While sites like YouTube that offer short clips of user generated videos have gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of years, the ABI report shows that viewers are also interested in watching TV shows and movies online.

Americans are watching more video on their PCs via broadband connections than ever before, according to a recent report published by market research firm ABI Research.

Meanwhile, older consumers are watching more short clips online than actual TV shows. Three quarters of those over 65 who watch video online responded that they have never watched TVs or movies online, according to the survey.

“Today’s younger consumers are developing habits that will mean drastic changes for the video entertainment market,” Michael Wolf, research director at ABI said in a statement. “Many consume a large percentage or even a majority of their video entertainment through online distribution today, and we believe that this trend will continue to accelerate as more efforts are made to put this content on various non-PC screens.”

But Web-based video isn’t without its challenges or without controversy. Sending video over the Internet eats up a lot of bandwidth. And peer-to-peer applications, such as BitTorrent, which distribute video have come under fire over the past year as a network menace.

Of course, much of the growth in this area comes from younger consumers. When asked if they watched long-form content such as TV shows or movies online, nearly half of those under the age of 25 and 53 percent of those aged 25 to 29 said they had done so at least once a month.

Over the past year, the number of U.S. consumers who had watched a video streamed through their browser doubled over the past year, going from 32 percent a year ago to 63 percent today. ABI analysts attribute the increase to more rich content available on the Web as well as faster speed Internet connections.

All of the major TV networks in the U.S. are currently offering at least some of their TV shows online. Some of the shows can be accessed right from the network’s Web site. But video aggregator sites such as Hulu.com also help consumers find what they’re looking for. Hulu was launched as a cooperative venture of TV networks to provide easy access to movies and TV shows.

Another important driver for watching TV online has been the proliferation of faster speed broadband connections. Cable operators have steadily been pushing up their speeds. And services like Verizon’s Fios service, which runs over fiber optic lines directly into the home, have also boosted broadband speeds.

The gear, installed at Rolling Stone's NYC office

Here’s the concept: It’s no secret young consumers don’t get high-end audio. It just seems like either total BS or an extravagance for the rich. Yes, it can be both of those things, but there’s a lot of great, affordable high-end audio that’s available to anyone who’s truly passionate about music. Here’s one quick example, Usher Audio’s staggeringly good S-520 speakers that go for $400 a pair (I’ll review them in this space soon).

Anyway, a high-end publicist friend of mine proposed this reach out to the youth concept through Rolling Stone magazine. He wanted to blow the magazine’s writers away with high-end sound and convinced two of his clients, Canadian electronics manufacturer Bryston, and Thiel, a speaker company from Kentucky, to loan Rolling Stone $40K worth of gear for their reviewers to enjoy for three months. Seems like a great “what if” idea to me. Obviously, the reviewers know music, and I can’t wait to hear how they’re affected by hearing music like never before.

It’s a killer system, with a Bryston BCD-1 CD player, Bryston BP-26 preamp, and Bryston 28B-SST power amps mated with Thiel’s astonishing CS3.7 speakers and SS2 subwoofer. For guys used to hearing music over $29 PC speakers it’s the equivalent moving up from a skateboard to a Chevy Corvette. Now they’ll actually get to hear the music they’re critiquing at least as well as the people who recorded the tunes in the first place. Who knows, maybe they’ll communicate that experience to their readers. Point is, sound matters, and hearing it with the best possible speakers and electronics is a good idea. We’ll see.

(Credit:
Thiel)

Thiel's CS3.7

In bad times, customers look for solid companies. Brands that are visible win. The worse thing you can do in a downturn is cut the marketing and sales budget by too much. While some belt tightening across the enterprise is prudent, this is one cost center where too much cutting can kill you. One area you can cut in marketing is the reach and frequency advertising. It is more powerful and cost effective to go big, in a very targeted way for shorter lightening strikes, than to spread an advertising budget evenly over 12 months. Don’t forget, if you make your brand disappear for a while, it may disappear forever.

Making smart cuts is part of winning in downturns. But no one ever cost-cut their way to greatness. Now is the time to go on the attack. It just takes courage, cash, and conviction.

The seminal move is to figure out what the key differentiator is for your company. Then launch a campaign to drive home that differentiation while building the category for your offerings. Consider traditional approaches (advertising, PR, direct, events, etc.), but emphasize nontraditional, highly-viral ideas. Here are some great recent examples:

Trek Bikes challenges people to ride their bikes more with their new Web site. Kinesio, the new athletic tape, gave their product away to athletes from 58 countries for use at the Olympic Games. One look at the wild, black spidery-like tattoo-tape on Kerri Walsh’s body as she swatted volleyballs down opponents throats and a lot of people started buying the stuff.
This summer legendary billionaire corporate raider and oil man T. Boone Pickens launched a bold campaign to create a breakthrough in market demand for alternate sources of energy. His ads, Web site and PR (appearances on CNN, Fox News, the New York Times and many, many more) make his case for reducing American use of foreign oil and embracing wind, solar, and natural gas, all while creating demand for his new companies.

Buy companies

Downturns are the best time to take market share. Most companies overreact. They get too conservative. They also forget that they are not the victims of the market.

Downturns are the best time to buy companies, and here are four reasons:

I am reminded of the sage words of Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith, who said, “Love in an elevator, livin’ it up when I’m going down.” Well, it’s time to live it up.

Cloud services
Enterprise social software (Social networks, wikis, blogs, prediction markets)
New software as a service (SaaS) apps
The emerging category of PaaS (platform-as-a-service)
Blade servers and storage
New virtualization & provisioning technologies
New mobile apps (Anyone notice the
iPhone & BlackBerry growth?) Business technology budgets at many companies will do down in this downturn. The question is, can companies cut and grow at the same time. They need to find and cut waste to fund new Web 2.0 projects. Optimization is the key. Following are a few ideas:

Whack 10 percent of all development projects (At least that many are no longer needed.)
Cut production apps by 10 percent (At least that many are under-used.)
Increase data center and application consolidation efforts
Look at more areas to outsource

Guest post:
Christopher Lochhead, the retired chief marketing officer at Scient and Mercury, offers a follow-up from his post in August on how companies can thrive in a prolonged economic downturn.

Customers buy (or they don’t) based on the way we do business with them, not the other way around. So now is the time to get aggressive, compel customers to buy and hit competitors when they are weak.

After twenty years in business and being the marketing chief at three public companies, Christopher Lochhead retired at 38. Now, he serves on a few boards and is a part-time strategy advisor. Every year he gives a handful of speeches, and from time to time writes something. Check out www.lochhead.com.

Launch a bold marketing campaign

Invest in new technology
Time has proven that companies that leapfrog with technology win. It is surprising how slowly Web 2.0 and other important new technologies are being adopted in the enterprise. Much of the innovation seems to be coming in the form of new consumer services and technologies. Now is the time for the enterprise to move from Web 1.0 to 2.0. There is a whole new range of new 2.0 stuff to look at and implement. Here is a list of a few of my favorites:

Reading The Wall Street Journal and watching CNBC lately can drive a person (namely me) to drink. Which is fun, but beyond answering the question, “Which scotch will I drink?” the seminal question is “How do we thrive in a downturn?”

Valuations and market caps are way down. Any company you want to buy is a lot cheaper today then it was a year ago.
Doing acquisitions now allows you to expand your market footprint fast, with new offerings, customers, geographies, or markets.
The dreaded word “synergy,” which is a euphemism for layoffs and cost cutting. It may be harsh to say, but acquisitions are a great excuse to take unneeded people and costs out of both the company you are buying and your own company.
It sends a strong message to your customers, people, competitors, and shareholders that you are a bad-ass company that is going for it, when most of your competition is hiding under their desks. This will often drive them to buy more of your product and your stock.

Maybe Twitter isn't so great.

(Credit: Internet Evolution)
In a recent article, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, claims that the internet is broken. While some of his arguments may have merit, it’s a shockingly bizarre PR tactic to come out against something (especially the internet) when your own stuff is broken. Especially the APIs!

The basis of his argument is that the internet is “in production” but there are scaling issues such as IPv4 and now we have to rethink how to fix them. True, but maybe he can give IM back to Twitter users in his spare time.

In true ironic reality show fashion, a poll running next to the article shows that 48% of the 141 visitors to the site believe “Twitter, a fad, will slowly fade away.”

I will now post this to my @daveofdoom Twitter account using the web instead of an API. Irony is delicious.

SEC filings show that Take-Two says it has received other offers, but has spurned those as well as the original $2 billion offer EA made last Friday and announced last Sunday, the Journal reports.

EA issued a public statement on Sunday saying it had made an earlier offer to Take-Two that was rejected and that it was boosting the per-share price it was willing to pay to make the deal worth $2 billion. But Take-Two quickly issued its own announcement, saying it thought EA’s offer was too small and that it would prefer to wait to have any negotiations with anyone until after the April 29 release of Grand Theft Auto IV, which is expected to be a hit.

For its part, EA has said it wanted to get a deal done before the game’s release. It is also evident that EA’s interest in Take-Two is at least partly in response to the recent acquisition of Activision by Vivendi, a marriage that could potentially turn the resulting video game giant, to be known as Activision Blizzard, into the industry’s largest company.

“The ones that are still working.”

The 40-year-old Brit has set out to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, and she passed a milestone recently: She’s now halfway to Hawaii. That’s after setting off from San Francisco in her 24-foot rowboat just before midnight on May 24.

Roz Savage set off from San Francisco more than two months ago to row across the Pacific Ocean. Here, she's seen early in her voyage, near the Farallon Islands.

(Credit:
Roz Savage )

With under 1,000 miles left to go on the first leg of her voyage, she took time out late last week to talk via satellite phone. Her location? Somewhere in the Pacific. More precisely, around 140 degrees west.

So what’s still working?

“The TomTom GPS is working. I consult that six times a day,” said Savage, adding that she’s been using it to update the ship’s log. She got the TomTom GO 720 last year for her
car. (Savage wrote in a photo caption on her blog: “The TomTom GPS from my car is rather confused to find itself in the middle of the Pacific.”)

She also has a handful of iPods onboard, but she said she’s only used one so far: the one that TWiT.tv’s Leo Laporte loaded up with more than 300 audio books. (Laporte checks in with Savage a couple of times a week for the podcast series “Roz Rows the Pacific.”) A few of the titles that have stood out so far include the fantasy novel A Game of Thrones and the nonfiction work A Crack in the Edge of the World, which covers the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

She has two laptops onboard, a MacBook and Panasonic Toughbook. Savage sends updates for her Web site via her satellite phone. (She also has a spare phone this time. When Savage rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in a race a few years ago, her satellite phone went dead about a month before she arrived at the finish.)

One gadget Savage is relying on is her TomTom GPS device. As she quipped in a photo caption on her blog, 'the TomTom GPS from my car is rather confused to find itself in the middle of the Pacific.'

(Credit:
Roz Savage )

What’s not working? Her energy-efficient Spectra desalinator that was capable of producing 25 liters of water an hour. “It’s totally corroded.” But she has reserve water supplies and a hand-pump water maker. Her onboard chart plotter also isn’t working, so that’s where the TomTom comes in. (In a blog posting Monday, Savage wrote: “The death toll on electronic components continues.” Over the weekend it seems chargers for her satellite phone and
iPod conked out. Luckily, she’s got backups.)

Even so, as Savage has said, her boat is a little model of self-sufficiency. She has solar panels and a wind generator providing the power for her electronics. She is growing her own bean sprouts. So what could this mean for the world at large?

“Sustainability is rather limitless,” said Savage. While she doesn’t currently have a home, Savage knows what she would do if she did. “I would very much want to make it energy-efficient, self-sufficient.” She said she finds value in being an example to people in different ways, and one aspect of that is embracing green energy.

In addition to her major task at hand, Savage also aims to raise awareness about the effects of pollution–in particular, plastic–in our oceans. Her trip is a project of the Blue Frontier Campaign, whose focus is on “seaweed (marine grassroots) efforts” surrounding ocean and coastal conservation.

Savage's view from her boat on day 36 of her trek across the Pacific.

(Credit:
Roz Savage )

Are people more receptive to her message because people in general are more environmentally aware these days? Or is it harder to get people’s attention because of all the news out there?

“It’s hard to tell from the (reader) comments. It’s a self-selecting sample,” Savage said. “But something I set out to do is draw people to the Web site in hopes that…they’ll stick around long enough to get the environmental messages.”

Savage keeps people coming to the Web site with the help of her mother, Rita Savage. As part of her “shore manager duties,” Rita keeps the blog updated, uploads photos, and has even written a couple of guest blogs. Rita, who turns 70 next year, has “moved along with technology,” said Savage. It goes back to the early 1980s when Rita bought a primitive computer for the family: a Sinclair ZX81, which had to be plugged into the TV set and had 1 kilobyte of memory. She’s very methodical and persistent, too. While “some of us would be heaving the laptop,” Savage said her mother sits there and tries to solve the problem.

The same could be said of Savage and her own stick-to-itiveness. But she hasn’t always been that way. “I did have to work up to this kind of thing. It was incremental…I didn’t go from an office job to rowing across an ocean,” said the former IT consultant.

And while you might think rowing solo across an ocean would make everything else in life seem easy, well, it doesn’t. “There are so many different kinds of challenges,” Savage said. Taking on these treks has given her more self-esteem, self-respect, and confidence. But, she said, she’s aware of her limitations too.

Savage is rowing across the ocean in three stages over three years. So far she’s been averaging about 30 miles a day. She is hoping to reach Hawaii by the end of the month. In all, she plans to travel more than 7,000 miles, ending up in Australia in 2010. (Among the safety gadgets she has aboard her boat, the “Brocade,” is a positioning beacon from Marine Track. Find out her latest position by going to her blog. Information includes latitude, longitude, and speed.)

It is her second attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. Last summer, Savage set off only to be foiled by bad weather some two weeks into the trip. She was rescued by the Coast Guard about 90 miles off the California coast.

In an interview with NPR last year, Savage talked about first coming up with the idea to row across the Atlantic: “My first thought was that is the best idea I’ve ever had. Of course, my second thought was that was without a doubt the worst idea I’ve ever had.”

Savage has said that her ocean voyages lead to frequent “a ha” moments. So what are some she’s had during her time on the Pacific?

“You never regret being ready sooner rather than later,” she said Friday. “It was an absolutely mad scramble” once she got a window of good weather to set off on her trip this time around. She had only 36 hours’ notice.

There’s a flip side too. “You’ll never be 100 percent ready.” But, as Savage said, “I’ve managed.” That applies on land too.

Updated 8:45 a.m. August 13 to correct the model of Sinclair computer. It was a ZX81.

Citing Google as a counter-example, he discussed how Google has been able to pull out of less-than-successful businesses, such as its own social-networking tool and Google Video. (I would throw Froogle onto the list as well.)

To be fair to Yahoo, it recently yanked Yahoo photos in favor of Flickr, and just announced it is dropping its music service and transferring subscribers to Rhapsody.

But it’s also fair to say that Yahoo has gone beyond being a “one-stop shop” (1990s portal thinking) to a company that neither employees nor customers really know what it’s about. I would tend to agree with Kanellos that an unwillingness to draw boundaries around what’s in and what’s out has a good deal to do with Yahoo’s problems. (Full disclosure: both Yahoo and Microsoft are clients of frog design, where I work, though I have no inside knowledge of the merger at all.)

In the book Code Name Ginger, which chronicled the development of the Segway Transporter, there was a great phrase–”drowning puppies”–that describes the mindset necessary when tackling innovative products and services.

The challenge is this: you’ll have lots of great ideas, but you will only be able to expend finite resources to bring a small number of them to market. If you try to spread resources across them all, they will all be starved and unhealthy. So you have to prioritize and not fund some of them. This is very difficult because, just like puppies, these ideas bounce around joyfully and are so shiny and perfect and full of future growth and promise. But the sad fact is you have to drown some of your puppies. It’s a harsh phrase, but accurate.

Yahoo has continued adding property on property, service on service, but has not done enough puppy drowning to allow for shifting away from less successful areas. Regardless of whether the merger happens, let’s hope Yahoo can regain some of its focus both for employees and customers.

Want!
Waiting for revamped iPods
Have no need for it
Taking a wait-and-see approach
I’ll stick with my ‘82 Walkman

View results

(Credit:
Microsoft)

This week, Microsoft let more Zune HD details out of the bag. The black 16GB version of the upcoming touch-screen media player will sell for $219.99, while a 32GB version in a “platinum” shade will cost $289.99.

Among the device’s features are its OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display and multitouch Web browser. It will be able to send video in 720p to an HDTV (using a dock, sold separately).

So now that you know what to expect when the Zune HD shows up in September, what are your thoughts? Vote in our poll.

Because it’s Monday, I figure you could all use a little amusement. Here’s a blurry camera-phone video shot at Friday night’s launch party for New York dot-com Dropio at the West Village nightclub Le Royale, in which the dance floor got a little bit rowdy.

Watch British import Pete Cashmore, founder of social-networking blog Mashable, bounce around like Silly Putty. (He’s the guy in the Mashable T-shirt.) With him is entrepreneur and dance-floor buddy Michael Gruen (guy in the argyle sweater).

Happy Monday!

Seth Rosenblatt (from CNET’s Download.com) and I are co-hosting a CNET Ask the Editors live session, during which we’ll be answering questions about
Firefox 3. So if you’ve got any, check in to join our chat forum. We’re here to help.

Why both of us? Because Seth knows more about using Firefox than I do, but I’ve spent some time with the Mozilla and Firefox executives, and can talk about the strategy behind the browser.

It should be fun. I love these live sessions. So come on over and join us.

See all our Firefox 3 resources.