Online Video Trends Shaping 2008

Several distinct forces converged on online video this year, some technological, some economic, and one entirely tied to the calendar. Here’s what happened.

Hulu opened to the public

After being announced in 2007 as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu launched publicly in March, offering full television episodes and movies for free, supported by advertising. Its arrival gave viewers a legitimate, high-quality alternative that didn’t exist a year earlier, and it signaled that traditional media companies were finally willing to compete directly on the open web rather than treating it purely as a threat.

A presidential election drove video into new territory

This year’s US presidential campaign made online video central to political communication in a way no previous election had. Full speeches, campaign ads and short clips circulated on YouTube and reached audiences directly, without depending on television networks to decide what aired and when. Regardless of political outcome, the pattern it demonstrated, that a YouTube channel could function as a direct, unfiltered broadcast channel, was closely watched by marketers outside politics too.

The economy turned sharply, and budgets followed

By the second half of the year, the financial crisis had become impossible to separate from any discussion of marketing spend. Companies that had been experimenting freely with video production began scaling back, and the shift favored formats that were cheap to produce and iterate on over expensive, one-off productions. Several brands that had built a following with low-budget, frequently released video found themselves in a stronger position than those that had bet on a single expensive campaign.

Mobile started to matter, even if it wasn’t dominant yet

With the App Store opening in July and smartphone adoption climbing, watching video on a phone stopped being a novelty for early adopters and started becoming a real, if still minority, viewing habit. Nobody built a video strategy around mobile-first viewing this year, but the first signs that they’d need to were becoming visible.

Pre-roll advertising started showing up more consistently

Ads that play before a video, rather than banners around it, became a more common part of the online video landscape this year on both YouTube and newer services. Advertisers and platforms were still working out acceptable length and formats, but the direction was clear: video-specific ad formats, not just repurposed banner ads, were becoming the norm.

Taken together

2008 didn’t introduce a single defining moment the way 2006’s YouTube acquisition did. Instead, it was the year several separate threads, a serious professional competitor in Hulu, a real-world proof of concept in the election and a recession reshaping what businesses could afford, all pulled online video in the direction of becoming a mature, budget-conscious discipline rather than an experimental one.