We all know that the name of the Internet game is to get viewers to tune in. With video, it is an even bigger deal since video requires more bandwidth and setup to operate properly. Advertising Age printed the results of a great study on how long you can expect your videos to keep your viewers entertained. To quote the article by Matthew Cutler,

…on average, nearly 20% of the audience that starts watching a given video clip will abandon it within the first 10 seconds of playback….Within the first 30 seconds of a video, you can expect to lose 33% of your viewers. At 60 seconds, 44% of the audience that started viewing the clip will have left.

Moral of the story: the first 30 seconds really need to be what the viewer wants.

5min is hitting the online video market hard. They already have $5 million in VC funding and have a catalog of 40k how to videos. They are cutting deals with many big web sites to serve their content in the 5min player on their page. The key is that they have all the videos tagged and automatically scans the text of the web page to see which videos are the best fit. Thanks to their partnership deals they are clearing over 110 million unique visitors per month. They also have their own ad serving network and sales staff in addition to using third party networks.

Times just got tougher for the small web sites that don’t have their own servers and players for their video content. Brightcove used to be one of the best free solutions for s small site that wanted to deliver their oen video. Just agree to allow Brightcove to show your content with ads and you could used their player as your content streamed from their servers. It was a great system with few headaches….until now.

Brightcove announced Monday that they are dropping their free service in little over a month. It just is not the cash cow that they were hoping for. After all, only 1% of their revenues came from the ads while the rest comes from their white label arrangements with major publishers like the Discovery Channel.

A web site can convert from the free service to the professional service for four figures a year, but I doubt that many will. It will be interesting to see what small sites do next.

Hollywood is very nervous about letting its content out on the Net because they are not sure where the money is going to come from. But the users want the content when they want it where they want it. Hulu has just released some great numbers showing that their services has expanded from 1.7 million streams a month to 142 million streams a month. It is nowhere near YouTube yet, but Hulu proves that free high quality content can be successfully mixed with ads to the benefit of everyone.

It is always great to get numbers from the big players on how their Internet video deployments are going. And one of the biggest was undoubtably NBC’s Internet Olympic portal.

After paying $900 million for the exclusive rights, they claim to have sold $1 billion in advertising. Not bad considering no one was even sure that people would watch the Olympics on the Internet.

But watch they did. Over 6.5 million unique visitors to be exact. Which translates into 36 million page views, 826K mobile video views and 300k text or multimedia alerts over 17 days.

That translates into $153 per person and $27 per page view, assuming all the advertising was just on the Internet pages. Silly assumption, of course. But if this test of the viability of the Internet could be profitable, just wait until the next one.