Five things I’m thankful for in the world of video

That’s right, it’s the end of the year which means it’s time to start generating lists of things. Top 10 this, top 5 that, yada, yada. I thought I’d get a jump on the end of the year lists by doing a Thanksgiving list. As we pass the potatoes around the table tomorrow, let us all remember to be thankful that:

1) Hulu for the Holidays has us covered. Sure,  Hulu.com is great because it helps us keep up with such heartwarming and touching family favorites as Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but it has gone far beyond that with its new Hulu for the Holidays campaign that introduces us to [actually] heartwarming movies we may have forgotten. Last week it was Rudy, A League of Their Own, and Call of the Wild, today’s featured movie is A River Runs Through It (in which one-time heartthrob Robert Redford simultaneously directs and passes down the mantle of screen idol to Brad Pitt). I would embed the clip for your immediate enjoyment, but, alas, due to rights issues this one is not viewable outside of Hulu.com.

2) Netflix went off the matrix. When I say matrix, I don’t mean the movie, I just mean the PC-based Internet. With Netflix off the matrix and on my $99 Roku box, my family actually enjoys watching Netflix streaming movies. It used to be I had to lead the kids to the PC and say, “look what you can do with Netflix!” They would blink once or twice and then say, “Dad, if I wanted to use the PC, I would watch YouTube or play Webkins.” Not anymore. We now have a queue of about 50 movies ready to play in the living room at any time. All of them family friendly, except, whoa, hey, who put Risky Business in there? I’ll have to check with my wife on that one. What does Tom Cruise have that I don’t? [Don’t answer that…]

3) Tina Fey is alive. As I reported yesterday, Nielsen says we watched 4.5 hours of TV a day in Q3 of this year. While that was attributable to the Olympics and the election, I think about 10 minutes of every day was probably spent watching Tina Fey. If she wasn’t doing her dead-on Sarah Palin impression she was talking about it with David Letterman; if she wasn’t being delightfully nerdy on 30 Rock, she was joking about it with Rachel Ray (btw, Tina Fey and Rachael Ray makes for a great rhyme, try it). And notice that all of her shenanigans, including CNN’s coverage of said shenanigans, are online for us to see on demand, over and over again. Do you ever get enough of her Palin-Clinton skit? Too funny.    

4) You didn’t have to go to YouTube Live. What? a YouTube event that is live? You mean you have to sit there and experience it linearly? You can’t just jump to the next related video as soon as you’re bored with the current performance? Hmmm. Why was this a good idea? The best headline on this one goes to the San Francisco Chronicle, “YouTube Has Real Party for Self-Made Stars.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of YouTube. It’s enormous — it delivers 25% of all the online video minutes American experience each day. But the whole point of YouTube is that it’s a massive filter. You don’t have to watch what you don’t want to watch. YouTube Live was not that. Luckily, I was able to catch up later by watching the highlights on, you guessed it, YouTube.  

5) We’re not this guy. By “this guy,” I’m referring to my friend, marketer and social web practitioner, John Johansen (pictured here in his Halloween costume), who accepted a challenge from me to live an entire week without any video at all. None. Zip. Nada. And he opted to take this challenge during Thanksgiving week. That means no movies, no catching up on episodes of shows while visiting family. No football on Thanksgiving Day! Could you do it? Bet you couldn’t. Be thankful I didn’t challenge YOU!

Cameron Death of NBC on stage saying good things

Welcome to Forrester’s Consumer Forum, in Dallas. We’re off to a bang, I have just finished my keynote speech a few minutes ago and now Cameron Death, VP of Digital Content at NBC Universal is speaking.

He put up a slide that I didn’t get to capture with my BlackBerry in time, but it showed the number of people who caught the Heroes season premiere. It was something like 24 million in broadcast (probably including DVRs), 8 million online, and just about 126,000 people in mobile and VOD. Just 126K! Online is hot, the rest is not. (Now if only Heroes had been as good as it was in season 1!).

He is so refreshingly open! My experience with TV execs is that they are very guarded. Perhaps because Cameron is an ex-Microsoft guy who has only been at NBC for a year, he is talking very openly about ratings, DVRs, and other challenges. And he’s very optimistic. Perhaps it’s because NBC is doing very well right now in the online space. NBC’s joint venture with Fox, Hulu.com, is a roaring hit. NBC is having a huge rush online thanks to Sarah Palin/Tina Fey. 

In fact, in a very surreal moment, Cameron read from today’s USA Today which was delivered to his hotel room here at the Gaylord Texan.  He quipped, “it’s interesting there are numbers in here, because I wasn’t given permission to share these numbers, so I’ll just quote USA Today!”

Not only did SNL get its largest TV audience (15 million) in 14 years for the October 18 broadcast with vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin watching Tina Fey impersonate her, but Palin-related SNL skits have been viewed more than 63 million times across the Web… – October 28 paper, Section D, page 1 (update note: originally had incomplete quote here, replaced it with full quote once I had a copy of the paper)

Cameron pointed out that this is clear evidence the digital channel matters, driving not only online activity that dwarfs the broadcasting viewing, but also lifts the broadcast viewing itself.

The forum is shaping up well. I’ll prepare a summary of my speech a little bit later, with some screen shots because there’s some good stuff in there worth talking about. If you want to follow the forum on Twitter, follow “forrester.” I’m also twittering at jmcquivey.

30 Rock debuts new season on Web

 This was noted earlier this week in Mediapost. It appears that flush with the success of all-things-Tina-Fey, NBC is hoping to finally get some attention for brilliant comedy 30 Rock by premiering the new season on NBC.com and Hulu.com a week before it airs live on October 30th.

First, it’s an amazing show and Fey has taken her career to all sorts of new heights with her I’m-normal-but-everyone-else-is-nuts persona. But it’s a show that doesn’t get the ratings it deserves, largely because its popular lead-in, The Office, doesn’t either since a boatload of its viewers watch in via DVR, so there’s no lead-in audience for 30 Rock. 

Premiering a series online isn’t that new, either. It was common this season and will be the norm in the coming seasons. But it does emphasize how dependent networks are becoming on the Web to cultivate and keep an audience. As long as ratings stay relatively stable, that’s fine, but once people start abandoning linear programming in droves, there will be some network execs who have gone along with it who will shriek.