conent creation
Flexibility creates its own issues for content
A modern television show may only be transmitted terrestrially once but with the large number of media channels now available to consumers, content owners have to create a variety of file types and sizes for on demand video content. Mark Horton, Product Marketing Manager for AmberFin, explains how to do this
Mobile is one of the fastest growing channels of consumer demand for video content. Predicting the future is a risky business, but research by In-Stat suggests near term strong revenue growth from mobile subscription, suggesting that this channel may be a significant part of the future media landscape.
There are a number of challenges when creating video for mobile devices especially associated with image formatting – catering for the multitude of devices, screen sizes, handling the different aspect ratios and masks of the source content. Another problem for the video to mobile industry is cost. Revenues from mobile delivery of individual items of finished video are often modest. Competing standards adds complexity, something that a report by the European Commission’s information society reveals clearly. So, making that mobile version, or those many mobile versions, has to be done cost effectively. Unfortunately, many processes for creating mobile content still have ‘touch points’ with creative staff on craft hardware systems doing things like change audio channels, change picture formatting and add logos. This is, potentially, fine for an occasional clip that is going to earn you a reasonable return, but it becomes very cumbersome and expensive if you try to scale this business
content2mobile model up in any way.
A good way of thinking about this problem is shown in the diagram below, produced by AmberFin for the Video
Convergence Forum. This diagram shows a simplified and basic way of calculating returns on multi format delivery – for example a trailer that is being created for multiple delivery portals in different countries. Market ‘a’ might be the most popular terrestrial broadcaster in a particular country, market ‘b’
deliverable, while as we move towards the smaller markets on the right, strong revenues become harder to make.
The VCO Forum has been set up to help drive down the costs of making file based deliverables, such as to web and mobile. One of the challenges the VCO Forum is trying to address is the lack of
Today there are more formats and wrappers than is possible for the many content owners to create versions for. Technologically speaking, it is more than possible to create any content over any network to any device, but the market is growing and fragmenting. Rather than even just a handful of formats for the mobile channel, for example, there is often a different standard that each handset manufacturer alone. As well as being a problem for video over mobile, this is a wider industry issue. Part of what the VCO Forum is proposing involves ways to standardise and automate aspects of deliverables creation to lower the cost baseline. This would have the effect of increasing revenues on already profitable services and allow smaller services to turn a profit:
In conclusion, the challenge for creating content for mobile devices is not simply a
Fig1: Manual creation of deliverables limits addressable markets
and ‘c’ might be less popular broadcasters and markets ‘d’ to ‘i’ might be web and mobile outlets. Market ‘a’ pays well above the cost of making their particular
standards, labour intensive manual operation and generally poor interoperability that currently plagues many content delivery workflows.
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technological one, but a matter of cost as well. If the industry can agree on common approaches to mastering, this will help increase profitability. With a successful business model in place for content owners, they would be willing to access the potential that mobile video can offer.
september 2010
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