Heroes is undoubtedly one of the most downloaded shows online and one that we track in our multi platform video measurement and audience engagement platform Scope. With the hype building for the new season of Heroes premiering in September 2008, we decided to put the last two seasons under microscope and see what were the total downloads for each show. See below for a list of the most popular shows of Heroes.

The table above is just a sample snapshot taken from the Scope for Heroes consumption globally and in the United States. With over 2,500 torrent files uploaded online for Heroes, it was downloaded over 14.5 million times by consumers worldwide. France was the top country of download for Heroes with about 7 million downloads followed by United Kingdom and United States with 3.6 million and 3.2 million downloads for the show so far. As you can see, the demand for Season 2 after the amazing season finale was huge and the first episode of Season 2 was the most downloaded show so far for Heroes with over 1.3 million downloads worldwide just for that one show alone. We will be eagerly watching the next season and how it debuts online and on peer to peer.

One of the great things about Scope is that we not only track peer-to-peer but also all the viral video platforms like YouTube, DailyMotion and tons of other sites out there. Check out this Fan made trailer of Heroes Season 3:

For any further information on the metrics or access to raw data, please contact us.

We do a lot of video monitoring of cell phone makers and one of them we monitor is HTC. HTC released a great spot last month of fingers going through various landscapes. Yes, you read right…fingers. The ad spot was for HTC’s Touch cell phone which is positioned as a competitor to Apple’s iPhone. The videos posted online quickly turned into a deathwatch between PC and Mac fanboys:

The great thing about Scope Video is that we can do great research on which ad formats work in this cut throat market. Clearly, this did not do well online and for good reason.

There are hundreds of millions of videos out there, ever wonder what brands are really engaging online video and doing a good job? We decided to take a look. We picked our favorite twenty brands and were quite surprised at what we got when we plugged the campaigns into Scope. 

So starting this week, we are launching the Brand20 Index. Every week a bunch of our highly trained, excited, and motivated analysts will log into Scope to compile a list of how these twenty brands are fairing in the world of online video. This is a huge deal because a lot of people are moving away from watching TV and going online to watch video in all sorts of places. So, having an online video strategy when it comes to brand management and promotion is key.

How it works 

The easiest way to make this list is to just pick the top video for X brands and make our chart that way. But that is not good enough because what if, for example, Nokia has a video with 10 million but there are only 2 videos related to Nokia. On the other hand a brand like BMW has a top video with 800,000 views but has 6,000 related videos. As you can quickly guess, BMW as a whole has more views.

What we wanted to do was aggregate thousands of videos that are related to a brand and deliver the aggregate stream count. So that is exactly what we did and with the help of Scope, we were able to do it effortlessly. The great thing about Scope is that it does most of the heavy lifting for us. It 1) Indexes all the videos related to our campaign 2) Monitors millions of videos across multiple platforms in realtime 3) Delivers insights into our campaigns such as traffic, unified demographics, and positioning information. In a few clicks, we know where our audience is, how to target them, and how to promote our newly published videos. 

The brands we picked 

The brands were chosen by polling our analysts. These are the brands that will make up the twenty:  BMW, Disney, Audi, Nike, Pepsi, Toyota, Mercedes, Sony, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, EBay, McDonald’s, Budweiser, Hyndai, Motorola, Taco Bell, Chrysler, Dell, Fedex, and American Express.

Suggesting brands

Don’t like one of the brands on there? Want another brand listed and tracked instead? Well here is your chance. Use the comment section on our blog to let us know your thoughts and if you have a suggestion for another brand, speak out! The more vocal people are about another brand, the higher the chance it makes it on the list. 

What to expect next week 

This is the first chart so it is sorted by all time view streams. But starting next week, we will use this chart as a reference point and sort the list of how many streams the twenty brands received for the week.  So we hope you enjoy our first chart. Be sure to click the “Top Video” link to take a look at what the top video is. There is definitely a wide range of videos from professionally created adverts to user generated content. It is truly amazing to see that anyone can have a profound effect on a brand.

Just how fast is online video growing? Fast and the numbers speak for themselves. Here is a great article about where we can see video consumption headed:

• Approximately half of online consumers sometimes watch their favorite shows online.
• Watching TV online has now replaced news as the most widely viewed content online.
• The top two reasons for watching TV on internet:
  • More than three out of five online TV viewers cite personal convenience as the major reason for watching TV broadcasts online. 
  • More than one-third cite a wish to avoid watching television commercials (other reasons cited include portability and a preference for computer viewing).
• The proportion of internet users who catch up online on missed TV content has increased to 42% from 30% a year ago.
• Four out of every five online viewers say that watching TV programs online has not changed their television viewing habits, but a small percentage claim that their traditional television viewing has decreased.
• The top methods for viewing broadcasts online are streaming and free downloading: About two-thirds of viewers stream online content, more than 40% download content for free.

Complete Article

People spend 10x the amount of time watching videos and listening to music than they do watching TV and listening to the radio. While TV ad spending is going down, as audience leaves for the internet, online video ad spending has grown far slower. Do you know why? Well we know the answer and we have been beating the drum for quite some time. It is the lack of metrics! I found this great article that has done done some serious research by polling the biggest names in the ad business to find out why they are keeping the wallets close but this passage stood out:

“McKinsey polled 410 marketing executives in five sectors, and among those already advertising online, 52 percent said “insufficient metrics to measure impactâ€? was the biggest barrier, followed by insufficient in-house capabilities (41 percent), the difficulty of convincing management (33 percent), limited reach of digital tools (24 percent) and insufficient capabilities at agency (18 percent).”

Amazing. These are the things holding back the ad industry and we couldn’t agree more. You can read the complete article here

Develop methodologies for serving and measuring in a super distributed landscape.Staying on top of the methods for digital video distribution online can seem daunting……….Courtesy: Eric Druckenmiller, iMedia Connections

While US is the leader in media advertising with its huge budgets, other countries soon follow in their footsteps. Indian media advertising is Rs. 3000 Crore market (~ $1 billion). With more and more people coming online in India, this market is only going to grow. The giants like Bennett & Coleman and others are trying hard to get a piece of this huge pie.Businessworld ran a cover story on online advertising in India. Indian users don’t have great access to the Internet compared to users in other countries. A large number of users in India still gain access to the Internet via dialup but that is changing fast and affordable broadband is making great inroads. The end result is the number of users jumping online is soaring but the sad reality is there are no metrics to engage online users in these emerging markets.Most of the advertising money in the Indian sub continent still goes to the traditional print and Television advertising, but as broadband penetration increases, India is going to become a huge market destination for online advertisers. The sheer population of India will soon be a major attraction for advertisers.

IntroductionAlright, a little background to those who are new to Divinity. We are the world’s largest Metrics Firm Period. Our global network tracks everything from movies, music, and books to television shows. We take this metrics data and help our clients market better, help in syndication, and help plan multi-million dollar events that fill seats. To the point, we help our clients make BIG BUCKS.VistaEnter Vista. Every so often we decide to write about cool things we notice on the Scope network and Vista has been something we have been tracking ever since we flicked the switch to our monitoring network. When we got the news from Engadget that MS was going to be releasing many flavors of the operating system to the market, we knew it was going to create widespread consumer confusion. Guess what? Yep, it did and the numbers show it.So let’s start with the sad news. First off, our network is built to watch users as they behave on the network and we have noticed over over 350,000 downloads of Windows Vista and Vista related content. This includes slipstreamed isos of Windows Vista and Office 2007. That is about $154,000,000 loss from what we have observed and if you remember correctly, we started our monitoring network two months ago. So we missed a large percentage of POIs that have died for whatever reason. And no to mention, people who do download Vista often give it to their friends, so the numbers we are talking about here are significantly higher. But there is still a lot of we can learn from this:Complicated ExecutionOut the door the packages that were introduced to market were quite complicated. Windows Vista this and Vista that caused a lot of consumers to scratch their head and attempt to bargain with what features they thought they wanted and what features they thought they did not need. Guess what? Most consumers at your local computer store are not tech savvy and most were absolutely confused on what to buy.Secondly, brand new computers often times were not loaded with Ultimate leading to consumers to get it form “elsewhere” and lastly, consumers who were not sure how their existing computers would handle Vista just got it from “elsewhere” as well to try it out.Bad PositioningThe print advertising campaign also did not go according to plan. To understand what I am talking about one needs to look at Scope. The Scope Number for Windows Vista is about 20,000 and that gives us a cross section of the population that is extremely interested in Vista and gives us all kind of marketing insights. We even went as far to put Windows XP into the system, which we have tons of data for, to further solidify our geographical marketing conclusions. Doing all that research was easy since Scope does all the analytics for us, we simply have to cash in.So, we can clearly see the places we do not want to advertise. Guess the marketers missed it, and we saw Vista signs popping up in areas that could care less about Vista. Take for example the Bay Area, CA. We saw scores of places where high priced Vista billboards were rented out in extremely poor areas where worrying about food was more of a priority than what operating system would “wow” them. The trend continued in Oakland and in parts of San Jose.EndWe like Vista. We plan to upgrade all our office machines to use Vista soon enough but from a marketing perspective, something went horribly wrong and the numbers prove it.