Jackson memorial streams overflowed
The memorial service for pop star Michael Jackson delivered online video’s second biggest day, according to an assortment of gaudy numbers flowing in Tuesday and Wednesday.
The king of online video streaming remains the inauguration of President Obama.
During the Jackson service:
The wide-ranging content delivery network Akamaidelivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams (in Flash and Windows Media formats). Global traffic peaked at 3,924,370 visitors per minute, the company said. The load was about 2 terabits per second, the CDN said.
The Obama inauguration hit a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams, Akamai reported at the time. The CDN said global traffic was up about 20& during the service.
The CDN handles about 20% of the world’s Web traffic. A typical day’s peak would be something like 580,000 active streams.
CNN.com said it served up 9.7 million live video streams to 11.8 million unique visitors, in the period between 12 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET. CNN’s site hit a peak of 781,000 concurrent live streams, according to an online traffic report from the network.
Ustream reported 4.6 million total streams with 1.6 million total unique visitors. Its streams included one from CBS News. More than 12,000 messages per minute ran through its chat rooms. Ustream says its feed was the only one available on the iPhone.
Facebook saw 1 million users post about 800,000 “status updates” related to the Jackson memorial stream provided by CNN.
ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, FoxNews.com and Hulu.com provided streams, to lesser numbers.
MSNBC.com said it served 3 million live streams of the event and a total of 19 million Jackson-related videos for the day. There were 7 million uniques during the service.
Hulu said its video streaming output was second only to the Obama ceremony. Hulu showed the Fox News feed.
Note: Different sources are reporting numbers for various time periods, but the above stats give the big picture.
In reaction to the big numbers, Akamai exec vp Robert Hughes had this quote moonwalked out to the media:
“When a public figure of global prominence such as Michael Jackson passes away, the public’s desire for up to date information and news is rarely satiated. Akamai’s network has seen a steady stream of online traffic when news of any sort related to Michael Jackson is updated, and we expected demand from a global online audience around the online streaming of his funeral would be no different.”
Update: Yahoo says it pumped out 5 million streams of the Jackson memorial, its biggest flow ever. During the Obama ceremony, it served up 1.8 million streams.
Online videos want more of your time
The attention span of online video watchers continues to expand, as viewers have come to expect more than clips of kids and dogs doing the dumbest things on YouTube.
The mainstreaming of TV on computers via Hulu and a few other outlets has acclimated many people to watching premium content at traditional lengths, such as those of sitcoms and feature films. Producers of online video programming are taking advantage of the added time.
“A few years ago, three minutes ‘watching’ your computer felt like a novelty; now, it’s as familiar as your television set,” one web producer tells the New York Times.
The Monday media section of the Times examines the shift, which is news to pretty much no one with an interest in streaming video. Still, the story “Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips” pulls together some interesting quotes and observations.
Here are some of the highlights of the Times’ story on online video lengths:
- “People are getting more comfortable, for better or for worse, bringing a computer to bed with them,” says Dina Kaplan, the co-founder of Blip.tv. … “On the Web, producers have this delicious freedom to produce content as long as it should be. They’re starting to take advantage of that.”
- Tom Konkle of the Web series “Safety Geeks” says the tradition of short Web videos reflected limits in Internet speed and server space. The online video experience has grown along with advances in computers and bandwidth capabilities.
- “More than anything else, the longer viewing spans may speak to the maturation of the medium itself,” the Times reported, noting that early kinetoscopes were about 30 seconds long, reflecting both the technology limits and expectations of audience’s attention spans.
- Jon Gibs, a vice president for analytics for Nielsen, said online video “(historically) has been very much a clip-based experience online. We believe we are moving into a transition period where more of that viewership is going toward long-form video.”
I’d add that the documented increase in video durations also reflect that the streaming audience is filling with teens and preteens who grew up with online video — and are far more likely to appreciate and consume longform entertainment on computers than older viewers accustomed to big-screen TVs.
That audience behavior — of convenience over presentation — brings to mind younger listeners’ widespread acceptance of inferior but highly portable audio formats such as MP3.
In addition to the longer durations, total time spent viewing online video has seen a significant jump in the past year.
Time spent watching up big in ‘09
Online video use has grown by as much as 50 percent in the past year, according to traffic reports for the month of May.
Nielsen’s VideoCensus reports that the Time Per Viewer metric was up 48.9 percent year-over-year for the month of May. The time figures out to 189 minutes of watching video streams in May, or just over three hours.
Total online video streams were up roughly 35% over the 2008 figure.
The all-mighty Unique Viewers stat for online video showed a 12.8 percent increase May-to-May.
The top online video site remained YouTube, followed not-so-closely by Hulu, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive Media and ABC.com.
Nielsen’s online video ratings have come under fire from content providers, who feel the overall numbers are far too low. A recent observational study of media habits funded by Nielsen found the online video numbers are too high, estimating time spent watching online video at something like two minutes a day.
Too high, too low — the only thing that seems right is they have it wrong.
Hulu passes Yahoo! in video share
Hulu blew past Yahoo! in the online video horse race in March, settling into a distant third in overall share. Hulu’s showing in March was up roughly 20 percent over February’s count, according to comScore’s monthly report.
Still, YouTube hasn’t much to fear from the red-hot News Corp.-NBC Universal site.
Google’s video sites (almost all YouTube) gobbled up 41 percent of the U.S. online video market, comScore reported. That’s almost 5.9 billion videos viewed by 100 million unique viewers at YouTube.
Fox Interactive Media had 3 percent of the action, compared with 2.6 for Hulu. Yahoo had 2.3 percent while Microsoft computed 2.0 percent.
Overall, U.S. online video viewing was up 11 percent compared with February, with 14.5 billion videos servered.
Hulu’s minutes-spent percentage (4.9 percent) almost doubled its videos watched share (2.6 percent), not surprising because the site specializes in broadcast-length fare.
Some other fun facts from comScore:
- Almost 78 percent of the U.S. Internet audience watched online videos.
- The average viewer viddied almost 5 1/2 hours of content.
- The average online video clocked in at 3.4 minutes.
- Yahoo! retained its third-place showing in unique visitors, but Hulu is close behind.
