When NBC announced plans to serve up massive amounts of video from the Olympics online, US broadcasters could be heard screaming as far away as Bejing. Could it be that broadcasters believe that their business is a zero sum game. It turns out ratings for Olympics boradcasts are exceptional along with a huge online audience. Maybe braodcasters will soon grasp that offering content online is a great way to build an audience for the broadcast.

After paying $900 million for broadcast rights to this year’s Summer Games, NBC Universal executives are determined to protect the television business by drawing viewers to NBC and cable networks like USA.

At the same time, they are also resolved to build an online audience through the NBCOlympics.com website, with the aim of drawing in more Internet advertising revenue for future events based on the success of this one.

It’s a delicate balancing act: Concentrate too much on TV broadcasting, and risk missing the boat on the next generation of Olympic fans online. Or put too much content on the Web, and there’s a chance some viewers will ignore coverage on TV, where advertisers have paid NBC top dollar for commercial time.

“I think this is really about tapping into both online and offline,” said Bob Jeffrey, chief executive of advertising agency JWT, a unit of WPP Group Plc. “I think that’s also a big part of what marketers want to do.”

NBC Universal has posted strong numbers so far for both its TV broadcasts and online coverage. Nearly 25 million people have visited NBCOlympics.com, viewing 456 million pages and watching close to 22 million video clips, NBC said on Thursday, recording more page views than for the entire 2004 Games in Athens. Meanwhile, U.S. TV ratings are running second only to the 2000 Games in Atlanta. (Yahoo)

Dear AT&T and Comcast, we know that this has to be driving you crazy. You’ve added bandwidth at great expense and dedicated it to pay TV via Digital cable or a closed IPTV system. Who could have predicted viewers prefer to watch programming on demand rather than on your schedule? Since they are watching commercials either way, why would they they prefer to not pay extra to view?  How dare consumers prefer a big dumb pipe that they control? Now, you’re pushing triple play and bandwidth caps in a soft economy. No wonder your take rate is starting to suck. We’ve told you before, but lets rey again: The world wants a big dumb pipe, not a bundle of scheduled programming with broadband on the side.

Now about that 20%. It comes from a new survey:

It showed that 50 percent of people viewing TV on the Web are watching programs as they become available and “appear to be beginning to use the computer as a substitute for the television set,” Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), which conducted the poll, said.

The other half are using the Internet to watch programs they have missed, or to re-watch segments or episodes they have already seen, IMMI, a company which links media exposure to consumer action, added.

“This is the first study to show there are a significant amount of people watching primetime shows online who are not watching some portion of those shows on television,” Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, said in a statement. (Reuters)

Here’s something a few of you may not know that is food for thought. If you use a mobile phone, more often than than not, the backhaul from the tower is done via a DSL connection. So, if you use a mobile, you been using VoIP for some time. With the entry of WiFi and 3G enabled smart phones, a few applications and services have emerged that will enable some to use VoIP their mobile outside of the wireless providers closed network. The obvious benefit for the end user is using no premium minutes via WiFi, and the ability to bypass outrageous international calling rates. The consumer benefits are also the main reason why the cartel of US wireless providers would prefer to keep VoIP capability off of their customers devices.

The current state of mobile VoIP software and services are not perfect, but they are improving - with or without the carrier’s blessings. In a recent post on GigaOm, Jason Harris details Seven ways to VoIP from your mobile. It’s a good read if you own or are considering the purchase of a smart phone.

There’s a little known (before now) thriving business of attacking open Bittorrent servers the reduce MPAA and the RIAA’s “losses”. While I have no way of being certain, it would seem that the one company in question could be operating automated attack and destroy systems that cannot differentiate between illicit and legitimate trackers. The liability should be huge, and the RIAA and MPAA have already accumulated a huge karma debt.

CEO Jim Louderback revealed today that the outage was caused by a massive denial of service attack that he says was perpetrated by MediaDefender, a file-sharing mitigation firm that gets paid by Big Content to disrupt peer-to-peer networks.

A SYN flood aimed at Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker clogged the company’s tubes and brought down all of its web services. The traffic logs indicated that the network was getting slammed by over 8,000 packets every second. Revision3 tracked the source of the packets and discovered that the attack originated from MediaDefender, at which point Louderback confronted the company’s executives. ArtistDirect CEO Dimitri Villard and MediaDefender vice president Ben Grodsky admitted to Louderback that they had been exploiting the lax security configuration of Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker and using it to conduct decoying operations, but they disavowed knowledge of the denial of service attack and claimed that their servers were only pinging Revision3 once every three hours. (Ars Technica)

According to Cnet, Amazon will be entering the pay per view business with a TVoIP video streaming service. The assault on closed content delivery networks continues….

In an interview with Walt Mossberg at D6, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “We are working on a new version of video on demand, a for pay streaming service we will release in the next couple of weeks. The streaming service will start instantly and it’s a la carte, for pay.” (Cnet)

Consumerist has an interesting expose here on the BS that CableVision is dishing out to its customers that they will lose services if they don’t upgrade to digital cable and they are blaming the FCC for the reason why. What I think of these kind of dealings I can’t print. –

Cablevision is lying to customers by claiming that the FCC will require all subscribers to upgrade to digital cable boxes in 2009. Digital cable boxes cost $6.50 per month, plus an extra $10.95 for digital service. Cablevision recently sent a letter to all boxless subscribers threatening to cut several channels unless they forked out a bundle of extra cash for digital service. When one of our family member called for an explanation, Cablevision shirked responsibility and placed the blame squarely on some crazy new FCC mandate. We called shenanigans and decided to call back and record our chats with several customer service representatives. Inside, the recordings of Cablevision lies and the FCC’s flaccid response.

This is what happens when you have a service monopoly in a particular area. I can’t support some wrath that Consumerist pushes in the article. But it is telling that a major corporation will out and out lie. Its just bad marketing and it forces customers to look around for alternatives.

The alternative? There are a few. Netflix and Netflix Online come to mind. But the bigger threat is TVoIP in total. Walling yourself off looking for ever higher revenue streams is not going to work in the end game for the cable co’s. Given TVoIP is just starting the major movie producers won’t be far behind. When the MGM’s and UA’s are streaming movies there too goes the Pay per View channel.

So go ahead CableVision, cheat your customers. You will pay for it in the end — literally.

Well TVoIP has a new partner, CBS. They are now releasing many original series in a high quality format available right over the net. The quality if better than what Hulu provides. So the bar has been raised on TVoIP content.

For example the entire 3 years of Star Trek classic is online here. So as much as I berated CBS News in a previous post; the entertainment division is getting the message. Here’s what I find surprising — why has not the TW and Comcast’s made a move to the legacy networks for affiliate parity? They way they could garner additional revenues. But I guess they are not that smart to see what is coming at them in the next 2-3 years.

The NHL will begin testing online video this month with a total of 7 channels. No plans to offer full games were announced, but I’m sure that it’s on the minds of team owners are always looking for new ways to increase revenue.

The playoffs that begin this week will provide a bit of a test run for the player on NHL.com. The site will then be relaunched in the new format in the fall before next season. For now, the broadband media player titled “NHL Network Online” will be an option on NHL.com.

The centerpiece of the site will be “The Hockey Show,” a daily live broadcast from the NHL’s studio in New York. It will be on five times a week during the season and sporadically in the offseason.

Each day’s telecast will include news, highlights and features.

In conjunction with all 30 NHL teams, another channel called “LiveWire” will feature sights and sounds from around the league - such as morning skates, news conferences and behind-the-scenes material that would otherwise be unseen.

There will also be a channel devoted to playoff coverage during that portion of the season. (SI.com)

I won’t say I told you so, but here’s proof that online viewing goes much deeper than watching the exploits of Darwin Award candidates on Youtube. Almost 10% of all full length series views are now done online, and the percentage will continue to grow very rapidly.

Convergence estimates that 9 percent of all full-episode TV viewing was done online in 2007—a 3 percent jump from 2006. The firm predicts that the numbers will grow even further this year and next, to 14 percent in 2008 and 19 percent in 2009. As of 2010, Convergence expects 23 percent of broadcast and cable TV to be viewed online.

Shorter clips, however, are still the most popular things to watch online. Five times as many viewers watch clips of shows as those who watch full episodes, said the report, with 75 percent of the clip content originating from broadcast or cable TV content. Convergence estimates that this gap will get smaller as time goes on, but will still remain more popular than full shows. The firm expects clip-to-full-episode views to decline to a rate of three to one by 2011. (Ars Technica)

The bad news for the Telco / Cable duopoly is that this viewing is all done via the wide open net, not over their closed pay TV systems. We’ll soon see a wave of connected set top boxes that deliver open, web based TVoIP content to the big screen in the living room as easily as the pay TV box does today. When that happens, pay TV as a distribution channel unto itself will fade away like analog TV. Watch for the first network to offer the daytime soaps via TVoIP and online viewing will explode.

If I were invested in companies that are touting high profit potential in closed content delivery systems, I’d be planning my exit right now.

ABC is currently offering full length episodes of some series in an HD stream. CBS is now preparing to join the streaming HD club. Look for all of the broadcast networks to be making HD streams of programming available before year end.

CBS released a high definition player today in the labs area of their site, along with a few clips. They are currently streaming (not progressive download) in H.264/AVC format at 480p, with 720p and 1080p coming soon, they say.

Hulu and others are also beginning to test high definition streaming. Some shows on Hulu, for example, are optionally available in 480p format. They also have a few clips available in 720p. (Tech Crunch)

Streaming will not overtake broadcast media anytime soon, but it’s coming. Much sooner than many “experts” think. The ability to measure actual view numbers will be invaluable to the sales of advertising, and convenience of view on demand instead of schedule will drive rapid growth in viewership. You saw that here first. Quotes us freely and often.