Commentary

4 Online Success Stories; NBC Sports Answers Back

It seems that just as some old-line publishers really get proficient at using streaming video in new ways, figuring out where most people will see it now has become more confusing. Nonetheless, Ooyala has produced a new white paper, “Four Stories of Video Success” that provides pointers about good directions to go, and the varying degrees (but all of them substantial) that social media is pushing the shape of online video.

The New York Times and The Atlantic, as publishers, aren’t always hitting digital home runs, but Ooyala gives them points for really taking the big steps, and doing it back when a lot of old media companies were still resisting the idea that things were changing. Or were changed.

Videos at Atlantic sites are a big part of the difference. “In just two years, The Atlantic Video has seen its video plays grow 3X,” this report says. “Videos are created to be more accessible and shareable, and as a result more viewers are sharing and discovering them via social channels,” says this report. “Today, most viewers are still coming from TheAtlantic.com homepage and Facebook, followed by YouTube.”

At the Times, paywalls paid off -- although there was more experimentation with them than a lot of publishers would have ever gotten away with, I think. 

But so have features like Times Videos, NYTimes Minute and TimesTalks.

Today, the white paper says, digital subscriptions bring in $150 million annually and increased 30% in 2014, although this Ooyala report doesn’t point out that the news company is not exactly making money hand over fist. Every Times move online is scrutinized because, well, it’s The New York Times, and some of them have been duds.

But Ooyala's larger point is that both old-line companies have figured out that their stuff has to be accessible on the device most people are using--and have figured out that the delivery mode is a moving target.

The second set of the “Four Stories” is about those content-makers that seem to have been quick learners and not quite as traditional. Fusion Soccer, a 2013 offshoot of Univision, knew how to drive toward the goal by investing heavily in social media and original content beyond its stream of the World Cup, just by concentrating on the viewers it knew it could reach. 

”Fusion Soccer recognized the power of its millennial audience, and formulated an effective online video strategy to appeal to them, one that highlighted original online video shows, social media and mobile devices,” the report says. 

And Kate Spade’s holiday ads showed how a retailer can be a content producer, and get away with it, if the business knows its shoppers.  The interactive video ad called “The Waiting Game” with Anna Kendrick, relied on a partnership with Facebook to delivery auto-play ads on targeted FB pages, resulting in 1.8 million views and 49,000 “likes.”

ABOUT NBC’S SUPER BOWL STREAM: People at NBC Sports saw Thursday’s OnlineVideo report in which I reported criticism of how well, and how quickly, that network streamed the game. Lots of media reporters also slammed NBC and some said it was as if the network wanted to produce a stream so bad--because it lagged real time-- that  it would drive viewers to the live event.

NBC Sports begs to differ.

For one, that a latency of 30 seconds to a minute, is “completely normal,” it says and consistent with the lag from the thousands of events it streams every year.   

While I reported on the complaints--and the wide viewership--NBC would like to stress the latter seems overwhelming more noteworthy than the former: The average engagement for NBC’s stream of the Super Bowl was 84 minutes, an eye-popping length of time that the network says proves most people didn’t think the stream was all that bad. (It also averaged 800,000 viewers per minute, and counts 1.3 million concurrent users, a Super Bowl streaming record.)

What’s more, streaming depends on the device of the user and the Internet provider (which in my case is Comcast, which owns NBC). The network says Akamai Technologies, which handled streaming for the game said this Super Bowl had the best-ever throughput.

As for the complaint that NBC didn’t show most of the commercials--and odd lament in most instances--the network points out it did make them available on a Tumblr page. But it did sell some advertising and NBC says its revenue from those ads was three times more than what it received in 2012.


pj@mediapost.com
Next story loading loading..