Saturday, March 31, 2007|
Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea. I have no idea what the traffic will be for this new venture if they create a single destination site. I have no idea what the traffic will be for video hosted by the distribution partners they signed up, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Fox and NBC/Universal sites themselves. Individually they certainly will trail Youtube in traffic. In aggregate, it has a chance to surpass Youtube, but we won't know this for a long , long time. Here is what I do know. 1. Because Gootube has chosen to hide behind the DMCA, it can only sell advertising around videos it has a license for. That means their inventory is limited, which in turn limits its ability to try new things and to make big sales. If the core competency of Google is to sell advertising and the foundation for the Youtube acquisition was to invent and deploy new and exciting forms of video advertising, that goal just took a huge hit. This new venture, if it can launch in the next few months, will hit the ground with more and better content, and more monetization options than Google. Its a unique opportunity to set the rules of how video advertising is sold. Something Google thought they had wrapped up when they bought Youtube. Whether Newco can live up to Google in terms of performance and innovation is another question, but they are going to have every opportunity to do so. Hiring some folks away at Google for stupid money would seem to make a lot of sense at this point. 2. Youtube's 10 minute limitation will put it at a disadvantage. Newco's distributors will have access to full episodes in addition to clips and user generated content beyond 10 minutes. This will give viewers much greater choice and could steal users from Youtube for this reason alone. It may force Google to combine Google Video and Youtube. It also will provide more options and flexibility for advertisers. 3. What may turn out to be the biggest problem created by Newco is the new competition for content from major content owners. Rather than Google walking into meetings as the only kid on the block, Newco can offer an alternative from the mindset of a content provider. It will certainly impact the terms and cost of content for Google. The good news for Google is that it may accelerate their ability to get deals done with people who dont want to partner with Newco for whatever reason 4. If the future of the net is video, where does this put Google Search ? Google Video Search right now plays in a walled garden of indexing and returning results only for Google Video and Youtube. How long will users give them a pass for this ? The distributors of content from Newco all have some level of internet video search, I would expect that they will start making an issue of this in advertising and promotional campaigns..."There are X million number of websites with video on them, Google Video searchs 2 of them..." This new venture is about so much more than who can get more traffic. It was a very smart strategic move to put significant roadblocks in Google's path, while paving a way for those involved with Newco to give users and advertisers what they want from Online Video. But as always, concept is one thing, execution is the bottom line
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [Blog Maverick] 11:09:36 PM  comment
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The TV Guys Aren't as Stupid as You Think. With a few notable exceptions, the blogosphere is, predictably, dumping on the NBC-News Corp. announcement of a new video distribution service. Don't be so quick to write it off. There are two ways to build an audience: aggregation and syndication. Aggregation means bringing everyone to you. It's what the broadcast networks do on television, and what YouTube does on the Web. It's a two-step process: build scale, then monetize. I think most people get this model, although doing it effectively (especially the second part) is harder than it seems. There's also syndication, which means distributing the content (or applications, or transaction opportunities) to where people already are. TV content producers do that too -- in fact, they largely invented syndication as a business model. And YouTube syndicates as well. I rarely go to the YouTube.com website, but I watch lots of YouTube videos embedded on blogs and other sites I visit. However, YouTube's revenues primarily come from leveraging viewership into visits to the central site, which creates and advertising and transaction opportunities. The new NBC-News Corp. venture is all about syndication. They are getting beaten up for not having a name for the website, but as they made clear at the announcement, the central site is almost an afterthought. The core of the effort is syndicated distribution through a network of partners, like Yahoo! and MySpace. This is smart. Putting only some popular content into the syndication pipe isn't smart, but I predict that if the effort takes off, that limitation will go away soon. Notice that lots of midsize media companies are already syndicating through third parties, like Voxant and Brightcove. An effective monetization ecosystem for content needs three things: platforms, standards, and tracking data. That's what the current efforts are working towards. Put aside the copyright rhetoric, which I agree is still overblown. This debate has never really been about "piracy" -- it's about business models and strategy: How big is the pie, and who gets which pieces. Don't underestimate the significance of big traditional media players acknowledging they need to follow their users to the Web. [Werblog]11:05:13 PM comment
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NY Times Spectrum Article. I'm quoted in John Markoff's New York Times article today about the 700 MHz spectrum auctions. The column grew out of a spectrum policy discussion I led a workshop last week, which John also attended. My quote compresses a longer point I made, which hopefully comes through. It's that the direct transactional price of acquiring a spectrum license may not accurately reflect the economic and social value of certain spectrum uses. This was a key point of my Supercommons law review article. The 2.4 GHz spectrum where WiFi operates was considered worthless "junk" spectrum due to interference, but opened for unlicensed use, it is the foundation for massive investment and economic activity. [Werblog]11:02:15 PM comment
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Amp'd Mobile Launches in Japan. WWJ Editors, 25 March 2007 As announced last November Amp'd Mobile rolled-out in Japan this month via a new portal service designed exclusively for KDDI subscribers. Amp'd Mobile-Japan debuted with its first "Amp'd Original Presentation" called Boston Gyro: The Big League Report provides real-time baseball reports covering Japanese players in the US from sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe. All Amp'd Japan content is delivered in Japanese or in English with Japanese subtitles. [Wireless Watch Japan] 9:36:53 PM comment
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Encouraging MediaFLO Survey Results. WWJ Editors, 27 March 2007 QUALCOMM and KDDI established MediaFLO Japan together in December 2005 and have announced the first results from an extensive consumer survey of attitudes towards mobile TV. The survey, which was conducted by Accenture Japan and included more than 3,000 Japanese consumers, showed that subscribers are far more likely to take up mobile broadcast services when they experience it firsthand. Survey results after the jump. [We noted in a recent WWJ newsletter that new digital tv spectrum allocation from the ministry is under review and the various lobby groups are in full motion to state their case -- Eds] [Wireless Watch Japan] 3:30:11 PM comment
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Xcerion makes Internet OS real. Internet OS sector seems to be getting increasingly crowded. Start-ups such as YouOS, EyeOS are vying for mindshare with Internet giants like Google. The seriousness of market is reflected by the fact that earlier this month, Microsoft set up an all-star group to tackle the Cloud OS opportunities.
Xcerion, now about five years old has started out as a company developing a friendly user interface for enterprise resource management systems, has developed a back-end software infrastructure was offering a two megabyte download that looked and mimicked any regular desktop OS. They claimed it took less than five seconds to boot up, and was able to offer applications that did most things we expect from apps on a desktop.
Too good to be true? That was my initial reaction, though my skepticism was allayed by the that Xcerion counted Lou Perazzoli, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer and one of key architect of Windows NT, and John Connors, former Microsoft chief financial officer was an investor. These two, clearly are two people who know operating systems.
It also helped that a Swedish venture capital group, Northzone was investing $10 million in the company (PDF), and the much-respected Mary Jo Foley, who despite similar trepidations about the company, had given it subtle thumbs up.
Xcerion’s technology falls in the category of “seeing is believing” products. (See the gallery of exclusive screenshots at the end of this article.) Daniel Arthursson, CEO of the company demoed the product, and it was a jaw dropping moment, when skepticism gave way to tempered enthusiasm.
The little OS worked as promised over the pokey Starbucks wireless connection, and for a few seconds I did forget that this was coming off the Internet and windows running locally.
He showed me an Outlook-type email/day planner app, a RSS reader, a word processing application, an Excel style spreadsheet application and a bunch of other small applications. “You can continue to keep working in our XIOS when offline and the information is synced when you connect the next time,” says Arthursson.
The entire application can be customized [base ']Äì developers can create skins that resemble MacOS, BeOS or even bring back some of the old OSes that are now long forgotten. (OS/2 anyone?) XIOS comes with a visual application development environment which can be used by anyone to create small applications [base ']Äì lets call them widgets [base ']Äì which can be completely bespoke or sold to others.
“XML was the only way for us to keep the download small enough and also be able to reuse the code when creating new applications,” says Arthurson. Xcerion is going to launch in the third quarter of 2007, and has developed the backend technology, that runs on servers using Ubuntu Linux. The company is putting scalable data centers in place to be able to handle all the heavy lifting.
Imagine this application married to say Nokia N800 tablet? It could be a full-fledged computer in your pocket [base ']Äì all you need is a decent Internet connection. Or XIOS embedded on a cheap $100 laptop that can be used by schools or kids in the emerging economies? There are many possible scenarios, but lets wait for the XIOS to be released: we all want to see it to believe it!
3:29:43 PM comment
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A dark horse in this race is 
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Apple TV in the UK PayTV market Iíve just been looking at the Apple TV box specifications all day and been scratching my head trying to figure out for what purpose the strange not-so-beastly device has been placed on planet earth. Well planet USA ñ Brits will have to wait a little longer to sample the delights. The specifications seem horribly basic for a modern consumer electronic device:
It all makes sense if you look at it from a PC-centric point: AppleTV allows you to play your content on your TV as the iPod before it allows you to play your content on the go. Of course, Apple would prefer you to buy the content from its i-Tunes store, but I suspect that as with mp3ís before it ñ if you can manage to get the content onto your PC in a non-protected format from another source, then AppleTV will sync and play it. The interesting part for me is not in slagging off the vision of Steve Jobs, but the disruptive role of AppleTV in the payTV value chain. Although I whinge about the limited formats options, Apple puts GooTube to shame. The quality of the Apple solution is not only higher because of the formats, but because it is a download solution, it generally beats the best effort streaming network centric solution of GooTube. Also, it helps that you can play Apple content on the iPod and TV screen as well as the PC screen. The GooTube solution looks cheap and nasty compared to the Apple solution. The GooTube solution is also currently heavily subsidised by the Google search engine near-monopoly rents. Next comparing the solution to the BT Vision solution which is basically Freeview + PVR + IPTV. Well the BT Vision box is not-so-free (£90 for installation and connection and you have to be part of the BT broadband ecosystem) and you seem to pay for content on a on-demand basis or by subscription, but the box is closed to non-BT acquired source material. However, you can record DTT content onto the larger hard drive and share it with other wifi networked devices. The interesting part here is the relative costs of the end-to-end delivery mechanism - who has the cost advantage?
The Virgin Media (cableTV) model is remarkably similar to the BT architecture and probably will be similar to the forthcoming O2, Orange and Vodafone clones ñ except theirs will no doubt feature some kind of mobile revenue cross-subsidy. Yet to be revealed is the BSkyB model: but it doesnít take Albert Einstein to figure out the route the content will arrive and the place where it will be stored. It also isnít difficult to figure out there is going to some sort of subsidy from the monthly subscription revenues and there will also be an attempt to get incremental advertising revenue. Iím not sure BSkyB will bother with a pay-as-you-download model, perhaps very limited as per current Sky Box Office and Live Events such as concerts, boxing and wrestling but they will probably use the satellite broadcast network as a delivery mechanism. It all makes for an interesting review of the UK PayTV market by OFCOM. From an economist point of view, how do you regulate a market where there is so much technological and value-chain disruption going on? It certainly smells like bonanza time for the crystal ball soothsaying industryÖ - KeithJamesMc [TeleBusillis] 3:28:37 PM comment
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Google, Online Ad Giant, Looks at Radio and TV. Google’s efforts to sell radio and TV ads are mixed, suggesting that it is far from becoming a credible player in traditional media. By MIGUEL HELFT. [NYT > Technology] 3:28:01 PM comment
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Computerworld to Microsoft: Fear the Fruit.
• Mac is finally able to move fluidly into and out of the world of Microsoft Windows and its applications. But he also thinks: Apple should create economy-oriented, business-class desktop and notebook hardware. Since Apple offers very few SKUs, it's almost impossible for enterprise buyers to save money by specifying this or that lesser feature in order to reduce cost.While how you view the piece is going to come down to what you think of Apple more so than what you think of Microsoft—do you think Macs are more usable and more innovative?—the fact that the perception is growing that Apple products are more intuitive and better designed than Microsoft's is more problematic than M$ seems to want to realize.
In NY, it seems like Mac users are the majority, though I realize it's not the case everywhere. What's it like in your neck of the woods? Are you considering "the switch"?
Why Microsoft Should Fear Apple [Computerworld] 3:19:39 PM comment
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Scot Finnie, who recently made a Last update: 7/11/07; 6:18:29 PM .
