On-Demand Viewing Up Along with Web Use after Storms
On-demand video use surged at some video providers after a second snowstorm blanketed much of the Northeast and mid- Atlantic last week (CD Feb 12 p7), our survey of major providers found. That was accompanied by an increase in broadband and data usage across wireline, wireless providers and cable providers in the two regions, including RCN, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Verizon. Some TV stations continued to have higher-than-usual website visits.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
RCN, with VOD use up 300 percent in the New York market Wednesday, hopes higher usage will continue, though it doesn’t expect anything near that surge, executives said. “It would be nice if we could continue those VOD buys every day of the week,” said New York General Manager Anthony Ontiveros. That may happen as “people got a taste that it’s very easy to use,” a spokeswoman said. On-demand views in the cable provider’s Washington market were up a lot during the first blizzard, which hit the weekend of Feb. 6, and rose at the northern Virginia systems of Cox Communications (CD Feb 9 p4). Last week’s blizzard led to “a sizeable increase in VOD usage in our storm-impacted markets,” which also include Connecticut and Rhode Island, a Cox spokesman said Friday. “We've seen as much as an 80 percent increase in use, depending on the day” from daily averages in January.
“We continue to see higher-than-normal VOD usage” at Verizon’s FiOS subscription-TV service, a spokesman said Friday. Across cable operators in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, on-demand transactions were up 5.7 percent Feb. 6- 7 compared with the previous weekend, said a spokeswoman for Rentrak. That’s based on preliminary data from the company, which tracks on-demand purchases. More time spent watching TV “is sort of a positive” for cable subscribers’ “understanding the benefits” of on-demand video, said President Bruce Leichtman of industry researcher Leichtman and Associates. “But I don’t think over the course of three days you are going to see any change in behavior.”
There were large increases in viewership last week from the previous week at nine TV stations in the Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia and Washington markets that responded to our survey. Several also saw a jump in visits to their websites. Disney-owned WABC New York had a 600 percent increase Wednesday from the daily average last month to 1 million page views, the ABC station said. “Our online impressions, on the day of and the night before the storm, were much higher than normal levels.” Friday’s page views are likely to be 50 percent above the average day, and doubled on Thursday, a station representative said. NBC station WRC-TV Washington, owned by NBC Universal, continued to see higher-than-normal online visits Thursday, said Matt Glassman, senior content producer. -- Jonathan Make
Storm Notebook
Comcast’s cable network supported millions of on-demand video streams during the “height” of last week’s blizzard “as people hunkered down and wanted entertainment,” blogged Senior Vice President Rick Germano of its customer operations. “Our network successfully supported a record number of customers -- including federal government employees in the Beltway” and private-sector workers elsewhere who used their office virtual private networks (http://xrl.us/bgvu3a). The “majority” of outages during the Feb. 5-6 storm in the Washington area were power-related and service was restored “quickly,” a company spokeswoman told us Thursday.
----
Radio and TV stations in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and East Coast pre-empted regularly scheduled shows to run expanded news coverage of the storm with fewer ads, NAB President Gordon Smith said Friday. The storms pointed to the “reliability and immediacy” of broadcasting, he said.