Via the New York Times
By Saul Hansell
Many people watch free, advertising-supported episodes of shows on sites like Hulu.
The conventional wisdom is that people on computers only have the attention span to watch very short video clips. But it’s clear that getting network programming on their own schedule makes it increasingly worthwhile for some viewers to watch full episodes on their computers.
Hulu, the NBC-Fox venture that just celebrated its first birthday, and despite initial ridicule, it is now the sixth-biggest video site on the Web. Hulu served 142 million streams, both episodes and shorter clips, to 6.3 million users in September.
And Internet users are becoming much more engaged with other forms of video content. That was one of the themes that jumped out at me in a roundtable Tuesday organized by Andy Plesser, the publicist and video blogger on Beet.TV.
On WashingtonPost.com, the most popular video programming has been its live coverage of election nights and conventions, said Chet Rhodes, the assistant managing editor for video. The Wall Street Journal has been experimenting with four- to seven-minute “mini-documentaries” in addition to shorter video segments that sometimes accompany news articles.
On Blip.TV, a site that aggregates semi-professional and professional videos, the average length of a program has increased from 3-5 minutes a year ago to 5-7 minutes now, said Mike Hudack, its chief executive. Certain programs, such as how-to programming, keep audiences for a long time. “If someone says at the beginning of the show he will make a chair, he spends the next 20 minutes making it in his garage, and then he sits down in the chair, people will watch that all the way through, and they love it,” Mr. Hudack said.
There is less interest in longer sitcoms and dramas made by amateurs, Mr. Hudak said. The issue is that independent film makers don’t have the resources and skills to make something that is compelling for much longer than five minutes, he said.
Many sites are finding, in fact, that users want to construct their own video programs out of parts.
“The consumer shows up with a partial idea in her head about what she wants to watch,” said Adam Berrey, a senior vice president of Brightcove, a video technology firm. “She moves from video to video in a non-linear way.”
Once a video finishes, sites are finding it useful to present a range of options for related content to watch next. After a breaking news story about China, Mr. Berrey said, sites should offer both more breaking news and more video from China to appeal to all the possible interests. MSNBC is developing technology to recognize key words spoken in its video segments so they can be indexed and presented on topic pages about various subjects.
This offers a bit of confirmation to a theory I’ve had for a while: that the Internet will reverse the dumbing down of news that was caused by television. One reason that TV reduces most news segments to two minutes is that everyone watching a newscast has to watch all of them, even the topics that bore them. Video on the Internet is more like reading a print publication. You decide how much you want to watch and when to switch to the next topic. And so programmers don’t have to be afraid of providing information that some people want because they are afraid that others will switch to a different channel.
That’s not to say that the conventional wisdom doesn’t have a point. All things being equal, it is easier to relax and watch video for a long time sitting on your couch than at your desk. And bringing Internet video to living room televisions, as Blip and some other sites are doing, dramatically increases how much people watch.
“Viewing time triples, quadruples, quintuples, when people are watching in a lean-back environment with a remote control and an HDTV,” Mr. Hudack said.
