Will Europe follow Chinese trend of substituting TV for YouTube?
Written on 25th August 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
YouTube has become one of Holland’s top 3 most visited sites, a study by Dutch research agency Multiscope shows. Two thirds of Dutch Internet users check the video site on at least a monthly basis, partly due to the network effect of the service (You know the deal, bored people sending each other videos during work). Apart from these impressive numbers, one part in the study report particularly struck me: the extraordinarily high average visit time, which is 8 minutes. Is online video becoming a substitute for TV?
Chinese TV threatened by online videos
In China, this already is the case. The country is the home of the world’s most exciting online video market. The government isn’t afraid to pull the censorship card every once in a while, there’s tough competition, as much rumors as videos, and millions, millions of funding and views. When I interviewed Marc van der Chijs, founder of Tudou – largest video site of the world with 35 billion minutes viewing time in January -, he told me the average visitors stays on Tudou for 47 minutes. “For young Chinese people”, he said, “it is a substitute for television”.
Will Europe follow?
So while the first signs of a similar trend are appearing in the Netherlands, the questions arises whether we Europeans will face a similar scenario in the near future. Comscore recently released data from their online video measurement service, indicating that 23.2 million French Internet users viewed 2.1 billion videos online in January 2008. That number of 23.2 million viewers makes up for 79.5 percent of the total French Internet audience. So almost 80 percent of French Internet users watched on average 90 videos in one month.
There’s of course one major difference though — European television tends not to suffer from censorship threats, thus it’s not as biased as in China. No frightened kids who run to the “unbiased” and fun environment of online videos. Though when I think about it, the quality of Dutch TV isn’t particularly high either. Will we abandon the couch en masse to watch four-minute clips?
[Via: Bright (Dutch)]
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
By Bob Boynton on Aug 25, 2008
There is an awful lot of work going on to bring YouTube [the web in general] to your TV set. Tivo is the ‘name brand’ for doing it, but there are lots of others that will do the same. TV sets are big, they are getting excellent display properties, and then there is the couch. The ‘environment’ is better than sitting in front of a computer monitor.
The most likely outcome is convergence — it seems to me.
Reply
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Aug 25, 2008
@Bob what about Apple TV?
Reply
By Bob Boynton on Aug 26, 2008
This is an informative piece from NewTeeVee about the video coming out of the Democratic convention. Everybody is streaming.
http://newteevee.com/2008/08/2.....onvention/
When you had rabbit ears you got three distributors and something close to three producers. When cable came along the distribution and production industry was changed quite dramatically. We have a new technology for distribution, and one surely should expect equally dramatic differences in distribution and production. It is going to be very different.
I think we are in for much more variety. No enterprise is likely to capture huge chunks of the market in the way they have been able to do in the past.
But I think we will all want to take advantage of these changes sitting in front of what we now call a TV set.
Reply