In 2007, 61% of Internet users in the U.S. said they never downloaded or watched a video online.
Today, more than 3/4 of consumers in Australia, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. say they watch video on their PCs.
In 5 years, the number of online video viewers is expected to grow to 941 million (from 563 million in 2008). That will represent just over half of the 1.8 billion consumers expected to use the Internet that year.
Source: eMarketer
Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin, the oldest living apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died Monday night at age 91.
Below are a few video tributes to Elder Wirthlin.
Elder Wirthlin’s Final Testimony:
Mormon Magz reminds us that the New Era Web site offers an MP3 download of the Christmas song “Little Baby,” which appears as sheet music in the December issue of the New Era. An instrumental version is also available for those who want to sing along.
Web users, in general, want fresh content, therefore it is typically the new sites or new postings on the site that get the most traffic. LDS.org is no different and, not surprisingly, traffic spikes around General Conference time as members are hungry to feast upon the latest words from our living prophets. In the weeks after conference, archived talks remain among the most popular items on LDS.org. Through the end of October, there were over 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference talks.
In this instance “downloads” has a specific meaning, which I will explain, but you will see that the 1.2 million figure is actually a conservation estimate. By download, I don’t necessarily mean that the talk was saved to the user’s hard-drive, merely that the talk was read, watched or listened to. I have de-duplicated the figures, meaning that if the same person downloaded the same content multiple times, I only count it once. I also wanted to include the numbers from people watching archived content on the Move player, the new interactive video player the Church is using. Since the Move player is tracked differently, I had to do some additional finagling, but again, I erred on the conservative side and simply took unique visitors to the page. Bottom line, the actual number of archived talks read/listened to/watched is probably much higher than my 1.2 million, conservative estimate.
In the charts below, you will see various breakouts of the 1.2 million downloads of October 2008 General Conference archived content. The numbers are through the end of October.
Summary By Format: Read/Watch/Listen
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Dnlds thru 10/31 | ||
| Format | Downloads | % |
| Read | 502,799 | 40.6% |
| Watch | 429,648 | 34.7% |
| Listen | 306,063 | 24.7% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
Summary By Technology
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Dnlds thru 10/31 | ||
| Format | Downloads | % |
| Read | 502,799 | 40.6% |
| Watch Move Player | 392,295 | 31.7% |
| Listen MP3 | 225,114 | 18.2% |
| Listen 300K | 60,532 | 4.9% |
| Listen QuickTime | 20,417 | 1.6% |
| Watch QuickTime | 19,050 | 1.5% |
| Watch Windows Media | 14,732 | 1.2% |
| Watch ASX 300k | 3,571 | 0.3% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
Summary By Session
| Oct 08 Gen Conf Archive Downloads through 10/31 | ||
| Session | Downloads | % |
| General Relief Society Meeting | 53,006 | 4.3% |
| Saturday Morning Session | 262,461 | 21.2% |
| Saturday Afternoon Session | 183,567 | 14.8% |
| Priesthood Session | 110,659 | 8.9% |
| Sunday Morning Session | 126,775 | 10.2% |
| Sunday Afternoon Session | 109,747 | 8.9% |
| Unknown (all Move Player archive views) | 392,295 | 31.7% |
| Total | 1,238,510 | 100.0% |
Check out Your LDS Radio, a new, free online LDS Radio station that just launched this past week.
In addition to a 24-hour stream of music, you can also hear on-demand audio segments updated every week with interviews, sacred music, comedy, and more.
The station strives to play music that resonates most deeply with Latter-Day Saint values, while at the same time introducing Latter-Day Saints to the artists who will shape tomorrow’s LDS music. The site also includes a discussion board where you can comment on the music or request songs you’d like to hear.
The Church has launched a new podcast of the CES firesides. You can subscribe to audio podcast feeds or Web feeds via e-mail on the feeds page (rss.lds.org).
I’m interested to see how the Church and other organizations are using a substantial amount of video to eduate the public about Proposition 8. A few are a little corny, but most are very well done and I believe are effective in getting the message across. What do you think?
See the Preserving Marriage Channel on YouTube for some great videos that explain the reasons for supporting Proposition 8. Also see our previous post on Proposition 8.
Video of all conference sessions (except the priesthood session) in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and American Sign Language was available online within hours of each session. These can be viewed using the new high-quality video player, which allows you to pause, restart, fast forward, and reverse.
You can also select a language at the bottom of that page to view files that you can download. Audio files are already available in many languages, and video and text will be available over the next few days.
We previously mentioned that the Church is providing audio recordings in various languages for the manual Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith, Jr.
The Portuguese audio is now available online, in addition to English, Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish.
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds (subscriptions). These media files can be audio, video, PDF, text, or other formats. You can then play, watch, or read these files on your computer or other device. The term podcast (like broadcast), can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated. This syndication is also called podcasting. The author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. Learn more about podcasting on Wikipedia.
Here is a short video that explains podcasting in plain English:
The Church has created a number of podcasts that you can subscribe to at rss.lds.org. You can also find many other Church-related podcasts at the iTunes store. Just search for “mormon” or “lds.”