YouTube is the king of mobile, Netflix the king of our living rooms!
Today, two brands dominate the global video market. In two sectors: YouTube is the king of the mobile, Netflix is the king of our living rooms! At least that’s the case in the U.S. – it will take a bit longer for the same to happen here in Germany.
Innovation in Video: Live Interactivity is the Key
According to Jeron Doucet, chief strategy officer at Ex Machina, 80 percent of the population in the economically and technologically leading countries have already got the YouTube app on their mobiles. And they spend a lot of time streaming videos. Not surprising when you take into account that there are more than seven billion videos in YouTube’s electronic library. The average viewing length for a YouTube video is 4.4 minutes. “YouTube is definitely the king of video snacking,” says Doucet, alluding to our eating habits. In the meantime, the video giant is energetically nibbling away at the advertising pie that until now has been reserved for classic TV.
Fear and horror in the TV industry
On the other hand, there’s the ‘king of our living rooms’, Netflix, and three-quarters of all U.S. households have a Netflix subscription. Netflix accounts for around 40 percent of OTT (stands for ‘over-the-top’, or TV and video consumption via Internet platforms) usage in the U.S. That’s three times more than the next competitor. Netflix is not only a rival to the big, classic TV networks, but in the U.S. also threatening the powerful cable TV providers – the streaming service is the reason why people are cancelling their cable subscriptions. There’s even already a word for them: `cord cutters’. Cord cutting is spreading fear and
horror in the TV and advertising industries.
So, YouTube and Netflix have definitely taken over the video-on-demand (VOD) and online video market. Even though they didn’t actually invent interactive television. That appeared on the market around 35 years ago, but hardly had any practical use. Not really even when Time Warner Cable in 1992 launched the first VOD product and interactive feature. It took around 25 years for interactive video experience applications and models to be developed that proved to be of value and were accepted by consumers. In
the end, two newcomers knocked out the big, established players on the TV market and led this model to success: YouTube and Netflix. Two companies that didn’t even exist 25 years ago. And now, these two dominate the video market.