Online Video Viewing on the Rise

According to Nielsen’s 2013 OTT Video Analysis, released last week September, viewers are streaming video at a breakneck pace - up 38% year over year, largely direct by the rapid growth of tablets and smartphones.  The data also surfaced details that some 38% of Americans are users or subscribers to Netflix, 18% are Hulu users (including 6% who subscribe to Hulu Plus) and 13% are Amazon Prime Instant Video users. The report also found that 88% of Netflix customers and 70% of Hulu Plus customers are binge users who stream three or more episodes of the same TV series in one day. This new ability to watch multiple episodes or even entire seasons of certain programs in one sitting is shifting the way viewers consume content and demonstrating incredible binge appetites for programming available anytime and anywhere on services such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime. MORE: 09/18/13 Nielsen.com - "Binging" is the New Viewing for Over-The-Top Streamers

Google Glass for Movie Making & other Possibilities

What would you do with $1,500? Well over 10,000 so-called Google Glass explorers are using them to search the Internet, write emails, check schedules, take pictures and shoot video in new ways never conceived. Now Google is enlisting film students from five Film colleges to help it explore how its wearable computing device can be used to make movies.  The participating schools are American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California are the participating schools. As part of its moviemaking experiment, Google will lend each school three pairs of Google Glass which the company says the schools will explore how to use Glass for documentary filmmaking, character development, location-based storytelling.

Obviously there are no limits to what they might do and according to Norman Hollyn, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, "students will be encouraged to use Glass to tell stories incorporating the first-person point of view." He elaborated by stating that one model that students might follow is one explored in the film, "Timecode," by director Mike Figgis, which uses multiple cameras to capture different people simultaneously. Students will also be encouraged to try to use Glass's data overlays as a way of revealing elements of a story. At least two short films are expected to be done by the beginning of next year and Google plans to share an update in the fall of how the students have progressed.

Students are not the only ones experimenting with Glass. Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America wants to integrate Glass into its cars to give consumers a door-to-door transition between pedestrian directions and in-car GPS. Earlier this month Qualcomm Life and Palomar Health announced an incubator they have called "Glassomics. The goal of the project is to explore the potential of wearable computing in medicine by designing and building a Glass app which empowers physicians with real-time access to information about their patients, such as laboratory results and genomic information."

 Dan McNelis, co-founder of Dito, a company involved in application development for Google glass said that "a client has them working on using Glass to build information modeling", basically allowing to move from the whiteboard to an in the field 3D imaging system. Dan when on to say "imagine the benefit that a Google Glass’ point-of-view system offers to a construction worker who could walk around a work site, look at a support column and confirm through Google Glass that it’s in the right place and set at the right angle."

I would be remiss if I didn't mention this here. We talk about the "second screen" here on SMM quite a bit and those interactive apps for television, movies and videogames are very likely to finally take off through Glass. Currently, most of us (except me and some of my readers) don’t want to be messing with their smartphones or tablets to get the second screen information, because they have to look away from the program they are trying to watch. Google Glass eliminates this challenge by displaying the information through an overlay. Social interactions, box scores, actors information, popup video style content, all delivered over what you are watching personalized by what you choose to see and know.

Bottom line, this is game changing technology and it has many potential uses. Google Glass will ultimately speed up and personalize the way we receive and process information in ways we never thought possible. It is an exciting technology that will continue to evolve until it becomes firmly entrenched in our everyday lives. Like any new, game changing, technology, there will be bumps in the road as technical’s get ironed out and people adjust to new social norms. This will only serve to improve Glass and make it an even greater experience.