[LINK] iView outpaces iTunes

[Jan Whitaker]

iView steals a march on rivals

Karl Quinn
February 20, 2012 - 3:00AM

THE ABC's iView player is on track to overtake piracy, which is 
illegal, as Australia's preferred source of streamed and downloaded 
video content, a study has found.

Forty per cent of all Australians watch video downloads or 
video-on-demand content more than once a week, according to the TV & 
Video 2011 Consumer Trends report produced by the telecommunications 
company Ericsson and released today.

The survey of more than 1000 Australians found that 32 per cent of 
those who watched streamed or downloaded content did so via iView, 
the ABC's catch-up video service, which is available on computer, on 
TV via gaming consoles and on mobile devices.

That made iView the second-most-popular source, just behind illegal 
file-sharing, to which 33 per cent of downloaders admitted, and ahead 
of the 22 per cent who sourced content for a fee from iTunes, the 
third-most-popular source.

The relatively strong showing of iTunes suggests the prevalence of 
piracy owes more to the tardiness of content providers than any 
innate desire to rip them off, said Ericsson's Kursten Leins.

''We're not a bunch of thieves by nature. There's latent demand 
there, and it's clear consumers want to have timely access to legal 
content and they're willing to pay for it,'' he said.

Rather than trying to ''protect and litigate'', the best response to 
piracy was to ''give the customers what they really want'', by making 
it available to download and stream at high quality, at a fair price 
and without delay''.

''People will go looking for stuff and they'll find it because there 
are many different ways of consuming content,'' he said. ''We're not 
saying file sharing is a good thing, we're just saying it's the 
symptom, not the cause.''

The Australian findings are part of a global survey that found 
Australian patterns were similar to those elsewhere, with the notable 
exception of the US, where illegal downloading accounts for just 14 
per cent of streaming and downloading of video content.

Paid video on demand, by contrast, is far more developed in the US, 
where Hulu and Netflix are the leading suppliers of downloaded or 
streamed content. Each is used by more than 50 per cent of the market.

This story was found at: 
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/iview-steals-a-march-on-rivals-20120219-1th84.html 




Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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