The Video Consumer Mapping Study found that 66% of all video is still consumed via live television, and that online video only accounts for 1% of all video viewed. The study claims that consumers tend to overstate how much time they spend on because “it seems new and cool,” where as watching TV doesn’t have as much social cache so people tend to under-report how many hours they watch.

The results come at the same time comScore video data for April shows a 16% increase in video watched online vs the month before. comScore found that 16,785,432,000 online videos were watched in the United States from 151,652,000 unique users.

Whilst it would be easy to suggest an ulterior motive to the results, particularly given a strong representation of media companies on the Council for Research Excellence, the study has a far more substantive range of verifiable flaws.

The initial consideration is how the data was gathered to begin with. The study used “American media consumers, primarily former Nielsen TV People Meter panelists.” Former is the key word there, because TV panel data is gathered through “people meters,” electronic devices that record viewing habits. In theory, it’s difficult to understate TV viewing when there’s an electronic device gathering data on what you are watching; and yet this study specifically picked people who didn’t have the devices.

Then there’s the problem of sample size and location. From the study:

[the study included ] a final sample of 952 observed days. This included 376 individuals in the Core sample from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and Seattle. Observing those people twice yielded 752 observed days. In addition, for the Media Acceleration portion of this research, 100 people were observed twice and yielded 200 observed days in the Indianapolis DMA.

376 or maybe 476 people in total (it’s not clear if the 100 are originally counted in the 376). The results of 476 people are the key behind a finding that online video is overstated, and some of the United States largest markets, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and even Austin, Texas (all four known for their tech communities) were completely ignored.

People who play with statistics will always argue that you can use such a small sample size to come to such conclusions, and that may be true to a point. But does a sample so small and geographically limited really reflect the overall market in the United States? Does the sample size fairly support a conclusion that goes against what every other survey and study is suggesting?

Of course it doesn’t, but that was hardly the point to begin with. This study was funded indirectly by media companies, and was to consider the following statements (direct from the study)

- The 30 second spot is dead
- No one under the age of 30 watches TV, They’re all streaming video on the internet.
- No one watches live TV, Everyone is Recording TV shows on their DVRS

Really outrageous propositions to begin with, and you don’t need a $3.5 million study to show that none are true. If you start a study with such outrageous suggestions, its little surprise then that you end up with an outrageous, and ridiculous result.

If you want to read the study, you can download it here (pdf)

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Webb Alert, the Morgan Webb hosted daily tech news video podcast is no more.

The show, launched in August 2007 gained strong initial interest at a time tech video podcasts were starting to become popular. Webb fronted the camera to share the days news in traditional television news format, professionally edited and top of its class in presentation.

Webb said in a post that her decision to abandon the show is due to increased demands from TV show X-Play. Allen Stern at Centernetworks though questions whether the show was paying for itself, with low page views, although notably that’s not a great metric for video podcasts.

I did try regularly watching the show for a while, and while it was reasonable to watch, it wasn’t compelling viewing. That’s no criticism of Webb, who did a sterling job as host, but more a reflection of the format. Do people really want to watch a news broadcast style show that summarizes the news from the day before, when most people would already be aware of it? The show suffered the same issue newspapers and television news do: delayed timing. While we’ll undoubtedly see new online shows emerge in the space, it’s never going to be a hugely popular vertical. News needs to be entertaining if it’s old (What the Buck comes to mind), not read out in a staid, traditional way, to attract scale.

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Anvato works by analyzing your copyright-protected video, then searching the Web for any sites that have snagged it without your permission. It claims to use “computer machine vision” to identify videos, even if they’ve been edited or otherwise modified. It then offers you the option of either contacting the site’s owner to ask for the video’s removal, or offering a system in which they keep the video up but add in contextual advertising, giving you the profit. The service is subscription-based.

The new funding will be used to further develop that monetization system, being branded as AdMatch.

Anvato is based in Mountain View, California. It was founded in 2007.

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The online video network found 88 percent of its visitors prefer to see a two-minute ad before a video than to see four 30-second ads spread throughout the video. The finding is specific to 22-minute programs.

“The opt-in rate is proving this is something people want,” Hulu spokesperson Christina Lee tells AdAge. “We are trying to break down a lot of these very traditional ways of thinking about advertising,” she adds.

Hulu is also experimenting with letting users select the type of ad they see — something it believes increases engagement.

We suspect it may just increase trips to the kitchen to make a snack. But hey, whatever they want to believe.

(Via Silicon Alley Insider)

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The online TV network is announcing a second full round of funding this morning, though oddly not saying how much it amounts to. Bain Capital Ventures is backing the dough. It also funded LinkedIn and LaLa Media (see Duncan’s not-so-favorable review here), among others.

It’s an impressive time to be able to pull that off. Startup after startup is cutting back left and right, as anyone who follows the tech space has seen. Yahoo is expected to announce major layoffs any minute now. So a round of funding, in this climate, seems to be a particularly noteworthy feat.

Along with the money announcement, Blip.tv is touting the fact that its servers saw more than 51 million unique views in September alone — a 250 percent jump from the numbers the same month last year, its execs say.

The new funding marks Blip.tv’s first fresh cash since its inaugural round back in June of last year. Ambient Sound Investments — the guys who founded Skype — put up the money the first time around. Since then, Blip.tv has grown to hosting tens of thousands of shows on not only its own site, but also on third-party sites such as iTunes, AOL Video, and Verizon FiOS.

Blip.tv has been around since May of 2005. It is technically still listed as being in beta.

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Sometimes referred to as the “Google of China,” Baidu says it has the nation’s largest legal online movie and TV database. That database, of course, is closely monitored by government authorities.

Baidu — which pulls in about 60 percent of the Chinese search market share — has denied claims that it deleted sites about tainted milk from its search results this month. Online postings suggested the company had accepted money from dairy companies to help hush concern over bad milk (which is blamed for thousands of sicknesses and a handful of deaths). Baidu does allow advertisers to pay for higher result rankings but maintains it has never in any way censored news related to the infected milk investigation.

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Magnify’s new player offers a pre-roll adserver integration option, letting you insert your own pre-roll ads before your content if you so choose. It can be linked with DoubleClick’s DART service for tracking purposes or can be used with Magnify as a pre-roll ad server. (In that instance, Magnify splits revenue 50-50 with you.)

The MVP, as it’s being branded, can be downloaded and installed with some options, such as color and size customization, for free. To get customizable logos and skins, though, you do have to pay for an advanced package.

So far, Magnify claims more than 42,000 video channels hosted on its servers. The company has been around since 2006 and is headquartered in New York.

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Conviva says it’s built the Internet’s “first live media platform” that lets developers set up a “virtual living room” on their sites. Oh, well…that’s much more clear. Thanks.

Here’s what we can glean from the company’s site: Its video system lets you stream live video with TiVo-like features, letting viewers pause, rewind, and control the content (interestingly, it appears a TiVo co-founder is among the Conviva board members). There’s a social component, with user-to-user interaction and sharing functions. There’s room for interactive features to go along with the live video. And there’s also the potential for in-video, targeted ads and viewer data analysis from the server-side.

Outside of that, the California-based startup isn’t saying much — including when its technology will become available or specifically to whom its being targeted. We do know its fresh round of Series B funding comes from UV Partners, along with original investors New Enterprise Associates and Foundation Capital. It puts the company’s total raised capital at $29 million thus far.

Conviva was originally founded under the name “Rinera Networks.”

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Blinkx and Miva are no strangers to each other; the two have worked together in an ad sharing partnership for several years. Blinkx’ CEO stated that the “combination of the two companies would be mutually beneficial to both companies’ shareholders, employees, and customers” and that the two “complementary businesses … could benefit greatly from Blinkx’s technology and Miva’s distribution network.” (The letter is available to read in its entirety over at CenterNetworks.)

Miva’s president and chief marketing officer resigned from the company just a few days ago, saying he was leaving to “pursue other opportunities.”

Blinkx, incidentally, was the rumored to be on the buying block itself a few months. Reuters reported that Google, NewsCorp, and Yahoo were all looking at acquiring the company back in May.

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Anvato promises to track down anyone who’s stolen your copyrighted video content and reposted it on his or her own site. The subscription-based service first has you upload your original protected video to its server. Anvato then performs an exhaustive Internet-wide search for any site with matching content.

“Our patent pending technology looks at video the same way the human eye does,” the site explains. “We use machine vision to find illegal duplicates based on visible content, not watermarks. We scan one million minutes of video under five seconds. Our method is robust against missing or replaced sound, image degradation or compression, [and] video editing attacks.”

Once offending videos are found, Anvato offers you the option of either contacting the site owner to request the video be removed, or proposing a contextual advertising system in which you share the profits.

Anvato is based out of Mountain View, California. Its web site claims to have discovered more than 34 million copyright-violating videos since its launch.

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Qumu provides video streaming solutions for high-profile companies such as Microsoft, Dell, and eBay. It’s also working with AT&T in a “strategic agreement” to manage the multimedia content within its AT&T Digital Media Solutions for businesses.

Executives say they’ll use the new cash to build the company’s sales and marketing departments and to focus on developing more video-based products.

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