Hi there,
This is a travel blog for Oulu UAS team heading towards Streaming Media Europe Conference 2009, London, UK. We´re sending three attendees to this event for updating which are leading trends in business and technology related to content delivery over the Internet.
As you probably know, streaming media is currently definitely not a boring industry to work in. Quite the contrary - for better or worse - it is rich in conflicts with lots of chances and challenges. The image of the industry shown in Streaming Media Europe was one of a market where in many fields a few big companies have positioned themselves in strategic places and hog control. A big part of the rest is observing them, hoping for things to get generally less hideous and difficult to do. It is obvious that the technical and creative possibilities are way beyond what we see today.
The dimensional difference between the European and the US-markets are apparent. We believe that with the growth of streaming media, in Europe we will see a market growing that follows its own rules and that serves the culturally so diverse people of Europe better. Small and micro-sized companies will have a much higher impact in that European market.
On that note, it is a pity that we didn't make it to present some of our results from the Neo Arena project and its pilot companies at the conference. On behalf of our cooperation partners we would have been able to add something to the mix that was largely missing, the perspective of small and micro businesses in the streaming market.
The buzz on the technology side clearly was HTTP as delivery method instead of classic streaming protocols. Recently Microsoft released their HTTP-based Smooth Streaming product. Apple declared HTTP Streaming is the only supported way of delivering streaming video to the iPhone. With Adobe announcing an HTTP streaming technology of their own, every big streaming technology player is betting on an HTTP streaming technology. HTTP delivery has the advantage of looking similar to normal HTML traffic, and thus passing firewalls and mobile networks. As opposed to traditional streaming, the player client itself handles the request of the right data chunks for the given time. This takes out a lot of logic from the streaming servers. Because of that HTTP delivery of video-on-demand clips can be handled by normal HTTP servers with little to no logic. If content has been prepared accordingly in beforehand.
Another technological trend is the actual arrival of bitrate adaptation on the broad market. All major players now offer that in their current delivery formats. For Microsoft and Apple it is part of their new HTTP delivery offering. Adobe has integrated that into their RTMP streaming protocol, but their upcoming HTTP delivery won't probably miss out on that one. A caveat is currently that in all those implementations you will need to manually provide the server with all the different bit-rates. The actual news here is that dynamic data-rate adaption actually works now. Real Networks has had the technology for ages, but it never really seemed to work so well in real-world services. Of course also the demand for such a technology, with streaming coming more and more to the mobile space, has promoted the appearance on the market heavily.
Format Convergence
The big hope is of course that those different HTTP delivery specifications would converge to a single omni-compatible standard. Software vendor Microsoft is not going that road, keeping their specs closed and limiting their Smooth Streaming to their own IIS and Windows Media / Silverlight technology. The HTTP delivery release seems to tune in with their current attention-seeking for their Silverlight technology. Apple in contrast openly filed their HTTP Streaming specification as an RFC draft to the IETF. Apple being a hardware vendor tries to shift revenues from the streaming solution market to their sky-rocketing device sales with that move by trying to short-cut the development from a device-user's perspective. I don't guess that Adobe is going to follow Apple's initiative. But it might be that Apple's approach will become a de-facto standard being supported in most other video playback clients. And then we have to see how Adobe and Microsoft are going to react.
In theory the format convergence would be possible as H.264/AAC has been pretty much established as the de-facto industry standard. And that in spite of the yet unclear future of MPEG-LA licensing terms, in addition to the double-licensing of both codec implementers and content distributors. Perhaps there is a chance that we are going to have a de-facto standard platform for web video streaming in an foreseeable time. That would be a major breakthrough for streaming media. But we should be ready for some nasty surprises as well.
So when we take an overview of convergence today between devices, desktops and appliances, we can see that a top-down convergence is still hard to find. Sure most targets now support some form of H.264, but things like delivery methods, ad-standards and DRM-requirements are still very fragmented. Apple offers convergence inside the walled garden of their device and service offering, but of course the bigger the convenience difference between their stuff and the rest of the world is, the more value it creates for them. Apple does not have a big interest in bringing the general convergence development forward, as is visible in their non-presence in initiatives like DECE. Their marketing power enables them to. I am not sure if there is a lot to expect from Microsoft in that respect either. Adobe has done some movement towards opening up with the Open Screens project, but the process is slow and we have to see where they are heading to. There is a lot of strategic manoeuvring happening between the main players, to the disadvantage of small content-producers and users. But it could be worse, a monopolist position of one of the big players would be deadly for the market and very disadvantageous for the end user.
Open Source in Video Streaming
An effective and proven solution to accelerate development and consolidation on the streaming market is to openly develop extensible specifications and publish implementations under widely recognized Open Source licenses. Adobe made an interesting case of that with the introduction of their MPL-licensed Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). The player component in Flex is basically replaced by the OSMF component offering of a modular plugin framework that allows all kinds of third-party extensions to hook into the playback life-cycle. That would be useful to mix-and-match different statistics-, authentication- or ad-integration modules connecting the player to different services. This is of course currently limited to the Flash platform, but perhaps this interesting development catches on to other systems.
Another interesting thing that struck me on the Open Source streaming front is the business model of the streaming platform developer Kaltura. They offer a video delivery software that allows others to build own video portals. The offering of three different editions of their platform is very interesting. There is a completely open community edition, a for-pay supported premium edition with proprietary modules, and a hosted version of that, which takes away most of the duties of running a video platform from the customer. This range of "totally independent" to "totally care-free" is a very interesting Open Source business model. The platform is developed in php and uses Flash as premier target client platform which probably targets the broadest range of the market on both sides of the wire. This can definitely facilitate smaller businesses to enter the streaming market with their own video site while the solution grows as they do. Kaltura advertises that it adds another option to the basic build-or-buy decision, an intriguing idea.
Generally, it's growing - a convincing stance for the market in a time of recession. Putting things into perspective, while in 2009 the volume of spendings for online advertisement overtook traditional TV ads, advertisement in streaming media still has a very small share of that. On the other hand - based on the Internet Advertising Bureau's research - it is the fastest growing market segment in advertisement. To keep up that growth, it is necessary to further advance the standardisation of video advertisement. Those are currently still fairly high-level and best-practice rules like ad clip length and insertion rate. However, demand is high enough to have stimulated the emergence of more advanced tools for video advertisement consumption analysis. Standardization of streaming media advertisement would ultimately facilitate business in the market. It is inevitable that advertisement is going to be one of the major business models in streaming media. Perhaps the hoped-for consolidation will finally stimulate a broad range of rights-owners to start globally offering their content in an ad-financed fashion as well as enable business for small content producers.
Content Delivery Market Turbulences
The growth of the streaming media delivery to big audiences has brought the CDN market into a major focus. It is undertaking several changes currently. With classic Telco companies entering the market, as well as cloud hosting services eating up classic CDN ground. Also P2P media delivery has appeared on the horizon. CDNs react differently to those changes. Some of them, like CDN Limelight, seem to believe so strongly in their business models that they dismiss the new competitors as immature. CDNs are usually big American companies. Their market-focus and business models are tailored to US-scales. The cultural diversity in Europe however presents a quite different environment. Big CDNs seem to generally problems in understanding that. Replying to criticism that their billing models are unsuitable for small businesses, they said that they don't see themselves as directly interacting with small businesses. Those are supposed to be served by proxy of aggregators. That of course raises the real-world cost for content delivery, which is especially critical in Europe as the possible audiences are not as big. Are those CDN business models going to sustain in Europe, are young European CDNs with different approaches taking over the market? Time will tell. There definitely is loads of unused potential.
One interesting thing that we observed was connected to rumours of Google further entering the CDN market. At least they are expanding their streaming offering. The fact was mentioned in pretty much every session. Traditional companies however were very reluctant to give real commentary on how they judge this move to their business. Is it that nobody wants to harvest Google's disgrace? Questions were usually discarded by stating that the normal business rules of the market don't apply to Google.
Telcos pout
Internet Service Providers and Mobile Network Providers had a vocal presence at the conference. According to them we have a bandwidth capacity problem created by streaming media. Which I guess is a valid point in the omnipresence of flat-rates and unlimited data plans. There are technical approaches like IP Multicast to tackle this. But significantly it is the ISPs themselves that hold back internet-wide adoption of the technology. Due to the one-to-many nature of Multicast, it does not fit into ISPs' current billing models. Instead they continue to implement measures to limit all the "wild-growth video streaming". Many mobile network providers are blocking RTSP video streams in their networks. The software and devices industry recently reacted by betting on HTTP delivery methods that are difficult to distinguish from normal HTML web traffic. Just to make mobile video work reliably in all networks.
But isn't it good for the ISPs to see a high demand? The prices could rise and they could further grow their core business. It seems however they are about something else than their core business. Telco companies don't get tired to moan about them being out of the equation in the big revenue streams. They say extending their networks would not pay off for them. Instead they reroute the discussion towards introducing technologies like IMS that offer authenticated services inside their own networks. But how is this supposed to solve the investment in bandwidth problem on the internet? Especially when calling into mind that IMS requires enormous up-front investments from the ISPs into their own networks.
I think the answer is: It is not supposed to solve the problems of the internet. With IMS they rather want to pull the most valuable parts of the online service and streaming media business inside their own networks, where they would have full control over data and revenue streams. They would promise quality of service only for their own services. The worse the performance on the internet, the higher the value of the own IMS services is. This is an approach to try shifting over market revenues.
Having a choice between the ISP's internal and the public internet-based services would be a positive thing of course. But I see two dangers in the implementation of IMS. The fact that the ISPs also control generic internet traffic is somewhat concerning, traffic that generates much less revenue than their own service usage. All access control in one hand I potentially see the freedom of choice for the user rather endangered than complemented by those plans.
By creating such a market place on their own premises it is important that the network providers understand to make it a viable place for everyone. They can't take too big a chunk of the revenues just because they are in control. When the Telcos want to implement IMS they only do so because they expect good return on investment in a foreseeable time. The high investments that are required for building the IMS infrastructure they have to get back in however make me sceptic that this will leave much of a business for third-parties. Like in the Finnish SMS services market, there they took such high rates that they basically killed off the market. We can only hope that the Telcos would not repeat the mistakes they did in other places.
The Perspective of the Conference
There was a lot of restless back and forth on business models for streaming media - mostly seen from the big content-owner's perspective. It seems a lot of corporations are still waiting for the new "One size fits all"-business that defines the whole market just like the old broadcast business model did. The interesting question is if there is such a thing. One could argue that development and change only accelerates over time. The change away from linear TV and the stronger involvement of the recipient has created a reality that is progressively changing all the time. But it seams that accepting this fact is the biggest impediment for the current old bulls in the content business to actually see the new markets as a possibility instead of only as a thread.
Some other aspects were mostly missing from the broad discussions. It was generally admitted from all sides that the currently ruling licensing practice that is still very nationally-focused is a big impediment for the internet market. On the net it is harder to impose restrictions on the target group than to just face a global market. I don't know if it was taken for granted and impossible to change the position of the big content-owners on this. HoNobody really enjoyed speaking about that topic.
The quality of the sessions in the business track was mixed. Most things were more or less interesting but some seemed a bit irrelevant. There was plenty of discussion on how the CDN market is developing and how the big companies are moving. What was missing out was the perspective of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and how they can manage to make business in this ever-changing market. Discussions happened mainly on panels. Depending on the moderator, the audience was often only integrated to a low degree. Regarding ideas and inspiration for fresh business models there was not much to fetch for SMEs. Perhaps however the centralized and corporation-oriented structure of the event is just not suited for exchange between SMEs. Perhaps a more open-spaces inspired conference approach would serve those better. An event where people come up with lightning talks about stuff they are doing and find important. However I think it would do Streaming Media Europe well not to forget a big creative group in the industry, small, medium and micro-businesses. And those need to be served with some interaction opportunities that go beyond the normal networking and exhibition offerings.
Moderator: Duncan Burbidge, CEO, Stream UK Media Services Ltd, UK Panel:
Sean Knapp, Co-founder, CTO, Ooyala, USA
George Fraser, VP of EMEA/Asia, Limelight Networks UK
John Dillon, Chief Marketing Officer, Velocix UK
Amazon's EC2 network offers cheap data delivery ($0.10/GB). Smooth Streaming uses http to deliver live footage. Azure is on the way. Session provides a look at how these considerations affect the current glut of CDN providers. As the content delivery quickly turning into a commodity, how can CDNs expand their ecosystem to prevent churn and attract new business? Also, how can customers decide which solutions are best for their needs?
Ooyala is a video platform provider utilizing Cloud. Sean Knapp underlines the power of cloud and what becomes to it's easiness, costs (its cheap) and robustness. From the Velocix point of view a Cloud seems to be something unclear and he also asks how technically robust the cloud providers can make their service.
Sean Knapp claims that the performance of cloud is perfect, just fine. As a background of this he proudly presents that Ooyala has tens of millions users for their platform. They can monitor the performance of cloud by monitoringthe baheviour of their video client and the results are justa fine, as mentioned before.
According to Velocix representative what becomes to the pricing comparisons between CDNs and Cloud, it's more complex than just comparing different CDN providers. That's because from the pricing point of view we're monitoring different things.
Fraser from Limeligth claims that the scalability and cost-base of cloud is not really clear. He¥s on to that the technical infrastructure ain¥t easy to build up. The 'new kids on the block' have lots of people just developing technology and building the network.
Ooyala can still (despiting the great amount of users domestic and international based) be counted as a start-up. Knapp says that the use of cloud is the right way to expand instead of investing to the HW and own data rooms.
As we see the trend in http video services utilizing H.264 are panelists asked if they see this also as a trend. Limelight answer is that http video delivery doesn't provide monitoring good enough. Ooyla's Knapp says that the trend exists and instead of wise and smart services the video clients (downloadable players) are smart. Still, the era of http streaming is not yet but during coming years.
According to the Knepp there is potential in p2p what becomes to the distribution of live video. Also Limelight finds potential and they believe in p2p but still there¥s a problem or better: a gap between offering CDN services as they are and as p2p cdn as the technology is so different and the big ones such as Akamai and Limelight couldn't easily mix.
Limelights Fraser analyzed IP Multicast which, according to him, is more for live video than On-demand for which the CDNs are good for. Limelight got a 'tight' question focusing on their nowadays model whereas customers need to make a long contract and asked if they ever gonna understand to change the model a little. Frasers answer to this was that they¥re probably not making andy changes in the near future which (IMO) clarifies their attitude. In common, as the Fraser said, the SMEs to distribute their content should make contracts with aggregators - not CDNs as the CDNs can't offer anything to them.
Moderator:
Christophe Lenaerts, Founder & CEO, Telemak Panel:
Cedric Gegout, CTO, Streamezzo
Guillaume Gerard, Senior Director, Helix EMEA, RealNetworks
Mr. Otto Schmidbauer, Director Video Solutions EMEA, Dialogic Corporation
It was agreed by the panel that the emergence of phones with big screens and higher usability has perhaps only opened the possibility to make Mobile TV finally profitable. The unlimited-data-plan-owning smart phone crowd is seen as a rather purchase-happy people that is easier to monetize than any mobile target audience so far.
The consumption time and length of consumed video has increased in parallel with the increase of the usability on smart phones. And the currently popular native rich media clients pre-installed or as apps on the phone are seen as a higher stimulant for usage than web-based services, as the former offers unified user experience and re-accessibility.
Technically, Rate adaptation is especially important and beneficial for mobile TV. And the hype towards that technology will surely benefit mobile video the most. The two standard delivery methods to mobile as of today are RTSP and HTTP. HTTP delivery is obviously the buzz at the moment, with major players endorsing the technology, like Apple supporting only HTTP delivery on the ever popular iPhone. Also firewalls and modems don't block the traffic as it often happens with RTSP.
HTTP has its own disadvantages of course, it does e.g. not perform as well for high-scale live distribution. The best-practice strategy seems to be HTTP segmenting, transforming RTSP streams to HTTP "streams" as late and close to the HTTP-only user as possible.
The problem of unsatisfied network operators has been a centric topic here as well. The rise of HTTP has taken the operators out of the equation, the video traffic is not distinguishable. Hence the strong push to the SIP-based IMS from the Telcos' side. Seeming mainly an instrument for operators to regain control over the data traffic, I asked about the benefits for users, service- and content-providers. The reply was that unification of billing and the possibility of data-service roaming would offer value to those parties. We'll see. I am concerned for example how that would effect non-commercial content like user generated content under creative commons license. Could IMS bring back the notion of restriction from of the old CompuServe-days? Anyways, IMS seems not to be undisputed and its emergence is essentially seen only as a long-term solution even by its proponents.
Looking at the mid-term, DVB-H seems to be a bit abandoned today. Alternatively there are other IP-based initiatives like MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast / Multicast Services) pushed by e.g. Sony Ericsson that try to implement multicast and broadcast across mobile networks to reduce bandwidth and cost to solve the bandwidth-problem in the short run. But we have not seen wide adoption of the technology in the last years. The most important thing to get to a solution is probably that the Telcos get their business sorted out.
One Studio, Many Screens: Disney's Anytime, Anywhere Strategy Keynote speaker: Myles MacBean, Vice President and General Manager, Disney Online EMEA
The triangle of the convergence of online video appeared again: This time coined to communication, content and interactivity. But the message is the same, online now unifies previously unrelated medias.
MacBean says that the kids are the first ones to really embrace new kinds of virtual-world experiences, as they have been growing up with the web.
He stresses that coopetition (sometimes competition, sometimes cooperation) is the future model for how to see the value chain, it changes in every case.
Disney uses several revenue models: Ad-supported (also as kind of a ramp-up), subscription-based and micro payment. They make this dependent on how a model works with the certain media. Disney's customers' requirement: "my content, my time, my place"
In Disney's vision, content is not the king. Consumer is the King (and in this particular case perhaps they are Princes & Princesses :)
Disneys vision: "Disney is special, fun entertainment with heart". In this sentence:
- "special" means storytelling, innovation and quality
- "entertainment" means fun, imagination, family, quality, magical experience
- "heart" means community, optimism, decency
MacBean also pointed out that the main entertainment device in modern homes is not just a television, but big screen at living room.
The value chain in Disney's point of view consist of four different layers, that are:
- Home devices (pc's, consoles, set-top-boxes, AppleTv...)
- Content Provider (publisher or user)
- Content Aggregator (independent or platform)
- Platform Services (open or walled)
Every company must declare what is their position (layer) on a value chain. This is the most important question to answer, if intention is to make successful business. Secondly, when you are positioned yourself you must identify your customers and their needs.
Advertisements are seen as "on ramp" for a customer
There are couple of reasons that encourages people to buy content:
- timeliness (eg. mobile use)
- exclusivity (eg. football game)
Creating Original Online Video Content: Who are the Commissioners and Where's the Funding? Keynote speaker: Nicholas Wheeler, Managing Director, ITN On, UK
(Multimedia Division)
The question asked is if we will ever get out of the state of seeing online as just a distribution platform instead of a creative new media that is difficult to create content for. Wheeler states that a lot of the content offered online today is what he calls long-tail, stuff that is recycled from e.g. cinema or broadcast, but not content originally created for online. Disintermediation changes the market structure, brands and content makers are more and more commisioning content on their own. One of the big chances to do something original that generates revenue are actually services around content.
We have one certainty - we can never be sure where the industry will end up.
We personally agree that sentence, but it still shows that this keynote didn't give us any clear answer for this big question: "Where's the money and how to get it in this business?"
The CDN Market Grows Up: Here Come the Telcos:
10:30-11:30
Moderator:
Dom Robinson, CEO, Global-Mix, UK
Panellists:
Andres Jordan, VP, Innovation, International Carrier Sales and Solutions, Deutsche Telekom North America, USA
Anna Mossberg, Vice President & Head of Product & Business Management, TeliaSonera International Carrier, Sweden
Joe Trainor, Senior Director of Content Services, European Markets Group, Level3 Communications, UK
Grégoire Villan, CDN Solutions and Market Manager - Europe, Tata Communications, France
In the past year we´ve seen additional telcos like Deutsche Telekom, TeliaSonera, Tata and many others enter the CDN market.
Big Picture: Googles recent offers for brightcove increased interest and activity in the CDN space of course. Still Google is always mentioned to be 'special' and it is always another case.
In the beginning there was discussion about if we should add 'video platforms' to the telcos CDN focus today and is the move in to the CDN space a defensive one or are these a part of a wider move into the sector? In general, it´s quite difficult to create platform that fits all. Telcos have some of the building blocks (i.e. CDNs now) but according to at least Anna Mossberg, they may not (won't) be the whole ecosystem. The move in to the CDN space is probably not the defensive move or a move 'because we can do' but more like service to the customers. Tata andl Level3 are active in the CDN space over the past 3-4 yrs. We heard that BT have announced their intentions to try to enter in near future.
Next we have some discussion which focuses on Telcos abilities to provide effective CDN service. One threath could be that Telcos are not big enough to guarantee effectiveness in this scale. Actually nobody takes the ball directly as it is. It is about what you choose... investments, acquisitions or not to provide own CDN spaces. Panel lays focus on next: Content Awareness!!!
Customers are extremely qualified about what they are buying. According to the panellists, providers like Google does not have telcos experience to manage 'network' 24/7. Telcos have been taken care of managed networks years and years.
What becomes to the regulatory issues Telcos may not face anti-competitive issues hence regulation is something Telcos have in their every-day market.
Good content is available in many places/services - there is no 'available only here service'. Naturally which is regarded as good depends on who and where you are. Panelists discussed also about different deliverable technologies i.e. multicast. Availability - to get the content to the customer - seemed to be the most important thing. Also interactivity is important.
Everybody says all the time: We're on the learning curve...
CDN is the one building block of the whole service but not the only one from Telcos perspective.
Using Quality of Experience (QoE) instead of Quality of Service (QoS). Services/networks should work 24/7 as expected.
Online Video Publishing Platforms
11:45 - 12:30 Moderator: Jose Castillo, President, thinkjose, USA
Panellists:
Stephen Clee, Managing Director, Datapresenter, UK
Daniel Daboczy, CEO, Dabber.tv, Sweden
Raghav Gupta, VP, Business Development EMEA, Brightcove, USA
Sean Knapp, Co-Founder & CTO, Ooyala, USA
Dr. Michal Tsur, President & Co-Founder, Kaltura, Israel
Jeroen Wijering, CTO, Bits on the Run, The Netherlands
Panel members are all involved with the online video distribution platform business. The introduction reveals that one of the panelists (Michal Trus from Kaltura, Israel) has open source business model. Video publishing market is very fragmented today as we all know. Question about paying models: the video publishing platforms has to support every possible paying method available. Ooyala's Knapp pointed out that they believe in mobile payment.
Building up a video publishing platform is definitely something more than just building a video player: it also requires archive, platform/CMS, server and so on. There are many new solutions coming up during next years. Rate adaptation has been desired feature for many years which hasn't succeeded until yet, maybe. Content user's opinions are driving the technology development to the right direction.
Alex's question for the panel: How much demand do you see from your customers to live streaming as opposed to VoD?
Live streaming is supported for almost every platform, and the demand of it is growing all the time. One panelist even specialises on live streaming. The monetization models are regarded as rather primitive still. But live streaming is regarded as an absolute requirement from customers. In general providers are getting more and more questions about live streaming. Everybodys interested in it.
To a question of existing video consumption profiles panelists declared that there is a profile for high video consmuption and another one for poor consumption. Companies are now trying to 'activate' the profile in between these.
Why Are We Doing This? Developing an ROI Model for Streaming Corporate Communications
13:45-14:30
Moderator:
Jake Ward, Broadcast Services Director, BroadView, UK
Panellists:
Louise Farrow, Head of Marketing Promotions, ACCA, UK
Niall O´Malley, Group Account Director, immediate future, UK
This session provided a look at how companies should be plannign to measure the success of their streaming media activities as well as how they can utilize aspects of social media to help extend the reach of their communications.
In general, if content consumption should be interactive the live streaming it´s the only alternative.
One example was BT Web Seminar Programme for the SMEs. BT had an approach of audience driven discussion programme - not a sales pitch - with independent guest and opinions. In this case
ROI was based on four key factors:
*Perception - average opinion change of +1.2 on a scale of 1 to 10
*Viewership - 35000 minutes of content viewed up to Augut this year
*Customer - customer interactivity extremely high 63%
*Leads - direct sales leads fed into existing BT sales process
Another example which deserves a short introduction was immediate future's SONY Rolly campaign based on the influence and efficiency of social media.
The company created promotial videos which were delivered via social media as a good example of viral marketing: "Influence the influencers" and videos were reproduced by the communities. They also were motivators for many user generated ones as our example above. The spirit of this movement is that the creators are the most efficient targets to prioritise in an influencer relations programme as they start conversations. Here are the steps of community involvement:
Moderator:
Sarah Platt, Co-Founder/Sales & Marketing Director, Kinura Web Video, UK
Panellists:
Andy Bell, Chief Creative Officer, Mint Digital, UK
Caroline Bottomley, Director, Radar Music Videos, UK
Alex Morrison, Managing Director, Cogapp; Director, Noostar, UK
Dr. Martin Zimper, Head of CAST, Zurich University of Arts, Switzerland
Thursdays last session covers e.g. question: What can we learn from the way that creative businessess, artists and educators use the online video? Session looked at the importance of digital archives for creative and educational projects, creative approaches to content production as well as collaborative projects and out of the ordinary strategies that use streaming video. Streaming video is used to create new narratives and deliver cross-platform events in the virtual and real world.
*Video on your pocket is obviously the trend for next few years. There are naturally limitations such as battery life but still.(Alex Morrison, Cogapp and Noostar)
*We're on treshold: from the written word in a paper as the most important - to moving images as most important. This has, obviously, an influence to the current business models (Martin Zimper)
UGC is very famous but the trend is that there is more desirable need for professional content. That can be proven simply by analyzing YouTube statistics for example. The statistic data shows that the most viewed clips are created by professionals with, naturally some exceptions such as Bunny Animation with it's 1.7M views or Pork and Beans with its 19M views.
Moderator:
Martin Sutherland, Director, European Sales, Vantrix Panel:
Pierre-Yves Le Berre, VP Business Development
AneviaMr James A Neufeld, Product Specialist, never.no
Jim Taylor, Chief Technologist, Sonic Solutions International Digital Media Alliance (IDMA)
The panel discussion touched on topics that relate to multi-channel distribution, or "Three Screen Convergence" how it was called.
There was talk about three sides that are involved in the distribution: Content provider, technology provider and bandwidth provider. Another (perhaps golden) triangle there.
DRM seems to be a big issue for video service implementations nowadays, that is of course especially true for the three-screen case, as missing standardisation makes multi-channel distribution especially expensive. DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) is an initiative that tries to achieve an ecosystem based on a common DRM standard, compared to the ecosystem around formats like DVD. Read about it this Digital Beat blog entry.
Using different but synchronized representations of the same content for the different target devices is seen as good practice. Concentrating on the strengths of the different devices this can make the devices complementary and stimulate even viewing the content on several devices simultaneously. Secondary devices like mobile are preferred for interaction and community-building around the content shown on the big screen.
The requirement of a convergent software platform that makes it easy to synchronize all the screens was brought up. It was agreed that the technology is actually there as of today, but problems are missing business models, low adaption and especially lack of standardisation (which would reduce cost vastly). So currently the convergence is more on the network level and in the possibility to synchronize the content between the screens on an application level. The next step has to be format standardisation, but it was agreed that as of now a format war coming up is unavoidable, that of course will hinder market growth in the a couple of years to come.
One general problem was brought up by Mr. Le Berre: Telcos are generally having a problem with any of the video or high-bandwidth phenomena in the sense that they see themselves as the losers in the equation, having to build up their bandwidth without making money with that. Interesting in conjunction with the unwillingness to embrace Multicasting. As a Telco employee Mr. Le Berre wants to see IMS as the next step towards convergence giving the ISPs control over the different content types, so that video, gaming or voice-over-ip traffic can be charged at different(higher) rates than the rest of the data traffic.
Moderator:
Tony Ballardie, R&D Director, Global-MIX Panel:
Michael Cooper, Head of Global Banking & Financial Markets Product Technology, BT Global Services Andreas Heidoetting, Global Head of Webcast Technology, Markets Division, Thomson Reuters Jonathan Rackowe, Managing Director / CEO, NetVue Greg Shepherd, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco
The panel discussion gave an interesting overview of how Multicast is used in production nowadays. Still the session was not heavily frequented, perhaps an indicator for the awareness around this topic?
Multicast specially in video delivery has the ability to significantly reduce bandwidth requirements for large-scale live-broadcasts and thus offers a solution to possible bandwidth problems imposed by high-bandwidth video streaming. The UDP-based Multicast offers superior delivery performance, but has some disadvantages in network-level reliability and control about the distribution to every single endpoint.
The already aged multicast standard has so far been largely overlooked, even though modern multicast routing protocols like PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast), it is possible to route multicast traffic between networks and hence over the internet. The great lack of multicast on the global internet is also caused by the conflict of business interests especially with ISPs. The classic unicast-based billing models might not hold up when a customer tunnels only one multicast through the ISPs network instead of hundreds of unicasts.
The internal networks of large corporations still seem to be the main places where multicast is deployed. E.g. it was said in the CDN session earlier today, most CDNs do use multicast internally. Another interesting example brought up is the widespread use of multicast in CCTV to distribute the surveillance camera data to the viewing points.
In my opinion it would be up to the ISPs to make a proper business model around multicasting that works for everyone. In the end it's them who are moaning about their bandwidth problems. Of course there are other ways of solving the problems Peer-to-Peer delivery of video would reduce bandwidth usage due to node proximity, a thing that is anticipated my e.g. Adobe. But we can be sure that the ISPs won't like that one either, as it takes them out of the business equation even more.
Thursday morning begins with fulfilling and traditional english breakfast. It included eggs, beans and sausages. The queue for breakfast at 8 am was about 10 metres long. This wasn't the first line that we've been on this short trip to England.
Twitter seems to be regarded as the official communication channel and can be accessed via the hash tag #sme09. Particularly Twitter seems to be a very common communication channel in and from seminars and conferences.
The Online Video Experience Keynote Speaker: Dr. William Cooper, Founder and Chief Executive, InformITV
The first keynote, "The Online Video Experience" was presented by William Cooper from InformITV and focused on online video development generally.
Obviously, as broadband connections get ever wider adoption, online video has been able to form a serious extension or even alternative to traditional broadcast tv in spite of still mostly lower general quality and reliability. But the added technical possibilities around networking and interactivity have been able to make online video what Mr. Cooper calls a disruptive media, that though inferior in the beginning is finally able to take over a lot of traditional space.
Cooper predics that the development in the next 5 years will go towards online video fully spreading from the computer screen to the living room's TV-sets as well as the integration of traditional tv and online video in our entertainment units.
Cooper sees the protective behaviour of traditional broadcasters and the very nationally oriented rights model as the biggest slowing factors for online video growth. I agree entirely that we are at a point where many technical problems have been solved, now we have to tear down some limitations regarding the availability of content.
One thought especially regarding content production in Finland: Think about how many households you can access when producing for traditional 500 million homes
This presentation focused on online video development generally. Keynote speaker looked forward to the next developements in the delivery of digital media over the internet.
YouTube.com has 1 billion views a day, 40 million views an hour and 20 hours of content uploaded every minute, mainly professionally produced content. It has become
a really substitute for television. Global broadband video distribution is the main target for development at the moment. The question is whether internet distibuted video content should be used via desktop computers or television devices. New devices exist such as IPTV set top boxes and Apple TV device. Widgets will enrich the content of future television, will this finally lead into interactive television which supposed to come already in Digital Television tehnology (such as DVB-T/C/H). Quality of service (QoS) is required more and more; this requirement has created technologies such as adaptive streaming, which seems to be the hottest topic at the moment. This might be one of the emerging technologies for integrating On-line services & content to the living room TVs.
In a time of Digital era there are many opposite trends compared to the Analogue era. Many of us claims to be in the time of digital era but follows the analogue era trends. They´re just replaced some physical devices - not thoughts and methods...
Analogue era Digital era
===========================================
closed networks open networks
broadcast multicast, unicast
transmission routing
fixed frequences shared cloud
film, tape streams, files
signals packets
scheduled on-demand
push pull
channels programmes, clips
schedule search
sequence selection
mass media unique users
interruptive advertising addressable advertising
Hello teachers: Which terminology list you use in your daily job...?
Video Advertising: Setting Standards for Success Keynote speaker: Guy Phillipson, CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Jack Wallington, also from IAB
Guy Phillipson from the Internet Advertising Bureau continued the lookout on the state of the video industry today with focussing on the online video advertising market in his keynote "Video Advertising: Settings Standards for Success". Even thought the online video advertising only holds a tiny piece of the video advertising market, it is the most heavily growing segment. Phillipson cited numbers like 195% growth for preroll video ad spending volume year-to-year in 2009.
H1/2009 online is the only medium showing growth with +4% in UK. Majority of broadband services are now above 2M (compared to Finland where 1M will be 'proofed service level' in 2010...)
Online spend has overtaken TV in UK. There are currently 23,5 % On-line share and 21,9 % on TV share. UK is the first ever land where that has happened.
Mr. Phillipson had prepared for a video demo, which didn't work at all. How surprising here;)
For Internet advertisement there exists already some Standard 'Formats' and more (technical) to come!
- Pre/mid/post-roll
- Interactive
- Interactive branded skins (depending on content used)
- In-stream overlay
- Branded content
Bad practice:
- lack of frequency capping
- not considering lenght
- not adapting for online (optimized for)
- allowing online to be pushed aside
Case Benjamin Button: VoD campaign contributed to significant rise for a Benjamin Button release which caused Warner Bros to choose VoD campaign for all coming movie launches.
(To be) online is the king of the consumer respond.
Summary:
- total online ad spend has overtaken TV
- pre-roll ads up 195% YOY
- IAB setting standards for video
Presenter: Jose Castillo, President, thinkjose, USA
This hands-on workshop on wednesday afternoon covered the basics of planning, building, and launching a video blog and answered to questions such as: how to make a video blog that can be used with different devices, such as laptop and mobile phone? Which is the right platform for multichannel video blogging?
A definition of vlog or video blog is easy unless we don't mess it up with 'show-ups'. A video blog shall include at least regular videos, syndication (i.e. RSS -feed), content metadata such as where the clip was recorded an when, as well as a platform where content is stored. A quick & dirty solution is i.e. YouTube.com unless it´s nature is, of course, also a platform for just 'show-ups' with no particular value added meta information. What becoms to the Google, the owner of YouTube, they love meta information thus it makes search processes run smooth and well.
During our workshop we attendees created a vlog posting which is available at thinkjose.com and maybe something will also be found from streamingmedia.com/europe. As every good production, this too (among the others) had a 'B-crew' producing the making-of document. We recorded the preparations situation with mobile phones camera and also published it on yotube.com. Our idea to do so was just to show that a vlog posting doesn't necessary require nothing else but a mobile phone with camera. Luckily we managed to make youtube.com upload by utilizing mobile web browser hence the 'camera man' had forgotten the USB cable to hotel room.
A very important question to all vloggers: Why are we doing this? The answer shan't be: 'Because we can' and we fully agree with this. What becomes to boost some biz-making to blogging one should identify a niche and have the end on mind while vlogging. In common, boosting vlogging into a business requires not only the (regular) postings but at least the mini biz-plan to be succeeded.
The power of a video blog is not in the production value. It's the speed of delivery, relevance of the story & value added to the conversation, key goal is to get your followers to start discussion. Keep it simple - video blog is not a studio production!
We really liked the way how Jose introduced the topic for the audience. The presentation was clear and simple so that there was no possibility for misunderstanding. It was also inspiring and got us thinking video blogging as a really useful tool for marketing or bringing any opinions into public.
Tip for video producers: check out livestream.com, it's a great publishing point for all kind of video stuff.
How do we do it? Plan - Build - Launch
Plan:
=====
why we are doing this?
- increase visibility, revenue, marketing etc.
- identify a niche
- how do you want them to respond?
- who is involved?
- what is the content length etc.
- how many episodes?
- where? who is our audience? how will they find us?
- how do we measure the win?
- agree to mini-bizplan
- set team-task-roles-responsibilities
- what equipment do we need?
Workflow
========
- write a script (or at least pretend on a napkin)
....be dramatically different and remember the audience: Why should they care?
edit
====
-slash & burn
-tell a concise story
-make others look good
-thruth is stranger than fiction
-bumpers (watched tv lately) = memoriable audio component
Market
======
-submit to itunes, podcast alley, yahoo etc.
-digital marketing tools (social media)
-show your best stuff! not everything
-chicklets, badges, user submitted content etc.
-ask content from your audience - be different
Developing a Rich Video Player for the Adobe Flash Platform, Workshop
Wednesday, Oct 14th, 14:00-17:00
Implementing Flash Video DVR Functionality for Live Streaming, Presentation
Friday, Oct 16th, 11:45-12:30
Speaker:
Steve Allison, Technical Evangelist (EMEA), Flash Media, Adobe Systems.
Steve Allison hosted both the Flash Video Player workshop and the presentation on the Flash Video DVR Functionality. Both talks had a lot of overlap and shall here be covered together. Mr. Allison being an Adobe evangelist delivered what you would expect, Adobe advertisement, rather well-done though. The slides were shiny and the sessions were some of the most technical things of the conference. So let's have a look at what Adobe wants to sell us.
With Flash Player 10 and Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 Adobe offers RTMP-based adaptive rate-switching based on the quality of user experience. [link to the microsoft one]
The other new feature in FMS 3.5 is the DVR functionality. While transmitting a live-stream, it creates a file-cache on the server of what has been broadcasted so far, which makes it possible to rewind to an earlier point in the live stream. That time-shifting functionality does offer possibilities around ads and offering hybrid live-on-demand broadcasts. Good to see more advanced functionality arriving in streaming server products, we seem to kind of slowly getting over the point of trying to get just the basics right.
After looking at what is there currently, here an outlook on what Adobe has announced: In Flash Player 10.1 Adobe targets to converge all versions of the Flash Runtime: Flash Player, AIR and Flash Lite. We have to see how well the adoption on devices will work out, but finally having Action Script 3 on smart phones (I'm not speaking about Apple's walled gardens here) would definitely be a good step.
Of course Adobe had to react to the much-hyped advanced HTTP progressive download product introduced by Microsoft [link to article]. Adobe's take on the functionality is announced for Q2 2010, as a software independent of FMS (they said on any HTTP server, we'll see).
Flash Access 2.0 , announced for 2010 is introducing strong DRM to Flash that allows to restrict the user in what he can do with media material he might have acquired via Flash.
An actually very interesting part of Adobe's offering is the release of OSMF (Open Source Media Framework) that happened some months ago. It is a framework that replaces the video playback component on Flash with Open Source licensed code that allows to plug into all kinds of integration points for the video playback. E.g. advertisement, analytics, authorization, integration into social networks.
I asked about the plans on availability of Flash Media Encoder on different platforms than Windows and Adobe development tools on Linux, but the answer was, unsurprisingly, marketing talk about ongoing considerations on profitable OS platforms.
10:00-13:00 Presenter: Tony Klenja, Director, Educational Technology & New Media, Daemen College, USA
With broadcasting a live stream to Microsoft clients Mr. Klenja presented what Microsoft got quite a hype about lately. Live video delivery to Silverlight with dynamic rate adaption via HTTP, dubbed Smooth Streaming.
Microsoft pitches HTTP as their new primary delivery method, they delivered a new implementation they called HTTP streaming that is an improved form of HTTP progressive downloading. It packs the video data into smaller segments that look like files to HTTP and can thus be downloaded via standard HTTP delivery. The advantage over classic HTTP progressive downloading is the fact that those segments can be dynamically created, thus also from a live broadcast. This is very similar to what Apple specified as the delivery method to their iPhone before.
The HTTP delivery method has several advantages, it has no problems with firewalls and NATs, needs no expensive media servers (Smooth Streaming works with IIS only though) and it is based on an W3C standard, which could lead to a consolidation on HTTP as a de-facto standard video delivery method. With Adobe following the hype and announcing HTTP delivery for the Flash Platform in 2010, this might not be just complete utopia.
Dynamic rate adaption can switch between different bit rate videos based on the quality of user experience. That allows the video quality to automatically degrade when the network bandwidth is too low or the video is too hard to decode on the device. A technology that has been there long time, but never really seemed to work. Good to see that finally arriving to common use, as it solves a lot of usability issues that online video has today.
Sure enough Silverlight's cross-platform story is not unflawed. Novell's Linux implementation "Moonlight" supposedly supports Smooth Streaming in the Moonlight 2.0 Beta but otherwise Moonlight is based on Silverlight 2.0 and it might be quite difficult to develop Smooth Streaming applications compatible with Windows/Mac and Linux at the same time.
However Microsoft seems to have succeeded in combining the two technology aspects (HTTP delivery and rate adaption) in one working product. And the competition that Microsoft has brought to the RIA market has definitely triggered some innovation. Not least making Adobe to slowly go more open to defend their position.
Encoding H.264 Video for Streaming and Progressive Download, Workshop Wednesday, Oct 14th, 10:00-13:00
Choosing a Video Encoding Tool, Presentation
Track A: Technology
Thursday, Oct 15th, 14:45-15:30
Speaker:
Jan Ozer, Principal, Coceo Publishing, USA
Jan Ozer is a writer and codec buff with some love for H.264. He has developed a method for comparing encoding quality of different codecs, encoding settings and encoding tools. Based on that he held a workshop on H.264 encoding that discussed different codec implementations and encoding parameters. In his presentation he did a comparison of the main commercial encoding tools for VP6, Windows Media and H.264.
As a short summary: With some test results Ozer showed that H.264 (with moderate encoding settings) is not harder to decode than VP6. Several encoding parameters like Entropy Coding were discussed separately. Generally all parameters have a varying positive impact on Quality, and have a drawback on either encoding performance, decoding performance or both. For comparison make an encoding where you turn down all advanced settings and one with all up. Then check what difference it makes in encoding, decoding and quality. It doesn't make sense to go into details here, this was the most technical session of the whole conference. If you are interested in the topic have a look at the workshop's slides.
The shorter encoding tools presentation gave more of a high-level overview of the market. Encoders were categorised into several tiers, free tools that come with a video program (e.g. Apple Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder), standalone tools (e.g. Sorenson Squeeze) and enterprise encoders that are automtable (Carbon Coder, Episode Engine).
A good point was made by Ozer about using several parallel instances of an encoder tool to reduce encoding time with a set of clips on multi-core systems. This is especially evident in VP6 encoding. Again, if you are interested, have a look at the slides of the presentation.
I was surprised about the absence of open source software like ffmpeg and x264 in the comparison. Following my question, Mr. Ozer said that he has received a lot of requests about that and promised to do a comparison with those in the next months. He added that he is very curious about the results to come from that, as some open source tools and codec implementations would have a very good reputation. The upcoming comparison will most likely be published on his website streaminglearningcenter.com, http://streamingmedia.com or in Streaming Media Magazine.
I'm really looking forward to be there and see what's going on at the moment in the field of streaming media. Is the problem of making money in streaming business finally solved for the content creators also? How big is the market potential for a micro or small sized companies to emerge into internet business with great video content, existing own video archives or live streaming to different terminals (including pc's, mobile phones, iptv applicances etc.)
Internet prophets and wise men say that content is the driving force for successful business in internet. I strongly believe that too, but is it only a wish, or are there still hidden costs in the infrastructure that makes profitable business impossible? These questions are the hottest topics for me at the moment.
Center for Internet Excellence (CIE) is an open innovation culture hub, creating new business from multi-disciplinary internet research and it aims to capture and create internet-driven growth opportunities. In practice, it will combine cutting-edge research innovations with agile new business creation.
CIE has set up a team leaded by Oulu University of Applied Sciences (Oulu UAS) to define Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) under the topic 'Culture and Social Media' (CSM).
Key research areas in CSM SRA include e.g. content production & delivery. Content is usually forgotten topic when discussion about development of Internet is taking place. We're heard stories and rumors how the technology itself generated this phenomenon we´re consuming daily. As well as leading manufacturer of mobile phones, Nokia Corporation, sees Internet as driving force for the mobility industry, we see clearly content as a driving force behind Internet development and it´s existence.
Social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace have created a new form of socialization and interaction. Users of these services are able to add a wide variety of items (images, videos, widgets and so on) to their personal pages, to indicate common interests, and to connect with others.
Internet usage is smooth and dynamic. The amount of mobile users is increasing, the technologies interoperable, and the information readily transferable among the various complementary systems which comprise the Internet.
Anyways, the key driver for Internet development has been, and still is content consumption. According to the ipoque’s Internet Study 2007 video consumption covered approximately 80 % of total usage.
Internet and its interactive technologies give people new place for cultural activities just like earlier days the market places and other public areas gave people opportunity to share information, opinions, art and other cultural activities. Nowadays cultural activities are reachable to basically everyone much easier than before. However, culture and social media in the internet doesn’t mean that traditional culture only changes its form into digital mode. Instead of that, the active use of digital environment gives creative people possibility to create culture in a new way. This impact of the culture enrichment should be taken into consideration when creating vision of future internet development.
Members of Team CSM are attending to Streamingmedia Europe 2009 Conferance which will take place in London, UK 14-16 October. Conferance covers the business of online video and the technology of streaming, video-on-demand, webcasting, IPTV as well as mobile. Three days of intensive conference sessions, workshops, seminars, and exhibits that showcase the best of what’s happening NOW in the online video and content industries.
We kindly invite You to follow and comment our travel blog entries.
