Connect 2 Endavo

From Small Screens to Big Screens

While big media, network and production companies are fighting over how to get from the big screens to the smaller ones, new major hits are being created and businesses built purely through “new media” and “new marketing”.... starting on the small screens. All you need is content, eyeballs, a good platform (to manage, distribute and monetize) and "new marketing"!

 

Here’s a great example of purely web-based entertainment platform/portal, starting from scratch, building an audience (through website, social network and viral marketing), and then turning that online success into a traditional TV deal...

 

Los Angeles - FunnyorDie.com, the comedy site backed by Will Ferrell that offers original video programming, has received an investment from Time Warner's HBO in exchange for a "small equity stake," Variety reports...

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117987248.html?categoryid=1236&cs=1

 

 - Paul D Hamm

 

Long Tail Platforms

I wanted to connect some dots established by one of my favorite industry pundits this week. You might be able to make some interesting and logical deductions from some market analyses conveyed by Will Richmond (excerpts below)… at least I have, so I’ll share my thoughts J. With Broadband and Mobile continuing to proliferate, Broadband and Long Tail Video continuing to gain momentum with consumers and the Video Aggregators garnering strong attention from the capital markets (thus providing more fuel for the broadband video players to continue pushing these trends), the next phase of this expansion has to be the other side of the broadband video industry – the Platforms. The big aggregators, broadcasters and production companies will likely either build or buy (in some cases license) the platforms necessary for them be able to manage, distribute and monetize content over the multiple networks, platform and devices consumers access to consume media. As evidenced by recent M&A activity (e.g., most recently Maven bot by Yahoo, Narrowstep by Onstream), buying an existing content mgmt/distrib/monet platform is a viable strategy, on one hand. On the other, the mid and long tail content market (from small-to-mid-sized aggregators/producers down to small businesses/organizations to individual artist/entertainers) to will likely choose to license platform(s) or buy hosted platform services in order to get into the game the quickest and easiest way possible. Since they want to control content and monetize more directly, many will want to create their own communities vs. just feeding aggregators. YouTube and MySpace is being viewed as great marketing portals, but not a platform on which to build a professional media business. It doesn’t take long to outgrow YouTube, although YouTube remains a wonderful continued marketing engine. Connecting these dots creates an interesting picture and an exciting opportunity for DIY platforms.

One thing seems to be clear from our view… the entertainment, businesses and organizations are definitely seeing these big trends happening and they want their piece of the presumed “gold rush”. Matter of fact, they seem to believe they have to get in the game if their brands/businesses are going to survive at all. the pressure to change is on because the consumer markets are changing (entertainment and work). So the markets are getting very creative now in coming up with ways to combine content & rich media and Web 2.0 community/interactivity to connect with their audiences more directly, in more places and more often, but not by just shoving content in their audiences’ faces but by creating engaging, interactive communities around content and inviting audiences to even feed in their own content. Let’s hear it for “long tail” platforms!!

From Will Richmond’s (Video Nuze) Posts:

Revisiting The Long Tail and Broadband Video

What does all this have to do with broadband video? As I explained back in '05, in reality, broadband distribution is essentially extending the long tail of programming. Broadband allows startups and established players (including cable and broadcast networks!) to utilize newly available broadband infrastructure to reach their audiences. The result is a massive proliferation of new programming and new viewer behaviors, further fragmenting audiences to ever-smaller niches.

Video Aggregators Have Raised $366+ Million to Date

With this week's news that Veoh has garnered another $30 million in financing, by my count the total amount raised by the top broadband video aggregators now exceeds $366 million. The breakdown is below, according to publicly available data I've pulled together.

While definitions of who should be included in this category are admittedly fuzzy, I consider broadband aggregators to be companies that are providing a broad-based destination site that focuses mainly on professionally-created video. Often these sites include broadcast network and cable TV programming, but they don't have to.

Heard at Digital Hollywood

Technology-empowered talent is the biggest disruptive force to the traditional Hollywood equation. Multi-skilled and motivated people who can write, direct, produce, act and promote implies a far different role for how Hollywood creates value for itself in the future.  (Herb Scannell, panelist and CEO of nextnewnetworks)

A massive potential opportunity has been created by the web and viral (social) video. In contrast to Hollywood fighting for coveted space on the traditional networks (TV, theater) and then getting repurposed through DVDs and now over the web, the Broadband Internet now provides an extremely conductive channel for virtually anyone to actually create hits directly and through viral distribution, which, in turn, can end up as premium content on the more traditional broadcast and distribution networks.

But creating hits is also about more than just posting a video on a website or on YouTube.

Good content/branding, a solid delivery and management platform (to easily reach many users, networks, devices), and effective target (guerilla) marketing can now be executed with minimal relative investment to make for a very profitable business very quickly, even without creating a blockbuster.

Good article by THR this week about a “viral video” success story.

- Paul D Hamm

Lies, Damn Lies and Stats

The "mothership" of statistics in our space from February were released from comScore today...

comScore released February 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, indicating that U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos during the month, representing a 3-percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66-percent gain versus February 2007. According to comScore, nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.

Other notable comScore findings from February 2008 include:

• 72.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube.com (42.6 videos per viewer).
• 50.2 million viewers watched 539  million videos on MySpace.com (10.7 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos.

Coming to a (home) theater near you

We're seeing so many new business models beginning to get seeded and blossom as we're providing businesses with the power to connect with their audiences and amplify their creative voice using broadband-delivered video and rich media.

HD Homes recently received some attention from CE Pro Magazine, which did a very good job, I thought, of encapsulating the value proposition of broadband video to the home theater industry.

Music to our ears (in surround sound, of course).

-Paul D Hamm

What is a Platform?

The term “platform”, particularly as it pertains to digital media, often sparks the question, “what is a platform?” We discuss this term with our customers and we even debate it internally. Here’s one approach...

HP defines their Digital Media Platform as providing a comprehensive technology foundation to support file- and network-based media workflows. Drawing on a service-oriented approach, the platform enables the integrated media storage, processing, management and distribution services and solutions that automate the digital supply chain.

A good technical definition but it doesn’t really communicate the full power of what a platform can actually do for people in simple terms.

Platforms can enable the power and freedom for many people to create and develop applications and services that are meaningful to them, leveraging underlying technology (platform) that they have not necessarily mastered.

Potentially, a platform can extend into a thousand or million variations, one of which could be right for just about anyone. Facebook took a lead among social networks by creating and opening up a social application platform, allowing anyone to play.

To me, a digital media platform is analogous to LEGO…. An identical set of LEGOs can be used to build virtually an infinite amount of unique structures. Similarly, a technology platform can also enable many different people to create an infinite number of unique video/rich media applications and services using the same basic building blocks (platform) provided.

Technology platform services further leverage and simplify technology to provide the power and freedom to create and build without having to necessarily think too much about the underlying technology. Just use the technology to create solutions and achieve objectives without building, buying, maintaining or upgrading the technology underneath. In this way, a hosted platform service can provide an enormous amount of freedom and power for many, many people. And it can do so at a low relative cost due to the leverage of a hosted, shared environment.

In the business of online entertainment & media, a digital media platform service can quickly and easily open up doors to many new opportunities for people to connect and interact with their specific or broad audiences using video and rich media. Every artist and business is unique and, therefore, reaching and communicating with different audiences poses unique challenges and opportunities. A digital media platform should provide end-to-end underlying technology that enables individuals and businesses to freely create, deliver and control just the right video/rich media communications service to support their specific brand and connect with their audience. A flexible, modular platform is required to enable and support the creative voice of many unique people.

YouTube is not your platform. You don’t control it. You can’t manage YouTube, you can’t change how they display your friends. If you wanted to add a new feature to your YouTube page, say a marketplace, or you want to deliver tracked e-learning, you simply can’t do it. It’s not really your tube - it’s their tube, over which they let you broadcast your video to their mass audience, but always remaining under their control. But it’s not your platform, it’s a portal. You don’t control your own content, your audience, your business. But even with those limitations, even by just giving people a portal to broadcast themselves, look at the power of using video over the Internet that has been unleashed to communicate, engage and inspire – pretty incredible. So, now introduce your own platform and services in the equation – the power and freedom to deliver your own Internet TV, enterprise video and social media. Now we’re onto something special. Similar to how the web browser platform has enabled millions of different websites for just about anyone. The power of the individual creative voice is being taken to the next level, thanks to Internet video/rich media platforms.

- Paul D Hamm

Consumer Online Video Growth Leading to Enterprise Digital Media Growth

It certainly looks like 2008 is setting up to be another banner year for online video (Internet TV), as well as big corporate deals - we're starting off with a bang with Microsoft and Yahoo (and Maven). In the trenches, content owners are expecting to deliver substantially more bits of content this year over 2007, 2-4X more as reported by Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media. Mr. Rayburn notes, "...the vast majority of content owners are telling me that they expect to deliver 2-4x more bits this year when compared with 2007. For most of them, that does not take into account the fact that this year, many content owners are bumping up their encoding bitrates from 300Kbps to 500-750Kbps. Taking that into consideration, with increased bitrates they could see their traffic growing from 4-8x over last year."

The surge in content distribution growth is supported by the changing habits of the American online population, who is gravitating steadily to more and more Internet TV. Digital Life America reports that nearly 80 million Americans, or 43% of online viewers, have watched "TV" online, a big jump from a similar survey a year ago that recorded only 25% of viewers watching online TV. The Digital Life survey also shows a full 20% of online Americans watch TV online on a weekly basis vs. 14% watching cable VOD.

Now to the point. This explosive growth in consumer Internet TV viewing is translating also into growth in Enterprise Video.

The Enterprise Digital Media market, based largely around the power of video, is growing rapidly. IDC estimates that the use of enterprise video will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 50 percent over the next four to five years. Enterprises are seizing on digital media to increase productivity, enrich community, enhance brand awareness and accelerate marketing ROI. And businesses are getting encouragement from an unlikely source: the consumer.

"The consumer video revolution is now driving the enterprise space," says Thomas Wyatt, general manager of the Digital Media Systems Business Unit at Cisco. "With the explosion of video iPods, YouTube video, and web streaming, people are becoming used to digital media at home and they want it where they work and where they do business. It is a transformational shift. Large enterprises see this demographic shift and are starting to use video to communicate and sell products and services."

If you're in the Tampa FL area, we're doing a Video Management & Marketing Workshop in late February. You can register for it here - www.insidetrack08.com

- Paul D Hamm

Testimonials 2 degrees out

We all like to hear positive testimonials and direct feedback from our customers. It's even better to hear what others on the outside say about your customers, especially when it's unsolicited and praises things your customers are doing out there when they are using your products and services in a way that has enough positive impact on them to cause other people to take notice. OK, maybe a little self-promoting, but here's some recent coverage from a music industry blogger, John Jinright, regarding one of our Internet TV customers, Eye Music Network, who uses our new platform as the foundation for their music video service that I thought to share (January 23 & 7) - http://jinright.edublogs.org/2008/01/23/test/

Movies To Go

VideoNuze posted an interesting article regarding an announcement this week from Blockbuster that they plan to offer movies to handset makers. In the VideoNuze response, Will Richmond poses the question about whether people will actually watch a 2 hour movie on a mobile handset. Interesting question and an important one for the movie business as more and more people every day are watching video on the their laptops and mobile devices.

Richmond may well be right on this one (usually is), but you might find it interesting that some research is showing that people will actually watch a 2-hour movie on a mobile handset - but they often will watch it in multiple bite-sized chunks (chapters). Think of it like reading a book... do you usually get from start to finish in one session? When traveling or commuting, would you rather read a chapter in the 3 lb. Harry Potter book you're lugging around or watch a chapter or two of the Harry Potter movie on your mobile handset? How do you think teens and young adults would answer that question? Movies are easily broken up into chapters (like on DVD), allowing the viewer to take it in bites.

Another thought... if (or when) movie makers begin thinking outside the box of the "2 hour" movie or start thinking of different ways to package and deliver a story, I suppose the distributors better be ready to distribute these new forms of entertainment as the markets change and if they want to keep up. I suppose the movie industry is scrambling to figure out new models already.

I wouldn't count out the movie-to-go concept too early.

- Paul D Hamm

Lies, Damn Lies and Stats

I know you're constantly bombarded with statistics about this and that. But whether you are a broadband video playa or hayta, there's something really happenin' out there...

Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers

Online Videos Attract Broad Audience

- Paul D Hamm