The Long Tail of Online Video Distribution

TV spreads out on the Web.
This looks like a big year for online video.

eMarketer predicts that over one-half of the US population will have watched video on the Web before the year is out.

By next year, more than 80% of all Internet users will be video viewers.



Online video is still new, however. What viewers watch and what sites they watch it on are evolving.

Many large video sites saw their share of unique visitors change significantly from January to November of last year, based on eMarketer calculations of Nielsen Online data.



eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman says that the top online video destinations are likely to change even more.

"Internet video is still new and the choice of offerings from broadcast and cable networks is still experimental," Mr. Hallerman said. "Even nearly a year’s changes represent only a preliminary picture of how the online video universe might look by the end of the decade."

That's good news for TV networks, which are working to improve distribution of their content to more sites. This improves the selection of professionally-made content available to consumers.

The main reason online video viewers currently value leading sites like YouTube and video portals is for their selection, according to an April 2007 study commissioned by the IBM Institute for Business Value and conducted by Zoomerang Market Research.



YouTube and other video portals have been removing TV shows from their sites at the request of copyright holders. As such, networks are more in control of how their IP is distributed. But getting the same scale of distribution requires deals with online video portals—not just YouTube and other current leaders, but lesser-known aggregators as well.

Mr. Hallerman describes the scenario for TV networks and other video producers as a short-tail vs. long-tail scenario, with networks' own sites, YouTube and other major portals as the short tail and lesser-known video-sharing sites as the long tail.

"Aggregating visits to the video long tail creates a potential market for greater video delivery, where video producers could distribute content across multiple smaller sites, making less costly deals for that distribution than they might at the more popular short-tail sites.

"The leading edge of the video-visit long tail is not as dominated by portals but also includes several video-sharing sites such as Metacafe, Break.com and Veoh," he said.

Those sites have caught on, and are moving from their user-generated video roots by wooing networks and their professional content.

"All the networks are moving toward super-distribution, where the content is available in every possible outlet," said Mike Henry, senior vice president of ad sales at Veoh. "They realize they're not always going to be the destination of choice."

Patrick Keane, EVP and CMO of CBS Interactive, put it another way in a September 2007 Jack Myers Media Business Report article.

“Instead of trying to ferret our users to one place, let’s follow our users and bring our content to them,”

Learn how TV is adapting to the Internet. Read eMarketer's Online Video Content: The New TV Audience report.