The highly touted web-based drama series “quarterlife” proved a network television flop in its NBC debut, drawing the network’s worst ratings for its time slot in at least 20 years, Nielsen Media Research reported. NBC had high hopes for the made-for-Internet series, a show about young adults designed to appeal to the very audience group […]

The Pakistani government has lifted a national ban on visiting YouTube. Late last week, the country ordered Pakistani ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam. But now the restrictions have been lifted after a national outcry. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has told ISPs to allow access to the site; […]

BBC iPlayer is already looking dominant in the UK download market. Traffic for ITV’s broadband TV service has remained flat over the past two months, while the BBC’s rival iPlayer offering has seen massive growth following a major marketing push. ITV.com’s video traffic hit a peak in November but has dropped off slightly since then. […]

Pakistan’s government has banned access to the video-clip website YouTube because of anti-Islamic movies posted on the site. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority told the country’s 70 Internet service providers that the popular website would be blocked until further notice. The banning temporarily brought the site down in some other areas. Pakistan is not the only […]

An IDC study of consumer online behaviour found that the Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours), almost twice as much time as spent watching television (16.4 hours), and more […]

NBC Universal has revealed will stream full episodes of old TV shows, including “The A-Team”, “Buck Rogers” and “Kojak,” on its websites. Beginning this month, the shows will be available on NBC.com and on network-owned niche sites SciFi.com, ChillerTV.com and SleuthChannel.com. The content also will be available on Hulu, the online video joint venture that […]

Google launched a new advertising technology that will allow publishers to incorporate text ads into online videos. The launch marks the search group's most ambitious attempt yet to make money by selling ads that appear inside video clips. Under the new system, advertisers will pay to have their messages appear inside online videos across the […]

In the same way that sport content was a major driver of pay-TV adoption, sports will be the single biggest driver of consumption for online video. Screen Digest forecast the number of online sports videos (OSV) streams/downloads served in the domestic US market will increase from 5.2bn last year to 10.8 billion by 2012. In […]

Over 17 million programmes have been streamed or downloaded on demand on BBC iPlayer in the first seven weeks since its marketing launch, according to the latest figures from the BBC. During January, over 2.2 million people watched a programme on BBC iPlayer, with approximately 11 million TV programmes streamed or downloaded on demand.

From Colin Mann in London P2P-Next, a pan-European conglomerate of 21 industrial partners, media content providers and research institutions, has received a E14 million grant from the European Union. The grant will enable the body to carry out a research project aiming to identify the potential uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for Internet Television of […]