VideoNuze Posts

I've had a fair amount of exposure to IMG over the past couple of years through Greg Fawcett, their VP Biz Dev. Greg and I met some time ago, and I've had the pleasure of having him on a couple of industry panels I've moderated.

When I started learning more about IMG I realized it is really the hidden jewel of the media business. The company has been steadily transforming itself from a talent firm to a full-fledged multi-platform video production powerhouse under the Forstmann ownership.

They produce over 10,000 hours of programming annually across every major category. They have an enormous library of video assets waiting to be monetized. And they have relationships with everyone in the sports, media, advertising and entertainment industries, all of which will only be enhanced under Albrecht.

This list continues to grow. Here are some of the names that are on it, and their activities:

• Michael Eisner, Vuguru, Prom Queen
• Stephen Bochco, MetaCafe
• Ben Silverman, Reveille
• William Morris/Narrowstep
• Spike Lee and Babelgum's online film festival
• Herb Scannell, Next New Networks
• Albie Hecht, WorldWide Biggies

What do all these big names see? In 2 words: colossal opportunity. Broadband is a wide open playing field. They all understand that a classic paradigm shift is happening in the video industry and are rushing to understand the medium and its new rules. How to engage audiences? How to monetize most effectively? How to optimize the formats? How to retain creative control?

File this one under "AOL's loss is Discovery's gain." Today Discovery announced that Josh Freeman, who had been an SVP of AOL Video, has joined Discovery as its Executive Vice President, Digital Media.

Josh and I did business together when I was consulting for TotalVid and we signed a distribution/promotion deal with AOL Video. Josh is among the smartest, most experienced people in the broadband video space and will no doubt have a huge impact on Discovery's growth in the area.

From the release:

"As Discovery's top digital media strategist, Freeman will be responsible for growing Discovery brands across digital platforms globally. Charged with seeking out new technology and strategic alliances, and developing new business models and markets, he is expected to help Discovery expand its footprint through the role and visibility of its world-class portfolio of brands online, on mobile and through other digital platforms."

At Discovery Josh will report to Bruce Campbell, President, Digital Media and Business Development. Coincidentally, Bruce, who's also relatively new to Discovery, will be on my CTAM NY Blue Ribbon Breakfast panel in 2 weeks, joining other panelists Dallas Clement (Cox), David Eun (Google), Herb Scannell (Next New Networks) and Matt Strauss (Comcast). The session promises to be a blockbuster and is already fully sold out.

On Friday I had a chance to meet with and get an update from Waikit Lau, COO/President and Co-Founder of ScanScout. They had given me a heads up earlier in the week about this morning's announcement of a strategic investment by Time Warner and new board member appointments, so I wanted to get a closer look.

ScanScout is among a group of companies that are trying to improve monetization of broadband video by using analysis techniques (e.g. audio, visual and metadata) to deliver highly contextual ads that go beyond conventional pre-roll ads. This group includes, to one extent or another, Digitalsmiths, Yume, Adap.tv, blinkx and Nexidia. ScanScout's format of choice is the "overlay", subject of much recent rabble following YouTube's decision to jump on this format's bandwagon.

Waikit explained that ScanScout sees its secret sauce in "extracting signals" (or descriptive data) from video streams, identifying semantics and correlations of like data and enabling "brand protection."

ScanScout first analyzes video content to characterize it so that scenes can become valuable in a way that today's keywords are. This is done though speech recognition, visual analysis and meta-data collection. Next, ScanScout technology is crawling the web each day to find all nouns and pronouns to determine how they relate to one another. By understanding these correlations and the underlying semantics, ScanScout's system becomes smarter, in turn enabling its advertisers to optimize their targeting. Finally, ScanScout's "brand protection" allows advertisers to de-select certain kinds of content and keywords so that their ads don't run in those offending videos.

The company is focusing on a network business model, so it's trying to sign up as many valuable publishers as possible to build its inventory, while also enticing advertisers and agencies to allocate some budget to its platform. Certainly having Time Warner in its corner will help the company gain access to the trove of TW content. However the company isn't focusing solely on big branded content. Waikit favors "torso" video (in Long Tail-speak, content between the head and UGC), that is monetization-challenged. And the company is focusing now on the entertainment vertical and on shorter form content, which Waikit sees as ideal for the overlay format.

It's a pretty cool model, but still needs time to be fully proven. Big brands love the CPMs they're getting for pre-rolls, so overlays are going to be less appealing for now. And for ScanScout and all its competitors, the proof of their wizzy technology will be tangibly improved targeting leading to higher user click-throughs and engagement. It's still too early to know whether the science leads to actual results. But with broadband content providers large and small scrambling for improved monetization, ScanScout and the others are playing in very fertile ground.

Recently the Boston Globe, my local newspaper, ran a 9,000 word, 2 part cover story in its Sunday magazine about a successful family physician who concludes at age 52 that he would be happier as a woman. Regardless of your personal views or politics, it has to be one of the most poignant and riveting pieces of journalism about transsexuals.

But what makes the piece truly winning is that the Globe went the extra mile by shooting 2 short videos (4-5 minutes each) to accompany each part of the story and featured them prominently online, just below the titles. The videos are shot in documentary style and while likely low cost to produce, they more than hit the mark.

What these packages demonstrate is how a traditional newspaper is able to offer a totally different (and I would argue, immeasurably more engaging) user experience with some simple video. This story in particular screams out for more than just words on a page, because it deals with a subject both foreign and somewhat mysterious to many readers. For example, what does the doctor look and sound like after the operations described in the article? Do her/his office colleagues sound convincing when they say they supported his sex change decision? Does s/he seem happy now, after all the traumas her/his family has been through?

These are the kinds of emotional subtleties that video is unrivaled at delivering. The Globe gets huge kudos for treating this story in a manner that marks a distinct break from traditional newspaper journalism. And it is yet another example of how newspapers shouldn't be counted out as dinosaurs yet in the Internet age. Broadband is offering them a whole new lease on life as trusted news and information providers. Shame on them if they don't seize the opportunity.

I think Playtex is going to score big time with its humorous new ad campaign entitled "Girl Talk."

The essence of the campaign is summed up below:

"We uncovered that women of all shapes and sizes talk about their bras and breasts in funny, witty and candid ways," said Vicki Seawright, marketing director for Playtex intimate apparel, which is part of Winston-Salem-based Hanesbrands Inc.

The ads will showcase women having funny, honest chats about their breasts, including using nicknames for their breasts intended only for the privacy of their own conversations. (You now see the voyeuristic aspect of the campaign)

Playtex intends to use conventional TV and magazine buys, but supplement or "support" as the company said, with YouTube video and American Greetings e-cards.

Here's my bet: this campaign is going to launch some uproariously funny video spoofs on YouTube. And you know what: Playtex is going to love them all. In the age of viral video-enhanced brand marketing campaigns, Playtex is taking a smart approach. By having fun with their marketing and opening the door for others to do so as well, they dramatically enhance the chances of breaking this campaign out of the clutter and getting big time buzz. In short, this campaign seems well-positioned to be an advertising triumph. Let's see.

WSJ reported today that DailyMotion, the French video sharing site, has raised $34 million in a round led by Advent Venture Partners LLP of London and AGF Private Equity. This financing adds to a wave of capital that has poured into the overall ad-supported video sharing/video aggregator platform space in the last few months.

Companies that I think fit in this group that have recently raised big money are Joost ($45 million), Veoh ($26 million), Metacafe ($30 million) and blip.tv ($10 million). Hulu, the NBC-News Corp JV which raised $100 million could even be considered in this category. And thinking a little more broadly you could include sites like Heavy.com, Break, Vuguru, Next New Networks, DaveTV, Babelgum, BitTorrent and others which are creating and/or aggregating broadband programming.

To be fair, each of these companies has a slightly different approach to their content strategy (pure aggregation vs. original development vs. hybrids), market positioning and technology capabilities. However, as best I can tell, they're all trying to offer distinctive video content into broadband-only delivery networks and to one extent or another, surround this programming with interactive tools. The intended result is unique viewing experiences.

In the aggregator roles they play, they're muscling themselves into the market owned by traditional video distributors like cable and satellite operators, and more recently telcos. These new companies are all very interesting to watch because ultimately they must do at least 3 things to generate traffic and revenue: (1) differentiate themselves from each other, (2) add value to content providers/producers relative to CPs/producers relying solely on a direct-to-consumer approach and (3) shift viewing time from the traditional distributors' programming to their own.

Any one of these would be a pretty high hurdle to get over. Doing all three will be even tougher. Yet a lot of smart money keeps backing these companies, further demonstrating how hot this overall category is -- and how quickly it could become overfunded. But I don't expect things to cool down any time soon. We can expect further funding in this space as investors clamor to get a piece of the action in broadband video.

On Friday, AP carried the news that Google intends to stop offering paid downloads at Google Video and that it will discontinue support for any downloads made since its launch. Thus ends one of the most anachronistic initiatives I've observed in the broadband video industry.

I was at CES in January 2006 when Google co-founder Larry Page delivered a keynote in which he launched Google Video Store. The press release is here. My recollection of the event is still quite vivid. First, it was such a mob scene that just finding a place to watch the speech was an exercise unto itself. I ended up watching it in a courtesy tent packed cheek-to-jowl with hundreds of others.

As Larry introduced Google Video Store, I kept thinking to myself, "How is that a company with Google's IQ could have made such a startlingly bad product decision?"

Go back to that time for a moment, and imagine that you are Google. You are the foremost company in the world at monetizing content through advertising. You have the ability to meet with the CEO of every major media company in the world -- companies whose video is disproportionately supported by advertising. You have the opportunity to suggest trials, experiments and potentially longer-term deals to bring these companies' video online in an ad-supported manner. You can tantalize them with online riches beyond what they currently collect on-air. And you can be their trusted partner, with the Internet's leading technology, to help figure it all out.

(By the way, at the time, Google's official word was that their choice of the paid model was the only way they could get their hands on full length programs. Yet, just 3 months later, Disney/ABC announced online distribution of ad-supported full length programs. So this was clearly already in the works before January, 2006).

Instead of doing all of this though, you decide to launch using a commerce model, thus completely turning your back on all of the company's massive online advertising horsepower. In doing so, you choose to compete with Apple's iTunes, which has dominant market share and is seamlessly married to the wildly popular iPod. And in an act of arrogance and silliness, you decide to launch your own player, thus rendering all of the premium video incompatible with WMP, Flash, Real and other devices.

And yet, all of this is exactly what Google did. Somehow it managed to persuade premium content providers like Sony BMG, the NBA and Charlie Rose to partner. And it even managed to get Les Moonves, CBS's CEO to come on stage with Larry and make a fawning speech about how excited he was to be a part of all this action.

Now in August, 2007, 20 months later, Google Video Store is dead. Hallelujah. What a ridiculous distraction it has been. I have written over and over that I believe Google is one of the best-positioned companies to exploit broadband video. And yet, like Yahoo most prominently, I still view Google (outside of its YouTube acquisition) as all thumbs in this important new market.

For example - whatever happened to Google's deal with MTV to syndicate its content through the AdSense network? Did anything important come out of that, which might be used for other partners? What's going on with "click-to-play" video ads? And, any updates on Google for TV ads announced in April with EchoStar? Then there's the overhang of the Viacom lawsuit and the introduction of ‘fingerprinting' technology from Google to deter copyright violators. Recently it's looked like its introduction is imminent, and yet no firm timetables have been established.

I'm still expecting big things out of Google in the broadband video area, and I was encouraged to see Gabriel Stricker say in the AP piece that "The current change is a reaffirmation of our commitment to building out our ad-supported...models for video." I hope Google means it.