What makes an online video hit?

NewTeeVee asks a pertinent and long overdue question with some interesting results:

• Does three million plays of Kate Modern over a month make it a hit or a miss?
• 100,000 views say execs at Revver, Funny or Die and Heavy.com — who also point to other metrics such as how much a piece of content is being talked about, forwarded or embedded in users’ sites
• Three to five million in the first week, say JibJab, creators of This Land  (> 80 million plays to date)

Just for perspective: last week’s top-rating show on U.S. cable was The Hills on MTV, drawing an audience of just over three million viewers, albeit using the lacking-in-accountability measurement system which has propped up TV nets for so many years.

VOD a fillip for Xbox Live

Good to see more content providers experimenting with reaching young audiences who may prefer to watch movies or TV via a games console, as profiled in this NY Times piece.

The Xbox Live Marketplace offers around 2,000 hours of downloadable content: a mix of download-to-own, download-to-rent (US $2 to $6 for a 24-hr viewing window) and free. contentonce downloaded, can be viewed for up to 24 hours. There’s some HD content, as well as exclusive stuff: a premiere episode of South Park was downloaded 400K times, when offered.

Among Microsoft’s content partners on the service are Paramount Pictures, New Line, Warner Bros., MTV, CBS, A&E and ABC.

“It’s where entertainment delivery is headed,” says Anita Frazier of industry analysts NPD Group. “It’s a natural evolution for any of these boxes, whether it’s a computer or an Xbox or a PlayStation 3 or Apple TV to deliver a variety of content and whether it’s games or music or TV or movies,” she adds. 

Most interesting of all, Microsoft cites “double digit” growth of VOD revenues from the service, every month since introduced.