According to a report put out by Pew Internet and the Amercian Life Project, the number of homes in the United States with broadband Internet access has hit 55%.
To put that into perspective, 73% of American’s have Internet access at home. By my math, that means of all American’s with Internet access at home, roughly 75% are using broadband.
And outside of the U.S. and Europe, developing countries are skipping broadband altogether and going wireless…where it’s estimated that 60% of India will have high-speed wireless Internet access within the next 4 years.
So what does it all mean? Easy. Online video is going to continue to explode…globally. What’s more, it illustrates one of my “battle cry’s” when it comes to web video; don’t dumb-down the quality of your videos so dial-up users can watch them quicker…always produce your videos at the highest quality possible. Don’t worry, the people that actually WANT to see your videos will be able to view them just fine.
For instance, the same report went on to say that the average monthly cost for broadband service in the U.S. is $34.50. The average cost of dial-up service? $19.70. A whopping difference of $14.80 a month. That’s about 3 meals at a fast-food restaurant…over an entire month.
Oh yea, the biggest reason why dial-up users won’t switch to broadband? It cost too much.
The point is that if dial-up users aren’t willing pay 14 bucks and some change for broadband, chances are they aren’t willing to pay for whatever it is you’re selling online either. So again, don’t dumb down your videos so they can watch them, OK?
But onto another interesting fact. One that supports another of my “battle cry’s”…that web video is no longer a novelty…that you’ve got to produce quality videos or people will click away. This statistic comes from the Neilsen Company.
They report that 119 million unique viewers watched 7.5 billion video streams. That was for last year right? Or maybe all of this year? Nope. That was in May 2008…alone.
The big point here is that both dial-up and novelty are out when it comes to online video. A lot of people fail to understand this message…don’t be one of them.