Tim Lewis
The Observer
Saturday 6 April 2013

Seven of the top YouTube creators, from left to right: Lex Croucher (tyrannosauruslexxx), Klaire De Lys (KlaireDeLys), Benjamin Cook (ninebrassmonkeys), Christopher Bingham (slomozo), Hazel Hayes (chewing sand), Shirley B Eniang (shirleybeniang), Thomas Ridgewell (tomSka). Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

COLUMBIA, Md., April 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – One in three Americans aged 12 and older now listen to all forms of online radio¹ on a weekly basis according to the new national survey from Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2013: Navigating Digital Platforms.

The study, released today, is the 21^st in a series of studies dating back to 1998.  Among the many other findings:

• Fifty-three percent of all Americans aged 12 and over (an estimated 139 million people) own a smartphone; three-quarters of those aged 18-to-34 own these devices
• Weekly online radio listeners report listening for an average of 11 hours 56 minutes per week, up by more than two hours over last year’s listening levels (9 hours 46 minutes in 2012), and nearly double that reported in 2008 (6 hours 13 minutes). During the same span of time, Arbitron’s RADAR service indicates that AM/FM Radio has grown to 243 million weekly listeners and time spent listening has remained approximately two hours a day
• More than one in four Americans (27 percent) check their social network several times per day, estimated at 71 million people
• AM/FM radio is an “almost all of the times” or “most of the times” in-car choice for nearly six in ten adults aged 18 and over; dashboard AM/FM radio (58 percent) far outpaces frequent in-car use of CD players (15 percent), portable digital audio/MP3 players (11 percent) and satellite radio (10 percent)
• AM/FM Radio delivers far more consumers (49 percent) than other media during the half hour before they arrive to shop, more than twice the number reached by the next closest medium (advertising on Billboards at 21 percent)
• Twenty-nine percent own a tablet; this is up more than 70 percent in the last year, compared to 17 percent ownership in 2012
• Among the nearly half of Americans (45 percent) who say it is important to learn about and keep up-to-date with new music, AM/FM Radio is the top source for new music discovery at 78 percent (more…)

WIRED

Illustration by LAMOSCA

On February 7, the fourth season of Community kicked off on NBC. It was something of a shock that the show had survived for so long. It ranked 193rd among broadcast shows. In May 2012, series creator and showrunner Dan Harmon had been unceremoniously canned. And on the night it aired, the season premiere pulled in just 4 million viewers. That’s a mere quarter of the audience enjoyed by ratings juggernauts like Two and a Half Men or The Big Bang Theory. It even underperformed a rerun of the ABC reality show Shark Tank on the Nielsen charts.

Until recently, those 4 million viewers would have been the end of the story. Just a few years ago, similar niche favorites like Jericho and Firefly were summarily executed for such numbers. In fact, cult legend Freaks and Geeks averaged nearly 7 million viewers in its single, 1999-2000 season before getting canceled. But that night in February, Communityaccomplished something that none of those shows ever had the chance to do—it spawned two worldwide trending topics on Twitter.

All of your favorite shows are ratings dogs. Breaking Bad, Girls, Mad Men—each struggles to get a Nielsen score higher than 3, representing about 8.7 million viewers. And it’s not just cable. NBC’s 30 Rock struggled to top a score of 2.5, and Parks and Recreation rarely cracks Nielsen’s top 25. There are two possible conclusions to draw from these facts: (1) All these shows should be canceled, or (2) maybe the ratings are measuring the wrong thing. Since the 1970s, television has been ruled by the Nielsen Family—25,000 households whose TV habits collectively provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior. Over the years, the Nielsen rating has been tweaked, but it still serves one fundamental purpose: to gauge how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set. But that’s not how we watch any more. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating. (In February Nielsen announced that this fall it would finally begin including Internet streaming to TV sets in its ratings.)

And the TV experience doesn’t stop when the episode ends. We watch with tablets on our laps so we can look up an actor’s IMDb page. We tweet about the latest plot twist (discreetly, to avoid spoilers). We fill up the comments section of our favorite online recappers. We kibitz with Facebook friends about Hannah Horvath’s latest paramour. We start Tumblrs devoted to Downton decor. We’re engaging with a show even if we aren’t watching it, but none of this behavior factors into Nielsen’s calculation of its impact. (more…)

Marketing Pros
Smart Thinking Pass It On

by Mary Beth Garber
March 22, 2013

Most people’s perception of whether Millennials like radio could do with a splash of cold water and a stream of cold, hard facts.

In fact, if you are between 18 and 34, you are far more likely to be pulling your ears away from AM/FM radio than your eyes away from Facebook to read this

article: 92% more likely, actually. Way more Millennials will use radio this week than they will YouTube or Twitter.(1)

Each week, 93% of Millennials (or more than 62 million of them) spend over 2.5 hours per day listening to radio. That’s more than a year ago. Or any time in history.(2)

Ah, but what about custom music streaming (e.g., Pandora) and other technological developments? Have they replaced listening to radio among 18-34s? No. In fact, research from 11 sources has concluded that streamers tend to be heavier users of radio than the average person. For example, in November 2012, Vision Critical concluded that “Pandora listeners report spending 50% more time listening to AM/FM radio than non-Pandora listeners.”

Why do 93% of 18-34-year-olds spend 2.5 hours listening to AM/FM radio stations daily via radios, mobile devices, computers, in cars, and other means?

Recent studies tell us that more than half them say that radio “energizes” them or “improves your mood.” It makes them happy, in other words. Millennials feel down or lonely, or they want the comfort of a familiar voice, or they want just to be entertained… as most people do. Maybe more so. More of them said they’d be more disappointed if their favorite radio station went away than if Facebook went away (62% vs. 45%).

AllThingsD
MARCH 19, 2013

Apple? Android? Amazon?

Whatever. You folks bought a lot of tablets of last year. A new survey from Deloitte reports that 36 percent of Americans (or, at least, 36 percent of Americans who take online surveys) say they own a tablet. That’s up from 13 percent a year ago.

And once you have a tablet, you use it. Especially to watch movies. Though it turns out that if you have a tablet you’re more likely to watch movies everywhere, on every device, than a non-tablet owner.

And kids these days! Deloitte says that a fifth of “trailing millennials” — 14-to-23-year-olds — say they’re watching TV shows on their tablets. That’s up from just 2 percent a year ago. But tablets still aren’t ubiqitous among that set — they’re more likely to watch their shows via smartphones, game consoles, computers or plain old TV sets.

March 14, 2013
Just over a quarter of Americans currently buy ebooks and nearly half plan to do so in a year’s time, according to a new survey from free ebook service Bookboon.

According to the survey, conducted in person and over the internet among nearly 6,000 U.S. adults, 27.1% currently buy ebooks and 22.7% expect to within a year, meaning that by 2014 about half of Americans will be buying ebooks.

This survey should be taken with a grain of salt. Bookboon put out a survey in Sept. that claimed that more than half of U.S. students preferred e-textbooks — however, adoption is incredibly low (about 6%) and other surveys and anecdotal evidence have been in lockstep asserting that students don’t yet prefer digital textbooks.

Bookboon also said in the beginning of 2012 that it intended to take 10% of the U.S. ebook market share by the end of the year and that hasn’t happened yet.

However, this particular survey seems to be in line with other surveys on similar topics:

– On the number of U.S. adults reading ebooks: about a quarter
– On the number of U.S. adults who own e-readers: about one-in-six
– On the number of U.S. adults who own tablets: between a quarter and a third

So, having passed this loose validation scheme, here are some other interesting stats from the report:

– 17.8% of Americans plan on buying an e-reader or a tablet computer or both by 2014
– 57.7% of Americans think that 50% or more of their book reading will be ebooks in three years; among current tablet owners, that number is 71.9% (read: tablet owners see the device as a place to read ebooks)
– 22.2% of Americans don’t plan to start reading ebooks any time in the next three years

Engadget
By Brian Heater
posted Mar 5th, 2013

We’ve been hearing rumblings about Google’s plans for a Spotify-killer for what seems like forever now. More recently, there’s been word that the company’s YouTube brand is also getting set set to enter the space, albeit with some overlap from a Google-branded effort. Fortune spoke to some anonymous-type folks in the record industry who confirmed the latter, adding that the service is set to launch this year. The offering will apparently give users some free streaming, with additional features being made available for a subscription fee. The site reached out to YouTube, who offered the following bit of hopeful non-commitment:

While we don’t comment on rumor or speculation, there are some content creators that think they would benefit from a subscription revenue stream in addition to ads, so we’re looking at that.

So, you know, stay tuned.

AllThingsD
MARCH 4, 2013

The big picture for YouTube looks good. The world’s biggest video site keeps getting bigger, generating more video views and more ad dollars.

The Wrap Media
Covering Hollywood
February 12, 2013

Intel will launch an Internet-based TV service by the end of the year, Erik Huggers, the vice president and general manger of Intel Media, announced at AllThingsD’s Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday. Huggers’ discussion with the tech blog’s Peter Kafka and Walt Mossberg confirms a longstanding rumor, and Huggers went into some if limited detail about the service.

Intel will release its own device, which will feature live TV, on-demand and applications.

While Intel will make its service available on other devices, he insisted controlling everything part of the product is critical in this kind of venture.

“You need to control the chip, you need to control the operating system, you need to control the app layers, you need to control the sensors, et cetera,” he told the crowd in Laguna Beach. “If there were platforms out there where we could deliver exactly what we have in mind, there wouldn’t be a need to do it. But there isn’t.”

In providing live TV and apps, the Intel service would compete with both existing cable suppliers like Comcast and set-top boxes like Roku. Much of the current discussion around cable is tied to price, as the prices for channels continue to rise.

Huggers said the service would still accept bundled channels, but will distinguish itself through personalization. It will include a camera that follows the viewer, tailoring content for the viewer and providing better information for advertisers.

Creepy? A little, but you can turn it off.