In case you think it’s possible that we could have missed something in the veritable smorgasbord of punditry and innovation piled high at AO’s Stanford Summit, here’s a short, and only mildly self-serving, summary of what Adobe’s Mark Randall, Chief Strategist, Dynamic Media Division, thinks it will take to make money from Web video. If you’re confused by the numbering, he worked backwards from six because he didn’t want to bury the lede. More…
6. Wallless gardens. Some leading tech firms dream of being media moguls, which forces big media firms to be technology developers, but do we really need a different TV set for every channel? (This could well have been aimed at Move Networks’ proprietary player.)
5. Create engaging experiences. How quickly “live” online has grown. Golf broadcasts, complete with data simulcasts, can allow users to pick the camera angles and which hole they’re looking at in real time. Adobe managed to support a half million simultaneous viewers with such an experience and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
4. Embrace open standards. H-264 is great open standard, as are HE-AAC, XMP, and IAB for ads. Use these and you will reduce your development costs, and accelerate market growth.
3. Be everywhere. This means moving beyond the browser. Social network widgets embedded with video puts video experiences in front of people who can watch something with their friends. We’ll see desktop delivery grow, but also mobile devices, and yes, set-top boxes, even though the latter platform is just starting to drop the walls.
2. You can’t watch it if you can’t find it. The old joke about how there are 500 channels but there’s nothing on has a new punch line; everything is always on, but you can’t find it. Coming soon to solve this problem: recommendation engines, friends lists – there could even be inverse examples, like bookmarking a reviewer with whom you always disagree. The bottom line, though, is that content has to get intelligent. Randall’s example was automated speech to text to aid in creating meta-data; mine would be crafting personalization tags so content could do more work finding people sparing people the trouble of finding it. One sobering word about descriptives for video, however. Randall sais that if you allow for three keywords to describe video two of them are always girls or funny. There may also evolve smart media players, such as the work Adobe is doing with Google and Yahoo! on headless Flash players that can make Flash searchable. From playback to servers to authoring tools, metadata is necessary to add intelligence into rich media. “People are drowning in media.,” he said; “Metadata will become a key. “
1. You’ve heard it said that the reveloution will be televised (he’d say Webcast). But he’d like to turn that saying into, “The Revolution will be Monetized. “ The problem so far with video online is that creators haven’t seen the same kind of returns from the same kinds of assets. What are in place today are self-forming ad hoc syndication networks. But the content itself doesn’t come with rules that explain under what circumstances and with what compensation video content can be apportioned and shared. Either that content has to contain envelopes containing where you need to send money, or here are the ad avails that accompany this piece of media, or rights management will collapse and with it the widespread availability of expression. Putitng viewers together with what they want at a price creators will accept – that will fund the “revolution.”
