Over at alvear.com, I mentioned that that I’m conducting a research report on how Internet video can impact social change.

I’m inviting non-profits, independent filmmakers and other organizations interested in social change to discuss how people can widen their distribution (to DVDs, theaters, etc.) and how they can earn additional revenue.

If you’re involved in Internet video delivery or social change, I’d like to invite you to fill out this survey. Responses will be anonymous and I’ll be able to share top level results publicly.

As an incentive for participation, I am offering a $150 Kiva gift certificate to one random person. These certificates allow you to log in to Kiva.org and micro-lend money to entrepreneurs all around the world.

The survey will close on July 7th, 2008 and the winner will be contacted privately soon afterward.

Please contact me if you have any questions. Thanks!

As much as I love Internet video, I hate online video advertising. Sorry. I just want to get right to the content. I hate pop-ups, interstitials, and other “in your face” advertising.

But what really gets me angry is when I click on a link to watch a video, and I get an ad. Argh! I don’t want to watch an ad. I don’t want to wait 15 to 30 seconds for the ad to finish. I want my video!

This just happened to me a few minutes ago, when I was reading a Yahoo News article about American Idol. I saw this “related video” next to the story and clicked on it. But the first thing that popped up was an ad for something. I was so disgusted I closed the video window and didn’t even get to watch the clip.

I realize advertising is important and pays the bills (yadda yadda), but I don’t care. I guess I’m much more laid back about advertising on TV since I can tune it out. Or if I’m Tivoing, I can fast forward. But many Internet video advertising disables the fast forward button when an ad is showing. Argh!

Even though I was reading Yahoo News, the video came from AP. Other web sites that shove advertising at me include CNN and TMZ. Like AP Video, these sites open up a new browser window (yuck) and show a bunch of other clips that I may like to watch. Are they assuming that I want to watch other kinds of unrelated video clips just because I happen to be watching video? Sometimes I just want to get in, watch the video and get out. I don’t want to lazily watch a series of video clips all in a row.

Anyway, I guess the number one time NOT to play an online ad is before you play the actual content. Please, content owners around the web: You’re only turning off viewers. Let us get to the content, then throw some advertising at us. If I wanted to see an ad I’d watch the Super Bowl.

And yes, I’m back!

It looks like Internet video is still going strong. ComScore said that Google’s video properties captured 27% of the online video market share, with 2.5 billion videos watched in July 2007.

Overall, viewers watched more than 9 billion videos and an average of 3 hours of Internet video. By TV standards 3 hours that may not be much, but considering that most online video is less than 3 minutes long, that’s a lot of videos watched. Most people can watch 3 hours of TV every night!

Other factoids:

• The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
• Nearly three out of four (74.2 percent) U.S. Internet users viewed video online.
• More than one out of three (36.7 percent) U.S. Internet users viewed video on YouTube.com.
• The average online video viewer consumed 68 videos, or more than two per day.

It’s not quite IPTV. Not quite Internet video. It’s somewhere in between. It’s the delivery of TV of movies over the Internet to set-top boxes.  Think of past companies like Akimbo or Moviebeam. They focused on movies. Start-up Vudu is using a set-top box as well, but it’s mashing that with peer to peer technologies.

The Wall Street Journal has a story about KyLinTV, which delivers Chinese TV, movies and video to immigrants living in the U.S. It’s a different kind of market, because it’s so niche-y and because the content is delivered to the TV. And because the content is delivered over the public Internet via broadband.

Weird, eh?

KyLinTV costs $30 a month and has 31 Chinese TV channels. From the WSJ:

The technology company behind KyLinTV is NeuLion Inc., a Plainview, N.Y., start-up that sells a new streaming-video technology. It enables KyLinTV and other companies to deliver programming via the Internet to the TV sets of small but passionate audiences for topics such as Cuban baseball, religious programming and television shows in Africa.

These niches allow NeuLion to target very specific audiences that are willing to pay extra for TV that they miss receiving. It’s not Hollywood blockbusters or recent TV hits. It’s tried and true content that people will pay for. So far, KyLinTV has around 25,000 subscribers and will apparently break even once it hits 30,000 subscribers, according to NeuLion.

The downside? It’s YASTB (yet another set-top box). Most people won’t want yet another box to crowd next to the DVD player, Wii, cable box or Tivo. But since this is niche content to niche audiences, people are paying. And having content delivered via the Internet cuts down on a managed network, like say IPTV.

NeuLion will probably have success in this market, but how long will it really be sustainable? Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

YouTube topped the list of Internet video sites, according to Nielsen/NetRating’s research. For July 2007, YouTube had a unique audience of over 55 million people, a growth of 81% from a year ago.

YouTube continues to be the decisive number 1 video site. MySpace’s video site only has about 17.9 million users. If you count Google Video, which is number three, the total unique audience for Google/YouTube is 70,976,000 people. That’s almost 4x more than number two MySpace.

It’s interesting that Nielsen/NetRatings doesn’t put YouTube and Google together. Perhaps that’s because they still exist separately. Will Google ever integrate Google Video with YouTube? Why keep Google Video alive any longer?

Some of the other interesting insights into the Top 10 are the addition of sites like “Funny or Die”, Veoh and Break.com. Although they’re at the bottom of the list, they are breaking through.

In fact, Veoh showed the largest percent gain from a year ago, increasing its audience 183% to 2.8 million. Veoh has recently made news by filing a “pre-emptive lawsuit” against Universal Music Group (UMG).

AOL Video is a new entry in this year’s rankings and doesn’t appear in last year’s data. The rapid growth of AOL Video is because of the popularity of AOL’s gossip blog TMZ, which has lots of papparazzi video and lots of readers.

Also making a big jump is Yahoo! video up 169% from a year ago although I can’t attribute it to anything in particular.

Here’s the top 10: (Click on image to see it in full-size.)

[From Nielsen/NetRatings’s web site.]

Technorati Tags: Nielsen/Netratings, Internet video, streaming, streaming media, YouTube, Google, Google Video, Veoh