Search »

NBC U Study Finds Viewers Watch Both Online and on TV

A new study released earlier this week indicates that online video has had an affect on the way people watch television.

Research by NBC Universal’s Digital Insights and Innovations team focused on the past three quarters of usage of NBC Rewind (the feature that allows viewers to watch regular NBC shows online at NBC.com). In the fourth quarter of 2006, NBC Rewind was attracting an average of 5 million unique users; that number had jumped to 10 million uniques by May of 2007, writes MediaPost.

The research showed that 35 percent of users went online to “sample” a Heroes episode (the most popular of NBC’s shows online) for the first time; 96 percent of them continued watching the series, both online and on television.

The research would seem to indicate that some viewers do indeed watch shows across multiple platforms, a theory that NBC has pitched to Madison Ave, saying that advertising across multiple platforms will accumulate a broader reach and different levels of engagement with viewers.

The research also indicated high levels of brand recall and other metrics among NBC Rewind users.

Meanwhile, a study from Veoh, jointly conceived by the Carat Digital team, looked at the impact of recommendation engines that use technology to make personalized recommendations to online video viewers based on their past behavior.

The experiment replaced 10 percent of the personalized recommendations with generic recommendations, and found that clickthrough rates were not nearly as high (2.4 percent for personalized recommendations vs. 0.3 percent for generic editorial recommendations).