How Pink Changed My Life!

When Pink got wet at the Grammy’s my life was changed forever. You probably saw it: The song, the sky thing, the water, the nudie suit. Well, the reason her performance changed my life is because I was watching this on TV and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing... so I grabbed my laptop, which recently has become a fixture in my TV room, in hopes of programming my own instant replay. My laptop was also by my side during the Super Bowl, and it was there, this past weekend, while my son and I watched the NBA All-Star Game.

This week we learned that 14 percent of home Super Bowl viewers, with Internet access, browsed the web at least once during the Big Game. Additionally, time spent on line for those multitaskers was up from 24 minutes last year to 29 minutes, with much of that concurrent time being spent on an integrated website or on a social network yammering about the event. Now as for me and my son, we reached for that laptop to socially yap. But we also looked at a ton of video. It has become clear to me that whether you look for video in the moment, while you watch TV, or look later, video, right now, is enjoying the kind of momentum typically reserved for the next big thing.

There are new numbers to support the fact that online video is now center stage. First and foremost, Fox Interactive served 125 million video streams in January, which is a huge number and among the highest total for a brand specific content group. Second, Nielsen recently announced the number of unique viewers of online video increased 5.2% year-over-year from 137.4 million unique viewers in January 2009 to 142.7 million in January 2010. Time per viewer on content streams is another very telling stat to me. It ranges from three minutes a day per user to almost ten minutes a day. That’s a huge deal to any sales and marketing team on the content side because it promises that average viewers are willing to not only open video content, they will stay engaged with them. ComScore has also checked in on this. Its Video Metrix service showed that U.S. Internet users viewed a record 14.3 billion online videos during January which is a 13 percent increase over December.

The online video opportunity is tried and true and is a welcome tool in all our sales kits. Online video will enjoy a phenomenal year in 2010 tied, in no small part, to enhanced integrated promotions from the TV networks and the popularity of social media. Having said that, I can't wait for the Academy Awards!