BIOS: Technology Means Business

Video mania is in full swing. Amazon is finally doing movie downloads. Apple is touting a new wireless gizmo to beam movies from laptops to TV screens.

U.S.-based NBC is introducing a video syndication service that might pit it against Google and Yahoo, and it’s joining the other big networks in putting its shows online for free with advertising. MTV is working with Google to populate its video content all over the Web.

But the boom in online video has started to reduce the hours people spend watching television, a survey said on Monday. The ICM poll of 2070 people for the BBC found that some 43 per cent of Britons who watch video from the Internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less traditional TV as a result.

Three quarters of users said they now watched more TV online or on mobiles than they did a year ago. Online video viewers are still a minority though, with just 9 per cent saying they go online regularly to watch clips.

There are three key advantages of streaming video. First, the programs are viewable almost instantly. They are not copied onto the viewer’s computer before or during play, making it difficult for the content to be captured for other uses. Also, the programs are encoded (compressed) for online transmission and can be designed to be of lesser quality than VHS or DVD programs. These two latter features protect an institution’s ability to sell its VHS or DVD videos in full-screen television viewing format.

Video downloaded from the Internet can be TV-broadcast quality (even HD quality) although not instantly available for viewing. It can even be shown on viewers’ living room TV sets instead of PC monitors through dedicated services like Akimbo. Online and mobile video is far more popular among the young, with 28 per cent of those aged 16 to 24 saying they watched more than once each week. That figure fell to just 4 per cent among over 45s.

The success of sites such as YouTube has boosted access to videos for those who want easy ways to find, watch and share them over the Internet. Unlike in the United States, where hit TV shows are routinely available from networks’ Web sites and services like Apple’s downloading store iTunes, Britain is still in the early stages of an online viewing boom. But the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are planning to offer most of their shows on demand on the Internet from the end of this year or the start of 2007.

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