Internet long tail of television programs

Last week Thursday, I was present at a mini-seminar of Nedstat. This Dutch webstats analysis company holds regularly mini-seminars to promoter their products. Charming about their method is that they add value to their company presentations. In this mini-seminar the company had invited the SKO, the Dutch radio and television stats research bureau. SKO charts the stats of radio and television programs for consumers and for advertisers. The statistical operation is executed by GfK and TV Times. So far SKO has kept itself busy with radio and television programs, but not with the internet counterparts.

But SKO now moves beyond traditional radio and television programs and will include internet video. This type of video has been growing in the Netherlands since 1999, but really picked up after 2005. In 2003 the company Financial TV started to present movies on internet, preceded by advertisements. In 2005 the company changed its name into Zoom.tv, which works throughout Europe these days. The video offers now is growing fast, partly because of set top boxes and through internet. Public broadcast as well as commercial broadcast stations like RTL and SBS in the Netherlands have popular play back programs such as Program missed.

SKO has now decided to measure radio and television programs as well as internet programs. In this way advertisers can get the real picture about the viewing of a program. Due to internet a program has received a second lease of life. The number of viewers on internet might not be many, but the program can be watched for a long time after the braodcast. An example of a video of program was shown (see photograph). The internet viewing shows a red long tail.

The combination of radio and television program stats and internet pose problems with business models: subscription; ad supported; content ownership; customer ownership.

SKO wants to make the usage of video on television and internet transparent:
- online live and parallel;
- online live only;
- program missed;
- micro-chunking: partitioning a program;
- micro-chunking of material not shown on television;
- theme channels.
SKO will have daily and monthly reports of the public broadcast companies and of the commercial company RTL by the end of October. After that time other broadcast stations can participate.

During the presentation a dummy of the stats was shown. The internet dummy stats were very low in comparison with the television program. This immediately solicited comments from providers which have video fragments on line. Bas Broekhuizen of de Volkskrant was very happy about these dummy stats as his stats were much better.

Blog Posting Number: 878

Tags video, television video, television, web analytics