RSSABC Says Online Video Test a Success
By Ed Oswald | Published June 20, 2006, 12:24 PM
Disney said Monday that its pilot program of offering downloads of prime time television shows from the ABC network the day after they air has been a huge success. In the first month of the test, videos were viewed more than 11 million times.
The test will end as scheduled on June 30, ABC says, in order to allow time to pour over research data collected during the trial.
The viewership for the test is larger than the number of videos sold at $1.99 USD each on iTunes over the past nine months, when ABC began offering videos on Apple's popular download service. 6 million ABC videos have been downloaded from iTunes the network said.
Additionally, some key metrics have both pleased and validated the company's business model of putting free video on the Web. As opposed to an average 40 percent recall rate of commercials on television, viewers of online videos were able to recall information from commercials 87 percent of the time.
Such figures could be useful to Disney in selling ad space, which allows Disney to offer the television shows online as a free service. The program's success has also led the company to decide to relaunch the service in the fall.
While much of the service will remain quite similar to the current test version, ABC said it will make minor tweaks based on customer feedback, and also offer different shows over time.
I just hope that they also allow this service into Canada next time. Presently if we try to access any of the shows offered, a screen comes up and says "available to US viewers only". ABC is available to anyone in Canada with cable or satellite so why cant we have access to the same shows on the net?
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|6 Million iTunes purchases vs 11 Million views on ABC.com...
How many of the 11 million reported views were the same person watching the same episode twice. Also, I viewed 5 minutes of several shows. This shouldn't count, but it does. With iTunes, the % of complete viewings is probably higher as would be the summation of total hours spent watching downloaded ABC content on iTunes.
It's all about number crunching to look good to the advertisers, the press, and the board of trustees.
I think that a dampening factor should have been included unless BetaNews.com's report left out other stats.
I like stats, these are only relevant in supporting that videos were launched 11 million times, which is great for marketing to advertisers wanting their ad to run preceeding television shows.
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|I think this was a great idea, the shows should be free. They were free when they were on network TV so why should you pay $1.99 for them on Itunes? I hope all networks do this. Yeah it sucks that we have to watch commercials, but I basically ignore them anyway..get up and do other things.
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|Probably because it's the cost of converting and cost of using Itune.
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|The cost of bandwidth, maybe?
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|Bandwidth is cheap, and you're the one paying that cost anyway. For a huge company like them, sending 1gb of data to somebody probably costs less than a cent.
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|In other words. Our test was a success... so we're going stop offering it for a while to give our competitors time to catch up and steal our edge.
Smart ABC!
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