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.

Thursday's Keynotes

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;)

Good places for online video advertising help, support and discussions:
-> iabuk.net/video
-> iabvideo.com

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