We’re not quite sure of the benefit that Cisco gets out of sponsoring the research, but in December and early January it came out with predictions and the results of a survey relating to video consumed over the internet. It also released an application that will tell you what your internet habits and personal bandwidth use compared with various national averages around the world.
The latest stuff is the new Cisco Visual Networking Index Pulse survey which Cisco has conducted for it by the Center for the Digital Future in Southern California. It compares internet video use in the US, urban China, Germany, and Sweden taking in 1,000 consumers in each location. We’re also not quite sure why Sweden is one of the countries, or Germany for that matter, which lags Europe in broadband penetration terms.
The results seems to shows that the US respondents watch more TV, 3.8 hours a day, with China last at 1.8 hours and the others in between and that in urban China 97% of users watch online video on PCs, ahead of the US where the number is 81%.
China has a problem in that TV content is heavily censored, and real life themes such as violence, state disobedience, homosexuality and infidelity are almost always edited out. Imagine US programs being shown in China on TV, without these themes, they are not so popular. However on the internet, same day pirated versions of US TV shows are put up within 24 hours, and served from outside the country, with translated voice-overs which keep all the original content. Every other country in the world would watch this on TV, but it China that makes no sense, so most imports are watched on the Internet.
We’re not sure this establishes clear cultural differences, when this is down to Government intervention.
The same has to be true about the survey’s conclusions on mobile video. It claims that the US has the largest percentage of users watching video on a mobile phone, at 23%. That may be true, but none of the countries chosen has widespread broadcast mobile TV. To conclude that the US is ahead in this area is quite simply wrong. In markets where there is broadcast Mobile TV, such as Korea and Japan, the percentage is approaching 50%, on a combination of broadcast and streamed content, more than double the US. Certain vendors like Orange and Vodafone have huge streamed programs in Europe, while countries which have flat rate internet access may have numbers rivaling or beating the US.
The survey says US respondents who watch video on their mobile phone spend an average of 36 minutes per day doing so. Well that’s a very high number which may well be of value. It is clearly rising from the 12 or 13 minutes a day two years ago, but way below the 62 minutes a day average in Japan and the 60 minutes in Korea.
The survey goes on to say that 85% of German respondents want to watch Internet video on their TV sets, compared to 55% of Swedes, 54% of Americans, and 35% of urban Chinese. Again in China the TV is associated with censored content, so perhaps they are worried that by putting it through their TV they would be found out.
The next claim is about professional content viewed and here we have to confess to having huge doubts about Hulu when it came out. On the surface, looking at the December released numbers, it appears that Hulu, and all the other broadcast operators are really making up a huge amount of ground on YouTube. But when you look deeper, what is actually the case is that the professional video takes up way more bandwidth ‘ which is not surprising ‘ for a substantially lower amount of viewing.
The graph shows that the amount of data is the same between US commercial interests and YouTube at 31 Petabytes per month, while the number of actual streams are 4.5 times as many by YouTube, and the number of minutes of streaming is way more than double at 12.5 billion minutes compared to 4.7 billion minutes of professional TV.
However in this survey the US respondents watched 2.5 times as much professional video (TV programs and movies) as they do user-generated video content on their PC or laptop. That would be in line with the graph above if it is measured in number of minutes.
By comparison German respondents watch twice as much user-generated video on their PC or laptop as they do professional video content, virtually the opposite, but this is almost certainly because broadcasters there have not put hardly any professional content on the web.
American respondents viewed 1.5 hours or online video a day while the Swedish respondents saw 0.7 hours a day, Germans 1.5 hours a day the Chinese 1.9 hours per day. For the Chinese this is more than their TV viewing figures. Which perhaps underlines my first point.
“Networked video is everywhere. People around the world of all demographics are using networked video as a communications medium to connect with the people and the content they care about most,” said Ken Wirt, vice president of consumer marketing for Cisco. “Whether they are seeking entertainment, information, education or communications, people are using video to meet their needs.’
Cisco is now sponsoring research for an additional eight countries, which will be released later this year and it launched its Visual Networking Index PC Pulse Application which is free and designed to show users how much network bandwidth they consume.
Going back to Hulu it is now significantly ahead of any of the other professional sites and has clearly started a trend. We initially felt it had too little content and that the owners, NBC Universal and Fox, would want to keep their best content for their own site and would eventually fall out over terms.
In 2008 Cisco says Hulu became the second largest source of Internet video traffic in the US at over 15 petabytes per month while YouTube remained the largest US video source at over 30 petabytes per month roughly the same as ALL commercial video from all broadcasters per month in the US. YouTube now takes up as much bandwidth as the entire US internet backbone did during 2000.
Cisco says that commercial video content will drive Internet video growth which will increase by a factor of five from 2008 to 2012 while User Generated Content site traffic will triple in the same period.