VideoNuze Posts

Today is the last day for discounted early bird registration for the VideoNuze 2013 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues, June 4th in NYC. Sign up now to save on the standard rate. As an added bonus, all early bird registrants will be eligible to win a Samsung 40-inch Smart TV, presented by VideoHub. For startups/students, note there's a special $195 ticket to make the event more affordable. Contact me for the discount code.

The 3rd annual Video Ad Summit is shaping up as a must-attend event for industry executives. There are over a dozen sessions and over 40 speakers from leading companies such as YouTube, GroupM, CBS Interactive, Nielsen, NBCU, Digitas, Viacom, LG, Scripps, Time, AOL and many others. If you need up-to-date insights on online video and advertising, the Video Ad Summit will be the place to be on June 4th.

Thanks to all 18 industry-leading companies that are supporting this year's Video Ad Summit: Premier Partners Adap.TV, Adobe, Akamai, TubeMogul, ValueClick and YuMe; Headline Partners Altitude Digital, AOL, BlackArrow, Collective, Innovid, LiveRail, VideoHub and Videology, plus Branding Partners EXPO, Extreme Reach, Mixpo and Real Media. All of them will have representatives at the event and it will be a great opportunity to engage with them.

Don't delay - save now on early bird registration!

I'm pleased to present the 180th edition of the VideoNuze podcast with my weekly partner Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia. There was a rush of interest around live streaming this week. Among the news items: ABC,TNT and TBS announced live streaming of their linear feeds; YouTube expanded its live feature and Brightcove launched a new live module, which followed thePlatform doing the same last week.

For live streaming TV, neither Colin nor I believe it will have broad appeal, with the possible exception of sports and maybe certain breaking news/events. It's no secret that on-demand, time-shifted viewing has surged in popularity, due to DVR penetration above 50% of U.S. homes and the widespread availability of TV programs online for on-demand use. So in a way live streaming TV is trying to put the genie back in the bottle - getting on-demand viewers to go back to linear.

The fundamental inconsistency to me in this is that if you're tech-savvy enough to be drawn to live streaming on an iOS device, you're even more likely to now be a mainly on-demand viewer. And for those not tech-savvy, who still do enjoy linear viewing, well, why do you need an live streaming app when you can just watch on your TV as you always have? Even the sports use case is a bit thin as watching out-of-home for most will be very expensive given mobile data rates, and most mobile device viewing happens in the home anyway.

Nonetheless, Colin and I describe all the reasons we think other TV networks are likely to roll out live streaming in the coming months as well. Maybe we're missing something, but it strikes us that these will have more to do with PR (countering Aereo for example) and supporting TV Everywhere/retransmission consent negotiations and won't end up resonating broadly with users. More interesting I think is the CW's move to make its shows available free next day on-demand via Apple TV and other devices which seems in synch with users' expectations.

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Near the top of my personal list of confusing industry terms is "mobile video." Does it mean watching on a smartphone? A tablet? Both? Does it mean using a wireless carrier's network (e.g. Verizon, AT&T) or a WiFi network or both for access? Does it mean watching while out of home (and if so, where?) or at home? And what content is watched - live? on-demand? short-form? long-form? genre? The list goes on and on. Mobile video is truly one of the most confusing and misunderstood industry terms around.

And that's why recent data from Leichtman Research Group, a well-respected media research firm founded by a former colleague of mine, Bruce Leichtman, really caught my eye. In its 7th annual "Emerging Video Services" survey, of 1,240 adults age 18+, LRG found that of those who said they watched video on their mobile phone in the past month, 63% said they usually watch at home. More striking, of those who watched video on their iPad, tablet or eReader in the past month, 89% of them said they usually watch at home.

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Following is a contributed post by Mio Babic, who is the founder and CEO of iStreamPlanet, the leader in live linear streaming solutions including the soon to be released Aventus live video workflow solution.

Multiscreen Live Linear - Consumer Values and Perceptions
by Mio Babic

Recently iStreamPlanet partnered with The Diffusion Group to better understand the opportunity in delivering a multiscreen live linear experience to multiple devices. As digital media innovators it’s easy for us to get excited about moving the technology forward, and while we see 24/7 live linear streaming as the next step in the OTT evolution, we wanted to verify that we are creating technology for an experience that consumers desire, and therefore profitable for our customers in the media industry.

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Live streaming is continuing to get a lot of mind share these days from both content providers and technology companies. The latest example in the latter category is Brightcove, which yesterday introduced in beta the Brightcove Video Cloud Live, a module to support live streaming across multiple devices.

A key part of Video Cloud Live is the recently announced Brightcove Zencoder Live Transcoding service, which provides live transcoding as a scalable API. This obviates the need for content providers to purchase and maintain their own hardware for encoding live events. This in turn reduces cost and complexity of running live events, making them far more feasible to offer to viewers. The Zencoder service also produces multiple adaptive bitrate streams so that users on various devices get the right stream for them.

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Early bird discounted tickets are only available until this Friday for the VideoNuze 2013 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues, June 4th in NYC. In addition to the early bird, for startups/students, there's a special $195 ticket to make the event more affordable. Contact me for the discount code. Also as an extra bonus to sign up by Friday, all early bird registrants will be eligible to win a Samsung 40-inch Smart TV, presented by VideoHub.

The 3rd annual Video Ad Summit is a must-attend event for anyone in or around the online video / advertising industries. We have over a dozen sessions with nearly 40 speakers from agencies, publishers and technology providers including YouTube, GroupM, CBS Interactive, Nielsen, NBCU, Digitas, Viacom, LG, Scripps, Time, AOL and many others who will share insights on all of the key industry topics. As with prior Video Ad Summits you can expect to come away with valuable insights and data, plus lots of new relationships. The past 2 years we've had 300+ attendees.

Thanks to all 18 industry-leading companies that are supporting this year's Video Ad Summit: Premier Partners Adap.TV, Adobe, Akamai, TubeMogul, ValueClick and YuMe; Headline Partners Altitude Digital, AOL, BlackArrow, Collective, Innovid, LiveRail, VideoHub and Videology, plus Branding Partners EXPO, Extreme Reach, Mixpo and Real Media. All of them will have representatives at the event and it will be a great opportunity to meet them and learn about their products and services.

Learn more and save on early bird registration!

The click-through rate for in-stream video ads served by PointRoll in 2012 was .62%, four times higher than for mobile ads (.15%) and rich media ads (.14%) served. The data is part of a new benchmark study comparing 2012 ad performance to 2011. The interaction rate for in-stream video ads was 5.7%, compared with 4% for rich media and .96% for mobile.

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ABC will enable live-streaming of its programs through its iOS app, moving beyond an on-demand only programming model for the first time. The "Watch ABC" live feature will no doubt please a subset of the people who have downloaded the ABC app 10 million times to date and who still value live viewing. But Watch ABC will also likely puzzle and irk some users when they discover they must be authenticated as a pay-TV subscriber in order to access the live stream.

In fact, requiring authentication for Watch ABC is just the latest evidence of TV Everywhere's tightening grip on broadcast TV. Another recent example was NBC making large portions of last summer's Olympics available only to authenticated pay-TV subscribers. In addition, Fox has maintained an 8-day exclusive window for pay-TV subscribers for almost 2 years.

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