Imposing order on video anarchy

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 5 years, you’ll have noticed that things have changed in the world of video. It used to be pretty straightforward: deliver tape to broadcaster, light blue touch-paper and stand well back.

The only place people watched video was on the TV, so you could be pretty sure you knew where they were watching and what they watched. Now there are more places to watch video than you can shake a stick at. It’s a massive opportunity. But reaching your audiences, keeping track of viewers and giving them what they want has become quite a challenge.

It’s no wonder things have got so complicated. Today, people can watch your video on your own websites, YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu (and hundreds of web services like them), mobile services, IPTV, outdoor displays, games platforms and in-store kiosks. Not to mention all the different models and mechanisms behind it – ad-supported, pay-per-view, streamed, multicast, downloaded, on-demand, peer-to-peer…

It’s all become rather… messy. There are so many different channels, devices, formats and screen sizes. The middleware is legion. DRM and content protection strategies are evolving as quickly as the pirates’ methods. Everything’s changing so fast and the technology is getting increasingly sophisticated (and complicated) to deal with it.

But content owners aren’t handling this in the best way. They’re still using manual video delivery processes and point solutions that don’t work smoothly and aren’t properly integrated with each other. There’s just no way that approach going to be able to keep up with the way the industry’s progressing. It’s awkward, inefficient, clumsy, error-prone and slow. And because of all this it costs a horrible amount of money.

The silo approach – building a new delivery platform for each channel ad opportunity – is not only prohibitively expensive, it’s a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up with content in the wrong place, or in the wrong format, or missing vital bits (like an audio track or a video overlay). It will cost a fortune and it won’t tackle the Five Big Challenges of video content delivery with the same degree of dexterity as an end-to-end, integrated solution can.

Obviously we’ve got one in mind, but we’re too modest to say.

All this mess is actually disguising a whole host of exciting opportunities. For those content owners agile and adaptable enough, the chance to monetize their video is there for the taking. If you’ve got the back-end delivery platform and processes to support you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Advertising and Branding, Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.