Gonzalo Martin's List: Estructura del sector /Cadena de valor /Trends

• nternet TV Platforms, like Brightcove, give media owners the ability to control how video is published on their own sites and syndicated across the Internet. Rather than existing at a single destination, Internet TV Platforms underlie thousands of properties and brands creating economies of scale in technology, delivery and distribution.
• 2007 was the year of the Platform. So as we walk into 2008, we have an Internet video market divided into two major groups: aggregators and platforms

• Aggregators - Aggregators bring consumers together at a destination. Three big categories of aggregators are shaping the Internet video landscape:
   

   
  • Consumer Sharing Sites
   
  • Commercial Video Portals
   
  • Social Networks

• latforms - Platforms enable website publishers and content owners to build their own online properties, syndicate video to other properties and monetize their content. The relevant platforms for Internet video break out into three major categories as well:
   

   
  • Internet TV Platforms
   
  • Community Platforms
   
  • Uber Ad Platforms

• Aggregators

   
   

  All three categories of aggregators share the same core business model which is to aggregate consumer traffic at a destination and monetize it with a variety of advertising strategies.
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    Consumer sharing sites are built around user-submitted video, although they are starting to embrace professionally submitted video. T
• he Consumer Sharing Sites continue to be plagued with the challenges of piracy and the low-quality of user-generated content. Some of the 2006 players have been shut-down and others are on the chopping block.
• In ad supported content, there are now destination sites and desktop clients. Both are starting to adopt a business model that is more favorable for media owners, which uses a 90/10 or 80/20 revenue split with content owners controlling ad sales and getting most of the revenue. The portals include MSN Video, AOL Video, Yahoo TV, MySpace TV, Hulu, and Comcast/Fancast. The desktop clients include VeohTV, Joost, Adobe Media Player (AMP) and Bablegum.
• The other major model is paid content, and while that hasn’t gotten the same momentum as ad-supported content, the players in this category bear some mention. The three notable solutions are iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon, but there are many other players in this space as well.
• Platforms run behind the scenes making it possible for content owners and programmers to build their own branded websites and control their own distribution and destiny.

  • Empiza definición de platafomras
• nternet TV Platforms act as operating platforms for online video publishing and distribution throughout the Web. At their core, Internet TV Platforms allow media owners of all sizes to operate direct-to-consumer websites and syndicate online video to aggregators. These platforms gain scale and value as more publishers use them, and are increasingly able to act as hubs for distribution, advertising and programming strategies.
• ommunity Platforms are largely complementary to Internet TV Platforms, and we see most of our customers using both along with a Content Management System to build out their web properties. But there is some competition around the area of user generated content (UGC). Many of the community platforms support services for accepting video uploads from consumers or they integrate with these services from Internet TV Platforms.

• The Uber Ad Platforms will deliver ads in every major format across every major medium, and they are waging a battle that will reshape the technology and media industries in fundamental ways.

   
• bits plus ads is a winning combination.

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• he ability to deliver ads in these environments has become a massive business that will continue to gr
• The Uber Ad Platforms are just taking shape. While they come online, niche ad network and technology players are battling each other with either unique technology strategies or specific genre and category focuses.
• Branded Destinations - Nothing about the Internet changes the fundamentals of media—value is created by controlling the content or controlling access to the audience. Media companies with established brands and new start-ups will continue to build successful branded destinations so they can control the access to audiences. We expect these destinations will leverage Internet TV Platforms, Community Platforms, and Ad Platforms to compete with the major aggregators by offering consumers a more focused and differentiated experience, including exclusive content, and by giving advertisers a better environment to build their brands.
• Audience Monetization - To date the advertising focus in the Internet TV market has been on monetizing video streams. But this focus is both shortsighted and not nearly as effective as thinking about how to monetize audience. By developing audience-centric strategies, content owners will look for new ways to blend ad formats, insertion policies, and targeting tactics across pages, short-form video clips, long-form shows, and open distribution. While they are more difficult to plan and execute these ad strategies deliver greater yield and a much better user experience, which means better sustainability. These strategies will also take advantage of both direct selling and integration with Uber Ad Platforms.
• Regardless of how it’s done, getting the context right means you can put the right video clips in front of a viewer, which makes everyone happy. We expect that contextual in-page video publishing will grow, and that it will be extended to slideshows and audio content as more and more rich media is brought out of silos and into the core of websites.

  • Contxtual publishing
• high-quality video will push Internet TV closer to traditional broadcast TV, and widen the opportunity for brand marketers that covet the deep engagement created by a full-screen, immersive experience.

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• but basically you have aggregators and the platforms.  

   

   Aggregators, there are three types. There are viral sharing sites or consumer-oriented sharing sites that are also playing roles as an aggregator. You have commercial video portals, which are not about consumer sharing, but they’re about leveraging their own distribution whether that’s MSN or Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) or AOL (NYSE: TWX) would fit in that category. We put social networks in aggregators as well even though they’re not taking the same approach in terms of building these formal content distribution relationships, although MySpace is.  The others, they’re kind of open platforms or they’re aggregated platforms from an end user perspective.  

   
• Then there are platforms and there are three major platform categories we’ve seen emerge: Internet TV platforms; these uber ad platforms that combine ad serving technology with ad monetization networks; and then community platforms is the last category, which has really emerged in 2007 as a real category.  We have the likes of Ning and KickApps and others.  So, the platform sites are all about getting those services embedded everywhere throughout the web.  The aggregators are obviously about being focal point destinations.
• he ad arena is getting more complex, not less complex.  For the first time, publishers at large are very eager to experiment with things like pre-rolls and as a result they need technology that allows them to figure out how and where to place inventory and video, policies that they can set across their own sites, but also across all the sites that they syndicate to. Which leads to the other big piece, which is the first generation of efforts in online video mostly focused in 2006 and 2007, mostly focused on putting up programming in your own sites as a media company.  Now that the kind of Hulu deal structure got put in place, there’s now a kind of framework that content players find acceptable, which is, “Hey, if it’s a 90/10 deal and I sell the ads, that’s a good deal.  I’ll do that.  I’ll do that until the cows come home.”
• Audience networks will become the sort of thing everyone’s going to want one in 2008 and that’s a nontrivial task across a lot of different dimensions of the business.  So, at one level, we’re growing with complexity and the richness of what people are trying to do.  On the other hand, we actually think on a mass market basis that we’re just getting started, meaning that online video and the other kind of rich media that augments it are going to be staples of almost every web property.

• What chance do you give it?  

   

   Allaire: That’s a good question.  The bottom line is just going to be distribution for that whether they get to a place in terms of distribution so that there’s a strong incentive for people to use it and that’s not there yet. It’s still in beta basically, but my assumption just having watched Microsoft over the years is first and foremost, the platform they’ve created from a development and design and technology perspective is quite good.  It’s the first real viable competitor to Flash and it’s a very meaningful competitor.  Again, I think they will get distribution over the next couple of years and then I think you’ll start to see much more activity on Silverlight, but I would say also Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) responded incredibly swiftly and improved the security and video formats and quality in their environment very quickly and are going to get to ubiquitous distribution for those new things in under 12 months.  I think they sensed the competitive threat and have been responding.

  • Sobre futuro de Silverlight

• What do you think of desktop players themselves?  Do you think they will gain any traction?  

   

   Allaire: I’m very skeptical.  We’ve seen incredibly limited adopted of Joost.  I don’t know anyone who uses it.  It’s not a good experience to have to go off into the desktop to get on-demand media when 10 years of being used to getting instant gratification and contextual framing through the web is just so powerful for users.  It’s not clear that it will add some significant value, especially as the quality levels continue to rise.  I think right now those have fairly limited adoption.  The only reason iTunes has any adoption for videos is because of portability and there’s a subset of people that want portable video, but for desktop-consumed content, there doesn’t seem to be a huge value added.

• Rafat: In 2008, what do you worry about in terms of your business becoming a commodity business?  

   

   Allaire: Well, I think the first thing is we would like our business to become a commodity business.  We would like the Internet TV platforms and these kinds of broadband media platforms to be technologies that are ubiquitous.  Commoditization generally means that something becomes ubiquitous.  I think we’re in an interesting place to be a company that helps do that, so create additions of our service that can be broadly adopted on a mass market basis.
• If we can create a model where our service can scale from small publishers to enterprises that are diversified media companies and as organizations grow in their use and the complexity of what they’re trying to do, that they can grow with us. One of my key passions has always been about kind of the ubiquity of video as a format, as a form of communication.

• What about video search? Do you think it will be solved?  

   

   Allaire: We continue to meet with a lot of companies in that space.  It is a hard problem.  We haven’t seen a huge need to solve it.  Really, the only category where there has been a significant demand for it is in the news category where people really want to make sure that their content is discoverable in that way.  We’ve seen some experimentation there.

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• “What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”
• ON does not distribute any traditional TV shows. Instead, it works with professional content creators who develop original programs in HDTV. So far, it has produced hundreds of episodes for 25 programs, all of which are available at the ON Web site, as well as through iTunes and AT&T, its distribution partners. They include a dating show, produced in partnership with NBC, and a home-building show called “Mainstream Green.”

• As a means to that end, Hulu may have persuaded the industry to relax a bit. Hulu’s player allows viewers to create short video clips from the shows they watch and put them in e-mail messages or on Web sites, including blogs, an activity that in the past has drawn nasty letters from copyright lawyers. “This is a key way that we can make sure the content finds the audience,” said Mr. Kilar.
• “There’s a lot of rewriting of the concept of windows in the TV network world today — the timing of when and where shows appear,” said Allen Weiner, the managing vice president for media and consumer technologies for the Gartner Group in Scottsdale, Ariz.
• “We’re seeing all kinds of new windows occurring, and no one knows what the magic formula will be,” he said. “A lot depends on advertiser reaction and on user behavior.”
• As far as ON is concerned, Mr. McClanahan intends to put his programs in every single window he can find. Unlike other companies, ON optimizes all its shows for viewing on any video-capable device, a feature he calls “lifestyle distribution.”
• You can’t expect to control consumers and force them to come to prime time at 7 p.m. on a Monday night,” said Mr. McClanahan. “If the consumer wants it on their phone at 3 p.m. while they’re on the golf course, then that’s where we have to deliver it.”
• Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which studies collaborative problem-solving. E-mail: dcaruso@nytimes.com.

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• Joost, Blip y ON comparten hasta el 50 por ciento de sus ingresos con los productores de contenidos, sin importar el medio de distribución. “Si ese modelo exisitiera hoy, los guionistas no estarían en huelga” dice McClanahan.
• Un enfoque que se está siguiendo atentamente es la nueva serie por internet “Quarterlife”, de Marshall Herskovitz y Edward Zwick, que produjeron “My So-Called Life.” Los episodios aparecen primero en MySpace TV, al día siguiente en Quarterlife.com, y una semana más tarde en YouTube, Facebook e Imeem. El programa también ha sido contratado por la NBC pero como la última ventana, en vez de la primera.
• “No puedes esperar controlar a los consumidores y obligarles a venir a las siete de la tarde un lunes por la tarde” dice McClanahan. “Si el consumidor lo quiere en su móvil a las 3 de la tarde mientras están jugando al golf, ahí es donde habrá que entregárselo”.

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• About 61% of high-speed Internet users download online video content at least once a week and 86% do so on a monthly basis, compared to 45% and 71%, respectively, in the 2006 study. News and user-generated, non-professional content are the most often viewed genres, followed by movie previews/trailers, music videos, and previews/segments of TV shows.
• NBC and ABC are the networks that Internet users mention the most frequently for online TV content (unaided), with "Grey's Anatomy" being the most often mentioned TV program viewed online (unaided).
• While consumption of broadband video has grown, the study shows that television is still the preferred platform for traditional TV content. About 70% of Internet users who watch TV online say do so because they missed the episode on TV. About 18% of these respondents say they watch TV shows online to watch them a second time (after having watched them on TV), or that they watch TV shows online just when they happen to find them or when someone else tells them about them (20%). Conversely, 13% of Internet users who watch TV shows online say they watch them directly online, and not on regular TV.
• "More and better broadband content, particularly entertainment content in video form, is bringing more consumers to the platform, either on their computers or on their handheld devices," said Howard Horowitz
• The data suggests that broadband video is not cannibalistic to linear video, but rather, an enhancement to the consumers' "traditional" TV experience, he said.

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• The most popular Web source for full episodes of television shows is ABC.com, according to a study conducted by The Nielsen Company and released today.
• The study demonstrates the increasing popularity of full-length streaming video on the Internet. The survey, of 1,599 Americans in October, found that 25 percent had watched complete television episodes online in the past three months. Among age groups, 39 percent of users in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic had viewed episodes online, compared with 23 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 11 percent of people 55 and older.
• But the popularity of online video is growing surprisingly fast.
• Among respondents who had viewed video online, 50 percent had used ABC.com, 41 percent had used NBC.com, 37 percent had used CBS.com and 24 percent had used Fox.com. YouTube (17 percent) and iTunes (15 percent) were used less often.
• Significantly more women than men said they had visited ABC.com for streaming video, a presumptive nod to the popularity of “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice.” Considerably more men than women said they had visited Fox.com.

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• Recuerda si puedes que Steve Jobs reveló que la mayoría de los contenidos cargados en los iPods no provienen de la tienda iTunes. La mayoría viene de colecciones de CDs existentes o de páginas de contenidos compartidos. Creo recordar que la media de canciones vendidas en iTunes por ipod está entre 20 y 30.

   

  El analista de Forrester, James McQuivey, señala que el gasto medio en iTunes por usuario está alrededor de 76 $. Obtiene esa cifra estimando que el 86 % de la gente que utiliza iTunes, compra algo en la tienda. Este colectivo es bastante grande: alrededor del 19 % de los adultos que usan internet. Es una porción respetable del universo….

   

  Pero ahora vienen las malas noticias para Apple: sólo el 19 % de esa gente que usa iTunes está comprando vídeo. Y aunque este grupo gasta casi el doble en iTunes – alrededor de 123 $ de media – McQuivey apunta que de ellos, sólo gastan 30 $ en vídeo. ¿La cuenta de resultados de ventas de vídeo? 100 millones de dólares en la primera mitad del año.

• la compañía MSN cuenta con acuerdos para reproducir producciones, por ejemplo, de Antena 3)

• hints that future growth in online video services may be predicated more on downloading models than on streaming models – and potentially more on free ad-based content than on paid content – particularly as younger consumers spend an increasing amount of their disposable time online
• First, the results clearly illustrate the consumer appetite for free, ad-subsidized online video services, in this case specifically for television programming. In addition, the data also articulates a division in preference among younger and older consumers in general: younger consumers – those ages 18 to 34 – prefer downloading longer form television programming online, while consumers 35 and older have a greater affinity for streaming television programming content.
• While today there are very few options offering legitimate free downloads of original television programming on the Internet, the data here suggest there is significant latent demand for these types of services
• Yet despite the fact the video downloading market today remains relatively niche, the reality is that video streamers and video downloaders are typically the same people
• the greater the reliance on streaming vs. downloading as the primary way to access video content online. A number of factors are likely influencing these trends, including a far greater number of free, ad-subsidized video streaming options online in comparison to free video downloads. Other behavioral-driven factors are also likely contributing to this trend, as Wright explains: “Perhaps what’s most striking about the data here is how this illustrates older consumers’ preference for the broadcast model for watching video.”

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• The surge in online video growth is expected to slow in 2008 with 74 percent growth (down from 89 percent in 2007) and a spending increase of $1.35 billion
• Online video players such as Google, Microsoft and the TV networks will fortify their video offerings by buying small, ad-related companies
• YouTube will play a decisive role in the 2008 US presidential election by either airing a user-submitted clip that embarrasses a leading candidate or setting the tone of the campaign through its series of sponsored debates
• US consumer spending on movie downloads will more than double from 2007 to 2008, from $114 million to $245 million.

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• YOUKU.COM, THE BIGGEST VIDEO SHARING site in the Internet's second largest market - China - is approaching the kind of numbers being generated by the world's largest video sharing site, YouTube
• To put those numbers in perspective, YouTube had only just exceeded the 100 million daily video views milestone in October 2006, the month it was acquired by Google

• Others have also depicted Apple's move as a direct strike at Netflix, but I think this battle is illusory. Rather, I view Apple's introduction of rentals as clear competition for the likes of Movielink, CinemaNow, Amazon Unbox, XBox LIVE and other rental stores, but not a blow to Netflix. The value propositions are very different. That's because Netflix very wisely has made the Instant Watching feature a value add for its subscribers, not an incremental fee.
• From an economic standpoint alone, the breakeven is only 4+ movies, which is likely well below the monthly consumption of most of Netflix's full unlimited subscribers
• Apple's rental model, users are still subjected to all the same online movie limitations all the other services have suffered from: no easy playback on TVs, lack of portability, viewing window limits, etc. Granted iTunes downloads enable watching on-the-go (vs. Netflix's streams), but I don't see that as a big differentiator. With Netflix you get the best of DVDs' advantages and now unlimited online delivery
• if Apple were to pursue subscriptions, that would be a direct attack on Netflix
• The fact is, Netflix has spent heavily on marketing over the years, and its strong brand awareness and 7 million subscriber base are quite meaningful advantages.
• Online movie delivery, whether rental or owned, still has a long way to go to achieve mainstream success. Apple will certainly nudge the category forward, but not dramatically. Still, Netflix needs to remain aggressively on offensive to retain its leadership mantle. This is a category with lots of moves yet to be made.

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• Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), which has been experimenting with making its online movie service unlimited with a few users, is now expanding it to everyone starting Monday, a day before Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is supposed to make some major announcements about its new online movie rental service
• Also, AP says this unlimited streaming option could erode Netflix’s profits because it isn’t raising its monthly rates even though its expenses may rise if increased usage drives up the licensing fees owed to studios.

• iewers don't delay viewing recorded programs, according to (pdf) an analysis of Nielsen data by Palisades MediaGroup, writes MarketingCharts.
• On average, half of all DVR primetime program playback occurs within the same day of recording. By the end of the following day, DVR owners complete approximately three-quarters of all program playback, Palisades said:
• "Nielsen estimates DVR penetration to be at 20 percent, up from 12 percent in January of this year. While this is a good-sized increase, the impact on viewership remains minor."
• ratings increase just over 15 percent due to DVR playback from live to live-plus-seven
• hat less than half of people who watch a recorded program fast-forward through the ads during playback
• "but overall DVR usage is not dramatically cutting into live viewing."
• The bottom line, according to Palisades: Advertisers with time-sensitive messages such as opening-weekend movie releases or special holiday sales offers need not fret over the DVR movement just yet; viewers are watching recorded programs shortly after they've been recorded - thus maintaining the timeliness of the advertising message.

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• FOR ALL THE HYPE SURROUNDING audience segmentation, YouTube and its parent Google continue to take an ever-larger share of U.S. Web video watchers, according to comScore's latest Video Metrix report.

   In November, more than 75% of U.S. Web users watched a video online--including both streaming video and progressive downloads--averaging 3.25 hours of video per person during the month, comScore reports.

   Google Sites, which includes YouTube, managed to increase their video market share by more than two percentage points to 31.3% from October to November.