For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
The most
recent data from communications regulator Ofcom says that British people watch
an average of just over four hours of television every day. About 45 minutes of
this is time-shifted; the rest is live TV.
Such mass
consumption dwarfs the time devoted to packaged media although the 26 million
UK households purchased 207 million Blu-ray and DVD discs in 2011, according to
figures supplied to the BVA by IHS Screen Digest. They also rented several
million more from Lovefilm, Blockbuster and others and probably watched quite a
few illegal copies as well.
Even
measured at its peak, however, the total length of time spent watching packaged
media was insignificant when compared to the hours spent in front of the box.
Today, the challenge comes not from TV but the other screens in the home: those
connected to the internet.
Digital
market research company ComScore has just released its report for December
2012. It shows that the UK has the highest engagement with the internet in
Europe and each user spends an average of 35.6 hours a month online. Turkey was
in second place with 33.7 hours and the Netherlands third with 32.2 hours a
month.
To watch
TV and browse the web are not mutually exclusive pastimes so for some of this
time users will do both. The arrival of the “second screen” brings the TV and
the internet together as never before so sports enthusiasts can check player
statistics while they watch their team win or lose while film fans can check
for prequels and sequels.
A close
look at the comScore data shows that the audience measurement relates to those
who go online from both home and work locations so that a total of 37.5 million
“unique visitors” accessed the internet from the UK during December. There is a
degree of double counting here as well since the same individual might follow a
sports event at home and from the desk at work. The arrival of Netflix and
increased competition from Lovefilm, however, can only increase the time that
the British spend online as film content streams to the main screen in the
home.
With
monthly “all you can eat” fixed price packages there is an incentive for those
at home to trawl extensive back catalogues and enjoy films all day, leaving
aside for the moment the potentially significant data charges.
Academic
research commissioned by Lovefilm and published in early February says that
film fans that watch two movies a week are “happier” than occasional viewers.
For the “Movie Medicine” report, researchers from Goldsmiths College monitored
the viewing habits of 1,000 adults over 12 months. They found that the measured
rate of “happiness” increases for every 10 films watched and that viewing 100
films a year or more correlates to higher earnings and reduced anxiety.
Report
author Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said, “The research suggests that the act of
watching film enables people to disconnect from everyday life, but also it
opens up our imaginations to be better prepared to make real-life decisions.
Your social brain studies the events on the screen and begins to relate to, and
learn from, the characters and their experiences.”
Lovefilm
has begun to lobby government ministers, including Secretary of State for
Health Andrew Lansley, and major UK companies to argue that access to filmed
entertainment has a positive impact on health, wellbeing and professional
productivity.
The
report includes a Top 10 of films most likely to boost “happiness”, with
Disney’s “Finding Nemo” in first place, followed by SPHE’s “The Da Vinci Code”
and “Casino Royale” from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. That
perennial feel-good film from ITV Studios Home Entertainment, “The Shawshank
Redemption” is at No. 5.
The
ability to stream non-stop feature films on demand could affect the level of
broadcast TV audiences more than packaged media sales. DVD titles at the far
end of the “long tail” will no doubt continue to sell on impulse for £3 but as
Lovefilm (“5000+ titles”) and Netflix (“thousands of titles”) offer instant
high quality video, the incentive to leave home is reduced. How much additional
“happiness” is induced if someone never goes out and instead spends time in
front of a screen watching online video?
A comment
on the Guardian website raises the question of just how bad streaming video has
to be before the viewer is roused to comment. One infuriated contributor wrote
that he had started to watch the Six Nations rugby on BBC Broadband: “What a
mistake, their poor picture quality could win prizes. Most of the time is
buffering.”
As the
technical support team will have told him, his connection speed is outside the
control of the BBC and he should contact his ISP to check his line before he
blames the broadcaster. It does raise the issue, however, of why some streams
will play perfectly at relatively low data rates and others fall over at the
first sign of contention.
On a slow
connection that plays UltraViolet and Blinkbox streams without buffering, the
BBC iPlayer stream that he complained about was almost unwatchable. The match
stuttered, stopped and restarted with the audio out of sync until just before
full time, when the iPlayer displayed the message “Insufficient bandwidth to
stream this programme.”
This was
not the experience of every viewer, of course, but the fact that these problems
were visible two days after the match and out of peak times shows that not all
streams are equal. Compression is more of an art than a science even in these
days of automated, multi stream video encoding. Access to the iPlayer is free
(at least for those in the motherland) but paid-for streaming video that does
not deliver leads inevitably to angry complaints and cancellation.
Netflix
has had its fair share of criticism for not anticipating the problems that come
with bandwidth caps. Even at £5.99 a month, customers will be unhappy if the
quality of the video does not match their expectations. Simply to increase
bandwidth does not solve all buffering and quality problems although it can
help. That side of the equation is outside the control of the company that
delivers the video, particularly in those deprived parts of the UK where 2Mbps
is a luxury.
To
increase the compression so that the file size for any given running time is
smaller is one way to reduce the incidence of buffering. Unfortunately, the
trend towards high definition (HD) video has led to bigger files and higher
bit-rates. The industry is working towards a new standard, known as High
Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), that will require higher-powered processors at
both ends of the chain and it is expected to deliver files that are 20% smaller
than today. That should arrive in 2013.
Netflix
decided it could not wait that long. On Feb.1 a Silicon Valley start-up called
EyeIO announced that it had found a way to halve video bit-rates and had
already signed up its first customer. Netflix VP Product Development Greg
Peters said, “Delivering a high quality video experience is top priority for
Netflix and EyeIO technology is an important part of the technology that we use
to improve video quality and overcome bandwidth challenges presented by the
internet infrastructure.”
There
have been many “breakthrough” product announcements concerning video
compression over the past 20 years but few have shown the promise they claimed.
One company managed to raise several million dollars, hold a massive launch
party in Las Vegas and then vanish in a puff of smoke when it transpired it
used Microsoft’s Windows Media Video for all its demonstrations.
This
time, however, it seems that the achievement is real and Netflix is rumoured to
be trialling the technology already. “EyeIO provides a straightforward solution
for accommodating the rapidly growing demand for video delivery around the
world, by alleviating the overwhelming bandwidth currently required to stream
video,” said Co-founder and CEO Rodolfo Vargas. “eyeIO continues to challenge
the commonly accepted limits of internet video delivery and enables everyone
connected to the internet to enjoy high-quality video, no matter where they
are.”
If his
claim that EyeIO can compress high quality HD video to a 1.8 Mbps stream turns
out to be true, householders in rural Britain will be very happy indeed.
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