In this session, Gavin McGarry from Joost gives an overview of the state of video online. What are people doing with video online right now, and what does the future hold?
Gavin did something interesting in this session - he put notes and links on his blog and used that instead of a bunch of slides. How's that for new media? Unfortunately, the incredibly slow wireless connection made it somewhat painful. Kudos to Gavin for giving it a shot though!
Some of Gavin's best quotes from this session:
- "I'm tired of going to conferences with talking heads."
- "It doesn't necessarily have to be about Canadians to be for Canadians."
- "Everything is about following the money."
- "There's been this misconception that everyone is making money online, and it's just not true."
On statistics:
- Over 2 billion people speak English around the world and more than 400 million are online.
- From comScore: Canada is #1 for online video around the world - 89% of Canada's online population watch video.
- From comScore: Canadians spent an average of 3 hours watching 68 videos apiece on YouTube. Videos on YouTube accounted for 46% of all videos watched online in Canada in December 2007.
On the cost of putting video online:
- After you have content, you need: encoding, a content management system, distribution, geo targeting, ad serving, DRM, revenue shares.
- Here's a spreadsheet with a quick and dirty calculation that Gavin has come up with.
- Total monthly cost based on the calculation above for 70 minutes of content: $21,850.14
Other notes:
- We need consistency around metrics. YouTube counts everything, Blip.tv is more stringent.
- Gavin mentioned Alexa as a tool for metrics - both Jim Louderback and myself ("Alexa guy") kind of shot that down. Alexa has problems - a quick Google search will tell you that. At the very least, use Alexa along with other services and don't rely solely on the Alexa data.
- YouTube Insight - Google's way of tracking everything that happens on YouTube. Excellent way to see statistics about your videos.
- Google Trends is another great tool you can use.
- Search is important for video discovery right now, but platforms like Xbox Live have the potential to change that.
You can learn more about Gavin at his blog. His post with links for this session is here.
