are missing how this effect has changed our daily lives with user generated content through YouTube. Youtube is now the second largest agregate user according to Sandvine with 15.43% aggregate traffic.
Now this is where we come in. At Hand in Hand Productions we can help you capitalize on this trend of utilizing how we are moving our viewing habits online and away from traditional television. YouTube is critical in a modern marketing strategy from an SEO standpoint. In fact YouTube is the 2nd most used search engine after Google. According to the Comscore. In fact over the last 6 years there has been an 800% increase in online videos. In June of 2013 according to Comscore over 15 Billion YouTube videos where viewed. Give us a call and let us help you become a part of this trend.