Pravda on Media, Technology, and Rebel Filmmaking

Sitting on the couch at blip.tv’s offices in Manhattan, chatting with Dina Kaplan, the company’s COO and Mike Hudak, CEO, I realized that one thing that Dina said was the true story behind this small company - that probably their content and distribution is the biggest and most unnoticed threat to TV networks.

Blip.tv is a video distribution and monetization platform. it offers distribution services to its customers, such an embedable player, distribution to main video sites, twitter notifications, and cross posting to blogs. The company also cut sponsorship deals for its customers with brands, as well as using basic advertisement technology to provide CPM/CPC of deals.

Their uniqueness is in their business strategy - focusing on independent producers of online shows:

- Independent producers are in most cases the ones who are not linked to major TV networks, the guys who just go out there with their own money (or, in some cases, investment money) and produce their own shows.

- Shows are not the dog on skateboard videos you see on YouTube, but an episodic content, just like regular TV shows.

Blip is hosting different kinds of shows, such as cooking shows, drama, comedy, technology and news.

Here’s an example of such a show, Political Lunch:

So, what’s the big news?

Well, couple of weeks ago, Mike and Dina showed me one cool thing - their integration with Sony Bravia. Sony Bravia has an Ethernet socket. And what I saw at blip’s offices is their content on a large screen TV with blip’s menu and interface.

Though Internet and TV integration is not a huge news, blip’s move into this area is significant.

Till now, independent creators had to face two challenges:

- The limited user experience web video offers

- How to promote their shows without the huge marketing budgets the networks have.

Now, blip’s player is no longer confined to the limitations of web video viewing experience. If users can just as easily see Political Lunch or The Closer, the competitive landscape is fundamentally different that the traditional separation of Internet video and TV experience. And again - the key here is that the content we are talking about is not the regular UGC low end content, but well produced shows, that are not a part of the TV industry.

In this new deal, blip.tv challenges the TV networks as they are providing new kind of content, from a new kind of creators, but on the same display vehicle - TV. By breaking the walls around web video user experience, and increasing the exposure to independently created shows, blip.tv are on a heads on attack on TV networks. Sure, they don’t have the money the big guys have - TV advertisement models and price range are much more profitable than what blip.tv and other online video communities can get today. However, like every innovation, things might take time, but they are definitely changing the landscape in a fundamental way.

It is yet to be seen if blip.tv will be around 3 years from now. I believe that they will be successful and snatched by one of gorillas in this market.

However their success or failure will not only indicate if they are good business people. It would be a clear sign for things to come in the market niche of independent content creators.

Robert Scoble published a thoughtful post on Techcrunch, regarding the future of live mobile broadcasting. While Robert is one of the smartest people in the social media circles, I have to say that he missed the point here.

Robert saying that Qik and Flixwagon has no future cause Kyte already has it all:

Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.
2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.
3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.
4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.
6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.
7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

I believe that content, not features, will win the market.

Dominance in live streaming, mobile and online, is not based on features. Look at the live streaming business - a lot of the competitors have the same feature set, and if not, it takes couple of months for laggers to play catch up. In this industry, features cannot win the market, as it is too flat to gain market share.

It is content strategy that will win the battle. The market player which will have the best video content, the best talents, and the best fit between live events and the mobile streaming application, will dominate this field. Only if Kyte would manage to strengthen point 7 in Scoble’s argument, they will win the market. But, it is just a matter of smart business development moves from their competitors, to change the market situation.

Image by Brnboy313 via Flickr

Good morning,

- Boxee, an open source OS for the living room, goes to Alpha this Monday. Good luck for this group of brilliant guys

- HBO bought 10% of Funny Or Die - another move of TV brand towards the Internet. Rafat wrote a great post about it, and a video here.

- An insightful and funny presentation about Final Cut Server, the new media management product from Apple, by Richard Townhill, Apple’s Director of Pro Video Product Marketing, can be found here.

- Chris Hambly and his social media gang from the UK are organizing another great Media Camp, focused around industry and academia relations.

Have a great day!

Om Malik anounced a new venture today called NewTeeVee Station, an editorial driven guide to online videos:

...NewTeeVee Station is your guide to online video, pointing you to hot new memes, following the emerging stars of the web, and just generally indexing this new entertainment medium. Whereas in the past we covered online video shows like Ask a Ninja, Obama Girl andWallstrip from a business perspective, now we’re also reviewing content for content’s sake…

….NTV Station features editorial reviews of online videos written by a team led by Liz Shannon Miller, who comes to us from Variety and the Daily Reel. We eliminate the static and bring to you videos that are actually good — but also the stuff that’s so bad it has everyone talking… When you visit the front page of NTV Station, you’ll see in one glance what’s hot at that very moment. Our editors monitor the online video universe and refresh the site with new videos throughout the day. A special widget developed using the VodPod API allows you to scroll through all of our past video picks….

I am a big fan of sites trying to make some sense of all the videos out there. In a past, I wrote a hotly debated post where I asked when would someone create an online HBO equivalent, and gang all the best video shows to one site. This is a form of content discovery in my opinion - a way to bring the best videos to my computer screen. Would Om answer my prayers?

Challenges ahead

Value

There were several initiative in this area, one of them was Jeff Pulver’s Network2.tv. While N2 was aiming at being a definitive guide to all episodic video on the web, it seems that Om’s effort is a mix of being IMDB and an editorial driven site, that does some filtering for the audience. What I am missing here is a clear value proposition, or, in other words, what exactly should I expect - the best videos? The hottest videos? All the “good” videos?

Definition of Quality

One of the trickiest issues in the world of online video is the definition of quality. How can the editor in NTV know what’s good for me? Though philosophical in nature, it is a major challenge, that I’d love to hear Om’s opinion about.

User Interface

Last but not least, user interface is one of the biggest challenges in online video today. Looking at the current interface of most video recommendation sites, one would see the same scroll down page with x amount of videos. This interface works for YouTube, but in my opinion should be improved. NewTeeVee is built as a blog, and as such it is well designed. As a video interface - not so good IMHO:

1. Almost one-third of the screen is dedicated to promotion, ad space, and other money making machines.

2. Viewers need to scroll down in order to see recommended shows.

3. Video player is covering a small amount of the screen - while it is supposed to be the dominant experience

4. Users need to click at least twice to start playing a video

My belief is that online video interfaces should be, well, video interfaces. I’d like to see a site with a dominant video player, where users could navigate and find the best videos for them. This way, the video experience is the dominant one, and not the textual interface.

I hope that Om will be successful in this project - the web certainly needs one!

Image via Wikipedia

- Veoh raises $30M from Intel and Adobe

- ABC.com stats are out in the open

- Scott Kirsner, fellow contributer to the workbook project, discusses web video financing

- Cyril Zimmerman shares some EU video CPM

Have a great day!

In my dreams, I was publishing without an effort. The day to day reality is completely differnt…

Let’s look on the workflow for publishing a video podcast. The creator needs to create podcast, encode it to different formats, wait for the videos to be uploaded to his/hers favorite platform, add metadata for different publishing tools such as iTunes, and then promote it in digg, delicious, twitter, Faceboook etc. I estimate that it takes at least twice the time to publish a piece than produce it (for a short and simple video podcast). In blogging it is not that different, as well as for audio podcasts.

So, here is my Dream Publishing Machine (AKA DPM….):

Content Creation

I’d like to have a plugin to audio and video editors that will enable me to send files directly to DPM. I don’t want to look for files on my computer- just to send the files to publishing directly

Content processing

I’d like to define in one location the different processes each content piece should go through. For example, I’d like to define all the required file formats in one place. This process should support scheduling as well - so I could export a file to the system, define which encoding are required, and define this task to start at midnight. This way I could continue working and let my Macbook Pro sweat at night… The same goes for audio files.

Content Publishing

DPM should upload my content to my favorite platform with a click. I could define one or more target sites, and DPM would do the rest. I don’t want to look at a progress bar anymore. This feature should support scheduling as well. It should also support multiple platforms, and allow me to define which file format to upload to which platform. As a corporate user I’d also like a to have a customizable and an embed-able flash player that supports all major blogging platforms and social networks. I’d also like to generically add metadata to my files, and that DPM would translate it for each platform.

Content Promotion

DPM should automatically add my content to all relevant bookmarking and life-casting applications. This is extremely time consuming today.

The Dream Publishing Machine could automate all the annoying and time consuming work done manually by podcasters and bloggers.

What’s your opinion? Is there anything like that out there? Or is it a pipe dream?

He Had a Dream too

Recommended Reading

Avid’s product manager, started to blog, a move towards transparency from a company that is facing many challenges in the market place. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.

LA Times has a great piece about Michael Eisner’s new web series, Foreign Body (a prequel to Robin Cook’s book) and the company behind it. Here are more details about Eisner’s philosophy

Futurescape has an interesting post about interactivity in online video and its effect on the creative process.

Jeff Pulver thinks I’m wrong.

New In My Feedreader

Jamima Kiss’ blog at the Guardian

Have a great week!

Is TV dying, or is it just a hype?

Last Friday I attended disrupTV, an “un-conference” for media technologies that I helped organizing. The event was organized by Nir Ofir and Rafael Mizrahi, hosted by Yossi Vardi and Jeff Pulver, and was the first “un-conference” on this topic in Israel.

In one of the presentations a question was raised - what should change in TV today? The usual statements about death of TV where told.

I had an unpopular opinion: nothing is wrong with TV, please don’t touch it.

What is Televison?

TV, in its purist meaning won’t change. TV is a winning format. Good stories told in 22, 45 or 60 minutes slots is a great invention. Especially when channels realize the power of story again, and let masterpieces such as “The Wire” go on air.

And you know what? The last thing I want is an interactive experience while watching high quality shows. I don’t want to buy the bottle of wine people are drinking on screen. I just want to be entertained. So please, don’t touch my TV

The TV set

The TV set is a different story. Yes, the TV set will change. Eventually it is just a screen. I am certain the new capabilities will be introduced into the TV SET, as a device. Most of them will fail, as companies will face UI issues again and again. However, smart TV sets and appliances, such as AppleTV, has a disruptive nature that is much more profound than adding interactivity to shows. AppleTV, iTunes, and competing services are breaking the value chain of the TV industry. This is the real issue.

Changes will happen

AppleTV and iTunes enable users to buy content directly from the producers. This is a major shift in power, as channels are no longer the sole distribution method of TV content. I will drill down to this issue in my next post.

Where is the money?

There are 3 main domains that will continue to change the market, and could provide financial gain to the ones who would master them:

1. On demand experience - when programming losing force, and consumers are moving toward personal viewership experience, on demand platforms will role the media world in years to come.

2. Content Discovery - following the previous point, content discovery, the ability to find the right content for the viewer, becomes an increasingly important need. Programing is a very primitive content discovery method - we know your demographics so we will push you the right content. As mentioned before, this method is losing ground. New technologies should solve this issue in a better way.

3. Commuinty - Vardi stated that there is a missing link in the community aspects of media consumption. Programming enabled people to gather in a specific point in time and share an experience. On demand viewership killed this aspect. He believes that there is here a potential for new players.

A word for TV executives

Time will tell how TV will change. But please, please, keep producing high quality drama, funny shows and great content. Changes will come, but one thing never changes - there is always audience for great content…