VideoNuze Posts

Three significant trends are behind today's launch of HD Cloud, a new video transcoding service being announced today: the proliferation of video file formats and encoding rates, the increase in syndication activity to multiple distributors and the cost and scale benefits of "cloud computing." HD Cloud founder and CEO Nicholas Butterworth (who I have known since he ran MTV's digital operations 10 years ago) walked me through the company's plan yesterday and how it benefits content providers looking to cost-effectively capitalize on broadband video's surging popularity.

Data that TiVo released last week indicating that nearly 60% of broadcast TV programs in the 8pm and 9pm primetime slots are timeshifted for later viewing should be interpreted as another positive for broadband video advertising for two reasons.

First, because the high propensity of DVR users to skip ads means that broadband delivery can be increasingly considered the only way for big brands' ads to be guaranteed to be seen. And second, because all that ad-skipping is making the effective cost of each TV ad more expensive, thereby making broadband-delivered ads look like a better value.

In prior posts (here and here) I've outlined how a top network show drives around $.50-$.75 of ad revenue per on-air viewer. Said another way, advertisers are willing to pay $.50-$.75 to reach that show's audience. But now factor in that nearly 60% of the targeted viewers are watching via DVR, and that of this group maybe only 10% watch any ads at all. That means maybe only half or so of the intended audience actually see the ads. With half the audience, an advertiser is effectively paying 2x the CPM it thought it was.

Advertisers understand this as well, and as we know from newspapers' current plight, expecting they'll pay more to reach shrinking audiences is not a sustainable strategy. So, on the assumption that smaller and smaller targetable audiences long-term reduces the demand for on-air network ad inventory, CPMs should decline as well. On a relative basis that means that for broadcast networks, broadband video ads, which can't be skipped, have better targeting and more interactivity (all of which already drives higher broadband CPMs), start looking better and better. In short, DVRs' surging popularity is very good news for broadband video ads.

But as I explained in the posts cited above, the problem for networks today is that higher CPM broadband ads still result in lower total revenue per program for broadband vs. on-air. That's because networks are inserting a far smaller number of ad in a broadband-delivered program vs. an on-air delivered program (my estimate is somewhere around 3 minutes for broadband vs. 20 minutes for on-air). Hence the broadcasters' challenge - get total broadband ad revenue up while DVR usage acts to drive on-air revenue down.

Doing so requires better strategy and better execution. On the strategy side, I've said it before (and it always pains me to say it again), but broadcast networks have to increase ad avails in their broadband-delivered programs. That probably means more ads per pod, but could also mean other types of non-intrusive units like banners. On the execution side, it means more attention to each stream to ensure well-targeted ads that are actually delivered.

With broadband revenue still accounting for a miniscule amount of total broadcast network revenue, it's tempting to deprioritize addressing these issues. I think that would be a mistake. TiVo's stats on DVR usage in primetime (combined with other shifting consumer behaviors) should be a major wake-up call for networks about how their business models need to change. Fortunately for them, broadband offers an even-higher value delivery option if it is exploited properly.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

Below is the 13th edition of the VideoNuze Report podcast, for April 10, 2009.

This week will discusses lessons that the broadcast TV networks might draw from the decline of U.S. newspapers, in order to avoid a similar fate. It is based on this post from Mon, April 6th. Meanwhile, Daisy speculates on the question of whether, with the explosion of iPhone apps, we're starting to witness iPhone app overload. Coincidentally, this week comScore reported that the top apps are games (no surprise there) and that major media companies are not experiencing much success with the apps they've launched.

Click here to listen to the podcast (13 minutes, 15 seconds)

Click here for previous podcasts

The VideoNuze Report is available in iTunes...subscribe today!

I'm pleased to be partnering with NAB to moderate 2 panels at the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, April 22nd. Access is complimentary by clicking here, and entering code "X104"

The first panel, at 11:15 am is entitled, "How TV Broadcasters are Capitalizing on Broadband Video" with the following panelists:

• Bill Bradford - SVP, Chief Product Officer, Fox Digital Media Broadband Channels Group
• Colin Dixon - Practice Manager, Broadband Media, The Diffusion Group
• Suzanne Johnson - Senior Industry Marketing Manager, M&E, Akamai Technologies
• Clayton Thomson - VP, Video Strategy and Development, WorldNow

The second panel, at 3:30 pm, is on one my favorite topics, "How Syndication is Powering the Broadband Video Era," with the following panelists:

• Doug Knopper - Co-CEO and Co-Founder, FreeWheel
• Steven Kydd - EVP, Demand Studios, Demand Media
• Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixsy
• Steve Rosenbaum - Founder and CEO, Magnify.net
• Brian Steel - President and CEO, VoloMedia

I hope you're able to join us, as both panels are sure to provide lots of great information. The panels will be in the "Content Theater" adjacent to the "Content/Commerce Pavilion" where many industry companies will be exhibiting (e.g. Brightcove, Limelight, Electronic Arts, Akamai, Kyte, MGM, etc.) Exhibiting opportunities are still available, so send me an email if you're interested. Hope to see you there!

Access is complimentary by clicking here, and entering code "X104"

Babelgum, the ad-supported broadband/mobile video aggregator and platform has recently embarked on an expansion into the U.S. market. A discussion I had with Karol Martesko-Fenster, the producer of Babelgum's film channel about the company's recent deal for exclusive worldwide Internet and mobile distribution rights for the new documentary film "The Linguists" reveals how Babelgum is seeking to succeed in an already crowded market, and also provides an outline for how independent content creators can tap the broadband medium.

Karol explained that Babelgum is focusing on premium-only content that fits within its half dozen curated channels. Babelgum's focus is the "Internet Free on Demand" (IFOD) window and it always seeks worldwide distribution rights, since it targets a global audience. A window of exclusive distribution is also important. To find new films, Babelgum has an acquisitions team that scouts film festivals and also works closely with digital rights aggregators such as Cinetic Rights Management, Content Republic, CAA and others. In addition it often deals directly with the content creators.

That was the case with The Linguists, a new documentary film from Ironbound Films which Babelgum spotted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Karol noted that the producers had been careful about retaining all of their rights. Babelgum secured a 4 month IFOD exclusive window for The Liguistics in exchange for an advance payment and a 50-50 split of ad/sponsorship revenue. Karol wouldn't specify the size of the advance, but said it's typically in the 4 to 6 figure range and is fully recouped before the splits kick in.

Karol believes Babelgum's willingness to pay advances is a key differentiator relative to competitors who he said are mainly focused on pure revenue-sharing deals. His experience is that for most creators who are even somewhat established, revenue-sharing alone won't be appealing.

Of course to make this model work on ad/sponsorship revenue alone requires Babelgum to be pretty careful about which films it acquires. Karol explained the variables that go into calculating the advance. Among other things, how exposed the film is, the length of exclusivity period and the ad sales team's projections. Then there's the traffic expectations. Babelgum pursues an aggressive online campaign including distributing excerpts to social media sites like Facebook and also distributing the film via an affiliate player to film festival sites and on mobile platforms (iPhone only today).

Karol acknowledges that there's some risk involved here, and that it's still very early days in figuring out the formula for how ad-supported only films will work online. However, Babelgum believes the IFOD window augments other distribution (theatrical, DVD, paid online, TV, etc.) and that the industry has recently begun to understand this. Babelgum's progress will be well worth following.

It's no secret that there's a huge amount of interest among independent content creators to exploit the emerging broadband medium. Karol's advice for independents is to get talks started with online distributors simultaneous with hitting the film festivals, clear all the worldwide rights, and be willing to carve up distribution rights into many different slices (with or without the help of digital rights aggregators).

What do you think? Post a comment now.

This week's announcement by YuMe and Mindshare to introduce an "iGRP" calculation for online video ad campaigns is another important building block in the online video industry's maturation process. Under the plan, YuMe and Mindshare will offer a reach and frequency metric for ad campaigns running across YuMe's network, which will correlate to GRPs that media planners use for TV ads. I spoke to YuMe's president and co-founder Jayant Kadambi about the iGRP plan yesterday.

Jayant explained that as the online video medium has grown, YuMe's sales team has begun interacting with more and more TV ad buyers, in addition to online ad buyers it customarily dealt with. While a lot of the spending for online video ads is still based on number of uniques and impressions, recently virtually all of the TV ad buyers YuMe deals with have been asking for a way to correlate and compare online video ad buys with TV buys. To address this need YuMe introduced the iGRP calculation a little while back and this week took the wraps off of it publicly. For those interested in understanding GRPs better, and the iGRP calculation, YuMe also released this useful white paper.

The white paper suggests that in addition to measuring reach and frequency, iGRPs can also capture an "interactivity factor" which would measure things like mouseovers, click-throughs and leads. YuMe and Mindshare plan to work with agencies and advertisers on various experiments testing the performance of different ad formats, durations, content types and targeting schemes.

I've believed for a while, as have others, that while there will be experimental ad dollars flowing into online video advertising, in order for the industry to truly scale, it is going to have to draw spending away from TV advertising. This is especially true in the down economy where advertisers are paring budgets, not increasing them. The $60 billion or so that's spent per year on TV ads is a rich pot of gold for online video to tap into. And given how reliant the online video industry is on advertising (vs. the paid model), the urgency to do so is quite high.

But actually making this happen is no easy feat. The TV ad industry is well-understood by all its participants, and despite its shortcomings and recent pressures such as surging DVR usage, many in the industry have little incentive to change. As a result, I believe online video ad executives must address and resolve all the friction points in shifting ad spending. Learning to speak in the same language - GRPs in this case - that traditional TV buyers have used in building media plans and doing post-campaign analysis is essential for the online video industry's growth.

YuMe's and Mindshare's GRP plan comes on the heels of Tremor Media's own GRP announcement with comScore from February. No doubt others will follow with their own approaches as well. This will make for a noisy period until the industry coalesces around standard ways of calculating GRPs and other metrics. Nonetheless, this awkward adolescence should be viewed as an expected part of the maturation process for an industry seeking to convert an already massive, and still rapidly growing amount of monthly eyeballs into meaningful ad revenues.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

New York magazine, the go-to-source for in-the-know New Yorkers, has relaunched the video section of its web site using the Magnify.net platform. What separates the magazine's effort from others is its plan to actively augment video it produces itself with other video sources, including users. By "curating" others' video, New York is looking to beef up the video section of its site by tapping into others' energy. Michael Silberman, the magazine's GM, Digital Media, explained more to me last week.

Michael said that as a print publication, New York was unlikely to ever have a large staff devoted to video production (it currently has just one dedicated person). However, the New York team has been watching broadband video's surging popularity and wanted to capitalize on this by making video an integral part of its web site. A key goal was to cost-effectively bulk up the volume of video it offered. That led the team to focus on how to aggregate and intelligently curate video from other sources so that the magazine's sensibility would be maintained. And all of this needed to be done in a "Hulu-like" user experience with accurately tagged videos presented in a logical flow.

In a prior post about Taste of Home magazine, I wrote about curation and how it can be a powerful editorial lever for print publishers' sites that have lean video budgets. The reality is that there is a lot of really interesting video being created that would be quite valuable to mainstream publications. In the Internet era, timeliness and omnipresence are important calling cards. Tapping into video-enabled readers, who often find themselves at the right place at the right time with their cellphones, digital cameras and Flips on hand, can produce real value if incorporated the right way.

Curation has been a mantra of Steve Rosenbaum, CEO and founder of Magnify.net, which I originally profiled here. The company has been continuously augmenting its video platform features while maintaining a focus on curation as a differentiator. This clearly paid off with the New York win; Michael said that of all the video platform companies it investigated, Magnify was the only one that could fully support its curation objectives. He also cited Magnify's robust customization tools using mainly CSS and Javascript that allowed his team to migrate the entire video section over in just 5 weeks.

New York plans to bring on a producer who will, among other things, run the curation process. No doubt there will be plenty of trial-and-error in the hunts for and includes appropriate 3rd party video, including users' submissions. But as I explained in the Taste of Home post, curation's potential suggests the emergence of a new editorial model for video that is particularly relevant in these penny-pinching economic times. It's the kind of break-from-tradition that may be jolting to editorial purists, but which reflects pragmatic - and strategic - thinking about how print publications can evolve and succeed in the broadband video era.

What do you think? Post a comment now.

Those of us who live in New England and still actually subscribe to Boston Globe woke up Saturday morning to a banner headline on page 1: "Times Co. threatens to shut Globe, seeks $20m in cuts from unions." With newspapers around the country declaring bankruptcy or going out of print, the news really shouldn't have come as a surprise.

The Globe's and other newspapers' struggles have been widely reported. They are on the wrong end of a double-barreled shotgun: the years-long shift in consumer behavior toward the Internet and more recently, the devastating recession. To me there's a strong analogy here: the Internet (an "electronic printing press") is to newspapers what broadband (a new video delivery platform) is to broadcast TV networks. So what can the broadcast TV networks learn from the newspapers' travails so they avoid a similar fate? Here are 5 thoughts:

Keep the product in synch with the customer - it's cliche to say this, but at the root of every successful business is an ability to keep the product in synch with the customer's behavior. But as the world changes, staying in synch is often at odds with traditions, deeply-ingrained cultures and management's skills. The harsh reality is that there can be no sacred cows when it comes to the product. Just because something's always been done a certain way does not make it right.

For TV networks, I think the key lesson here is around program length. By tradition, programs have been 30 or 60 minutes. But online is about short-form content. Broadband delivery provides an opportunity to expand the networks' mission and capture new market share (as some are already doing). That doesn't mean giving up on 30 and 60 minute programs, but it does mean more actively diversifying their attention and resources.

Focus on monetization - If keeping the product right is job #1, then getting paid for it is certainly job #2. Newspapers have experimented widely with ad-supported and paid models, yet they've suffered their own "analog dollars, digital pennies" conundrum, with online users not generating comparable revenues per eyeball as the print edition. There are various explanations for why they've fallen short.

When I look at networks' current online efforts, I am increasingly concerned they're not going to succeed either. Their ad strategy for online programs is not aggressive enough (yes, as a viewer it hurts to say that) to make the online delivery model work. And on the execution side, as NBC.com recently showed, they're often not even capitalizing on what's readily available to them. Both need to change fast.

Restructure costs aggressively - There's simply no escaping the fact that businesses with troubled top lines need to restructure their costs aggressively to stay viable. The key is getting ahead of this process, rather than waiting until the last possible minute. This isn't easy with unions and guaranteed jobs and managements that are well-paid. Broadcast TV networks face similar issues: strong guilds rightfully protective of their members' interests and executives who are perceived as overly compensated. Many in the industry have called out the fact that all of Hollywood needs to focus more on aligning costs with market realities. The day of reckoning is at hand.

Prepare to be radical - Painful as it is, sometimes there's no avoiding doing the radical. The free market can be quite ruthless. If Craig Newmark chooses to run Craigslist as a virtual non-profit, then anyone looking to make money out of classifieds is going to get hit. If the Huffington Post can make a business out of repackaging others' content under its own headlines and excelling at SEO then original newsgathering is threatened. And if Google can support YouTube's operating losses, then it will be around to continue to take video market share and attention away from incumbents. These are game-changing forces; the responses to them need to be equally radical.

What do you think? Post a comment now.