YouTube Archives

Aug 27

How Google is Driving Mobile Video Market Growth

Google’s top advertising customers are pushing for convergence of mobile and video quickly, which is turning into a strong catalyst of growth of the global mobile video market. With their largest advertising customers wanting greater flexibility in bringing video to mobile devices, Google will make significant strides this year to make that happen.

During their latest earnings call, Google execs said that Android, Chrome and YouTube are the highest priority areas of their business. I’ve been following the last year of earnings calls closely, and it’s clear that Google’s largest advertising customers are pushing the company to bring video to mobile at a level of performance and usability not accomplished yet. The Q2, 2012 earnings call transcript makes this point clear which can be accessed here Google’s Management Discusses Q2 2012 Results – Earnings Call Transcript.

Mobile and Video: Transforming Convergence Into Cash

Over the last year, Google executives have mentioned the growth of YouTube and its quick evolution from a content management system to a profitable advertising platform. During the Q1, 2012 earnings call held on April 12, 2012 the following points were made:

Google reported they had over 800 million monthly users uploading over an hour of video per second

U.K. mobile operator O2 used YouTube as the foundation of a brand launch that year with support for 100 new original channels completed and launched

Global product launch plans from GM, Toyota and Unilever and several other large advertising accounts are also underway

During the Q2, 2012 earnings call, Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer started his comments regarding the YouTube business with the statement “I think in 2007 it was when newspapers frequently said YouTube is groping for an effective business model. I think we can declare we found our model.” Immediately after making this statement, Mr. Arora mentioned that yearly account signups have doubled year-over-year and users are uploading over 72 hours of video every minute. He also mentioned that “thousands of partners are making six figures and we’re proud to work with major record labels in Hollywood studios on this platform.”

The call continued with the points made of Danish advertisers shifting their television advertising dollars to YouTube and other Google branding solutions. Additional companies mentioned on the call using YouTube-based advertising include Denon, Shire, and Intel. Clearly these companies have major product introductions coming up and see mobile video as perfect for reaching more potential customers than ever before.

Google’s Challenge: Keep Content Quality and User Experience Constantly Improving

If Google is going to attain the full revenue potential of YouTube as an advertising platform, they’ll need to focus on the following factors:

Create Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) and easy-to-use programming tools for quickly creating mobile-optimized sites. As Gartner studies have shown, video on telephones is most often used as a time-filler, with a median length of 2 minutes, 46 seconds.

YouTube will need to support more optimized mobile-based video browsers that can support contextual search. This will be a core requirement for the enterprise, specifically in the areas of mobile customer care, mobile commerce and mobile health.

More extensive analytics in YouTube than are available today, specifically tying into to major marketing strategies including product introductions. It is becoming common knowledge that videos improve viewer engagement and prospects attribute a more positive shopping experience when they are used. Luxury brands are investing heavily in this technology including BMW, Burberry, Channel, Louis Vuitton and many others.

A Google/Ipsos OTX MediaCT smartphone users study completed in April, 2011 shows that 77% of smartphone users said that their most visited site was a mobile search engine.

Mobile Video: The Market YouTube Built

The size of the worldwide mobile video market was comprised of 429 million mobile video users in 2011, projected to grow exponentially to 2.4 billion users by 2016. Smartphones and tablet sales will contribute 440 million new mobile video users during the forecast period. These market estimates are from the recently published Gartner report, Market Trends: Worldwide, the State of Mobile Video, 2012.

Additional take-aways from this report include the following:

Allot Communication’s reports that mobile streaming grew 93% in the first half of 2011; Allot also reports that the usage of YouTube’s mobile channel grew by 152% and YouTube generated 22% of all mobile video traffic in the first half of 2011. YouTube reports getting 400 million video views a month globally.

Gartner reports from a survey completed in the 4^th quarter of 2010 that 32% of mobile enterprise users watch short videos from YouTube and other sites optimized for video streaming.

The fastest growth for mobile video will be in Latin America as smartphone adoption continues to accelerate, replacing traditional cell phones in these markets. Asia/Pacific will have the highest number of mobile video users at 541 million by 2016. Both of these markets will benefit from low-cost smartphones being produced by contract manufacturers who are becoming the dominant production strategy of brand leaders globally. The following graphic shows the Mobile Video User Forecast by Region, Worldwide, 2008 – 2016.

By 2016, close to 60% of professionally developed mobile video content will be delivered via mobile-optimized websites that also have enhanced contextual search functionality included in the content management systems.

Mobile customer care, mobile commerce and mobile health will be the three primary industry drivers in the near-term of mobile video market, emerging as growth catalysts of this emerging market.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index study reports that last year, mobile video accounted for 56% of all mobile data traffic.

3G/4G connections are emerging as a powerful catalyst of mobile video growth. Gartner is forecasting that the worldwide share of mobile video connections on 3G/4G will increase from 18% in 2011 to 43% in 2015. In more established markets incouding North America and Western Europe, the percentage of 3G/4G connections is expected to be as high as 80% and 96% respectively.

Gartner projects that 70% of mobile video users will use only Wi-Fi to view mobile video, with the remainder of the market relying on a mix of cellular and Wi-Fi networks to gain access and also upload content. The following figure shows the Mobile Video User Forecast by Network Type, Worldwide, 2008 – 2016.

Source: Market Trends: Worldwide, the State of Mobile Video, 2012. Gartner Group. Published: 10 February 2012 ID:G00223693 Author: Shalini Verma. Link: http://www.gartner.com/id=1920315

Jul 3

1 Comment

Assessing the Cloud Computing Landscape: Insights from the MIT Enterprise Forum

Bottom line: The following video provides a topical, informative and useful update on the cloud computing landscape; it’s worth the 30 minutes to listen to and consider how rapid the development platforms are maturing.

Jun 25

Measuring the Growth of Cloud Computing

The bottom line is that the need for staying current on analytics, business intelligence, data mining and linguistic modeling using cloud-based data is going to accelerate in importance faster than anyone expects.

May 18

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How Programming Is Becoming the Catalyst of Cloud Innovation

The following video clip features Dr. Joseph Hellerstein, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, discussing how programming languages need to be augmented to support larger data sets and more ubiquitous levels of integration.

Mar 24

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Ada Lovelace Day and a short video from Padmasree Warrior of Cisco on Cloud Services

Celebrating women’s accomplishments and thought leadership in science and technology, Ada Lovelace Day needs to permeate the cultures of the world. Only when that happens will the coming generations of women have a chance to make the most of their potential in these areas.

Padmasree Warrior of Cisco is a case in point of why this day and the thought behind it are important, especially for young women who are gifted in math and science, seeking role models.

Hidden Brilliance That Needs To See the Light of Day

In the graduate courses I’ve taught the most surprising aspect of any class are the women of exceptional brilliance that tend to hide their intelligence in science and math, only to show exceptional command of complex concepts on tests. These women, many from Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European cultures, would never engage in a fiery debate over the ethics of the Internet censorship in China or the best approach to defining an ERP system for a given case study. Yet when they put pen to paper as part of our case studies their work is perfect. Flawless. Excellent. The ones who attended British schools in Hong Kong analyze and write at a level that is well beyond their peers. They have so much talent yet such a reluctance to make the most of it. These are the women who need to hear about Ada Lovelace.

Padmasree Warrior, Senior VP and CTO of Cisco Systems Speaking on Cloud Services

In the following video clip Padmasree Warrior explains the fundamentals of Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery, a key component of their foundation for Cloud Services. At 5 minutes it’s worth watching and listening to.

Mar 22

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Tim O’Reilly on the Future of Cloud Computing and Gov 2.0

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Tim O’Reilly shares his insights and thoughts on the future of Cloud Computing in the following video from the Minds in the Cloud channel on YouTube.

Of the many excellent points he makes, the one that is the most noteworthy is the fact he sees the costs of testing new ideas plummeting as Clouds emerge as low-cost testing platforms. IBM already has a complete application testing service that is Cloud based that aligns with the insights shared.

Most fascinating are the insights into how government needs to be more of a platform and less of a bureaucracy. The points made about analyzing the strongest and weakest areas of the existing healthcare system are especially timely given the passage of the bill over the weekend. At just over 4 minutes this video is worth watching.

Mar 17

1 Comment

The Dunbar Number and Value Propositions: Time to Separate the Two

The optimal or maximum group of friends any person can keep up with is 150, or to be precise, 147.8, according to Dr. Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford. He has further stated that language is the means of “social grooming” which conjures up an image you would expect from an anthropologist, namely one of reciprocity and mutual support through contact.

Popularized by best selling books including one of my favorite, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell and vocal discussions by Chris Brogan, Seth Godin and others, the Dunbar Number continues to be either assailed as irrelevant or praised as the truth.

Feb 19

IDC Predictions 2010 and the Cloud Computing Landscape

International Data Corporation (IDC) does a consistently excellent job summarizing their IT predictions and then regularly critiquing them throughout the year.

In the following five minute video, Frank Gens, Senior VP and Chief Analyst, discusses the top10 predictions most impacting IT in 2010. Included is an assessment of cloud computing’s extensive adoption and growth. If you are interested in downloading the predictions please visit the microsite IDC has created for this series. It’s excellent.

Feb 11

Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO and Linda Cureton, NASA CIO, Discuss Cloud Computing

Bottom line: Forward-thinking CTOs and CIOs in governments globally have the potential to drastically reduce process and cost inefficiencies. It remains to be seen if the biggest and costliest impediment of all – which is resistance to change – will be eventually overcome by their efforts.