The Nielsen Company today announced the launch of Nielsen On Demand Reporting & Analytics, a new service that reports on video-on-demand (VOD) usage.

The service offers viewing stats based on real time transactions collected at the set-top box level.

At launch, Comcast will be providing VOD data for the service. Comcast will also begin using the NORA service immediately to analyze trends in VOD usage based on a number of factors, including programmer, program distributor, program category and the box-office revenue.
By providing set top box-level data on actual VOD selections, the service will let Nielsen clients interpret on-demand viewing trends.

The announcement reflects a larger trend of advertisers looking for accurate, real-time stats, and also highlights the podcasting world’s lack of accepted listening/viewing stats. For the foreseeable future, advertisers are going to feel a lot more comfortable putting their money into on-demand television than video podcasts.

According to research from Accustream, user generated video (UGV) – things like video podcasts, vlogs and YouTube videos – scored 22 billion views in 2007.

That’s a 70% increase over 2006. People’s attention is moving to online video fast, limited mainly by bandwidth and the availability of content.

Other research highlights:

• Long tail videos getting substantial traffic – almost 20% of total views generated in 2007 were delivered by videos published in 2006 or before.
• UGV sites are attracting the attention of pros – There is a growing presence of both semi-professional and professional content inside UGV environments. For example, YouTube partner channels accounted for 10.6% of cumulative site views generated over the past year. Semi professional content grabbed a 47.5% total share on MySpace TV, and the Screen Bites category on Crackle.com generated a 17.5% cumulative share of total views.

YouTube is getting serious about mobilecasting, expanding its mobile service to include virtually all of the videos available on its Web site.

Starting today, people with current generation mobile phones can watch tens of millions of YouTube videos. YouTube also is providing mobile access to many of the same features that have become staples of its Web site. The additional mobile features include the ability to rate videos and share clips with friends.

According to YouTube, more than 100 million devices worldwide should be able to access the expanded mobile service. This opens up a large new audience for Internet video consumption, an audience that will only get bigger as devices get more powerful and mobile Internet service gets faster.

Last week, when Sprint announced that it was laying off 4,000 employees, we suggested that Apple’s iPhone was killing off those jobs.

A lot of people took issue with the suggestion, saying that Sprint’s lousy customer service was to blame.

Sprint’s customer service IS terrible. We used to be Sprint subscribers, and found that going to our local Sprint store was a complete hassle. When we decided to switch carriers, they told us we wouldn’t get hit with a cancellation fee and then they billed us with a cancellation fee.

But there’s more to Sprint’s declining fortunes than bad service: Apple’s iPhone and AT&T’s iPhone service are a leap forward, and Sprint customers are switching providers as a result.

• According to a recent survey, subscribers from Sprint and T-Mobile are the most likely to say they would switch providers to get the iPhone. About 12.5 percent of T-Mobile customers and 8.1 percent of Sprint customers surveyed expressed a high interest in the iPhone.
• AT&T said Thursday that fourth-quarter earnings rose over 61 percent, helped by the addition of a record 2.7 million wireless customers, many of which are believed to have switched to the provider as a result of Apple’s iPhone.
• Sprint is cleaning house, getting rid of their CFO, CMO & President of Sales & Distribution, because they’ve failed to compete effectively with the AT&T/Apple combo.

You can’t attribute all the 4,000 jobs cut at Sprint to pressure from the iPhone. Sprint has been giving customers a lot of reasons to consider other carriers.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that the iPhone is increasing the pressure on Sprint, by providing a friendly alternative to the phone industry’s status quo.

Vudu is slashing the price of its video-on-demand box.

Effective immediately, the Vudu is now $295, down from its original $399 asking price. Customers who’ve purchased the unit in the past 30 days can get a $100 movie credit by calling the company’s customer service line (888-554-VUDU).

This move is expected, given the growing strength of Apple’s Internet television offering, Apple TV, and the limitations of the Vudu platform.

When it was introduced, we called the Vudu dead on arrival:

There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity in the world of digital video. The video capabilities of the XBox 360 and Apple TV are far from ideal, and there’s plenty of room for innovation in this area.

Unless the Vudu can deliver innovation that leapfrogs the current capabilities of Microsoft and Apple’s offerings, though, it’s a device that’s dead on arrival.

Even at $295, the Vudu is still an expensive closed platform that lets you buy more stuff. With increased pressure coming from an upgraded Apple TV, Vudu needs to innovate fast to survive.

The IFPI, an organization that represents the mainstream music industry worldwide, has released its take on the state of digital music 2008.

According to the report, digital music is booming and the music industry is further along in the transition to digital than other industries. The industry appears to be more focused on P2P file sharing, though, than building on its booming digital business. The IFPI even wants to get your ISP to police file-sharing services.

Digital Music Is Booming

Highlights of the report include:

• Avril Lavigne is leading the digital music boom. She tops the first-ever global music download sales chart, having sold 7.3 million track downloads of her song Girlfriend across the world in 2007
• Global digital music sales are estimated at approximately US$2.9 billion in 2007, a roughly 40% increase on 2006 (US$2.1 billion)
• Single track downloads grew by 53% to 1.7 billion (including those on digital albums)
• Digital sales now account for an estimated 15% of the global music market, up from 11% in 2006 and zero in 2003. In the world‚Äôs biggest digital music market, the US, online and mobile sales now account for 30% of all revenues
• The music industry is more advanced in terms of digital revenues than any other creative or entertainment industry except games. Its digital share is more than twice that of newspapers (7%), films (3%) and books (2%)
• There are more than 500 legitimate digital music services worldwide, offering over 6 million tracks ‚Äì over four times the stock of a music megastore

Despite Success In Digital Music, Industry Sees Threats Looming

Despite the fact that digital music grew tremendously in 2007, especially from P2P file sharing. The IFPI wants to force ISP to start policing the use of file-sharing services.

“ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled.” according to the report.

Here are industry risks that they highlight in the report:

• Tens of billions of illegal files were swapped in 2007. The ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold is about 20 to 1
• Progress in the digital music market is being hampered by lack of interoperability between services and devices, and lack of investment in marketing of new services
• The growth rate of around 40% in digital sales did not offset the sharp fall in CD sales globally, meaning that the overall market for the year will be down on 2006

For the third year in a row, Dixie Consumer Products has renewed its sponsorship of the MommyCast podcast, with a new 2008-year agreement. The continuing relationship will allow Dixie to maintain its role as a “preferred online sponsor” and partner of the long-running and popular MommyCast.

Gretchen Vogelzang, co-host and co-founder of MommyCast, said, “We think it says a lot about the power of the podcasting medium that Dixie wishes to sponsor us for a third year – it recognizes that they have received real value from their association with this new media.”

MommyCast was an early podcasting hit, having launched “way back” in March 2005. The podcast holds the distinction of being one of the first independent podcasts to land a major corporate sponsorship (with Dixie). Its early debut into the podcasting fray makes this third consecutive year of corporate sponsorship an apparent industry first.

MommyCast made new media headlines last fall when it launched the new MommyCast Family & Friends network, powered by Podango, featuring a variety of different parenting and family-oriented podcasts (including my friend Mark Blevis’ podcast series, Just One More Book!, about great children’s books and the people who write and love them).

Doug Kaye, founder of volunteer network PodCorps, has clued us in on another one-time opportunity for podcasters. The New York Times needs local “radio producers” to gather audio interviews on Super Tuesday, February 5th, 2008, in the following states:

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California (Northern & Southern)
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Georgia
Idaho
Illinois
Kansas
Massachusets
Minnesota
Missouri
New Jersey
North Dakota
New Mexico
Oklahoma
Tennessee
Utah

Stringers are asked to create and edit the content quickly: “record, edit, and file several short interview clips early in the day, within a few hours,” and submit with a digital photo you’ve taken of each of your interviewees. The Times is looking to cover the primaries in a variety of polling locations, at different times of day, staggering the coverage chronologically and geographically.

I’ve been catching up on Lost recently with the HD episodes available from Hulu and ABC. The quality is very good, considering it’s streaming HD Internet video, and having all three seasons of Lost available on demand is great, too.

Their advertising implementation is terrible, though. Here’s why:

• Before you watch the show, you have to watch a pre-roll ad.
• Ads are inserted at fixed intervals through the show, not at the natural ad insertion points. In other words, at the points in the show where there should naturally be ads, there aren’t any, and then in the middle of a scene, there’s an ad.
• The ads don’t pause the video correctly. After the ad is done, the show resumes at an earlier point in the show, making you rewatch scenes.
• The ads that you see are not intelligently inserted – you’ll end up watching the same ads over and over for things that you don’t care about.
• The ads are too long. 30 seconds long enough to switch to another window and check your mail, encouraging people to multitask and ignore the intrusive ads.

Unfortunately, ABC & Hulu’s ad technology is the rule, rather than the exception, and it’s holding back adoption of Internet video.

Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg has announced that WordPress.com, a free blog hosting service, has updated the amount of space it allocates to each user to 3 gigabytes:

Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Most typical bloggers will never need anywhere 3 gigabytes of space – so there’s really only one way to read this move: Mullenweg wants you to be a podcaster on WordPress.com.

Here’s his rationale for the change:

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

This is an interesting move by Mullenweg. It will challenge other podcast hosts to deliver more. It will grow the number of WordPress.com users making rich media files available as podcasts, whether or not the users consider themselves podcasters.

Unfortunately, Mullenweg’s “freedom to blog rich media” doesn’t currently include video:

You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies, and we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.