Thursday - Track B: Business & Content

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:

Favourability  Behaviour:
--------------------------
awareness      visibility
attention         sharing
action             engagement

Creativity Bytes
16:00-17:00

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.