This continued growth in video consumption in the US confirms what we know – that there is a lot of activity in the video related digital market. Traditional media companies are digitising more content and promoting their online video services, and then digital start-ups (like Boxee and Hulu) are gaining traction. This growth in new content and video services is not slowing down any time soon, making it easier for people to find specific content (because it is all available through search) but making it harder to discover new content because there is too much of it.

My team at The Filter have been working closely with some of the top 10 video providers in Europe and the US to increase user engagement by finding ways to help discovery through offering relevant video recommendations. The results have been really exciting – in all of the services we have been working on over the last 12 months, we have been able to deliver uplifts in video streams per visit of 20-50%, and users who get more relevant recommendations also visit more frequently.

Obama video on eGuiders

There is no doubt that you can start watching great video content within 5 seconds. I was drawn to Obama’s ad-libbed election night speech (Fired Up? Ready to go!) – I never actually got to see this at the time and it is brilliant. And I then went back to the home page and picked another 3 or 4 videos all of which were great. No dross. I then started to look into the individual eGuiders (the curators of the site) and used them as a way of finding good content. I think the site could do more to suggest/recommend video to me once I have started my session – maybe using my behaviour to start personalising the recommended videos.

But other than that, eGuiders is a simple and effective curated video service that delivers what it says it will. I wish it well.

Recent research (by Pew) has found that video watching is nearing epidemic levels among the younger age groups – 9 in 10 internet users in the age bracket 18-29 watch content on video sites. And 1 in every 3 watches video content every day.

The interesting stat I found in this report was that amongst those who watch TV shows or movies online, 23% of them have hooked their computer up to a TV. It is video content that is leading the fabled living room convergence. Make no mistake.

This all translates to a healthy and active sector in terms of investment and opportunity. Which is refreshing in the current climate.

I can back this trend up with what we have been experiencing at The Filter over the last few months. Demand for our video recommendations and relevance technologies is at an all time high: whether from content owners, distributors or aggregators, they all have a pressing business need to find intelligent ways of connecting more of their content to their customers. Editorial and popularity-based suggestions are better than nothing, but our experience is that it is only when companies start using consumption data and sophisticated and matured algorithms that they get seriously exciting results in terms of increases in dwell time, video streams per visit and visits.

Is the Wii the best for movies?

So, the PS3 is from Sony. That’s a good start. So’s my telly. But, it is a big machine and my kids don’t really play that many games on the PS3. It does have a built-in BluRay player. But, seriously, I can’t remember the last time I bought a movie in physical form.

Xbox 360 is from Microsoft. Not a standard in home entertainment, that’s true, and the box is ugly IMHO. But some of the games are awesome (yes, I had to use an american hyperbole when talking about MS).

And then there’s the Wii. From Nintendo, a gaming giant, but no longer in the hard-core gaming sense, and more in the mass-market kind of way. Nintendo have revolutionised gaming. My kids (5 and 9) do not understand how to use a traditional joypad or joystick, they are used to just waving their arms around and using instinctive movement to control the game. The console is small, fits neatly in the cupboard under my TV and has an HDMI connection. It’s just me, but if I can get access to movies/catchup video on a box that also doubles up as my kids’ favourite gaming console, then I am sold.

SuBo on Britain's Got Talent

This a classic example of a highly experienced ‘traditional’ media guy struggling with the world of digital. The embarrassment of having missed out on millions of pounds of advertising revenue during the Susan Boyle craze (because Grade and his team had failed to agree on a revenue share deal with YouTube), has lead ITV to leap to the conclusion that the only way forward is to charge between 10p-50p per clip.

I just don’t get this thinking. So, you get a viral phenomenon like SuBo on Britain’s Got Talent. It drives up the ratings, it makes the show even more talked about an popular across the globe. So, next time, instead of finding multiple ways of monetising the viral/exponential growth by maybe doing exclusive distribution deals of the content with one of the many video aggregators or social networks or even providing the content on their own ITV embedable video player – all of which could be monetised through advertising – they are going to but a great big barrier to viral growth. All this will achieve is some very mediocre content revenues and a mountain of legal costs in protecting the content that will inevitably appear on the torrents and unofficial video sites.

Glatonbury mud festival

Glastonbury was four times bigger in 2009 than in 2008… well, in digital terms, anyway.

The BBC festival website managed a record of 7.2 million video streams and the red button coverage on digital TV attracted over 6.1 million viewers over the weekend. Lady Gaga was by far the biggest act online – attracting 1.3 million streams compared to last year’s top act Jay Z who attracted just 119,000 streams…

So, why the increased interest compared to 2008? It’s not like there are 4x more people online, surely? It could be because they had three webcams placed around the site giving visitors a chance to watch from different angles. Even though that was cool, I think that the increase has more to do with the fact that the iPlayer has become even more prevalent in our everyday lives over the last 12 months.

NewTeeVee brands itself as the place to go to “follow the video revolution”. If you work in any form of video/TV or are simply passionate about the way TV and video is changing, then this is one to add to your feeds. I manage to keep on top of the main news stories in video just by scanning through the daily email. For my job, it is an essential source of information.

But NewTeeVee is not just about video related news – it’s also about the content. They have their own station that highlights and showcases the best web video out there. The team review webTV series and content, and visitors can rate the content. In effect, through their editors and community they do what all the big video portals fail to do – they filter out all the crap so that we are left with some great content to chose from. Lovely.

They cover a wide range of content type from great viral vids posted on YouTube all the way to fully crafted webTV content. Recent examples of great content highlighted by NewTeeVee includes the Filipino Prisoners tribute to Michael Jackson…

And Imaginary Bitches first series on YouTube.