{"id":640816,"date":"2013-01-31T14:37:16","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T19:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=223928"},"modified":"2013-01-31T14:37:16","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T19:37:16","slug":"new-numbers-show-microsoft-moves-more-media-than-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/640816","title":{"rendered":"New numbers show: Microsoft moves more media than you might think"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone was focused on the fact that consumers still buy plenty of DVDs and Blu-ray discs when the NPD Group published its 2012 Home Video Data report<\/a> this week. It\u2019s true: 61 percent of all U.S.-based transactional home video spending goes towards physical media, compared to 64 percent in 2011. But the real surprise to me was to see how much digital media Microsoft is moving these days.<\/p>\n

Microsoft made a significant showing in the area of internet VOD, which is industry slang for those 24 or 48 hour video rentals you can get from iTunes, Vudu and others. That segment currently accounts for just 12 percent of total video-on-demand revenue, with 72 percent of the money coming from rentals through pay TV operators. But it\u2019s an interesting segment, in part because it\u2019s not dominated by just one or two players.<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s iTunes does have a strong lead with 45 percent of all internet VOD revenue, according to NPD, but there\u2019s a fierce competition going on for second place: Amazon Instant Video generated 18 percent of the industry\u2019s revenue in this segment in 2012, followed by Walmart\u2019s Vudu with 15 percent and Xbox video with 14 percent.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s a pretty strong showing for Microsoft, considering that the company has just begun to put some more muscle behind its own video rental offering. Microsoft just recently unified all of its entertainment offerings under the Xbox brand<\/a>\u00a0and is now beginning to promote it as its home entertainment property across all of its Windows 8 platforms, as well as the Xbox 360. I wouldn\u2019t be too surprised if Microsoft surpassed Vudu and maybe even Amazon by the end of this year for internet VOD rentals.<\/p>\n

Of course, one has to look at these numbers with a grain of salt: NPD\u2019s home video data focuses entirely on transactional spending, meaning that Netflix and competing subscription offerings don\u2019t show up at all. That\u2019s despite the fact that Netflix now has some 27 million subscribers<\/a> in the U.S. alone. But subscriptions generally don\u2019t offer access to movies right after they were in the theaters — and that\u2019s an area in which Microsoft, with a pretty big installed device base, is starting to move a lot of media.<\/p>\n

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Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:<\/strong>
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