MaxxoMedia Digital Media and Entertainment Trends

Via Mashable

David A. Yovanno is the CEO of Gigya, Inc., a leading social optimization platform for online business. He can be found on Twitter at @daveyovanno or e-mail dave(at)gigya(dot)com.

Now that most social networks are supporting functionality on third party sites — via Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, Yahoo! Open Strategy, MySpaceID, and other similar technologies — entertainment companies are experimenting with a variety of approaches.

While movie promotions on Facebook, top sports moments on YouTube, and MySpace music pages remain key fixtures, many entertainment companies are also now actively focused on how to apply social strategies to their own sites to deepen relationships with fans and become more relevant. Here are four ways on-site social features are benefiting both fans and the entertainment industry today.

1. Making TV Participatory

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TV has historically been a “lean back” form of entertainment -– just sit back on your couch and let your eyes and ears take it in. Reality TV shows like American Idol broke new ground by making TV participatory -– fans can take action and influence the outcomes — and social technologies are now helping to make TV a “lean forward” experience.

In the most recent season of Dancing with the Stars, ABC made the voting process social. Fans could sign-in to abc.com with a Facebook or Twitter account to cast a vote for their favorite couple, and then donate their status to help support that pair. For example: “Vote to keep Louie Vito and Chelsea Hightower dancing on ABC!”

In the realm of real-time engagement, another example comes from MTV, which enabled live chat for previously aired episodes of the popular show 16 and Pregnant on MTV.com, where viewers could discuss the often controversial content with other fans.

Benefit for fans: Viewers are empowered to not only vote, but get out the vote among friends. Voting with a Facebook or Twitter identity makes voting a personal, rather than anonymous, experience. For 16 and Pregnant, teens have a live forum for sharing thoughts and experiences.

Benefit for TV networks: Fans are highly engaged with the show online, and the shows gain significant exposure on social networks from donated status updates. Traffic is generated back to the show online and off. Offering users a choice of networks for participation appears to boost engagement. For example, data from Gigya shows that for a single episode of 16 and Pregnant, tens of thousands of messages were sent by chat users to their social networks with the following distribution: 40% to Yahoo, 29% MySpace, 24% Facebook, and 7% Twitter.

This is the technology from Last Call from 13th Street, an interactive horror film. Sometime, during the movie, an audience member’s cellular phone will ring, and it is up to this audience member to give the character on screen directions.

Watch the video to see how the startled damsel in distress from Last Call tries to escape from the mad slasher. Yes, she actually calls an audience member during the film, and his or her voice commands tell her to go left or right, up or down, and so on.

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Via: Cell Phones

Written by Sarah Perez

At the recent Mobile World Congress 2010, Dutch app store analytics firm Distimo presented their findings on the six largest mobile application stores in existence today: the iTunes App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. In their presentation, they analyzed everything including store size, store growth, the most popular applications and where you can find the best deal. They recently shared some of the highlights from that presentation by way of a slideshow embedded on their blog.

For mobile industry insiders, some of the findings won’t be all that shocking, just common knowledge paired with statistics. However, there were a few surprises that caught us off guard, maybe they will you too.

Distimo collects public application data from app stores and also offers developers an analytics tool which is used to monitor their apps and those belonging to their competitors. After examining and analyzing the data, the company releases market reports detailing their findings.

Free Vs. Paid Apps

One of their most recent reports looked at which application stores have the highest percentage of free apps. Not surprisingly, the Android Market was the winner here. In an interview with Venture Beat, Distimo co-founder and CEO Vincent Hoogsteder said this was due to multiple factors: the nature of the open-source operating system from Google attracts the sort of developers that enjoy giving away their works and the open nature of the application- approval process (that is, no review board middleman exists between app creation and public release) makes it easier for casual developers to launch. Also, anecdotal evidence points to developer’s dissatisfaction with Google Checkout – paid Android apps are required to implement this payment method for purchase, a much slower process than Apple’s 1-click buying process.

The different ratios of free apps versus paid was one of the findings presented during MWC 2010. In the chart below, you can see the varying percentages by store. (Note that Distimo’s findings were focused on the U.S. market only). Android has the most free applications (57% free) and Nokia has the most paid (85% paid). The next closest store to Android in terms of free is Palm, followed by Apple, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and finally Nokia.

Another interesting finding had to do with the prices for the paid applications. Apple, Android and Palm were all in the same range when it came to the average price for paid apps ($3.27 to $3.62). However, RIM and Microsoft were more than twice as high ($8.26 and $6.99, respectively). This didn’t necessarily have to do with the different types of applications available in each store – sometimes, the exact same app was just priced higher on other platforms. For example, Tetris was $4.99 on Apple and $6.99 on Windows. IM+ was $4.99 on Apple and $29.99 on Blackberry.

Store Size and Growth: Look Out for Android!

Android is now the second-largest application store, reports Distimo, with 19, 297 apps. It’s still a far cry from Apple’s 150,998 apps, though. And other competitors are farther still. Ovi, we were surprised to discover, is the third largest with 6,118 apps available while Blackberry has a respectable 4,756. Palm has only 1,492 and Windows has 693. Apple is also the fastest growing store with a shocking 13,865 new applications added per month. Android’s growth is picking up too – they now have 3,005 new apps per month (15%). Relative to the number of apps housed, Android is actually the fastest growing store.

Games, Games, Games

Also discussed were the popularity of applications by category. On Apple’s store, games and entertainment were the most popular categories (58% and 18%, respectively). Somewhat more surprising was the popularity of games on Blackberry, the platform often used more by enterprise and SMBs than by consumers. Here, games were also in the lead with 29% popularity to only 18% for utilities. One would have thought that would be the other way around – that corporate users would be more likely download apps that helped them work, not play. Apparently, that’s not the case.

For more details on this presentation, you can view the entire slideshow on Slideshare or contact the company itself for a more in-depth marketing report.

via The Truth about Mobile Application Stores.

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The shift of marketing budgets from traditional channels to digital channels will continue to rise in 2010 with 46% of companies plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2010 and 66% will increase their investments in digital marketing channels. 28% of marketers are shifting at least some of their overall marketing budgets from traditional to digital channels, according to a new Econsultancy survey.

* 28% of marketers are shifting at least some of their overall marketing budgets from traditional to digital channels:

- At least part of the reason for the shift to digital marketing is that marketers find it easier to track the impact these channels have on hard financial metrics. Marketers tend to take a more “scientific” approach to their allocation of digital marketing budgets than they do when allocating traditional marketing budgets. 34% of marketers said digital marketing budgets are allocated based on “more science than art” compared to only 20% who allocate traditional marketing budgets based on “more science than art.”

* Marketers who focus on “brand reputation” as a measure of marketing effectiveness are the most likely to be shifting budgets from traditional to digital channels:

- Marketers who focus on this metric are more likely to be increasing their investments in social media such as Facebook and Twitter. They’re also more likely to be increasing investments in online display and mobile marketing, and less likely to be increasing investments in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, and acquisition-based email (i.e. email to rented lists). These increased investments in retention-based email marketing (i.e. email to registered customers) is on par with other marketers.

* Marketers have the most difficulty measuring ROI in social media and mobile marketing:

- Ironically, says the report, these channels are most likely to get budget increases in 2010, despite marketers’ inability to measure the effectiveness of this emerging media. The study found that the ability to measure ROI is not the primary factor in budget increases across digital channels. But while 34% of marketers plan to increase paid search budgets in 2010, 13% will decrease spending in this area.

* 64% of marketers plan to increase SEO budgets while 54% will increase retention email marketing budgets. Only 3% of marketers plan to decrease budgets in each of these areas:

- The majority of marketers are able to effectively measure these established digital marketing channels. When it comes to digital marketing budgets, marketers feel confident increasing their investments when efforts can be linked directly to their bottom line.

* In addition to examining how marketers plan to allocate their marketing dollars in 2010, this study also highlights some of the challenges that exist in digital marketing:

- While company respondents cite restricted budgets (40%) as the biggest barrier to additional digital marketing investments, agency respondents cite lack of understanding about digital marketing (48%) as the biggest impediment to growth.

* Lack of staff to make the most of any digital investment was cited by 35% of both company and agency respondents as an additional barrier:

- While marketers are increasingly optimistic about the opportunities digital channels provide, lack of training may limit an organization’s ability to take full advantage of these opportunities. One respondent report that, “with the last year being tough financially, training and investment have been cut.”

Additional budgeting highlights:

- 70% of responding companies plan to increase their budgets for off-site social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter)

- Only 17% of respondents are increasing their print media budgets, compared to 41% who are decreasing spending. 15% of companies are increasing their radio budgets, but 36% are spending less

- More than half of companies plan to increase their budgets for mobile marketing (56%), email marketing (54%), and paid search (51%)

via Kenradio.com

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Social networking has risen among all age groups in the past few years, particularly among teens and younger adults. 73% of online teens used social networking sites in 2009, compared to 47% of online adults. Breaking down online adults into older and younger demographics, 72% of adults 18-29 use social networking sites, compared to 40% of their counterparts 30 and older, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Social networking adults in all age brackets favor Facebook by a wide margin, with older adults preferring it slightly more. Seventy-three percent of all adults 18 and older who use social networking sites have a Facebook account. Broken down by age demographic, this includes 71% of adults 18-29 and 75% of adults 30 and older.

In contrast, 48% of all adult social network site users have a MySpace account. The younger generation is much more apt to use MySpace, with 66% of social networking adults 18-29 having a MySpace account, but only 36% of the 30 and older bracket. Usage rates for the professional networking site LinkedIn are the reverse of MySpace. 14% of all adult social networking site users have a LinkedIn account, which breaks down to 7% of adults 18-29 and 19% of adults 30 and older.

Younger Adults More Apt to Tweet
Tiwtter and other status-updating sites are more popular with younger adults than older adults. 37% of online adults 18-29 use Twitter or another status-updating site, compared to 9% of 50- to 64-year-olds and only 4% of online adults 65 and older. The overall Twitter/status-updating site usage rate among all adults is 19%.

Older Adults Blog More
Blogging is becoming more popular with older adults and less popular with younger adults. While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.

* In December 2007, 24% of online 18-29-year-olds reported blogging, compared with 7% of those ages 30 and older.

* By 2009, just 15% of internet users ages 18-29 maintained a blog, a nine-percentage-point drop in two years. However, 11% of internet users ages 30 and older maintained a personal blog.

Almost Everyone Under 30 is Online
74% of all adults 18 and older go online. This percentage climbs to 93% for both 12-to-17-year olds and 18-to-29-year-olds. Even among adults 65 and older, the least likely age demographic to use the internet, 38% of the population is online.

Other Findings

* 81% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are wireless internet users. By comparison, 63% of 30-49-year-olds and 34% of those ages 50 and older access the internet wirelessly.

* Roughly half of 18-29 year-olds have accessed the internet wirelessly on a laptop (55%) or on a cell phone (55%), and about one quarter of 18-29 year-olds (28%) have accessed the internet wirelessly on another device such as an e-book reader or gaming device.

* 75% of teens, 93% of adults ages 18-29, and 58% of 12-year-olds now have a cell phone.

* 8% of internet users ages 12-17 use Twitter. This makes Twitter far less common than sending or receiving text messages — as 66% of teens do — or going online for news and political information, done by 62% of online teens.
Global Time Spent Social Networking Rises

In December 2008, global consumers spent an average of three hours, three minutes and 54 seconds on social networking sites. That amount of time increased to five hours, 35 minutes and five seconds one year later. In addition, unique audience increased 27%, from 242 million in December 2008 to 307.4 million in December 2009. Facebook dramatically increased its dominance of the US online social networking market between December 2008 and December 2009. In December 2009, Facebook recorded about 110 million unique visitors, a 100% increase from 55 million unique visitors in December 2008. MySpace, which remained the second-most popular US online social network, saw its number of unique visitors drop about 17%, from roughly 60 million in December 2008 to roughly 50 million in December 2009. While Twitter only recorded 18.1 million unique visitors in December 2009, this represented 579% growth from 2.7 million unique visitors a year earlier.

via Kenradio.com

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American teenagers send an average of 10 text messages per hour they are not in school or sleeping. By analyzing more than 40,000 monthly US mobile bills, in Nielsen new study determined American teens sent an average of 3,146 texts a month each during Q3 2009. Their counterparts 9-12 sent an average of 1,146 monthly texts each, or four per hour not spent asleep or in school.

In comparison, the average number of monthly texts sent by all mobile users combined was a little more than 500. In Q4 2009, users 9-12 increased text usage by 8% and almost doubled their text message volume.

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Context is King: How Videos Are Found And Consumed Online

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts by guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.Previously, he wrote about the State of Online Video, and 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising.  In part 3 today, he examines how videos are found and consumed online. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo , a producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 110 million streams since 2006.

To try to understand—let alone guess—the future of video advertising, one needs to start by looking at the biggest trend in media over the past few decades.  In November 2006, Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang published a study called “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment”.  While Bear Stearns has since beenacquired by JP Morgan and is now a mere footnote in business books, the study’s findings are more relevant than ever.  Let’s examine 8 key factors behind online video consumption

Factor 1: Media is Fragmenting

According to a recent NY Times article, in the 1952-53 season, more than 30% of American households watched NBC during prime time, according to Nielsen.  In fact, up until twenty years ago, you could buy a 30-second spot on CBS, NBC or ABC and reach “everyone.”  Today, NBC’s prime time reach is 5%.  Sure, NBC is lagging CBS and ABC, but neither the Tiffany network nor Disney’s counterpart is faring much better.  The secret’s out: fewer people watch TV and teenagers spend every waking minute connected to the Internet, increasingly through the mobile web.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has the results in from its latest media usage study, and it was enough to shock the authors.

The last time the Foundation looked at the media usage of 8- to 18-year-olds was five years ago, when they were at just shy of six and a half hours of media consumption per day. At that point, the study authors felt that they must have hit a ceiling on media usage.

Not so, according to the latest study, which puts the average up more than an hour to upwards of seven and a half hours per day. Plus, for the first time, time spent watching TV actually dropped in favor of other forms of media, including listening to music, using a computer, playing video games, reading print publications and watching movies.

Moreover, because so many of the kids are multitasking by consuming multiple forms of media at the same time, they actually end up consuming closer to 11 hours’ worth of media content within that seven and half-hour span. Nor does do those hours include the time kids are spending talking on their cell phones (half an hour) or sending text messages (an hour and a half).

Director of the Center on Media and Child Health and Boston pediatrician Dr. Michael Rich pointed to the ubiquity of media usage as an indicator that it may be too late to continue debating the question about whether media was a positive or negative influence on children’s environment. Instead, media may have become essentially “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

What do you think of the study results? Parents out there — have you noticed your children consuming more media over the past five years? Do you set any limitations or place any guidelines surrounding your kids’ media usage?

via Kids Spend Every Waking Minute in Front of a Screen [STUDY].

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Web 3.0 is all about recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that’s no longer random data, but tailored, highly intuitive and delivered in real time. Identifying some broad trends that dominate the new crop of Web tools and services which are in tune with the next generation of the web – Web 3.0 site worth bookmarking.

Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas. Loopt.com is a new one this year that blends our love of social networking with location-based services. It’s has been described as a ‘social compass’ as it detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints your mobile friends in the vicinity. Loopt is US-centric at present, but the company says it working on looping up Europe. I personally have become a fan of FourSquare and I’ve gone many associates addict to it.  

Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves. But, Google doesn’t have a monopoly on innovative mapping. Openstreetmap.org is about people mapping everything from great hiking routes to off-piste ski runs or and wine tours, and it’s mapping the world.

Personal organizers: There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business. Tripit.com & Dopplr.com solves your travel paper trail by being your ‘personal, full-service travel assistant’. They compiles your itinerary, from transport modes to dinner dates, and adds in weather reports, suggested local attractions and more. They are worth a glance if you travel and have a busy agenda; useful too for family holiday plans.

Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You’ll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

Audio: Everyone loves audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day. Two that seem to fill a market gap are Songkick.com and Blip.fm. Songkick tells you where your favorite group’s next gig is based on your music library. It’s called the world’s biggest concert database, and let you ‘never miss a gig again’. Meanwhile, Blip.fm is billed as a kind of ‘twitter for music’ as it lets you create a social network based on your music choices and recommendations.

Social Media Intermediaries: There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter world. Tweetag.com, which is billed as a search engine for ‘tweets’. With millions of people adding content each day, the Twittersphere is a morass of information and comment, some useful and some useless. Tweetag helps you search tweets for trends. It also edges towards Web 3.0 semantic search by offering up a tweetag cloud and organizing search results according to whether other Twitterers have ‘re-tweeted’ – in a sense seconded – an idea.

via Kenradio.com

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

2009 saw a few newspapers change their business model to an online focus or shut down completely. 2010 will most likely see the same struggle and, perhaps, new business models emerge for these media entities. One thing is clear, the era of Americans reading a daily newspaper each and every day is coming to an end. Just two in five U.S. adults (43%) say they read a daily newspaper, either online or in print almost every day. Just over seven in ten Americans (72%) say they read one at least once a week while 81% read a daily newspaper at least once a month. One in ten adults (10%) say they never read a daily newspaper, according to a new Harris Poll survey.

2009 saw a few newspapers change their business model to an online focus or shut down completely. 2010 will most likely see the same struggle and, perhaps, new business models emerge for these media entities. One thing is clear, the era of Americans reading a daily newspaper each and every day is coming to an end. Just two in five U.S. adults (43%) say they read a daily newspaper, either online or in print almost every day. Just over seven in ten Americans (72%) say they read one at least once a week while 81% read a daily newspaper at least once a month. One in ten adults (10%) say they never read a daily newspaper, according to a new Harris Poll survey.

One reason for the dying of the daily newspaper is the graying of the daily readership. Almost two-thirds of those aged 55 and older (64%) say they still read a daily newspaper almost every day. The younger one is, however, the less often they read newspapers. Just over two in five of those aged 45-54 (44%) read a paper almost every day as do 36% of those aged 35-44. But less than one quarter of those aged 18-34 (23%) say they read a newspaper almost every day while 17% in this age group say they never read a daily newspaper.

One potential business model that newspapers are exploring is charging a monthly fee to read a daily newspaper’s content online. This model, however, seems unlikely to work as three-quarters of online adults (77%) say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a newspaper’s content online. While some are willing to pay, one in five online adults (19%) would only pay between $1 and $10 a month for this online content and only 5% would pay more than $10 a month.

There is a slight regional difference in who would pay for online content. Over four in five online adults in the Northeast (81%) say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a daily newspaper’s content online. Those across the country, however, are more willing. While seven in ten Westerners (71%) still say they would not pay, almost one-quarter (24%) of Westerners would pay between $1 and $10 a month to read a paper’s content online.

The struggles of the daily newspaper will continue as Americans have more and more ways to find the news content they need and want. The challenge for newspapers will be discovering a way to get their content to people and make money doing so. One area they were intently exploring was charging for online content, though it appears they need to find another way.

via Kenradio.com

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Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter.

The organization is installing Tweetdeck on staff computers to stimulate news gathering via social media, according to reports from a UK blog.

The Tweetdeck rollout to staff is scheduled to be completed within the month. While journalists using Twitter is pretty commonplace, an organization-wide rollout is significant. The decision signals a change in ideology around conventional news gathering, and points to the need for journalists to use Twitter to keep pace with the flow of news.

Julian March, executive producer of Sky News Online, made the following statement to Journalism.co.um on the Tweetdeck rollout:

“The big change for us in 2010 is evolving how social media plays a role in our journalism. We no longer ghettoise it to one person, but are in the process of embedding throughout the whole team.”

For those of you who work in more traditional work environments, you can appreciate the significance of software installs on company machines, typically regulated to lock down or limit employee downloads. The vetting of Tweetdeck as an application worthy of a serious news organization is one that should not be overlooked.

via Tweetdeck Infiltrates the News Room.

Want to snag Pearl Jam’s new single “Just Breathe” without having to pay for it? No problem. You can do an old-fashioned switch-a-roo and swap one of your tweets in exchange for an iTunes download of the track.

The band is using Culture Jam’s custom Twitter application to manage the Twitter whuffie track exchange, so retrieving your free copy of the live recording is a simple-three step automated process.

Click the “Connect to Twitter” button on the application landing page, grant the application access to your Twitter account and tweet as instructed. You can then redeem your music download using the provided iTunes gift code and the I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal is complete. Should you also want to take home one of 15 White Vinyl LP editions of the Backspacer album, you can enter to win that as well.

Pearl Jam’s Twitter giveaway is by no means unique, but it does signify that giving away free tracks via the microblogging site is a trend that here’s to stay. Obviously more and more artists are realizing the power of a message spread through Twitter’s real-time digital airways.

via The Price of Pearl Jam’s New Single: One Tweet.

In what will be called one of the most monumental milestones in TV and broadcast media’s battle with the Internet for content, viewership, and advertising, Pepsi has decided not to join the Super Bowl's massive advertising spectacle this year, instead opting to place its money along strategically placed spots on social media sites and platforms.

This is the first time in 23 years that Pepsi’s high-production spots won't be found in the commercials for the biggest sporting event of the year. Between 1999 and 2009, Pepsi spent over $142 million on Super Bowl ads, but that number won’t be growing anymore come February, according to ABC News.

Instead, Pepsi will put over $20 million into The Pepsi Refresh Project, a social media advertising campaign set to launch in 2010. On January 13, Pepsi will begin accepting requests from the community for project proposals by which Pepsi can “make the world a better place.” The winning project by number of votes (voting starts February 1) will receive up to $20 million to make the project a reality.

Before the rocket launch rise of social media, the Super Bowl’s ability to sit down over 95 million viewers (42% of TV-equipped US homes) seemed like the best possible avenue to reach people. Even a 30-second spot during the commercials would draw in a massive number of potential customers.

On the other hand, 85% of people aged 18-34 use popular social media sites. Facebook is the biggest, with 350 million users worldwide. Just tapping into a percentage of that kind of advertising potential could easily earn Pepsi more viewership than would the Super Bowl.

via VatorNews – Pepsi drops Super Bowl for social media.

Right in line with this new report, I just added an old laptop into my living room media mix. The laptop is pared down to basically a browser with preset bookmarks for Hulu, Netflix, Last.FM, Vevo, Amazon VOD and YouTube.  Seriously considering reducing my cable service to the lowest level and saving some money.

More than ever before Internet users in the United States want to be able to connect their TV to the Internet. Research firm Deloitte says 65 percent of Internet users want online content available on their televisions, with Millennials (14-26 year olds) leading the way; some 74 percent said they want to connect their TVs. But they weren't alone in their desires, said Deloitte in its “State of the Media Democracy (4th edition).” Gen Xers (71 percent), Boomers (59 percent) and Matures (46 percent) also contributed to the 7-percentage point uptick from a year ago.

The economic downturn that has plagued the nation may have contributed to an increase in TV viewing by Internet users as well, with viewing topping 18 hours per week in 2009. Deloitte said about 4 percent of respondents said they watched some of their favorite shows on sites like Hulu, with another 3 percent saying they watched post-broadcast episodes of their favorite shows on the show’s website.

via Survey shows increased desire for TV-Internet convergence – FierceOnlineVideo.

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