Canadians lead world in online video watching, but it’s time for organizations to create
Posted on: December 30, 2010
Posted in: Video
The latest data from Comscore, as detailed below in a Postmedia article, is yet another sign Canadians are leading the developed world in the adoption and consumption of online content.
Fact is, the internet is becoming video-based. Not just in terms of bandwidth (video now makes up the biggest chunk of internet bandwidth). But the experience itself. Internet connected televisions and mobile viewing will only accelerate a shift to the medium that, in modern history has proven to always win. Visual storytelling rules.
So the latest stats show Canadians are “cutting edge,” consuming online video more than any other country. But strangely, Canadian organizations have been ‘relatively’ slow to embrace the production of video content, compared to their U.S. counterparts. Many U.S. companies are producing video with their agencies, filling YouTube channels and intranets and all kinds of communication channels with video. There are regularly conferences and summits that focus on video. There is even a government conference focussed entirely on video.
Here in Canada we like to watch it. I’m generalizing. And many organizations (including some great clients we work with that you can see in the embedded video here) are embracing it, but as a nation not even close to the level we are seeing South of the border. Population has something but not everything to do with it. It’s that for generations content was geographically silo’d, and passed along like a dinner roll. In the television universe, high quality programming was more difficult for Canadians to create and afford. Things have changed. With the tools available today, storytelling and smarts are helping level the playing field. Canadian producers can go head to head with producers from around the world. The online universe is for everyone to share. Content creation is more accessible now, and everyone can have a visual voice (with a bit of help:)
Canadian organizations can no longer wait for some “Canadianized” content to be flipped their way. It is more important than ever to regionalize video content. In the future, we will PERSONALIZE it.
Sure, I’m biased on this front because I produce video content, based in Toronto. But as one of those Canadians who also watches a lot of it – I want to see more content produced by Canadian organizations.
(online video production, Toronto producer director mike edgell, web video production, Thornley Fallis, 76 design, digital video)
I am Canadian, I watch YouTube
Canada leads G7 nations when it comes to time spent watching online videos
Move over hockey. Canadians are embracing a new national pastime: YouTube.
When it comes to watching online video, as with hockey, Canada is a world leader.
Seventy-one per cent of Canadian Internet users, or 17.6 million people, visit YouTube every month, according comScore, a company that specializes in measuring digital activity.
Once on the site, they spend an average of 292 minutes a month watching videos such as Classified’s O Canada or the Bed Intruder Song, two of the most popular videos in Canada in 2010.
In comparison, 55 per cent of the American online population surfs YouTube monthly, comScore said. Canada also beats out every other G7 nation, according to the company.
“When it comes to communication, when it comes to Facebook, when it comes to a lot of these Web 2.0 tools, community-based, Canadians are really highly sophisticated,” said comScore’s Canadian VP Bryan Segal. The growth isn’t limited to YouTube, he said. Canadian broadcasters, such as CBC, CTV and Global have seen steady growth in the number of people watching their content online, according to comScore’s analysis.
“We are content-heavy and media-heavy and I think that is one of the great things about our country,” he said.
Canada has also long been known as the world’s top Facebook nation with 83.1 per cent of the online population on the popular social-networking site. In the U.S., Facebook has 71.5-per-cent reach of the online population.
More Canadians have also mastered the 140-character tweet than Americans, with 13.7 per cent on Twitter monthly compared to 11.3 per cent in the U.S. The size of the Canadian population, the expanse of our land mass and the reach of our broadband penetration has spurred the online migration of Canadians, who are now venturing deeper into cyberspace, Segal said.
As for our national obsession with hockey, online video is feeding it. NHL.comis one of the most visited websites in Canada, Segal added.
December 16th, 2011 at 8:16 am
[...] we’ve done it again. Latest comScore research data on video consumption shows that Canadians watch the most video [...]