Changes Is Good

Ok, so research Tuesday became research Wednesday Thursday.

Males Love Video Long Time
It’s been a reading week for me. Lots of great stuff to mull over and help shape ones thinking about digital media. Lets start with a report by consultancy Frank N. Magid & Associates with the irresistibly tantalizing header “80% of 18 - 24 Males Watch Online Video“. Only 53% of their female counter-parts are watching an equal amount of video. The report goes on to claim that news clips are the most watched content type. Teenage cat fights, skating injuries and soft-core porn dont even chart according to the report thus greatly reducing its credibility. Via Digital Media Wire

Ladies Love Drunk Texting
Ever gotten a drunk text at 3am from a former girlfriend, proclaiming her undying love and mounting desire for you? Maybe this just happens to me… Well, thanks to a new survey put out by Samsung we now have some fun research on these women. Yup folks, the technocrats at Samsung have put out a pretty funny research report outlining some of the cell usage behaviors of single women. The title is a good indication of the rest of the report: “Single Mobile Females Find New BFF: Their Cell Phone“. It’s a funny fast read lite on details with blog worthy data pulls like 40% of women experience “text shame” the morning after texting while inebriated.

Bears Love Long Tail
Chris Anderson would be proud of this next report from Bear Sterns entitled “A Longer Look at the Long Tail“. The sooth-sayers at Bear Sterns have put out a 40 pager, with some of their latest thinking around how the Long Tail applies to the entertainment industry, specifically the video segment of it. The four main themes of the report are: 1) There will be lots more content offerings for people to choose from and finding it is more important then making it. 2) UGC is no fad and aint going away, so deal with it. 3) Choice is good, people like it. Choosing is bad, people dont like it. Solving this conflict is where most of the opportunity/value resides. 4) Media companies suck at making great media consistently and probably wont build their digital business fast enough to offset the decline in their analog businesses. There really is little original material in the report but its always good to see that common knowledge is trickling way up to the leather couch and private bathroom segments of corporate America.
Winning Quote:

“our online survey find that UGS is the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular content category among men 18-34 and all respondents respectively. “

Academics Love Long Words
In what has to be one of the most confusing titles for a piece of academic fluffery I’ve seen all year, soon to be PhD’s Kath Milkman, Todd Rogers and HBS Prof Max Bazerman explore the DVD rental behavior of our friends down under. The report’s title is “Film Rentals and Procrastination: A Study of Intertemporal Reversals in Preferences and Intrapersonal Conflict“, the which basically translates as “Fooling Yourself: Why People put stuff they’ll never watch in their DVD rental queues?” Its a fairly dense, but surprisingly quick read that has direct implications for digital downloading, time-shifting and recommendation services built around video.

Gadgets Love Leaving Leaks
Ubiquitous computing is a topic very close to my heart. I once gave a talk on the subject and was uncharacteristically hogging-up most of the airtime in a four person panel. I love the idea of calm and pervasive gadgetry quietly making things simpler in our daily lives. Leave it to a bunch of super smart egg-heads to expose the fact that these devices can leak more personal information then a vice presidential chief of staff. In a paper entitled “Devices That Tell On You: Privacy Trends in Consumer Ubiquitous Computing” the security of the iPod, the encrypted slingbox and the Zune is ripped to shreds. This is another dense paper where you can skim most of it and still walk away with a pretty good understanding of the issues and conclusions. The summary is that many digital devices leak lots of personal info that it would take a few seconds fix if manufactures of those devices cared to do so.