VideoNuze Posts

Kaltura's Chairman and CEO Ron Yekutiel came by the VideoNuze booth at the recent NABShow and shared a detailed company update. Kaltura operates in three verticals: media, enterprise and education. Ron provides an in-depth update on customers Kaltura is working with in each vertical and the apps they're using Kaltura for. It's a very rich discussion of some the user dynamics in the video space. Watch the video below (6 minutes, 30 seconds).

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Don't delay - early-bird discounted registration for the VideoNuze 2012 Online Video Advertising Summit on Tues, June 19th in NYC ends next Friday. Sign up now for big savings off the standard rate. For startups/students, I've just created a special $200 value ticket to make the event more affordable. Contact me for the discount code.

I've added two more sessions to the program, "3 Screens, 3 User Experiences: Making Monetization Work" (with executives from CBS Interactive, Discovery, Mixpo and U.DIG) and "Best Practices in Online Video Advertising: A 360 Degree View" (with executives from Razorfish, The Weather Channel, Conviva and Latergy). These executives join others from GroupM, Google/YouTube, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, LG Electronics, Macy's, eMarketer, American Express, Digitas, VivaKi, Adobe, TV Guide and more in what promises to be a compelling day of learning and networking.

Whether you're a content provider, advertiser, agency, technology or other ecosystem executive, the Summit will be premier opportunity to gain first-hand insights into online video generally and the rapidly-evolving online video ad industry in particular.

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).

To get the ball rolling toward the Summit, join VideoNuze, TubeFilter and FourScreen Media for our complimentary Multi-Screen Mix-Up tomorrow night, 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 receive free tickets to the Summit.

Yesterday, Encoding.com announced that Revision3 (which was recently acquired by Discovery) is replacing its in-house encoding infrastructure with Encoding.com. The win is a validation of Encoding.com's vision for its cloud-based, encoding-on-demand service model as more scaleable and cost-effective vs. the traditional approach of media companies operating their own encoding systems.

Jeff Malkin, Encoding.com's president and I caught up at the recent NABShow. Jeff discusses why over 3,000 companies across multiple industries have elected to work with the company for their encoding needs. Encoding.com is also moving into TV Everywhere, to support longer-form video encoding for multiple device delivery. Watch the video below (5 minutes, 58 seconds)

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As this week's TV advertising upfronts kick-off, the inconvenient truth of live TV viewing's ongoing decline should be on the minds of everyone in the ecosystem. The days of forcing viewers to tolerate almost a minute of advertising for every two minutes of TV programming they viewed are fading. With DVRs now approaching 50% of American homes, viewers are more in control than ever, and live viewing's decline will accelerate. One bit of good news for both TV networks and advertisers is that online video advertising is maturing in time to help. Following are 4 reasons why online video advertising's appeal should grow:

Read the 4 reasons

There's lots of online buzz right now about an apparently massive amount of online piracy for HBO's hit show "Game of Thrones." To better understand HBO's online strategy with its HBO GO app, I recommend watching the interview I did with co-president Eric Kessler at last November's VideoSchmooze event, which I've re-posted below. This interview is the primary source for a lot of the back-and-forth going on about the GOT piracy issue and what's behind it.

In the interview Eric is very clear in explaining why HBO is focused on maintaining exclusive distribution through pay-TV providers, which means the HBO GO app is only available to HBO/pay-TV subscribers. Coincidentally, this week's podcast touches on how restrictive access to popular programming helps breed piracy.  In this case HBO has rabid GOT fans, but many aren't cable subscribers as Forbes points out, and therefore can't subscribe to HBO. I explained this conundrum back in March, 2011 in "Could HBO be the Next BLOCKBUSTER."

By limiting its distribution, HBO is adhering to a traditional model that still works reasonably well and is very rationale, yet also leaves lots of opportunity on the table and encourages illegal behavior. It's yet another one of the many dilemmas arising as analog era business models collide with digital era distribution realities.

Watch the interview

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).

I Want to Keep Reading!

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.

Listen to the podcast

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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