a renaissance? business today
prosperity. But what is required, suggests the newly formed Video Convergence Forum, is a whole new video delivery ecosystem. The VCO believes that there is a fundamental necessity in building a framework for all video delivery stakeholders to drive the creation of specifications and certification to ensure interoperability and scalability of video delivery. It proposes that its members achieve this aim by developing open APIs and MIBs where required, and coordinating between existing standards bodies and solutions available in the market. According to CEO Daniel Bar-Lev, there is a huge opportunity within this new ecosystem to drive scalability of Internet and mobile video delivery and to increase affordability and enable mass market adoption. However, to do this, he told IBE at the NetEvents conference in February 2010, a total rethink of the video ecosystem is required. The new ecosystem, he envisaged, would encompass content owners, mobile value added service providers, transcoding vendors, software application vendors, MSOs, video delivery vendors, content hosters, system integrators, video infrastructure providers, user device manufacturers and - really significantly - ad insertion providers. Not only is the VCO’s stated objective to enable the streamlining of media delivery over any type of network to any type of device, monetisation is specifically included in its definition. This is a welcome addition that
prevents the setting up of just another standards body talking shop. Most of the VCO’s activity to date has been among the transcoding community who stand to gain significantly from the distribution of video over many platforms. One such firm in Ripcode whose CEO and president, Brendon Mills, revealed at NetEvents the full extent of what the ecosystem could be dealing with and the pressing need for standards. “For movies and TV the output is relatively static. There are about 1000 movies released and about 60,000 hours of TV broadcast every year. Compare this with Facebook that offers 650,000 videos per day. My Space offers 450,000 videos per day and Yahoo 500,000 videos per day. Then there is You Tube with 1.1 million videos per day. That’s 200-250 hours of programming per minute.” Programming which users are increasingly demanding to experience on a plethora of platforms. Mills added that, not only do you have to support multiple devices, you now have to support multiple bit rates on each: “It’s about adaptive video: there are three to 10 different bit rates supported by an iPhone. There is no control.” This was the key factor. There needed to be a common way for attributing video to each and every platform and this video stream had to include advertising or some way in which monetisation was addressed. Otherwise where’s the business sense in setting up such a framework?
A new
landscape is on the horizon. One in which enriched media services will operate and which could bring about... business transform- ation, and deliver prosperity. But what is required, suggests the newly formed Video Convergence Forum, is a whole new video delivery ecosystem.
Mills was clear in what was needed: a real time workflow that was platform aware. He said: “It’s all about enablement. We need to construct a network to manage video transactions and to be able to add value on top [of the streams].” Mils used Hulu as an example of where the lack of a standard API was diminishing revenue opportunities, even though it enables people to access video form multiplatform. Hulu was constructed, sensibly, to support ad insertion to the video stream. This insertion comprises four national advertising streams and one local, a vital element for US broadcasting. At present, Mills suggested there was no standard API to give a workflow to manage this concept and as a consequence Hulu could only support national ads. “The management of video transactions is a nuts and bolts thing that has to happen,” Mills warned.
In general, the talk in the TV world should not be that of recession, nor even recovery, but that of
renaissance. Yet despite the optimism that currently exists and which will almost certainly persist, there will be some not inconsiderable challenges to address. Lack of interoperability is denying the industry from generating much needed revenues. In the case of the Hulu example this deficiency was removing a fifth of the available revenue generating streams. It’s issues such as this that the industry needs to address before anyone in either the old or new ecosystem can turn promise into profits.
www.ibeweb.com l march/april 2010 l ibe l 7
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