Cable TV audience not large

Digital media beats old media, including cable TV --

Wolff: The unbeatable Roger Ailes: "...The cable audience, for all the attention heaped on it for its theoretical political sway, is not that large. The average Fox prime time audience in 2013 was little more than a million people. MSNBC's 2013 non-election-year prime time viewership was 640,000, CNN's 568,000 (but for the first time in two years, MSNBC fell behind CNN's daytime audience). These are target marketing rather than mass market numbers. Magazine numbers. ... the cable news audience, a kind of passionate couch potato (network news still commands that larger audience of catatonic couch potatoes). This was an older and less urban audience, which left its competitors to fight over a younger and more fickle audience. The loss of audience share to other news and entertainment options (from Jon Stewart to digital news) has been much more severe for CNN and MSNBC...."

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Vimeo, online videos, HTML5

Vimeo moves to default HTML5 player, says videos load faster | PCWorld: "Vimeo has rebuilt its video player using HTML5, the latest version of the Web programming language that is challenging Adobe Systems’ Flash player in serving up Web video. The use of HTML5, which allows certain types of videos to be played natively in Web browsers without additional software plugins, means that some content on Vimeo will load in less than a second, wrote Brad Dougherty, a senior application engineer, on the company’s blog on Tuesday.

Vimeo speeds its online videos, goes HTML5 by default | Internet & Media - CNET News: " . . . The new player also makes it easier for people sell video right from the player when teaser videos are shown. "With the addition of this 'buy now' button on the trailer, everywhere the video travels, there is an instant call to buy that comes with it," Mellancamp said ... Two thorny issues still complicate HTML5 video, though. One is digital rights management (DRM), which lets content owners encrypt video and audio to curtail copying. Another is the choice of codec -- the technology used to compress video and audio. HTML5 standardized how to send video, but didn't specify which code was to be used. Google's open-source, royalty-free VP8 and newer VP9 codecs are one option, but most of the tech industry -- especially those in the video world -- preferred a royalty-bearing standard called H.264. Google said it would eventually phase H.264 support out of Chrome, and Mozilla was a strong VP8 advocate, but H.264 won out: Google backed off its decision, and Mozilla added H.264 support by drawing on modern operating systems' built-in support. For DRM, Microsoft and Google have controversially developed a standard called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which already is in use for Web-based video streamed by Netflix. DRM isn't much of an issue for Vimeo, though: "Videos, whether downloaded or streamed, on Vimeo On Demand are DRM-free," the company said."

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Google Chromecast, Unofficial Manual

Good source for Chromecast use below --

Getting Started With Google Chromecast: The Unofficial Manual – ReadWrite: "... Tab casting is rather interesting for another reason. Thanks to this feature, anything you can open and play within a Chrome browser can play on your television. This includes many unsupported video sites—particularly at full screen playback—as well as select video files (including H.264 MP4 files and WMV vids), audio clips and songs, and images. You can open computer media files in Chrome easily, whether by dragging and dropping them on your Chrome browser or, within the application, going to "File -> Open File…"..."(read full article at link below)

(Editor's note: I "cut the cord" last August when I installed Chromecast and saw everything it could do -- I also disconnected and gave away my Roku -- video quality on Chromecast superior to Roku)

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The Post-TV World

Kevin Spacey at the Edinburgh Television Festival:
The device and length are irrelevant. For kids growing up now, there's no difference between watching Avatar on an iPad, or watching YouTube on a TV, or watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It's all content. It's just story.
A "TV" is just another device with a screen in your living room. People now watch streaming video on different devices/screens around the world. According to Ooyala:
  • Mobile and tablet video share has grown 133% year-over-year.
  • PC viewers watched live video 11X longer than VOD (video on demand), for an average of 30 minutes per session in Q3.
  • Tablet TV viewers spent 25% of their viewing time watching videos more than 60 minutes long.
Welcome to the Post-TV World!

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Popular streaming channels: Netflix: The king of movie and TV show streaming. $7.99/mo. YouTube: User-submitted videos and some original programming. Free. Hulu Plus: TV shows days after they air and some movies. $7.99/mo. Amazon Prime: A strong Netflix competitor with other Amazon benefits. $79/year. Crackle: Movies and TV mostly from Sony's library. Free. Vudu: Movie rental site owned by Walmart. Fees per movie

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