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Saturday, January 14, 2012

MUST Read: Jim Harris on The Death of TV & YouTube's VP Robert Kyncl's Forecast for the Future

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Excerpt from Jim Harris's Article in The Huffington Post, 13 Jan. 2012:

"On Thursday, Robert Kyncl, YouTube's Vice President of Global Content Partnerships keynoted at the at 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

He argued that the world of TV is changing profoundly: "If YouTube's top five channels were stacked against cable channels, they would be in the top 20 in terms of viewership."...

"...Kyncl pointed out that in 1980 there were only four TV channels and they had 100 per cent of the audience. But the emergence of cable TV in the 1980s dramatically changed the economics of distribution and resulted in hundreds of new channels. By 2010, 75 per cent of Americans viewing was spent watching cable channels, but only 25 per cent with the original four broadcast networks.

We are going through this same revolution again, with the Internet and streaming media once again dramatically reducing the cost of distribution. It eliminates barriers to entry, enabling content developers to narrow cast highly target audiences.

For instance, Kyncl cited the fact that today there are 17 million American yoga enthusiasts (and probably double that worldwide), yet there's not a single dedicated yoga channel on traditional TV. Kyncl predicted that within 12 month there will be a very successful YouTube Yoga channel.

And the fact speak for themselves: 350 million videos are shared on Twitter every year; and more than 100,000 person years worth of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook annually.

On hundred million iPads and tablets will be sold in 2012 according to the Consumer Electronics Association and analysts from GfK. Add that to the existing installed base of 70 million (15M in 2010 and 55M in 2011) -- all of them able to stream content; add to that the 600 million video enable smartphones that will sold in 2012 (add this to the 700 million smartphones sold in the last two years: 262M in 2010 & 435M in 2011); and finally add the 1.25 billion PCs worldwide. Presto, you're looking at more than 2 billion devices that can stream content.

By comparison there are only 115.9 million TVs in the U.S. and 1.6 billion TVs worldwide..."

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales

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