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Britain's online video habit: three web clips per day

Here's a finding that, while inevitable, is sure to raise the blood pressure of your typical ISP executive -- and your boss. Our daily online video habit is reaching a staggering proportion.

According to Comscore, Americans viewed 11.5 billion (yes, billion...with a b) videos in March, or an average of 83 videos for every American who ventured online last month. The most recent tally for the UK is even greater, Comscore says. In December, Britons watched 3.1 billion videos, or 108 videos per UK net user.

Assuming an average video length of two minutes, you are talking about more than 103 million hours spent (some may say "wasted") in front of the computer watching YouTube and, for a week at least, the BBC iPlayer (the iPlayer launched on Christmas Day klast year).

It would be interesting to see Comscore's most recent numbers, which will reveal the iPlayer's contribution to our video-snacking habit. It will also no doubt trigger more howls of protest from the likes of Tiscali and Sky, who see the iPlayer as the biggest threat to their business.

In the US, YouTube is the dominant player, Comscore reports. The video-sharing behemoth has 38 per cent of the market (by videos viewed; 51 per cent if you count unique viewers) and its audience is growing.

Freesat: a sign of Freeview's failure

An uncharitable view of Freesat, the free-to-air satellite TV service launched today by the BBC and ITV, is that it demonstrates the failure of Freeview. Why else would the very people who begged us to buy a Freeview set-top box now be urging upon us an alternative, incompatible system involving a new set-top box, a satellite dish and professional installation?

In fact, Freeview has not been a failure. It has the makings of something much more frustrating: a short-term success. More than 14 million British households already use it, but some doubt its suitability as a national broadcast system for next-generation television.

It faces two main problems: patchy coverage, which leaves more than a quarter of the population without a signal, and problems cramming bandwidth-hungry high-definition signals onto the part of the broadcast TV spectrum. Limited trials of HD over Freeview are expected to begin next year, but only four channels will be available and viewers will have to buy yet another set-top box.

Freesat, which delivers its signal via satellite, will liberate the BBC and ITV from the constraints of the broadcast spectrum and allow them to offer more high-definition programming. Both broadcasters see HD as a way of holding onto viewers (and advertisers, in ITV’s case) in a fragmenting media market, and until now they’ve had to sit back and watch Sky TV take an early lead in HD programming.

Encouragingly for both broadcasters, nearly half a million subscribers have stumped up for Sky’s high-definition channels, proving that there is an appetite for super-sharp TV. A similar service without the barrier of a contract and monthly subscription is likely to be popular.

So where does that leave Freeview? Anyone who gets a good signal with the existing system and has no interest in upgrading to HD will probably stick with what they’ve got, but it would be hard to recommend it to anyone who has not yet made the switch to digital TV. For a relatively small, one-off fee, Freesat offers a much more future-proofed system.

That’s frustrating for those who plumped for Freeview but now have an HD-ready TV and want to make the most of it. Some will no doubt find the cash for Freesat, but the cynics among them may be wondering how long they’ll have to wait before it too is rendered obsolete.

What's on Mick and Keith's iPod?

Stones songs. Lots of them. From the most recent performance.

Richard Kerris, the band's former AV geek, tells Variety he introduced Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ronnie & Co. to the wonders of the iPod on the 40 Licks tour. Ever since, the band has been recording all of its shows to a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie Watts' drum stand. After the show, the techies then port the play lists to iPods so the band can listen afterwards.

As Kerris tells Variety, "If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."

Mick, says Kerris, is a natural geek. He took to the technology in short order. And Keith? Well, that's a different story. Says Kerris, "Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."

Where are all the Blu-ray discs?

Call it a casualty of winning the war too soon. Now that Sony's Blu-ray technology has emerged the victor in the blinked-and-you-missed-it high-definition format war, the real struggle is just beginning. It looks as if there is no chance there will be enough Blu-ray discs to meet global demand this year, say analysts at Screen Digest.

Now that chief rival HD-DVD (backed by Toshiba and Microsoft) has been consigned to the scrap heap, global demand for Blu-ray discs is expected to jump three-fold in 2008 to a minimum of 43 million units, Screen Digest says. The problem is that production capacity can hardly match the surge. The top producer is Sony itself. Sony DADC's unit is investing in extended production line capacity to produce 38 million discs per month by October. This would meet just 60 to 70 per cent of global forecast demand, Screen Digest says.

Greater than expected demand is great for Sony's bottom line, but consumers will feel the pain. With production capacity being outstripped so far by demand, expect disc prices to remain at a premium.