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The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – still watch television using traditional cable or satellite options, according to Nielsen. But the number of households that choose to opt out of cable or satellite TV is on the rise, from 2 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2013, Nielsen’s data show.

“This scares the bejesus out of the cable and satellite people,” said Jim Barry, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va. “I think it’s going to change the business model.”

A main driver behind the high cost of cable and satellite in recent years is the expensive license fees networks pay sports leagues to broadcast their games. The cost gets passed on to consumers to pay for the “bundles” of channels they get with their cable satellite subscriptions, whether they plan to watch sports or not.

Each time the show goes to commercial, viewers following the TV broadcast with their computer, iPad or smartphone handy will be able to unlock unique content related to the finale’s plot that adds new dimensions to the story. (An on-screen prompt will read “The story continues now at CBC.ca/ArcticAir.”)

CBC’s goal is to reward the audience with a “transmedia storytelling event” that happens in tandem with the live broadcast.

provides more information on the characters, their motivations and elements that won’t be seen on TV.

71% of connected TV users report having taken an action as a result of the ad (e.g., by clicking on the ad to learn more), and 19% say they have purchased the product mentioned in the ad, according to [pdf] an August 2012 report from YuMe. Of 7 possible actions identified, the most common was visiting the website mentioned in the ad, by 30% of viewers.

Other actions taken by these viewers included: looking for information about the product (26%); looking for a product to purchase in a store or online (also 26%); liking or following a brand or product (25%); considering purchasing the product mentioned in the ad (also at 25%); selecting or clicking on the ad to learn more (23%); sharing information about the product or brand with others (21%); and telling someone else about the information in the ad (also 21%).

or Internet-based TV to be a competitive option, it either needs to be cheaper than cable and satellite or it needs to provide the content that subscribers want in a better way.

For the companies still working on Web TV, it would mean charging less than traditional competitors for a service while paying more than traditional competitors to offer it.

for a Web TV offering to be truly Web TV, it would need to offer all the channels consumers want alongside the "over-the-top" video capabilities like Netflix and Hulu that they associate with Internet viewing.

Three years after launching the first generation of Google TV devices, Google is now looking to rid itself of the brand and realign its smart TV platform efforts more closely with Android. The move is part admission that Google TV failed, part hope that Android will eventually find its place in the living room.

They are calling it ‘Android TV.’”

Google announced earlier this year that it would update Google TV to the latest version of Android, which would allow developers to use the same APIs available on mobile devices.

Robbins, whose career has included producing TV shows Smallville and One Tree Hill, admitted that it's still much more profitable to have a popular TV show than a popular YouTube show, but sees that changing. "The advertising model is catching up very slowly. Right now TV is getting this much money, and YouTube is getting this much," said Robbins, with gestures to indicate huge and tiny ad revenues respectively.

That's one reason why DreamWorks bought AwesomenessTV so early in its growth. Robbins said the company plans to spend around $10m creating shows this year, from bigger projects like Side Effects to smaller videos designed for viral sharing.

"There's a handful of companies in Los Angeles right now who I think are going to be the next generation of cable networks,

Significantly, 14% of consumers used their tablets to search for content and engage in social media directly related to the television program they were watching. 

The findings present an opportunity for broadcast and cable networks to interact with consumers much more readily and immediately than they have in the past,

Among devices, the PC/laptop is still the top device used for these “over-the-top” (OTT) services with 65% of respondents using them to watch video content (up from 59% last year). About a third (31%) said they did the same on a mobile phone (up from 24%), while 22% said they used a tablet (up from 14%). Tablets and PCs are the preferred devices to watch longer-form video (such as movies or TV shows), according to the survey. 

sports (31%) and reality (17%) are the primary genres generating social TV buzz, combining to account for about half of social TV conversations between January 1 and November 30 2012.

The CTAM study also finds that viewers are more likely to talk about shows the next day or after (83%) or right after the show (75%). (The study was not limited to social media conversations.)

NBC was easily the most engaging network of the year, with the Olympics a big reason why.

Twitter based information is now directly integrated into the guide of the X1 platform. Not only will users be able to scroll through the guide and see which shows are currently trending on Twitter, they will be able to reorganize and filter the programming based on what’s trending and change the channel from there.

Last week, Xbox and Twitter announced that Twitter will be directly integrated into the Xbox One’s TV experience. Automatically displaying tweets related to the show you are watching in a Lower Third type overlay experience as well as Trending hashtag and topic information integrated into the Xbox One’s OneGuide.

Curatorr may be powering curated streams of show based twitter content for EVERY show in Xbox One TV. Keeping in mind here that Curatorr is a Twitter owned product, these curated streams of content can be further fine tuned after the initial airing of shows and can then be “restreamed” as a Social DVR of sorts.

Investors should keep tabs on Verizon's negotiations with Intel to see if Verizon acquires the OnCue Internet-based TV services. If the deal goes through, investors should pay attention to how Verizon plans to use the OnCue services. Bundling OnCue services with Redbox Instant would incentivize subscribers to use Redbox services as a complete TV and movie entertainment package. Outerwall would greatly benefit from such a bundle because more Redbox users translates into expanding revenue. Also, additional offerings under the Redbox name will improve the company brand.

OnCue would be a good addition to Verizon because the company is already in the content business with Redbox Instant and FiOS TV. The question is whether Verizon can negotiate a good deal with Intel. The OnCue service would work well bundled with FiOS and Redbox Instant, or left as a stand-alone product.

The features of this service resemble those of a DVR, but the main difference is every show is recorded and available at any time. The OnCue hardware and services are currently being beta-tested by Intel employees and select users.

traditional scheduled TV is limited by what he called the "tyranny of the grid," or the 21 hours of prime-time programming that get the most viewers. Anything that doesn't fit into that grid gets thrown out

In contrast, internet TV allows audiences to aggregate over time and space, and can afford to curate content that has smaller audiences at any one time.

Netflix originals don't need to be 48 minutes long to fit into a prime-time schedule, and don't need to force cliffhangers that keep viewers in suspense for the next episode, because viewers can "binge" into the next episode right away.

With the rapid adoption of the tablet as a content device, interest in streaming content has nearly doubled in the past year (from 17% in 2012 to 32% in 2013). Consumers have also expressed more interest in consuming programming on different devices and from different sources. (Indeed, younger Millennials spent more time watching content on non-television devices, even when that content was originally created for television, Belson says.)

“This is the first year that consumers have started to decouple the notion that content from a particular source [must be viewed on] a different device,”

Only 6% of consumers who had pay-TV services said they were considering giving up the services in the next year, according to the survey.

Reach is not public data, and very few people (likely less than 20 companies across the globe) have the ability to access a significant number of pages’ reach metrics. So most (if not all) of what you’ve read on the subject is probably irrelevant, or greatly exaggerated.

Among the 142 industries (Facebook page categories) we have in the sample, only 18 are up or steady. But among the 124 categories seeing their organic reach going down, there are still a lot of them reaching more than 15 or 20% of their fans organically for each post.

We focused on the Organic Reach metric for posts (the only one that cannot include paid reach) of over 6,000 pages. We then averaged Organic reach by industry and compared the results between the two periods (July 2013 & May 2014)

or all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV.

Even on the web, there is a huge difference between the video sites which attract the biggest audiences and those which are the most engaging. The top 5 video sites by unique visitors are YouTube, Vevo, Yahoo, Facebook, and MSN. But the top 5 video sites by time spent are Netflix, YouTube, Tudou, Hulu, and Megavideo.

The Golden Triangle will one day soon engender a shared experience across the three screens, but for the meantime, a resurgence of crowd-powered demand for relevance and personalization is leading a groundswell of change and evolution within each medium.

The result of the social effect and the integrated social hooks inherent in today’s online networks will only inspire a genre of connectivity and interaction as programming will eventually feature creative triggers that engender desired responses and action. The same is true for any event, whether it’s on air, live, or on the big screen.

The water cooler or social effect is only one part of defining a more meaningful experience over time. It is culturally significant as it connects people around common interests in real-time all over the web using events as our participation hub and as our magnet for convergence.

the biggest developer of addressable TV advertising technology, Invidi, is partnering with Clypd, a promising ad technology start-up that wants to create  marketplace for buying and selling TV that works just like online’s programmatic exchanges.

a wide variety of technology players have set their eyes on transforming the $60 billion-plus TV advertising marketplace, including big agency holding companies, their trading desks, and online video technology companies such as Tremor Video, YuMe and Adap.tv, which is being acquired by AOL and recently became the preferred video ad-buying platform for Interpublic’s Mediabrands.

the reason the deal between Invidi and Clypd is significant, is that Invidi is the only player to have built and deployed the kind of addressable TV advertising technology that will enable advertisers and agencies to target and buy audiences the way they buy online audiences -- at the individual level.

But negative comments about the feature continued. A more recent factor was the highly publicized revelations about surveillance activities by the National Security Agency. “What pushed me over the hump was the whole NSA sort of thing,” Huggers says. “I don’t want to go there.”

Not that Intel doesn’t plan to offer plenty of ways to personalize the TV-watching experience. For example, the company cites a Personal Profiles feature that helps switch between individuals using the device, so they have access to relevant content and recommendations. Another option lets users add favorites so they have access to recently watched shows, with the ability to instantly pick up in the program where they left off.

Still another feature, called Spotlight, integrates recommendations based on what’s trending in social media as well as curating content based on a user’s age, interest and time of watching, the company says.

It’s internally testing “Chronological By Actor,” a new way to display updates about live events so they appear in order from most recent to oldest, surrounded by feed posts ranked by its traditional relevance-sorting. It’s not ready yet, but the algorithm test denotes Facebook’s keen interest in stealing Twitter’s real-time social media crown.

It revealed it would start publicizing News Feed algorithm changes in blog posts, as well as two changes that have already been rolled out: “Story Bumping,” which bumps stories you haven’t seen yet to the top of the feed, and “Last Actor,” which shows you more feed stories about the people you’ve recently interacted with or viewed the profile of.

If you want up-to-the-second information about what’s transpiring in a sports event or breaking news story, Twitter wins. Y

Twitter's 49.2 million U.S. users generally skew younger and are disproportionately in cities, for example, according to marketers and media analysts.

marketers see potential value in knowing which shows have Twitter enthusiasts. For some, it is becoming a factor when they purchase TV time: The theory is that if fans are engaged on Twitter that "means the ads are also being paid attention to,"

The stakes are high for Twitter, which is under the spotlight of an initial public offering of stock and has identified TV-related ad spending as a crucial revenue driver.