Weekly online video consumption in the U.S. has risen to 9 hours and 18 minutes this year, up from 8 hours and 33 hours last year, according to a new survey by Limelight Networks.

In its State of Online Video 2020 report, Limelight Networks found that the average American binge-watches streaming content for 2 and 54 minutes per week, with 40% spending more than three hours bingeing on shows, with 6% saying they watch more than seven hours at a sitting.

In order to have content to binge, 45% of Americans have subscribed to a new streaming services in the last six months, Limelight Networks said. 

Limelight Network also noted a rise in the amount of time spent on user generated content, which is the third most popular content type with Americans watching themselves, their kids and their pets for 3 hours and 42 minute per week. 

By comparison, viewers spend 5 hours and 48 minutes watching TV shows online and 4 hours and 32 minutes watching movies.

YouTube is the top platform for user generated content, with 50% of those surveyed using it, followed by 22% for Facebook. TikTok was preferred by 13% of viewers 18 to 25 years old, but just 8% overall.

The survey was conducted Aug. 1-12 with 500 responses from consumer panels in each of 10 countries: France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S. 

"As we look to the future of e-learning, school systems will continue to leverage and experiment with these platforms in creative ways. Today, most school districts and universities are discovering new ways to integrate e-learning into their lesson plans." -Nigel Burmeister, VP of Product, Limelight Networks

The pandemic has turned our world upside down, forcing us to find new ways to connect and conduct daily activities. Streaming video has emerged as much more than an entertainment medium - now a means of uniting the world, providing the tools needed to learn, work and access information. This has sent streaming skyrocketing with Nielsen data revealing viewership has increased 85% during COVID-19.

Going forward, how will streaming continue to connect our world? When we look at the state of education, business and healthcare systems, it's impossible to operate without it. Online video is powering new ways to function in this new normal, changing how we learn, work and access information.

Powering New Education Opportunities

Every day more school districts and universities announce they are remote for the fall semester and some go so far as the next academic year. This has forced many education systems to turn to e-learning, allowing teachers to continue classes from a safe distance. Before COVID-19, schools primarily used e-learning platforms as a supplement to their normal curriculum. Some teachers would prepare an in-class lesson and send students home to expand learning through online video courses or homework. At the university level, institutions have opened up the option of online-only classes for years. However, the pandemic has pushed e-learning into the forefront, becoming the sole educational resource for students.

As we look to the future of e-learning, school systems will continue to leverage and experiment with these platforms in creative ways. Today, most school districts and universities are discovering new ways to integrate e-learning into their lesson plans. The opportunities are endless: we will see more schools transition to using these services during severe weather, while universities may add new online learning options to expand accessibility for students who cannot afford to move to their city. Regardless, we can expect to see online video play a major role in the future of our education system even when in-person interaction increases.

Driving Business Collaboration

In addition to keeping kids home from school, the pandemic has pushed corporate America to adjust to working from home. For many Americans this was the first time they worked from home - according to the How Video is Changing the World report, a third of people said their employer offered the ability to work from home for the first time during the pandemic.

Online video services are helping fill a void when it comes to collaboration and communication. Workplaces are leveraging video-driven collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom to drive a sense of employee interactivity and connection, virtually. In fact, video conferencing platform Zoom reportedly reached 200 million users per day in March.

These video applications are removing barriers by allowing workers to connect face-to-face, share ideas and strategize projects. But beyond that video sessions are going above just collaboration but helping to instill a sense of normalcy - making people feel like they’re in a conference room rattling off ideas rather than in the confinements of their homes.

Aside from strictly team or department engagement, live streaming is enabling organizations to open the floor up to their workforce and discuss business or market changes driven by COVID-19. By ditching email updates and holding staff meetings, training sessions and webinars online, companies can streamline communication while keeping their workforce educated and supported. It goes without saying that communication is essential right now and the ability to continue company-wide meetings or even just virtual lunches and coffee chats with coworkers is empowering people to persevere through it all.

Empowering Safer Healthcare Communications

The coronavirus outbreak has also brought the future of telehealth into the spotlight. In fact, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have temporarily allowed changes in government-provided healthcare to include telehealth services. These virtual healthcare platforms are feeling the demand with one platform citing usage surging by 650 percent or more in regions most impacted by COVID-19.

With these live online video services, doctors are “seeing” patients virtually while keeping both parties as safe as possible. In this post-COVID world, it’s expected that people will continue to take advantage of telehealth services, especially as residual concerns with entering doctor’s offices (and all other public spaces for that matter) resume.

Past one-to-one appointments, online video has also become a critical means to receiving news on the healthcare industry, progress of COVID-19 and, most importantly, strides to stop the spread. For the healthcare industry and the public, it’s imperative to stay up to date with the latest news and regulations. Health organizations and the government are working together to keep the public as informed as possible and online video is allowing consumers to have an archive of easily accessible information. While press conferences are widely available via live-stream on various sites, such as the White House’s YouTube channel, to ensure everyone has access to this critical information, no paywall involved. The most beneficial aspect of these additional viewing options is they’re proving to be a reliable means of reaching large sections of the population and improving our access to information.

Online Video is the Future - But Only If Internet Infrastructure Is Ready to Support it

In these difficult times, online video allows us to create a new normal by staying engaged and connected with schools, workplaces, healthcare professionals, governments and communities. With this, it’s also brought a heightened awareness to the digital divide. For rural communities without a strong internet connection, online learning or working from home has not been easy. Accessing the internet and downloading online video isn’t something many households even think twice about, but the infrastructure in underdeveloped communities is falling behind because they lack strong enough internet connection to stream this content. Now more than ever, it’s critical that internet service providers and tech vendors come together to build better internet infrastructure that makes online video services accessible to everyone, everywhere, any time.

We’ll continue to depend on online video as we settle into this new normal. From an entertainment perspective, live sports are back; however, it’ll take some time before we see people crowding tailgates and stadiums again. Online video technology can step in here to bridge this gap of experience by providing immersive, interactive streams that make fans feel like they’re safely part of the action.

Beyond entertainment, streaming will continue to be a key factor in keeping us all grounded. People need human interaction and services like Zoom or FaceTime give us this ability while keeping us safe. All these factors highlight that video is becoming our hub of information, connection and normalcy, making it crucial we work toward minimizing the digital divide.

Limelight Networks is a leading provider of digital content delivery, video, cloud security, and edge computing services.

The popularity of online video edged up in 2019, according to a new global survey from Limelight Networks.

On average viewers surveyed said the spent 6.8 hours per week watching online video, up 0.7% from 6.75 hours in the 2018 study.

Younger viewers--in the 18 to 35 age bracket--watched the most at 8.4 hours a week, with 14% viewing for more than 20 hours per week.

Of the nine countries involved in the study, viewers in the U.S. watched the most online video, with respondents saying they watched for 8.55 hours per week.

Limelight said that online video viewing was coming at the expense of broadcast, cable and satellite TV, which was down 10% from last year.

The most popular online video content was movies, followed by TV shows, news and sports. Those types of programming were all watched more than professional produced video on social media sites, user-generated content and watching people play video games online.

This year, for the first time, smartphones were the device used most for viewing online video at 2.08 hours, eclipsing computers. The U.S. is among the countries where the smart phone is the top device for viewing online video.

Watching online video on smart TVs and devices grew to 1.64 hours per week from 1.44 hours per week a year ago. The most popular devices were Amazon Fire TV and Google Chromecast globally and Roku in the U.S.

Limelight said  that 70.4% of online viewers now subscribe to one or more SVOD service. The highest rate is in the U.S., with an average of 1.7 subscriptions, compared to 1.2% globally.

Not surprisingly, price is the primary reason people said they canceled an SVOD service. The second most popular reason was that the content available on that service was not interesting.

Limelight found that 60.6% of the people who watch online video also subscribe to a cable or satellite TV service. Like SVOD services, price is the top reason why people cancel cable.

As streaming increases, so does binge-watching, which was up 18% last year. Binge-watching sessions lasted on average 2 hours and 40 minutes. In the U.S. viewers binge-watch for 3 hours and 11 minutes a pop.

Pre-roll advertising, if its interesting to them, is not opposed by 74% of online viewers. Viewers are even more accepting of ads when they have the ability to skip them. The survey found that when it comes to AVOD, 87% of people are OK with short ads before a video if the content is free.

Resistance to advertising is stronger when the commercials appear in the middle of content, however.

The most frustrating part of watching video online is rebuffering, the survey found. While most viewers will keep watching after a first rebuffering, 66.3% of those surveyed said they would stop watching if it happens a second time.

Based on the survey, Limelight recommends that online video providers make content available on any devices, ensure high-quality mobile viewing experiences and deliver live content in real time.

The study was conducted for Limelight in early August by a company with access to consumer panels in France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K. and the U.S. About 500 responses were collected from each country with a total of 5,000 global responses.

Traditional pay TV companies sweating out the streaming video revolution got some solace in a recent report from Limelight Networks that claims consumers place more emphasis on pricing and quality when picking a video provider.

According to Limelight’s State of Online Video report, consumers are supplementing their traditional pay TV subscription with streaming services not replacing them. Limelight said that while online video consumption is growing – consumers watch an average of 6 hours 45 minutes online every week, an increase of one hour per week over last year -- 62% of respondents worldwide pay for more video services in addition to their pay TV subscription, and said the top two devices for watching online video are smart TVs (31%) and set-top boxes/DVRs (18%).

Pricing is still important – more than half of respondents to the survey (55%) said that price increases would be the primary reason to cancel an SVOD service and nearly half (46%) said the same for their cable subscription. Quality of service also was a top priority – 43% said rebuffering was their primary frustration, with 66% said they stop watching a video after two rebuffers and 60% claiming they would be more likely to watch a live sporting event online if it was guaranteed there would be no viewing delays.

Globally, people watch movies online the most, followed closely by TV shows and news. Young millennials (18-25) watch professionally-produced video and user-generated content on social media more than they watch the news and sports online.

According to Limelight, data for the report was collected by a third party and was based on responses from 5,000 consumers in France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States age 18 and older who watch one hour or more of online video content each week. The survey responses were collected between Aug. 1-12, 2018.

In a move that aims to bring more scale to over-the-top video services, Qwilt and content delivery network provider Limelight Networks have stitched together an integrated caching system that places more content toward the edge of the network and closer to the end user.

The integration combines Limelight’s CDN with Qwilt’s “open” caching in ISP networks around the world.

The linkup with Limelight will help to improve the quality of experience and lower latencies of OTT services, Qwilt CEO and co-founder Alon Maor said.

While Limelight is the first on board with such an integration, Maor stressed that the agreement is not exclusive and that Qwilt has trials ongoing with other CDN and streaming infrastructure providers. He also noted that this is a technical integration, and that no money is being exchanged as a result.

“This is a very meaningful step toward an internet that’s not just for open connectivity, but also content delivery that’s closer to the edge,” Maor said.

Related: Qwilt Takes Live Streaming, VR to the Edge

He also confirmed that the work between Qwilt and Limelight stems from an “open caching” architecture/initiative that’s been undertaken by the Streaming Video Alliance that aims to drive more scale and quality into online video.

The SVA, a group formed in late 2014, is focused on specs and best practices for video streaming. Charter Communications, Limelight, Qwilt, Verizon Communications, Viacom, Yahoo and ViaSat were among the first group of companies to get directly involved in the SVA’s open caching project.

Limelight Networks and Akamai Technologies have come to an agreement that puts a long-standing patent fight between the content delivery network rivals to bed.

Limelight announced this week that it has entered an agreement that settles the spat centering on the ‘703 patent (US. No. 6,108,703, describing a “Global hosting system”) and certain other patents in the form of a settlement that converts the $51 million judgment handed down last year into a $54 million license that will be paid in twelve equal quarterly installments starting August 1.

Both companies have also waived all rights to appeal as part of the agreement, and Akamai will release the $51 million letter of credit that bonded the judgment.

As a result, Limelight said it will regain access to the full amount in restricted cash supporting the letter of credit this month.

Dan Rayburn, EVP for StreamingMedia.com and principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, tweeted that the agreement settles a protracted legal battle.

Limelight Networks will pay the $54M it owes to Akamai over the next 3 years. - 10 year patent suit finally over. https://t.co/IibFFbwQSF

— Dan Rayburn (@DanRayburn) August 1, 2016

However, the agreement excludes patents that Akamai asserted as counterclaims in the patent infringement case filed by Limelight against Akamai and XO Communications in the Eastern District of Virginia in late 2015 and does not otherwise impact Limelight’s rights in that case, Limelight said.

“We are pleased by the outcome of this agreement. It eliminates the continuing risk from the ‘703 patent and allows us to extend the $51 million payment over a three-year period at an attractive interest rate,” Robert Lento, chief executive officer of Limelight, said in a statement.  “This agreement, coupled with the series of financial and operational improvements, further enhances our confidence in Limelight’s value creation opportunity.”

Last month, Limelight posted a Q2 net loss of $54.9 million (53 cents per basic share) on revenues of $43.6 million, flat from $43.8 million in the year-ago quarter.

Despite every effort to deliver the best user experience, how do you really know it’s the best if you’re not measuring the right metrics?

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all global consumer Internet traffic in 2019. Consumers have voted with their eyeballs and binge-watching is here to stay. With TVs now wider than the average loveseat, and rapidly approaching sofa-size, achieving the broadcast-quality that viewers demand is anything but a trivial feat.

Since you can’t optimize what you can’t measure, the first step is clearly to gather video quality metrics. But which metrics? “Good” and “great” are relative, especially with no industry standards for measurement and statistical aggregation.

Quick - How do you calculate a rebuffer ratio? What about percentage of buffer-impacted-views? Is your reported average bitrate a measure of all bits on the wire, or of the labeled video bitrate?

Achieving consensus on units of measure matters.  Did you know that Napoleon Bonaparte was actually not short for his time? The myth started because he was documented as being 5’2” tall, but they were using pre-French Revolution units of measure. In modern units, he was actually nearly 5’7”, which was taller than the average Frenchman of the era!

The good news for measuring the quality of online video is we can borrow substantially from other industries’ experiences establishing experience metrics in hopes of bringing about standards in a much faster fashion.

For example, it took nearly 20 years after the introduction of digital cable for the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) to publish industry standards to provide cable operators with reliable tools to measure and improve the customer experience. The first Web APM vendors hit the scene decades ago, not long after the surge in popularity of HTML and the web. The primary approaches initially included monitoring on the server-side and measuring periodically from distributed test servers located in data centers. This allowed operations teams to know when their servers were completely down or consistently slow, but failed to catch most other issues.

Over time, measuring the actual end-user experience became crucial and as a result, Real User Monitoring (RUM) was developed. RUM involves sending actual end-user performance data from the browser back to a central location for collection. Initially, all implementations were “roll your own” and ensuring support and data consistency across all browsers was impossible.

In 2010, the Web Performance Working Group (W3C) was founded to create standards for measuring and improving web application performance. Their initial focus was on making metrics available to web developers via client-side APIs. To date, they have been successful at ushering in many excellent specifications for in-browser performance diagnostics such as Navigation Timing, Resource Timing and User Timing. However the collection, or beaconing, was quite literally “left as an exercise for the reader.” On Feb. 9, 2016, they addressed this by publishing a draft of the Beacon API, a specification that defines how to collect this valuable data without impacting performance.

In short, it took a significant amount of time to acknowledge the need for, create and fine-tune standards for performance and quality metrics.  We are just now beginning to realize the benefits of standardization.

Online video metrics that measure customer experiences –  often referred to as QoE (Quality of Experience) metrics –  cannot be accurately measured from the server delivering the content. Many experience-degrading factors occur between the end-user and the server, including congestion and resource exhaustion on the end-user’s side. Therefore, beaconing, or the sending of telemetry from the playback device, has emerged as a more accurate approach. But the problem is that there are no standard definitions of the metrics or standard APIs for accessing them across players.

Further complicating things is the breadth of devices and applications that can play video – browsers, smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, Smart TVs and more. The video players also vary and can be custom, third party or sometimes native to the device. Not surprisingly, some or all of the metrics of interest aren’t accessible in every case, and with contemporaneous industry initiatives to encourage cross-platform compatibility, increased security and device stability, the problem is getting worse.

Where do we go from here? 

Fortunately, the Streaming Video Alliance, an organization seeking to develop, publish and promote open standards, policies and best practices in the video streaming ecosystem, is working to promote standards for QoE metrics for this industry. The group is currently working on rigorous definitions of end-user quality metrics and statistical aggregations for rolling up millions of such data points. Not the most exciting work, but you have start somewhere, and establishing a common language should pay dividends on its own.

Sound familiar? Hopefully this time we will make progress faster.  The solution is left as an exercise for the reader.

Jason Hofmann is a Senior Director, Advanced Architecture at Limelight Networks, a leading global content delivery network and founding member of the Streaming Video Alliance. 

Members of the coveted millennial audience spend about as much of their time online perusing social-media platforms as they do watching over-the-top video, according to a new study from content delivery specialist Limelight Networks.

Those activities were neck and neck, followed closely by reading news content, per Limelight’s second annual State of the User Experience report, which tallied results from more than 1,300 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore. When a larger group of consumers were added to the mix, social networking dominated time spent online, followed by video viewing.

And it’s increasingly clear that eyeballs continue to shift from traditional TV. Limelight said 45% of those surveyed spend more than 15 hours per week online outside of work, up from 23% in the year-ago study. Interestingly, 51% of baby boomers (51-to-69 year-olds) said they spent that much time online, versus 41% among the millennials studied.

Limelight also found that consumers are becoming generally more patient with buffering and loading times. Last year, 41% of respondents were willing to wait five seconds or more for a website to load, but this year’s study found 52% of respondents were willing to wait that long.

Consumers are also expecting improved mobile experiences. About 35% of respondents to the 2015 study were willing to wait longer for a webpage to load on a mobile device, down from 44%. Likewise, 26% were willing to deal with longer load times on PCs, up from 15%. “The flip-flop between 2014 and 2015 clearly indicates that performance for the mobile Web has become top-of-mind for consumers,” Limelight said.

For more charts from the Limelight report, download the PDF of this story from the Nov. 2, 2015, edition of Multichannel News.