VideoNuze Posts

Here's a measure of just how all-important big-time sports have become in driving the entire TV ecosystem: in NBCU's latest court filing against Aereo (embedded here), it cites as one of the harmful consequences of Aereo's potential success that NBCU would be unable to fund its programming. But what single example of expensive programming does NBCU call out? Not its news or entertainment - staples of the traditional broadcast network program agenda - but rather its 9-year, $10 billion Sunday Night NFL rights deal.

Sports are considered so critical to broadcasters because they're primarily viewed live and therefore immune to DVR-based ad-skipping (see yesterday's DISH Network "Auto-Hop" news for more on why DVRs are so threatening). As a result, the networks have aggressively bid for sports rights, led of course by the pursuit of NFL and Olympics deals. But those deals have been partly funded by burgeoning retransmission consent fee payments negotiated from pay-TV operators. These payments give broadcasters another revenue stream beyond just advertising (and just like cable networks, as pay-TV operators pay more in retrans fees, rate increases are passed along to ALL their subscribers, whether sports fans or not).

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I'm pleased to be joined once again by Colin Dixon, senior partner at The Diffusion Group, for the 132nd edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for May 11, 2012. This week's topic is content piracy and to dig into it we're joined by a guest, Stuart Rosove, VP of Marketing at Irdeto, a software security provider.

We kickoff the discussion with Colin and Stuart each sharing some data on how extensive piracy is and what flavors it comes in. As Stuart explains, there's a huge range of piracy activity from criminals who profit from piracy to hackers motivated by bragging rights to casual viewers like college students who don't think they're doing any harm, to frustrated consumers who can't find legitimate access to confused consumers who aren't even aware they're doing something illegal.

To get a sense of how critical the piracy issue is, Forbes has written that HBO's hit show "Game of Thrones" is on track to become the most-pirated show of 2012, reaching a staggering 2.5 million illegal downloads per day. It's a very complicated landscape, which will become even more so as connected devices proliferate. Stuart also shares information about how Irdeto is helping content companies as many pirates as possible to paying customers.

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At the recent NABShow, MSN's Joe Michaels stopped by the VideoNuze booth and discussed how it is now producing 15-20 original video series on its network. Some are produced by MSN itself, while others are with studio or 3rd-party production partners, or are branded entertainment. Joe said the ones that are most successful are focused on verticals, like TV recap show "Last Night on TV" and auto guide series "Road Raves." Joe also talks about the success MSN is having with "MSN Now," which tracks top social media trends with a companion video series. See the video below (4 minutes, 19 seconds).

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mPortal is an 11 year-old mobile content discovery company, which has recently announced its Springboard Media product for TV everywhere applications on multiple devices. In this NABShow interview, Fady talks about how the product fits into content providers' and pay-TV operators' work flow enabling them to deploy and dynamically change content in apps distributed to multiple devices. I described the product more in a recent post. See the video below (6 minutes, 32 seconds).

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After a golden period of scorching growth from 2010 to mid-2011, Netflix has been on a rocky road since, to say the least. While subscriber growth re-started modestly in Q1, the company reported its first loss in years. True, you can't "drive while looking in the rear-view mirror," but it is intriguing to think about where Netflix might be today had it done 5 (or maybe more) things differently. Here are my top 5 "what-ifs" to consider:

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I visited the SeaWell Networks booth at the recent NABShow and got a demo of their new network-based ad insertion capabilities from CEO Brian Collie. SeaWell's Spectrum technology helps service providers manage delivery of adaptive bit rate (ABR) streams to multiple devices, in partnership with ARRIS. At the NABShow, Brian demo'd how Spectrum can dynamically and seamlessly insert ads into video based on an individual user's behavior. SeaWell just completed an $8 million financing. See video below (5 minutes, 43 seconds).

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Early-bird discounted registration is now available for the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues, June 19th in NYC. Sign up now and save up to $170 (almost 30%) off the standard rate.

The Online Video Ad Summit is going to be an exciting day of learning and networking for industry professionals, including panel discussions, fireside chats, research presentations, best practices case studies and technology demos. Speakers include executives from GroupM, Google/YouTube, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, LG Electronics, CBS Interactive, Macy's, eMarketer, American Express, Digitas, VivaKi and others still to be announced. If you're a content provider, advertiser, agency, technology or other ecosystem executive, this will be premier opportunity to gain first-hand insight in the rapidly-evolving online video ad industry.

The Summit is generously supported by Title sponsors Auditude/Adobe and YuMe along with Adap.tv, Innovid, Collective, Conviva, Eyeview, Mixpo, TubeMogul, VideoHub, Videology and LiveRail. We'll also have a fun door prize drawing sponsored by Jivox.

Save now with early-bird registration!

(Note, the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit takes the place of last year's "ELEVATE" event).

As a warm-up to the Summit, join VideoNuze, TubeFilter and FourScreen Media for our complimentary Multi-Screen Mix-Up next Wed, May 16th at Copia from 6:30-8:30. Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 (which was just acquired by Discovery) will be our speaker. And we will be doing a drawing for 5 attendees to win free tickets to the Summit.

Elemental Technologies, which has developed an innovative GPU-based video processing technology, has raised a $13 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, to fund international and product expansion. Total financing raised to date is $29.6 million. Elemental's CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman told me yesterday that the company racked up "8-digits" in revenues last year, up from "7-digits" in the two prior years, and has been close to being cash flow positive for the last couple of quarters.

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