GenDigital

Online Video Insights: Paying For Video Content

We recently wrapped up our latest Online Video Insights supplement exploring audience preference and interest as it relates to professional video content a la TV shows and movies. Online Video Insights is a supplementary component of the comprehensive Youth Trends Emerging Media & Entertainment portfolio. Findings for the latest wave (Q1 2010) were based on interviews completed the week of March 15th. The interviews were conducted with just over a thousand members of the Youth Trends Digital Media panel. All of the participating panelists had to stream at least one free or paid TV show or movie during the past month. That was the main qualifier for participation.

Here are some of the key findings:

By a pretty healthy margin, participants were most likely to stream an episode of one of their favorite TV shows they missed on-air. While on-demand viewing and other time-shifted options (DVR viewing) were indicated, it's online streaming that comes out as the most common behavior.

The participants tend to demonstrate a greater willingness to pay for online video content, both TV shows and movies via a monthly subscription fee as opposed to a pay-per-view option. More than one in four participants (27%) said they would at least consider paying $0.99 to stream an episode of one of their favorite TV shows, while about 30% said they would at least consider paying $9.99 a month for unlimited access to their favorite TV shows online.

Exactly a third of participants would at least consider paying $2.99 to stream a full-length movie, while 26% said they would at least consider paying $4.99. Clearly, price is a determining factor for many of the participants. Interestingly enough, more than a third of participants (36%) said they would be more likely to pay for online video content if the videos themselves, contained no advertisements or commercials.

The initial read left price and video type out as variables--about one in ten participants said they would definitely pay for video content online if it was no longer accessible for free. Another 16% said they would consider paying for it. Keep in mind, these are young people who have already demonstrated a propensity to stream content online, so if anything these guys represent more of a targeted potential customer base than that of the overall teen and young adult population. Clearly, interest levels adjust when you start throwing out pricing and different types of accessibility, but at this basic level, you're left with a not so small percentage who will at least consider paying for something that they're not typically accustomed to. YT client subscribers will be able to download the full report tomorrow.

Q1 2010 College Top Ten List Report Highlights

Another quarter is almost complete and that brings us a new wave of Top Ten. College is the first to come out this week followed by Kids and Teens next Monday. For some reason, may be it's just the simplicity of the report, Top Ten garners more press mentions than any other YT report, go figure, but I think the concept of ranking against a particular topic is something that most everyone can relate to pretty easily.

Moving onward here, the Q1 wave of College Top Ten was tweaked a bit as the celeb category was broken out by more general Hollywood celeb personalities and sports-specific personalities. We'll also continue to rotate between most socially responsible companies/brands and favorite sports-related activities. When all is said, we covered a total of 12 individual categories including favorite TV shows, magazine titles, musical artists, movie & DVD titles, male Hollywood celebs, female Hollywood celebs, sports celebs, video game titles, web destinations, clothing retailers/brands, footwear brands and sports-related activities. To read the full background and view the table of contents, click here. For non Youth Trends subscribers, Top Ten can be downloaded/purchased for $399.

Some topline highlights:

- TV: relatively unchanged at the top compared to Q4 '09, White Collar debuts among males and American Idol makes a surprise appearance among females

- Mag titles: six of the top ten titles among females are trending downwards on a sequential basis, sorta sums of the category's picture fairly well

- Musical artists: goo goo for Gaga and welcome to the list NeedToBreathe

- Movies & DVDs: V-Day performs as expected, no let up for The Hangover

- Hollywood/sports celebs: Jessica's back at the top, LeBron is still king and Elisha debuts for the first time

- Video game titles: COD Modern Warfare 2, 'nuff said

- Web sites: check out Sporcle, it's legit...

Q4 '09 College Top Ten List Highlights

The Q4 '09 wave of College Top Ten is out and available to download. You can view the report background and full table of contents here. Top Ten provides an authentic top of mind look of what's most popular among young people (college students in this case) with respect to pop culture topics including TV shows, musical artists, video game titles, web destinations, celebrities and other lifestyle-related areas.

A few brief highlights: in the realm of TV, for the third straight wave, The Office was the top pick among college males, while Grey's was once again the top show among females. Glee debuted as the third most popular TV show among females, while MTV's Jersey Shore came in 9th among males and 6th among females.

For the second straight wave Taylor Swift was the most popular musical artist among all students, while Breaking Benjamin, Lady Antebellum and Justin Bieber appeared for the first time. Twilight stars continue to dominate the celebrity rankings with Robert Pattinson leading the way along with Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart.

On the retail front, fast fashion is still where it's at as evidenced by the performance of Forever 21, but Urban Outfitters is picking up momentum as well as premium yoga wear retailer lululemon. Finally, we included a new measurement for the Q4 wave as college respondents provided their choices for the most socially responsible companies or brands. Leading the socially responsible pack was Ben & Jerry's followed by Burt's Bees and Coca-Cola.

To learn more about Top Ten, you can visit the Youth Trends site.

Teen Top Ten List Report: Q3 2009

The latest wave of Top Ten for the teen segment is now available via the Youth Trends Research Store. This wave of Top Ten covers the top TV shows, magazines, web destinations, musical artists, video game titles, movies, celebrities and clothing retailers. The Q3 '09 wave was completed the week of August 17th using a sample of 1,011 teens between the ages of 13 and 18. The final wave of the year for Top Ten will be conducted in the next two weeks.

Disney Has Green Ambitions With Launch Of New Film Division

First off all, Happy Earth Day to everyone. Of course it would be hard not to notice that today is Earth Day as evidenced by the green marketing tactics used today by portals ranging from Yahoo's front page all the way to a front page greeting on the NY Times advertising The New School's new environmental studies program. Apparently, everybody is going green. Disney's film group looks to leverage the surge in green awareness and interest in launching a new production banner under the name Disneynature. The decision, according to Disney brass was really a no-brainer based on the success of "March of the Penguins," which cost less than $5 million to produce and had box office receipts in excess of $125 million. The first film due to drop under the new production banner will be a film titled simply "Earth" which by no small coincidence will be brought to us by the same producer who created the highly rated "Planet Earth" mini-series that aired on the Discovery Channel. "Earth" will be released exactly one year from today. In 2010 Disneynature will drop "Oceans," which touts the use of a new technology to film underwater activities and coming in 2012 look out for "Chimpanzee," which will be filmed over the course of the next three years on the Ivory Coast. Like most other films under the Disney or Pixar umbrella, the Disneynature films are sure to be family friendly, a plus considering about half of tweens surveyed in our latest Tween & Teen Lifestyle Report said they attended at least one movie in the past two months with a parent or a friend's parent.

Superbad Headlines Youth Dominated Media Weekend

This past weekend was a perfect storm of action for young people ranging in age from as young as six or seven all the way up through age twenty four. Last Friday night, August 17, will most likely be confirmed today or tomorrow as one of historic proportions for the Disney Channel as well as all of basic cable. Early reports have the premiere of High School Musical 2 drawing some 17.2 million viewers, which would make it the most watched television show or movie in the history of basic cable. Not a bad way to start off the week for the folks over at Disney. Luckily, I was able to see firsthand how members of the tween and young teen audience were acting in anticipation of the premiere. I think it was brilliant ploy by Disney to feature the countdown clock to the premiere, it only got your viewers even more excited. What's more, I think it is more than fair to say that there were quite a few "viewing parties" taking place this past Friday, I politely and stealthy crashed one of the them. Now that it is over, it's always about what's next with this audience. If you saw (or heard) the reactions of some of the tweenie boppers faces when I told them that the next time they saw a High School Musical movie (the third iteration) it would be on the big screen, well, all I can say is, my hearing is almost back to normal, but not quite there yet. If that's any indication of what's to come for Disney, we should expect the billion dollar franchise to grow into a multi-billion dollar franchise. Switching gears to the teen and college aged segment...Give it up for Sony's opening weekend performance of Superbad, who boldly jumped over Rush Hour 3 and Bourne Ultimatum to secure top spot of the box office. Seriously, it is any surprise who drives July and August theater visits? In the spirit of Borat, Superbad was made relatively inexpensively, and will most likely turn out to be extraordinarily profitable for Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. It's really a winning formula with a few twists here and there...a couple of hormone crazed high school guys on the prowl for alcohol and girls, not necessarily in the that order...

It's About Time...Sex & The City Flick In The Works

Well it's about time. I wonder what they were waiting for? (kinda of a ignorant question, obviously it was getting the four principal players the gobs of money they were most likely demanding). Yup, this is definitely a good day for Time Warner and their New Line Cinema unit as word is out that a Sex and The City movie is finally in the works. Believe it or not, but the show has been off HBO since 2004, but you can still watch re-runs thanks to their syndie deal with TBS, which opened up the show to the non-premium cable audience. Needless to say it has been a boon for TBS, especially among the female young adult audience. Even though the show is running syndication, it has remained in the top ten favorite television show list among females (currently 9th based on Spring '07). As a point of reference, the only other television show to remain on the list for that period of time is Friends and I don't really need to go into to why, right? Anyway, I'm going out on a very sturdy limb and predicting the Sex & The City movie will gross at least $200 million at the U.S. box office and finish the year (assuming it is released sometime in 2008) as one of the top five movies among the female audience.

MTV Leveraging Mutliple Platforms For Super Sweet Sixteen Flick

MTV is preparing a full frontal assault leveraging multiple media touch points as it readies the made for television movie version of its reality series hit "My Super Sweet Sixteen." Starting next week, MTV will release the mobile version of the "My Super Sweet Sixteen" the movie on Verizon's V-Cast service. This marks the first time the cable network releases a movie via a wireless platform before premiering on-air. For those of you not into the whole mobile media thing, you can also view new flick on-demand if you're a Comcast customer. For those of us who are not Comcast customers or prefer to bypass the mobile viewing, you will just have to wait until July 8th when the movie will air on the network for the first time. In case you have plans on the 8th and don't have a DVR, no need to fret because beginning just two very short days later, the DVD will be available. One might deduce this could be some sort of working blue print for future content offerings as the major media conglomerates continue to evangelize the whole notion of being platform agnostic. 

300 Rocks Weekend Box Office Receipts

Nothing is better than starting off the week knowing a prediction you made on Friday came to fruition (and then some) over the weekend. Warner Bros. epic "300" hit theaters last Friday and had a huge run over the weekend grossing some $70 million compared to $28 million for the number two film in country, "Wild Hogs." We knew that "300" was going to be big, but we didn't realize it was going to blow away opening weekend records. In fact, even the studio thought "300" would pull in $35 to $40 million this weekend, instead in pulled in about double what was expected. The studio estimates via exit polls that "300's" audience was about 60% male and slightly more than half (52%) were under age 25. It looks like "300" will fast become the year's second film to gross more than $100 million at the box office, "Ghost Rider" just hit the $100 million mark this past weekend.

Expect "300" To Roar This Weekend

The big entertainment story this weekend will be the premiere of Warner Bros.' new epic "300", which opens today. Even amid not so great reviews, we believe the movie will attract a strong following from Generation Y. According to our latest Top Ten List Report for Movie and DVD titles, "300" came in at the number seven position on the men's list, which sets a precedent. The Top Ten List Report covering the first quarter (Jan '07 - March '07) was conducted the week of February 12th, a full three weeks before "300" was to hit theaters. This marks the first time a new unreleased movie cracked Top Ten, let along the top eight positions to date. That finding, along with anecdotal chatter we've been monitoring from a portion of our entertainment-heavy panelists seem to have all the makings of a perfect storm for "300," at least among the youth market.