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Sezmi Unveils LA Pilot, Pricing and $25 Million Financing
Talk about the big bang theory of PR: Sezmi, the next-gen video provider, is unveiling today a public pilot project in Los Angeles, pricing for its 2 tiers of service, and $25 million in additional financing. Dave Allred, Sezmi's SVP of Marketing and Product Management briefed me on the news last week.
Sezmi hit my radar 2 years ago, when, as "Building B," its co-founders Buno Pati and Phil Wiser began pulling back the curtains on a bold plan to create a full substitute for cable/satellite/telco TV service. Key to the company's plan was its "FlexCast" model for delivering video via digital broadcast and broadband networks, to a proprietary receiver which is packed with a terabyte of storage. Having seen multiple demos of the product, I've been consistently impressed with how it combines traditional linear TV with on-demand, broadband, DVR, personalization, social networking, advanced advertising and sophisticated navigation.
While Sezmi is the sleekest multichannel video experience I've seen, I've continued to be concerned about the following questions: Was the system technically sound and could it scale? Would the company overcome venture capitalists' nuclear winter to satisfy its fund-raising needs? Could it land a full complement of cable programming deals to offer a bona fide alternative to incumbent providers? Would Sezmi's eventual pricing live up to the company's assertions that it would be "substantially less" than today's providers? Today's announcements begin to answer those questions.
The pilot, which Dave says will be open to about a thousand LA-area residents will be the first time Sezmi will go beyond successful friends and family technical trials. The goals of the pilot are to do a final shakedown of the service before broader launch, test marketing collateral and start to scale up in advance of a Q1 rollout. The pilot will also begin a process of close scrutiny by consumers and competitors of how well Sezmi stacks up.
Pilot participants will get their service for free and be offered equipment discounts to continue after the pilot wraps up. Dave explained that going forward Sezmi plans to offer 2 tiers of service, a $24.99/mo "Supreme" option that includes all local broadcast channels in the LA market, many familiar basic cable channels (the pilot includes 23 channels, from Turner, NBCU, Discovery, Viacom and Rainbow), broadband programming from YouTube and others. Premium programming from networks like HBO, Showtime and Starz will be available on a subscription VOD basis (i.e. no linear feed will be available). A "Select" tier for $4.99/mo, which will carry just the broadcast channels. Subscribers to both tiers can either buy the equipment for $299 or lease it for $11-$12/mo (for each TV).
Sezmi's value-pricing will invite immediate comparisons to DISH Network, which has been the low-price leader in video services. On the other hand, Sezmi's next-gen technology approach will resonate most with early adopters. Dave said that the company's research consistently found a sweet spot of consumers interested in having DVR and HD capability, plus an integrated video system, but unhappy about paying $60-$70/mo, which is the typical monthly rate from cable/telco competitors once promotional discounts expire. Sezmi's belief is that people are "over-served" by today's providers and that by focusing on the basics, executing on them with a tech-forward but approachable solution and pricing aggressively the company will gain share. Its marketing strategy feels similar in some ways to what JetBlue has pursued in the airline industry.
Prospective customers will first focus mainly on Sezmi's content. As yet, Sezmi does not have deals with all the major cable programmers. Most prominently missing from the current list are the channels owned by Disney-ABC, Fox, Scripps and A&E. While its likely to assume Sezmi will eventually close those deals, until they do the company is playing with one hand tied behind its back (it's impossible to compete effectively without, for example, ESPN, Fox News or Food Network). The company's goal is to carry channels that account for 80-90% of consumers' actual viewing.
Sezmi will not have the full array of channels now available in HD. Dave explained that Sezmi's bandwidth constraints forced it to make choices. For some viewers that won't matter if the price is right; for others it will be a deal-breaker. Sezmi also will not be carrying linear feeds of premium channels like HBO, Showtime and Starz, instead focusing on offering them on a subscription VOD basis, plus offering thousands of pay-per-view movie titles. Lastly, Sezmi will have limited appeal for sports fans as it lacks content like NFL Sunday Ticket, RedZone, MLB packages and popular regional sports channels.
Still, Sezmi has a lot going for it. Beyond low price, the personalization features are likely to resonate most. Once Sezmi learns a user's profile, it automatically records programs, and organizes them into each family member's "Zone." Pressing the "mi" button on the remote provides a customized view of that particular content. Sezmi also seamlessly integrates broadband content, today from YouTube, but in the future from many others into the overall experience.
As I've described before, Sezmi's model is to partner with telcos, broadband ISPs and retailers for its go-to-market strategy (there's an unnamed partner involved in the pilot). There will be heavy marketing costs involved to educating the public about Sezmi's benefits, so partnerships are essential. While no names are being cited yet, Dave alluded to a number of key partners, who will be announced in January. I'd bet on AT&T for one, although anyone who wants to be in the video business likely will have a look at Sezmi as well, particularly those seeking to offer a triple play bundle.
Despite all the talk about over-the-top video and cord-cutting, Sezmi is still the only bona fide new competitor I'm aware of that could be a replacement for cable/satellite/telco services. The company still has a long road ahead of it, but today's announcements are solid evidence of its progress.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Cable TV Operators, Deals & Financings, Satellite, Startups, Telcos
Topics: SezMi
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4 Items Worth Noting for the Oct 5th Week
Following are 4 items worth noting for the Oct 5th week:
New research shows TV viewing shifting - Mediapost had a good piece this week on Horowitz Associates' new research showing that 2% of all TV programming watched now occurs on non-TV devices. This translates to 2 hours of the 130.2 hours of TV that viewers watch each month shifting. This top line number is a little deceiving though, as the research also shows that for viewers who own a PC or laptop, they watch 9%, or 13 hours of TV programming per month, other than on their TV. I plan to follow up to see if I can get breakout info for young age groups, my guess is that their percentages are even higher.
I've been very interested in these kinds of numbers because there has been much debate about whether making full-length programs available online augments or cannibalizes traditional TV viewing. The broadcast networks have forcefully asserted that it only augments. I agree online augments, but I've suspected for a while that it is also beginning to cannibalize. If networks generated as much revenue per program from an online view as they do from an on-air view this shifting wouldn't matter. But as I wrote in Mediapost myself this week, the problem is they probably only earn 20-25% as much online. TV viewers' shifting usage is a key area to focus on as broadband video viewership continues to grow.
PermissionTV becomes VisibleGains, targets B2B selling - PermissionTV, one of the original media-focused online video publishing and management platforms, officially switched gears this week, changing its name to VisibleGains. Cliff Pollan, CEO and Matt Kaplan, VP of Marketing/Chief Strategy Officer briefed me months ago on their plans and I caught up with them again this week. Their new focus is on enabling companies to provide their prospects with informative videos during the information-gathering phase of the sales process.
Cliff argues persuasively that in the old days the sales rep presented 80% of the information about a product to a prospect; now prospects collect 80% of what they need to know online, and the sales rep then fills in the blanks. Through VisibleGains "ask and respond" branching format, companies better inform their prospects, qualify leads and add personality to their typical text-heavy web sites. It's another great example of how video can be used beyond the media model.
Unicorn Media demo is impressive - Even as PermissionTV changes its focus, Unicorn Media is entering the crowded video platform space. I mentioned Unicorn, which was founded by Bill Rinehart, founding CEO of Limelight, in my 4 items post a couple months. This week I got a demo from CTO AJ McGowan and Chief Strategy Officer David Rice and I was impressed. Key differentiators AJ focused on were an enterprise-style user rights model for accessing the platform, APIs that allow drag-and-drop content feeds, and an "ad proxy" for configuring ad rules.
Most interesting though is Unicorn's real-time data warehouse feature, which provides granular performance data up to the minute. Data can be displayed in a number of ways, but most compelling was what AJ termed the "magic Frisbee," a clever format for showing multiple data points (e.g. streaming time, ad completes, # of plays, etc.) all at once, so that decision-makers can hone in on performance issues. AJ says prospects are responding to this feature in particular as assembling this level of information today often requires multiple staffers and data sources. David reports that Unicorn is finding its biggest opportunity is with large media companies that have built their own in-house video solutions, as opposed to competing with other 3rd party platforms. Unicorn doesn't charge a platform fee, instead it bills by hours viewed. Separately, I have a briefing next week with yet another stealthy platform company; there seems to be no shortage of interest in this space.
Vitamin D shows breakthrough approach to object recognition in video - Speaking of demos, Greg Shirai, VP of Marketing and Rob Haitani, Chief Product Officer from startup Vitamin D showed me their very cool demo this week. Vitamin D is pioneering a completely new approach to recognizing objects in video streams, using "NuPIC", an intelligent computing platform from Numenta, a company founded by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Dileep George. Some of you will recognize Hawkins and Dubinsky as the founders of Palm and Handspring.
The demo showed how Vitamin D can recognize the presence of moving humans or objects throughout hours of video footage. While the system starts with the assumption that upright humans are tall and thin, it learns over time that their shapes can vary, if for example they are crouching, or carrying a big box, or are partially obscured behind bushes. Once recognized, it's possible to filter for specific actions the humans are taking, such as walking in and out of a door to a room. Vitamin D is first targeting video surveillance in homes or businesses, but as it is further developed, I see very interesting applications for the technology in online video, particularly in sports and advertising. Say you wanted to filter a Yankees game for all of CC Sabathia's strikeouts, or insert a specific hair care ad only when a blond woman was in the last scene. Vitamin D and others are continuing to raise the bar on visual search which is still in its infancy.
Reminder - VideoSchmooze is coming up on next Tuesday night, Oct. 13th in NYC. We have an awesome panel discussion planned and great networking with over 200 industry colleagues. Hope you can join us!Categories: Enterprises, Startups, Technology
Topics: Horowitz Associates, Numenta, PermissionTV, Unicorn Media, VideoSchmooze, VisibleGains, Vitamin D
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Channels.com Launches "Web Video DVR"
Inevitably, the explosion of broadband video programming has led to the problem of how to keep viewers' favorites organized and receive updates when new episodes appear. Recognizing this problem and believing it is likely to become even more acute as more mainstream users adopt video and choices continue to grow, Channels.com is launching today, positioning itself as "your web video DVR." Last week, Sean Doherty, Channels.com's CEO and founder gave me an overview.
I've known Sean since our cable days in the mid-'90s, and he's been tweaking Channels for a couple of years, providing me periodic sneak peeks. The best way to think of Channels is analogously: Channels is for video what RSS readers are for text. Sean's insight was that most serialized video is now published with MRSS, RSS 2.0 or iTunes feeds which can be collected and then presented well in a central viewing environment. Channels is like a feed reader that is optimized for video.
Importantly, Channels doesn't touch the source video or the accompanying ads; everything is passed through as is. That means for content providers Channels increases reach and ad inventory without
disrupting the experience. Channels also doesn't actually record web shows, making its "DVR" tagline and references to "recording" somewhat misnomers. More accurately Channels is a "network DVR" since it's simply organizing feeds that exist in the cloud. Channels' secret sauce is how it crawls the web searching for feeds that may contain video "enclosures" or files. Those that do are then incorporated into the Channels directory with searchable metadata. Sean reports that Channels now includes 160K+ shows, including 400+ TV shows.
I've been playing around with Channels and my experience has been mostly positive. I was quickly able to find and view recent episodes of some of my favorite shows like David Pogue from the NY Times, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "Barely Political" and a couple Revision 3 shows I dip in and out of like "AppJudgment." On the flip side, it was hard to find shows like "Heroes" and "Lost" although Sean says they're still in the process of loading up all the content.
Though a display advertising model is readily at hand, Sean says he has no immediate plan to monetize Channels. For now he's focused on building traffic, optimizing the user experience and seeing how the video landscape unfolds. Once past its development phase, Channels is a pretty low-burn rate operation, self-funded by Sean and other angels. A key part of building its distribution and use is by incenting video providers to place a Channels "chicklet" on their sites, so video can be instantly added to users' Channels playlists.Valuable as Channels and others trying to organize the web video user experience are for computer-based viewing, where they will really resonate is when web video moves to the TV. A significant navigation challenge lies ahead in the living room, compounded by lack of keyboards and mice there. In fact after using Netflix's Watch Instantly feature to send content to my Roku, I'm becoming more convinced that the convergence paradigm may be that you organize/choose content on your computer and navigate/consume on your TV.
All of these issues still lie ahead. For now Channels has introduced a neat new way of making the most of the broadband video viewing experience.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Startups, Technology
Topics: Channels.com
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15 Seconds of Fame (15sof.com): A Broadband, Social Media-Based Version of "American Idol"
Andy Warhol's famous quote that "everyone gets their 15 seconds of fame" is the inspiration behind a new web site called 15sof.com that is like a broadband, social media-based version of the hit show "American Idol," but created and promoted at a fraction of the cost.
15sof.com is meant to capitalize on the growing subculture of society (that tends to skew younger) who are either seeking fame and fortune or want to influence the process of who attains it. These motivations have been the key forces behind the explosion of reality-based contest shows now running and arguably drive many of the most outlandish stunts seen on YouTube.
15sof.com's founder/CEO John Bonaccorso explained to me that the site offers aspiring contestants a simple but novel proposition: pay $1 to submit your 15 second (max) video to one of the myriad contests running at any one time on 15sof.com. The community then votes on the submissions and moves a handful of contestants on to subsequent rounds where lengthier videos are accepted. The prize money is funded from the contestants' fees. Contestants can enter as often as they'd like, but precautions are in place to prevent voting fraud. 15sof uses a white-label social media platform from Reality Digital, which I last wrote about here.
With current top prizes in the $25-$100 range, nobody's going to get rich, but they will gain visibility and of course psychic gratification. As John explained, particularly for the high school and college-aged drama crowd, 15sof.com offers them an opportunity to show their stuff, which is plenty enough.
15sof.com is itself a pure social media creation: John said the site hasn't spent any money yet on conventional marketing. Instead it has built awareness and participation solely through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media platforms. In the world of 15sof.com - and many other social sites and apps launching today - there's no need for tune-in ads, billboards or other expensive marketing tactics. Sites like 15sof.com grow out of the burgeoning social community, dominated by the young. John wouldn't disclose numbers, but said the site beat its first month traffic goal in the first 3 weeks. That's no indication of future success, but it's a good start.
For me, there are 2 other noteworthy aspects of 15sof.com. First, the site reflects yet another example of "purpose-driven" user-generated video, a concept I've explored in the past in connection with Unigo, a start-up trying to use student-created videos to disrupt the college guidebook industry. The "purpose-driven" video idea is to get the multitudes of amateurs whom YouTube introduced to video to turn their newfound skills and passion toward something more remunerative and possibly productive. Purpose-driven video concepts are proliferating. Most notable are the myriad brand-sponsored consumer video contests and also the many sites featuring user-created how-to videos. I continue to believe there will be many bona fide business opportunities based on purpose-driven video.
Second, 15sof.com also illustrates the evolving interplay between online and on-air programming. We are starting to see how programs born in one of the mediums can create a variation in the other, or where a concept can migrate from one medium to the other. For example, John's vision is that 15sof.com - the spawn of American Idol - could itself eventually become a TV show. Another example of this phenomenon is Scripps Networks' Food2, where new talent being showcased could eventually graduate to programs on the Food Network itself. I suspect some of this multi-platform thinking is behind Ben Silverman's new venture with IAC. My point is that broadband is giving programmers a lot of new flexibility in how they bring their creative concepts to market.
Meanwhile, if you're expecting to find yours truly belting out a song on 15sof.com, you'll have to keep waiting. I'll be here hiding behind my keyboard.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Topics: 15sof.com, Food2, Reality Digital, YouTube
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SundaySky Enables Unlimited Customized Videos from Web Site Content
An occupational hazard of following the online video space as closely as I do is that it's rare when I see a technology that feels truly breakthrough. So when it happens, it's not only an "aha!" moment, but also a tangible reminder of how much running room the online video industry still has ahead of it. These were my reactions when SundaySky's CTO and founder, Yaniv Axen, showed me a private demo of the company's "DynamicVideo" platform and explained its model to me.
In a nutshell, DynamicVideo integrates with a web site's database or content management system, and then upon a user's request, it creates short videos out of specified pieces of web site content, completely on the fly. Yaniv explained that DynamicVideo does for building on-the-fly videos what ASP or JSP does for creating dynamic web pages. All of the generated videos are completely customized based on the specific pieces of site content being assembled.
The process of implementing DynamicVideo starts with an upfront creative step in which SundaySky works with the site's team to create "Videolet" templates. This step includes generating all the creative elements
(graphics, voiceovers, music, etc.) that would conceivably be needed in any of the videos to be created, along with the shell templates for the videos. When a user request a video, what's happening is that the required content is pulled from the site's database/CMS, matched against the corresponding creative elements and assembled into the correct shell template. All of this happens instantaneously and the video begins playing as quickly as you'd expect a web page to load. SundaySky also provides full analytics so it's easy to test and optimize different pieces of the video.
All of that may feel a bit abstract for some of you. Yaniv showed me several different mock implementations (though the company isn't ready to show any publicly, Yaniv did supply this example of an Israeli ecommerce site, which really just scratches the surface). One of the mockups was for Expedia. Imagine clicking on a suggested hotel and instead of (or in addition to) scanning the page for the hotel's number of stars, proximity to attractions, pictures, reviews, rates and contact info, a 1+ minute video instead presented it all to you. I believe the video brings the hotel to life far better than even the best-designed page can.
The mockups showed a broad range of potential applications: MyYahoo (personalized video summary of recent updates), CNET (product comparisons), YellowPages search results (vendor profile information), MySpace (social media presentation) and NBA.com (6 degrees of separation game). Basically, any content that can be extracted from a database/CMS becomes fodder for a video, tailored to the site's particular goals.
What's most compelling to me about SundaySky are the financial implications for content providers. Implementing DynamicVideo allows site owners to generate not just a ton of new and highly targetable videos and but also a ton of associated ad inventory (the idea of a "this video brought to you by" brand slate is a natural). Site owners can also deliver a totally new consumer experience that helps them meet users' increasing expectations for video. This can only help drive higher engagement and desired actions.
And last but not least, by providing a low-cost and automated "manufacturing" process for creating an unlimited number of videos, SundaySky completely changes the video business case, thereby enabling more sites to profitably embrace the online video medium. As I wrote recently in "Inside Demand Media's Content Factory," sites that learn how to crank out large volumes of high-quality video will have real competitive advantages in the broadband era.
On the heels of an $8M first round it raised in January, SundaySky is just starting to share more details. Yaniv alluded to a couple of big media deals coming soon. But, for competitive reasons, it's still keeping things very close to the vest. If its platform scales as well as the demos suggest, this is going to be a very interesting company to watch.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Startups, Technology
Topics: SundaySky
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Market7 Streamlines Collaboration Around Video Production
As more and more companies begin to exploit the power of video for promotion or product support, many individuals who have never managed the process of actually creating a high-quality video are getting a taste for how hard it is. Market7 is a new company that streamlines the collaboration process essential to
producing high-quality video. Market7 was born from the frustrations that founder/CEO Seth Kenvin experienced trying to create company and product videos while VP of Strategic Marketing at Big Band Networks. Last week Seth explained to me how Market7 works.
As with other marketing or promotional collateral, at high level, the video production process starts with getting all stakeholders on board with the project, its goals and budget. But once approved, there are myriad production steps such as writing and finalizing the script, shooting and then managing the assets, editing, gathering comments on rough cuts, editing some more, and of course trying to keep the project on schedule. Often these steps are managed by a 3rd party video producer, but they still involve a lot of client interaction. While there are individual products for each of these process steps, Seth believes Market7 is the first all-in-one solution.
Market7 allows the project lead to manage process, including setting up tasks, timelines/deliverables and team member responsibilities. Producers upload video assets and other team members are able to annotate the video with their comments, including on the video itself at specific points. That allows feedback to be highly targeted ("the background is too dark in this scene") and thus more actionable by editors. Market7 is not meant to be an online editor, but rather a collaboration environment that moves a project from script development through to final cut as efficiently as possible. The full product suite is available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with pricing based on storage, admin accounts, support level and branding flexibility.
While Seth believes there are lots of different potential customers, he sees the sweet spot in corporate video production, with the videos used for online promotion, trade show support, on-site product demos or internal use. That said, there are a number of agencies using the product, along with an animation studio, infomercial producer and a couple of broadcast and cable TV networks. Market7 is a little bit like Wistia, another early stage company I wrote about recently that's also enhancing collaboration around video production. I'm very intrigued by these kinds of companies that are sprouting up around the video ecosystem. Neither one is likely to become a direct substitute for big budget video productions, but with so many new companies now trying to tap the power of online video, cost-effective yet robust tools like Market7's address real pain points in the market today.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Startups
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HD Cloud Launches Video Encoding Platform, Capitalizing on "Cloud Computing"
Three significant trends are behind today's launch of HD Cloud, a new video transcoding service being announced today: the proliferation of video file formats and encoding rates, the increase in syndication activity to multiple distributors and the cost and scale benefits of "cloud computing." HD Cloud founder and CEO Nicholas Butterworth (who I have known since he ran MTV's digital operations 10 years ago) walked me through the company's plan yesterday and how it benefits content providers looking to cost-effectively capitalize on broadband video's surging popularity.
Anyone who spends a little time watching broadband video will notice variations in video formats and quality. Behind the scenes there are diverse encoding specs for how video is prepared from its source file before it is served to users. This video encoding work is multiplied significantly for content providers if they also want to distribute through 3rd parties like Hulu, Netflix, Fancast, TV.com, etc, all of which have their own encoding specs. Further, these 3rd parties all have their own ways of accepting video feeds and associated metadata from content partners. Yet another driver of complexity are adaptive bit rate players like Move Networks which automatically hop between multiple files encoded at different bit rates depending on the user's available bandwidth. Combine it all and it means encoding has become a labor-intensive, complicated, yet highly-necessary process.
Traditionally encoding has been done locally by content providers using encoding solutions from enterprise-class companies like Anystream, Telestream, Digital Rapids and others. By offering encoding as a service, HD Cloud gives certain content providers an alternative to spending capex and running their own encoding farms. Content providers choose which source files are to be encoded into which formats and bit rates. They also provide HD Cloud with their credentials for distributing to authorized 3rd party sites. When a job is configured, HD Cloud performs the encoding and 3rd party distribution. HD Cloud doesn't store the files or keep a copy, mainly for security reasons.
The key to making all this work is so-called "cloud computing," whereby HD Cloud (and many others) essentially rent computing capacity from providers like Amazon's EC2. As new jobs come in, HD Cloud
requests capacity, temporarily loads its encoding software (which is a combination of open source and its own custom code) and runs its jobs. When they're done, HD Cloud releases the capacity back to Amazon. It's all a little analogous to the old days of timesharing on mainframes, except with new efficiencies. HD Cloud's economics are based on Amazon buying the computing capacity and operating the facilities and utilizing them at a far higher rate than HD Cloud or any other customer would have on their own.
The result is that HD Cloud prices its encoding at $2/gigabyte, which Nicholas thinks will only get cheaper as bandwidth prices continue to fall. A financial model he sent along suggests that the content provider's ROI given certain assumptions about the amount of content encoded and streamed could be 3-4 times higher than with traditional local encoding solutions. This also assumes the avoidance of upfront capex for local software and hardware encoding alternatives, an important cost-savings for many given the economy. HD Cloud is announcing Magnify.net as its first client today. Others in this space include mPoint, Encoding.com, ON2 and others.
Between encoding's growing complexity and syndication's appeal, content providers are going to need more extensive and cost-effective encoding solutions. Cloud computing in general, and HD Cloud (and others) seem well-positioned to address these needs.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Startups, Technology
Topics: Anystream, Digital Rapids, Encoding.com, HD Cloud, mPOINT, ON2, Telestream
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Clearleap Bridges Broadband Video and Ads to TVs
Summary:
What: Clearleap has introduced a new technology platform for distributing broadband video content directly to TVs and an accompanying ad management system.
For whom: Incumbent service providers (cable/telco) and new over-the-top entrants (device makers, aggregators, etc.), content providers and advertisers
Benefits: For service providers, a flexible, cost-effective system for offering broadband content to their subscribers with minimal technology integration; for content providers a scalable system for distributing content across multiple providers and platforms; for advertisers a new method of targeting on-demand audiences.
More innovation is coming to the ongoing quest to bring broadband content to TVs as Clearleap, an Atlanta-based startup, pulled back the curtain yesterday on its ambitious technology platform. Last fall, CEO/founder Braxton Jarratt gave me a glimpse into what the company was working on and yesterday he explained it more fully.
Clearleap aims to do multiple things with its "clear|flow" and "clear|profit" products. For incumbent video service providers (cable and telco operators) and new "over-the-top" entrants (device makers, aggregators,
etc.), Clearleap enables delivery of broadband and other video to the TV including integrating with existing Video-on-Demand infrastructure when present; for content providers, it improves the process of distributing of content across multiple providers and platforms; and for both service providers and content providers it offers an ad management solution that allows flexible ad insertion and business rules for ads running with Clearleap-delivered video.
That's a mouthful, so to break it down a bit, here's my interpretation. First the delivery side. Obviously there's been a lot of discussion, particularly just since CES in January, of new entrants delivering broadband content to TVs, thereby presenting potential alternatives for consumers to "cut the cord" on existing cable and telco providers. One way for incumbent to combat this is for them to offer the best of the web (like TiVo has been doing with TiVoCast for a while now) in one seamless package delivered through the existing set-top box.
To date incumbents haven't pursued this strategy much though. Braxton attributes this intransigence to lack of adequate technology, than to lack of interest. Braxton says Clearleap has a couple of small deployments active and other announcements pending. The key to success is allowing the incumbents to control the process of what content they acquire and to present it in context with other VOD offerings. clear|flow ingests video from content partners into Clearleap's data centers, transcodes it and properly formats it for target devices, adds metadata and business rules and then enables service providers to subscribe to whatever content they want. The video is either served from Clearleap's data centers or pushed to an incumbent's own hosting facility.
On the other side of the coin, another goal of clear|flow is to become the glue that allows content providers who want to distribute across all these emerging platforms to do so with minimal work. Just upload your content, specify business rules and the service providers take it from there. Of course, there's a "chicken and egg" challenge here that content providers will only take an interest when there's sufficient distribution. Braxton recognizes this issue as well and said they've been encouraged by the willingness of certain "friendlies" to get involved, which he hopes will provide validation for others to come on board soon.
Last, but not least, clear|profit allows ad avails to be created and properly divided between the content providers and service providers according to specified rules. Ad management and insertion has of course been the Achilles heel for existing VOD systems, rendering today's VOD a largely revenue-free pursuit for most service providers. Cost-effectively solving the ad insertion process for VOD alone would be a major win.
Clearleap has an ambitious vision and ordinarily I'd say it feels like a lot for any startup to bite off. But Clearleap has a veteran executive team from N2 Broadband, which was a successful VOD software provider prior to its acquisition by Tandberg Television. The Clearleap team knows its way around cable data centers, has strong industry relationships and is benefitting from pressure incumbents feel to broaden their offerings - all no doubt key factors in helping the company raise money.
Still, there's going to be plenty of competition. Others circling this space in one way or another include ActiveVideo Networks, AnySource Media, GridNetworks, Sezmi, TiVo and lots of others who all have their own approaches and systems for connecting content providers with incumbent and new service providers to bring broadband video to TVs. It's going to be an interesting space to watch as there is no shortage of energy aimed at merging broadband with the TV and vice versa.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Cable TV Operators, Startups, Telcos
Topics: ActiveVideo Networks, AnySource Media, Clearleap, GridNetworks, SezMi, TiVo
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Taboola Aims to Crack Video Recommendations Nut
For Internet-based content, recommendations have to be one of the toughest nuts to crack. There are just so many variables in play - analyzing and characterizing the initial piece of content consumed, building a large enough database of content to match it against, understanding individual user's peculiarities, presenting results in a meaningful way, etc. Still, effective recommendations are powerful because they enhance the user's experience, increase consumption and drive more ad inventory.
One company trying to crack the recommendations nut for video content is Israel-based Taboola. I recently
caught up with their CEO/founder Adam Singolda to learn more about their approach and progress. The company's ViDiscovery system analyzes both the content provider's video and its users' behaviors. The combination of the two then drives Taboola's recommendations, which can be presented in a number of different formats depending on the content provider's preferences.
You can see several examples of the recommendations in action. At CNN.com, a little tab in the bottom left of the video window prompts for "Videos Like This" which in turn opens a horizontal scroll bar with recommended videos. In some cases the recommendation work very well, matching specific news stories with one another. But in other cases the experience was mixed. For example, when watching a video about the "Zooz Beat" music app the first recommended video was an update about Hurricane Gustav from August '08 and the second was about a refinery workers' strike in the U.K. Hmm, if there's a correlation between the three videos, I'm not sure I see it.
Still, Taboola's team has an impressive pedigree and has raised $6M to date, plenty for a small team to continue refining its algorithms and results. The company's primary model is ad-based, with it receiving a revenue share for incremental video viewing that it drives. That kind of success-based approach will endear it to resource-constrained content providers eager to generate additional usage and revenues without extra expense. It's easy to implement Taboola by just adding a line of code to the player or web site.
High-quality recommendations are not easy to pull off, but if Taboola can get its system really humming with demonstrable case studies of success it could gain very quick traction.
What do you think? Post a comment now.
Categories: Startups, Technology
Topics: Taboola
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Sezmi Update: Technical Trial Complete, New Round Raised, Q1 Launch Planned
Sezmi, a company I wrote about enthusiastically back in May as a big potential disruptor of cable/satellite multichannel services, is making steady progress toward commercial launch. Phil Wiser, the company's co-founder/president gave me an update this week.
Most important, the company has completed technical trials in Seattle with three local broadcasters (Fisher, Tribune and Daystar), to prove in its "FlexCast" distribution model. Sezmi uses a portion of over-the-air spectrum, along with broadband connectivity, to its set-top box to bypass traditional cable infrastructure.
Phil explained that broadcasters are motivated to work with Sezmi for several reasons: incremental revenue from leasing spectrum, enhanced positioning in the Sezmi UI vs. current EPGs, and new ad-driven destination areas or "Zones," that broadcasters can use to create more customized and monetizable viewing experiences.
On the cable networks side, Sezmi pulls down signals to its operational center in Melbourne, FL, processes them and uplinks them. Then, with dishes and other equipment installed at its local broadcast partners' facilities, Sezmi combines all channels for distribution to the home. That gives the viewer three ways to access programming: through traditional linear feeds, through VOD and through DVR.
Phil's confident that these technical trials validate the Sezmi delivery model as well as the feasibility of a national rollout. The next step is a beta trial, with "hundreds" of consumer homes, with a limited, geographically-based commercial rollout intended for sometime in Q1 (no doubt driven by its partners' priorities). Phil confirmed several other broadcast deals, including ones where multiple cities are covered, have been signed, and that several distribution partners are on board, including one with a national footprint (hmm, AT&T? Verizon? Someone else?)
Importantly, I also extracted from Phil that the company has closed another round of financing - greater than the earlier round of $17.5M. Sezmi has a big vision and with 3 pieces of consumer premise hardware (antenna, set top and remote), plus backend equipment and national/local delivery infrastructure to fund, this is a big dollar project for sure.
I remain optimistic about Sezmi's opportunity. As I said in the May post, I haven't seen the whole thing work at scale yet, so there are significant technology unknowns. There's also a sizable customer education mountain to climb (though hopefully mitigated by large well-branded partners' assistance). Then there's the small matter of signing up the local broadcasters, as well as the cable networks.
Still, Sezmi's core value proposition - a better viewing experience at a lower cost than today's cable/satellite incumbents - is right on the mark. The old adage about execution mattering more than strategy has rarely been truer than with Sezmi. It's going to be interesting to watch its continued progress.
What do you think? Post a comment now!
Categories: Cable Networks, Cable TV Operators, Devices, Startups
Topics: Daystar Television Network, Fisher Communications, SezMi, Tribune Broadcasting
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Startup Unigo Harnesses "Purpose-Driven" User-Generated Video to Drive Disruption
I was absolutely riveted by an article I read in this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine entitled "The Tell-All Campus Tour," about Unigo, a tiny startup which threatens major disruption to the college guidebook industry. In particular, the company's emphasis on user (i.e. college student) generated video caught my attention. It got me thinking again about the business value that "purpose-driven" UGV has when it is properly channeled.
I've touched on this theme in the past, with respect to brand marketers' UGV contests that have unleashed all kinds of "amateur" creativity (see "Baby Ruth Hits a Home Run..." or "And the Oscar Goes To...Dove"). These contests have demonstrated that, with the proper incentives, users' passions and video know-how can lead to really compelling results. Now, upon reading about Unigo, I've become further convinced that there are bona fide startup opportunities in leveraging purpose-driven UGV.
To put this in context, YouTube struck gold by enabling, for the first time, random, and largely
unmonetizable, user generated video. Now a new generation of startups like Unigo can build on the YouTube phenomenon by focusing on purpose-driven UGV. To succeed, I think these companies will have 3 common elements: a reasonably large existing market that can be disrupted through the use of purpose-driven video (mixed with other web 2.0 features), a critical mass of amateur video creators who are self-motivated to produce high-quality, authentic video, and a group of advertisers eager to reach targeted audiences through new alternatives to traditional channels.
That's a mouthful, so let me use Unigo to break this down a bit. For starters, the company was founded by a precocious 23 year-old whose can-do energy and deep understanding of the college market is equally matched by his lack of real-world experience and formal company financing. All of that illustrates lesson #1 for purpose-driven UGV entrepreneurs: the barriers to creating these kinds of startups is shockingly low.
Somewhat buried in the 3,400+ word article is what resonated for me: Unigo bought a hundred Flip video cameras ($90 apiece at Amazon, fyi) and strategically distributed them to students at over 100 campuses nationwide, with no clear instructions on what to do next. The resulting student-created videos (which are continually submitted) span the gamut from slice-of-life to panoramic to comedic to everything in between. Unigo features text-based student submissions and photos, which, when combined with the videos, form an unvarnished - and unprecedented - user-generated multimedia guide to the America's campuses.
Simply put, Unigo is a product created by the YouTube/Facebook generation for the YouTube/Facebook generation. It offers a simple, breakthrough value proposition that will no doubt attract a large audience. And that large audience will be extremely interesting to all manner of advertisers.
Unigo's business value could make it a TripAdvisor-like, must have resource that initially augments, but could eventually squeeze traditional guidebooks and ratings services. While it is still way too early to call Unigo a success by any traditional standards, the work it has done to date offers a fascinating window into the emerging purpose-driven UGV-centric business model. That makes it well worth keeping an eye on.
What do you think? Click here to post a comment.
Topics: TripAdvisor, Unigo, YouTube
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1Cast: A Legit Redlasso Successor Has Tall Mountain to Climb
Personalized online news is as old as the web itself. But personalized online video news is a nut that has yet to be fully cracked - although by all rights it should be. This was Redlasso's goal, until broadcasters, which hadn't given permission for their content to be ingested and shared, put an end to the young company last month.
Now comes 1Cast, a company seeking to be a legitimate Redlasso successor. Today it is announcing first round funding from wireless king Craig McCaw's Eagle River Holdings. Yesterday I got more details from 1Cast CEO Anthony Bontrager.
Anthony has correctly realized that gaining deals with video news partners is an absolute prerequisite to
success. To that end he says the company will have "no shortage" of content, and also has a particular focus on "repatriating international content." Though for now he's not disclosing any details, based on conversations I've had with broadcasters, my sense is that credible companies, even when early stage, can get deals done.
Yet there are other key success factors for a personalized news aggregator like 1Cast to succeed. Three that are high on my list are user experience, audience growth and revenue generation. Miss on any of these three and I think the model fails.
From a user experience standpoint, Anthony says creating a new personalized "micro-cast" is a simple three step process. That sounds promising, though since the beta won't open till later month (with full launch late in '08), I can't judge the specifics yet. And the wildcard is how content providers will ultimately react to having their videos mashed together with competitors' videos in a single micro-cast.
Growing an audience is a more daunting. As we all know, the web is incredibly noisy, and users have well-entrenched news-gathering habits. Yet there is white space in personalized video news. Anthony said that while 1Cast will be a central hub, he's focused on "channel partners" as well, and portals in particular, to grow traffic. Deals with majors like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and others would be a huge win, but are notoriously hard to clinch for startups.
Last, but not least is revenue. Even assuming an audience can be built, optimally monetizing it is a challenge. Anthony said they're working with an undisclosed ad network and will also build their own sales team. Direct sales are important as living primarily off an ad network's splits will not produce sufficient revenue for 1Cast.
Yet even a direct sales team isn't a panacea; Anthony mentioned that some content providers want to sell any new impressions 1Cast generates. That's consistent with how I understand other Syndicated Video Economy deals like these work as well. But like other aggregators, that leaves 1Cast with a swiss cheese inventory situation that is complex to sell. Then factor in that some inventory will be essentially local in nature (i.e. generated from local video news) - which really requires a local sales orientation to fully monetize - and complexity grows still further.
Add it all up and 1Cast has a tall mountain to climb to succeed. Not insurmountable, but definitely challenging. From a consumer standpoint, personalized video news is very compelling; I just wonder whether a 6-person startup has the necessary mojo or if it requires a larger player with deep resources and content relationships. Meanwhile broadcasters are pursuing their own video initiatives and others like Voxant, WorldNow and Critical Media have been circling these waters for a while. 1Cast has an ambitious story; how it unfolds will be worth watching.
What do you think? Post a comment!
Categories: Aggregators, Startups, Syndicated Video Economy
Topics: 1Cast, Critical Media, RedLasso, Voxant, WorldNow
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Azuki Systems is Poised to Ignite Mobile Video
Azuki Systems, a Boston area startup, is poised to ignite the mobile video market with a comprehensive management, publishing and interactivity platform. Mobile video is a space with a lot of buzz, particularly with the recent iPhone launch. However, buzz has not yet translated to anything close to the activity we've seen in broadband as yet.
I spoke with Azuki's VP of Marketing and co-founder John Tremblay and Director of Marketing
Communications Laurie Klausner earlier this week to learn more. They are quick to point out the range of issues that has constrained the mobile video market to date: heterogeneous handsets/networks, constrained navigation, slow and inefficient new services creation, download application requirements, lack of interactivity/social media tools, a weak ecosystem and minimal monetization opportunities (that's quite a list...).
Azuki's "MashMedia Platform," a SaaS offering, addresses all of these with a browser-only requirement, meaning content and services can be delivered to 1.8 billion+ handsets immediately(Azuki's estimate). That alone significantly widens the target universe beyond the minority of handsets that today are "video-ready."
But Azuki correctly recognizes that "mobile TV' is not really the market opportunity to chase. Rather, it's the ability to deliver personalized, contextual and snackable video segments that have seamless interactive and social/sharing features. For content providers, Azuki super-charges current WAP offerings. "Facebook-on-your-phone" would be a little inaccurate to describe the experience Azuki enables for both users and content providers, but many elements of web 2.0 and social media have clearly influenced Azuki's product development vision.
John gave me a spin through a sample app created by WheelsTV, an automotive content company. Azuki ingests content from WheelsTV's CMS (or assets could come from a video CMS like thePlatform, Brightcove, etc.), then processes it into media objects. These in turn feed personalized profiles the user can build, or which can help sort content that may have been virally shared by others.
Azuki can use metadata to break down longer segments into mobile-friendly segments, also navigable through a gallery of thumbnails. Posting videos to your Facebook page is one touch away, and videos can be commented on, rated and shared with others through SMS and email. Targeted advertising completes the picture.
Azuki has a big vision which is backed by a blue-chip founding and management team, with past startup successes including ArrowPoint, SightPath, Airvana and Acopia (names very familiar to those in the Boston tech scene). The company will be rolling out beta content and services partners in the coming months, as it pushes toward commercial release later in '08. For content and service providers looking to beef up their mobile video offerings, Azuki is clearly a company to watch.
(Hat tip to Paul Roberts at The 451 Group for steering me to Azuki)
Categories: Mobile Video, Startups, Technology
Topics: Azuki Systems
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Visible Measures: Ultimate Broadband Video Measurement
If you've ever hungered for insight about a specific video's performance beyond just how many views it has received, Visible Measures is a company after your heart. An independent firm that measures the reach and engagement of broadband video across the Internet, VM heralds an era of ultimate insight into how each and every video performs when it enters the Internet's fast-moving current.
By integrating its code with the video player, VM collects data on session length, drop-out points, rewind activity, click-throughs, viral distribution, geographic usage and other metrics. Think of VM as "big brother-esque" (in a positive way) in tracking a video's "true reach" as VM puts it, supplying a dizzying array of data to content providers and advertisers. The data is presented in intuitive, graphical formats that analysts can parse and sort to understand the video's ROI and what can be done to improve performance next time around. The company is already tracking over 80 million videos in its database.
I recently spent time with Matt Cutler, VM's VP of Marketing and Analytics who gave me a demo of the system and how it's being brought to market. VM is targeting established and early stage media companies, advertisers and ad agencies, all of whom have a critical stake in developing business cases for video deployments and ad campaigns. VM's tracking capabilities are especially meaningful given how pervasive the "syndicated video economy" is becoming.
None of this is to suggest that VM's data will replace programmers' and advertisers' creative instincts, but it would surely provide some real world augments to help offset the inherent guesswork involved in the creative process. (for more specifics about how VM works, see the below video from DEMO '08)
For advertisers specifically, today VM is announcing both its "VisibleCampaign" solution to measure ad campaigns' performance and also a collaboration with Dynamic Logic to track how these campaigns affect a brand's perception. Both initiatives are important in helping advertisers and agencies gain more insight about the broadband video medium and why it's important to invest. As someone who has expressed concern that the broadband ad business needs to mature quickly to support the myriad startup and established media companies relying on it, VM's will surely help decision-makers across the board gain comfort in shifting over more of their budgets.
VM is a perfect example of innovation needed to help optimize a new medium as it takes root. The company has raised $19 million through three rounds and is based in Boston. Based on what I've seen I'm quite enthusiastic about its odds of success.
Categories: Advertising, Startups, Technology
Topics: Dynamic Logic, Visible Measures
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Akimbo, Vongo Expose Risks for Broadband Pioneers
The last few days' news about Akimbo and Starz's Vongo service, two of the earliest players in broadband video delivery, shows how risky the broadband video market can be for pioneers.
Akimbo - which has closed its doors after raising approximately $50 million since 2003 - demonstrates that
misjudging the key characteristics of an early market can be devastating. Akimbo's faulty assumptions included:
- Anticipating that consumers would be willing to buy a broadband-only set-top box, despite overwhelming research to the contrary.
- Expecting that consumers would be willing to pay yet another monthly subscription fee, although broadband's value proposition was still in its infancy and consumers were already complaining about the high cost of cable/satellite subscription services.
- Building its initial content strategy using a pure "Long Tail" approach of aggregating lots of niche programmers, not grasping that Long Tail models only succeed when "head" content - in this case from broadcasters and cable networks - is also included.
As these misjudgments became obvious, the box was dropped, select cable programming was added to the content lineup, pricing was changed and management was overhauled. Ultimately in February '08, the whole company strategy was blown up, as Akimbo unsuccessfully tried to get a toehold in the already over-crowded white-label content management/publishing business. But once a startup is in a deep hole, it's almost impossible to climb out.
Meanwhile, Starz's announcement yesterday with Verizon, of its first "wholesale deal" for broadband delivery of its programming, shows additional risks for early players. Yesterday I caught up with Bob Greene, EVP of Advanced Services at Starz, for whom I did some consulting work several years ago on Vongo's predecessor service, Starz Ticket.
Starz launched Vongo in early '06 as a broadband-only subscription and download-to-own service, featuring programming it had under contract, plus other categories it later added. Vongo went to market direct-to-consumer and through device partners like HP, Samsung, Toshiba, Creative and Archos, but Vongo's growth has been modest as the broadband subscription category has yet to really take off.
Vongo's larger goal was getting deals done with existing service providers like cable, telco, and broadband ISPs. But this aspiration ran into the buzzsaw of incumbents' intransigence, illustrating that reliance on ecosystem partners, who often have divergent motivations, can be very risky. In this case, Vongo's would be distributors perceived Vongo as less as an opportunity to grow the market and tap new consumer behaviors, and more as a potential long-term end-run, with immediate threats to profit margins and cash flow contribution.
Cable operators have been saying "no thanks" to distributing Vongo, concluding it had more downside risk to existing Starz linear subscriptions and Video on Demand than it had upside broadband potential. The Verizon deal may reverse things; Bob says more deals are in the offing. Time will tell. In the meantime, with Vongo's direct marketing efforts set to be further de-emphasized, Starz's broadband fate is falling squarely into the hands of reluctant incumbent service providers.
Akimbo and Starz show that to succeed, it's essential to make correct fundamental assumptions about a market's early growth have a keen understanding of ecosystem partners' motivations and concerns. Missteps on any of these can have disastrous implications.
What do you think the lessons are from Akimbo and Starz's Vongo? Post a comment!
Categories: Cable Networks, Cable TV Operators, Devices, Startups, Telcos
Topics: Akimbo, Starz, Verizon
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Sezmi - Building B Portends Major Disruption to TV Industry
Builidng B, the stealthy, well-funded startup I wrote about last December, is at last pulling back the curtain today, unveiling "Sezmi" as its new name and releasing details of its end-to-end system for delivering traditional television programming and broadband video directly to the TV.
I got a preview of Sezmi (pronounced "SaysMe") at a private briefing with company executives at NAB 2 weeks ago. Upfront I want to offer a huge caveat that I only saw the system in demo mode so I cannot vouch for its performance in actual, scale situations. That said, if the system works as described, then I
would rank Sezmi as the most promising approach I've yet seen for bridging the currently separate worlds of broadband video and TV. Sezmi could well be the first bona fide broadband/on-demand competitor to cable TV and satellite operators.
First things first. Sezmi should not be confused with broadband appliances seeking to bridge broadband and TV, such as AppleTV, Vudu, Akimbo and others. I am an avowed skeptic of all of these. Sezmi does not focus on delivering broadband video as an add-on to existing cable/satellite subscriptions. Rather, it is looking to replace these providers by combining the best of the traditional linear broadcast/cable network model with broadband, on-demand, digital video recording, personalization, social networking and ease-of-use that many of us now consider second nature.
Sezmi is a complete system, providing an antenna, set-top box and remote control to the consumer. One of Sezmi's key innovations is "FlexCast," which leverages multiple delivery networks to get broadcast/cable channels and broadband video into the home. In fact, the traditional channels are the bedrock of Sezmi's service offering, enabling it to be a true competitor to incumbent video providers. Sezmi leases digital broadcast space from local stations to efficiently deliver these channels, which can be watched in either familiar linear mode, or in recorded on-demand mode (note the initial set-top box comes with 1 terabyte of storage, soon to be 2 terabytes). For broadband video, it makes use of the existing broadband ISP connection.
Sezmi creates an entirely new, and exciting user experience that digital media enthusiasts will instantly recognize, and I believe, value. These include the remote control with an iPod-like scroll wheel, no numeric keypad and one-touch personalization for family members. There is also the on-screen navigation, which groups shows by episode, and presents them in personalized home page-like settings. And there's targeted contextual advertising, allowing familiar click-through options.
Recognizing that a direct-to-consumer approach would be costly and slow to scale, Sezmi has adopted a partner-centric go-to-market strategy. It is working with ISPs, telcos and others who seek entry to the video services business. Buno Pati, Sezmi's CEO/co-founder told me he expects consumer pricing would be approximately half of today's digital cable tier, including HD and DVR capability. I suggested that might imply a $35-40 per month fee. While not confirming that number, he said he wouldn't disagree with my estimate.
If Sezmi can work out its economics with partners and deliver that pricing to consumers, it would be a very compelling alternative to today's cable/satellite offerings. The key is to whom? In my briefing many types of customers were mentioned: analog subscribers, new HD TV purchasers, over-the-air households, and others. Given how ground-breaking it service is, in my opinion Sezmi needs to go after digitally savvy audiences first.
Today the company is announcing only that it is commencing trials in pilot markets and expects commercial launch with partners later this year. All eyes will be on Sezmi to see if it can execute on its bold vision. If it does this is a company that has major disruptive potential.
(Note - very coincidentally, Sezmi CEO/co-founder will be on my Digital Hollywood panel next Wed, May 6th at 10:45am)
Categories: Cable TV Operators, Devices, Startups
Topics: Building B, SezMi
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Hulu's Kilar at NAB, My Reactions
One of the best hours I spent at NAB was the one listening to Hulu's CEO Jason Kilar. Too bad it was scheduled for 5pm on Day 3, resulting in a desultory crowd of only a 100 or so. Broadcasters and others could learn a lot from Kilar and Hulu's early experience.
Hulu, which was derisively referred to as "Clown Co" prior to its launch, is anything but. In my previous review of its beta, I gave it a B+. One month since its official launch, I now move it up a notch to A minus, and as I'll explain later, an A is within reach.
Hulu is as well-thought out a broadband video enterprise as currently exists, for at least three reasons:
Clarity of purpose - While Hulu evokes Google with its lofty goal, "to help people find and enjoy the world's premium content, when, where and how they want to," it has provided discipline to keep Kilar and his team focused on meaningfully supportive differentiators.
Relentless user-focus - Hulu is Apple-esque in its devotion to what Kilar called an "atypically strong user experience." The team has sweated over and uses every design and technology lever available to make Hulu easy and enjoyable and accessible to the mainstream market.
Organizational capability - Hulu has a startup mentality where every decision is do-or-die. It may feel intangible if you've never worked in a startup, but personal ownership is an incredibly important advantage. Inculcating this ethos despite a $100 million investment and $1 billion valuation is no mean feat.
Several recent spins through Hulu showed how these come together. Hulu now has 50+ content partners, but is uncluttered by UGC. This is a place for only high-quality programming. Finding and playing video is a snap. Graphics and fonts are simple and clear. As Kilar said the site's 16:9 graphics, differentiated from standard square thumbnails, suggest this place is different from the rest (no "Tokyo at night" orientation here). Here you can also easily clip and share favorite scenes, which Kilar says has been done 100k+ times on 12K sites since launch.
And how about this - do a search for "Lost" - the popular ABC program which is NOT available on Hulu - and you'll get results pointing you offsite to ABC.com. Talk about putting the user first!
Hulu's real lesson to broadcasters and others is that if you create a high-quality user environment, you open up real opportunities and options. These include getting above average CPMs from advertisers (through effective units like the 7 second introductory "brand slate"), wringing value out of programs no longer on-air (example "Arrested Development" was #1 or #2 most popular on Hulu), pre-empting non-revenue producing/non-branded environments like file-sharing sites and YouTube, allowing new programs to be easily sampled and last but not least, re-capturing users who prefer online over the traditional on-air model.
Hulu still has major challenges ahead: massively building out its content library, proving its syndication value to content partners who could as easily go direct to distributors, making its overall economics work, and of course, navigating the treacherous political waters of its big media backers. If it does all of these, it gets an A. Hulu's impressive progress to date gives me every reason to believe it will.
What do you think of Hulu? Post a comment!
Categories: Aggregators, Broadcasters, Startups
Topics: Hulu
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Insights Aplenty from How-to Video Category
One of the hottest corners of the broadband video market is the ad-supported "how-to" category. How-to lends itself well to video because, if a picture's worth a thousand words, a video is surely worth a million. Recognizing this, there's now a host of start-ups in this category which together have raised tens of millions of dollars. I wrote about some of this a couple months ago.
Several recent calls with industry participants got me to thinking the how-to category actually offers many valuable insights for all broadband industry participants. These fall into 3 key areas: content development, traffic acquisition and monetization.
1. Content: "Build Our Own" or "Offer a Superstore of Others' Videos"?
Players like Expert Village, 5Min, VideoJug and MonkeySee are pursuing the "build our own" video library approach, incenting individual "experts" to contribute to their sites. On the other hand, sites like WonderHowTo (WHT) and SuTree rely primarily on scouring user-generated video sites like YouTube, plus those above to aggregate the best videos available. With how-to being the ultimate "Long Tail" space,
WHT's Stephen Chao told me in a recent briefing that trying to cover the infinite number of niches would be impossible. So to be comprehensive, relevant and high-quality, WHT curates what its crawlers return with a small in-house team and presents the cream of the crop to users, complete with a range of community-building features.
Here's one non-statistically significant example that illustrates the two approach's results: I did a search for "bbq steak video" on Expert Village, which bills itself as the "World's Largest How-to Video Site" and on WHT. EV returned 15 results, regrettably not one of which was relevant. WHT returned 357 results, and on the first page of 20 results alone, at least 12 looked relevant. These came from a wide variety of sources. Try doing a few searches and see what you find - my guess is your experience will be consistent with mine.
2. Traffic acquistion: Syndication or SEO?
All of these sites are ad-supported, so traffic is key. The sites with private libraries can syndicate to heavily-trafficked partners. Ordinarily, as a big syndication fan, I'd say that sounds like an advantageous traffic generating plan. But how-to may have a different traffic acquisition dynamic. It may well be that far more traffic will always come to these how-to video sites via searches at Google and other search sites, as compared with the sum of various syndication deals. That's because, absent a household brand-name in how-to, default consumer behavior may well be to simply type their how-to video query into Google.
If that's the case, then it will actually be those sites which have the most highly-optimized pages for all the
niche videos that will gain greater traffic. Though I'm not an SEO expert, it seems to me that, taking my "bbq steak videos" example, WHT, with 357 related videos can optimize better than say EV with 15. And sure enough, when I ran the "bbq steak video" search on Google, right on the first page is a result from WHT, whereas nothing shows up for EV even after 5 pages. Bottom line: more relevant videos = more zero cost, Google-driven traffic.
3. Monetization: Video ads or Keyword-driven text/display ads?
Last but not least is monetization. How-to sites have lots of contextual ad potential. In my "bbq steak" example, any company that sells grills, steaks, sauces, etc, would love to advertise to me. It's tempting to believe that those with their own video libraries have more profit potential, because they can sell pre-roll or overlay ads, whereas a superstore site like WHT or SuTree cannot, because they're linking off to the source sites.
But consider this: how many of these potential advertisers will actually have video ads or the budget to create them? Unlike entertainment video, how-to, with its Long Tail character, seems to lend itself more to a low cost keyword ad approach which can be pursued by even the smallest advertiser. So say WHT or SuTree can build traffic in all those video niches and surround the video with keyword-driven text or display ads, all automated through a bidding system. Though yielding lower revenue per ad, my bet is that the total revenue for all ads with the keyword approach would be greater.
Summary
The how-to category is nascent and dynamic. I'm not suggesting for a second that it's a winner-take-all space or that all of the above are strictly "either/or." But I do believe the above analysis raises valuable points all industry participants should consider when developing their content, traffic and monetization strategies.
What do you think? Post a comment now!
Categories: Advertising, Indie Video, Startups, Strategy, Video Search
Topics: 5Min, Expert Village, MonkeySee, SuTree, VideoJug, WonderHowTo, YouTube
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Modern Feed Jumps Into Video Navigation Space
With the proliferation of available broadband video comes a massive user navigation challenge. Modern Feed is launching today to address this. It is part search engine, part aggregator, with a specific focus on indexing professionally-produced programming, not user-generated video. It's also focused on actual programs, not promotional clips.
J.D. Heilprin, Modern Feed's founder/CEO told me yesterday that the company is targeting mainstream users providing the easiest way to find available, high-quality video. It employs a team of "Feeders" charged with curating the best videos to include on the site. The result is approximately 550 "networks" and 25,000 pieces of content now indexed, where "networks" is a loose term ranging from traditional broadcasters to indies new entrants like Boston Symphony or Architectural Digest.
Modern Feed is rights-holder friendly, not indexing any illegal or pirated video, and playing the video from the source's site (though sometimes with a thin Modern Feed navigation frame at the top of the screen). I played around with Modern Feed and found it to be easy-to-use and well-laid out. Modern Feed also offers an iPhone implementation that looks pretty cool, other devices are to follow.
The big challenge (and opportunity) for Modern Feed is that it's entering a very noisy space where user behavior is very undefined. There are myriad video search engines (Truveo, ClipBlast, blinkx, Veveo), portals (AOL, Yahoo, MSN), navigation sites (TV Guide, recently-launched PrimeTime Rewind) and of course the networks' own sites (and syndication efforts) offering users the ability to quickly find quality content. Then there's YouTube, the first stop for many users when it comes to video. And YouTube is increasingly moving up market by striking partnerships with premium providers.
Modern Feed's strong user experience, focus on mainstream users and device integrations are differentiators for the company. Whether these are ultimately success factors really depends on how user behavior unfolds in the nascent video navigation space. Modern Feed has raised several million dollars from angels and has 30 full-timers with aggressive growth planned.
What do you think? Post a comment and let everyone know!
See prior posts:
YouTube, C-SPAN Team Up for User-Generated, Multi-Platform Voter Project
Categories: Startups, Video Search
Topics: AOL, Blinkx, ClipBlast, Modern Feed, MSN, PrimeTime Rewind, Truveo, TV Guide, Yahoo, YouTube
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Being "Constrained by Reality"
Back in the mid-to-late '90s when I was running business development for Continental Cablevision, then the 3rd largest cable operator in the US, I had the opportunity to meet with a lot startups that wanted to partner with us to gain access to our 5 million subscribers. Meeting these startups and hearing their ideas was almost always interesting but all too often our talks were inconclusive.
Why? Because frequently there was at least one or more completely unrealistic assumption in their business plans, which made us skeptical about the company's likeliness to succeed. I often found that otherwise intelligent and analytical executives had somehow convinced themselves of something that just wasn't realistic. I came up with a catchphrase that helped guide our evaluation of proposed deals: our go/no-go decisions would be "constrained by reality."
That principle has stuck with me, and has been reinforced through my own startup experiences, watching CEOs who also understood this principle and those who did not. Being "constrained by reality" especially means that the optimism that all entrepreneurs and startup executives radiate must be tempered by a careful analysis of what's actually happening in the market and what limitations the new product, feature, deal, etc. will meet up against. Not doing so can be a fatal mistake.
I bring this up because, as with early other immature markets, the nascent broadband video space has become a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Yet I continue to be exposed to ideas that are not aligned with market realities or key customer priorities. These companies are in for a rocky road ahead.
Conversely, I'm often impressed with CEOs who are no less confident, but do completely grasp the importance of being "constrained by reality." One technology CEO told me recently that his team spends an inordinate amount of time focused on "sequencing" or trying to model their customers' priorities. This informs their product development agenda and helps them stay aligned with recognizable opportunities. Similarly, a content executive told me that his company is very focused on production cost per minute because, having done an analysis of advertising CPMs, sell-out rates and splits, they have a solid grasp of what's required to be profitable. Another content executive acknowledged that while changing behaviors in his large company was critical, it was akin to "turning a barge" - something that needs to be done slowly and with care.
The above examples illustrate the subtle mix of optimism and pragmatism required for success in the broadband video space. I often try to explain that as exciting as broadband video is, it must be looked upon in evolutionary, not revolutionary terms. Feeling the constant pressure of being "constrained by reality" helps instill the kind of discipline that ultimately contributes to success.
Categories: Startups, Strategy