YouTube announces video annotations

Reported first on NewTeeVee, and more details about it here.
I'm not 200% convinced of the way they've gone about implementing it, but it's a start.

If you are a theorist interest in learning more about such deep, dark plots by GooTube, go ahead and download Marc Davis and Ryan Shaw's paper titled "Towards Emergent Representations for Video"

Enjoy. Annotate.

Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Does anyone remember the time streaming media was really hot a decade ago? Pretty much around the dot-com bust?

There were some interesting things going on back then(EyeWonder, DestinyMedia doing player-less streaming), Microsoft's Web TV (ahem..), and streaming media was touted being the next hot spot to be in.
Of course, that didn't happen.
Infrastructure(hosting and delivery) was expensive, the market wasn't well defined, and coupled with the dot-com situation, the streaming media proposition became unattractive.

YouTube changed that. Fast forward four years from the bust, and it seemed like the whole world wanted to publish video on the Internet. In 2007, the bandwidth consumed by YouTube alone equalled the total amount of bandwidth consumed on the Internet in 2000. Apples and oranges..maybe, but significant, nonetheless.

Then the "democracy" thing happened: MyTube, YourTube, OurTube, HerTube, HisTube, WeTube, ThisTube, ThatTube, TheTube, ATube, TheirTube....everybody wanted to participate in online video. It was a large enough opportunity, and a number of worthy video sharing websites cropped up.
"Internet TV" was everywhere. White-labels got into the action, with Brightcove, Move Networks, Maven, and FeedRoom(to name a few) starting to serve content studios and corporate publishers looking to go online with their video. Internet TV needed to get turned on, and content publishers needed to turn on their Internet TV channels.

And they did. A few twists and turns aside, a noticeable percentage of media publishers are now serving their content on the Internet, in the dream of enhancing brand value, generating a new source of revenue, and most importantly- reach more people.

I daresay they have realized their dreams. Brands are even being created now because of Internet video(a la LonelyGirl15), new revenue streams are opening up(more so for niche sites like GlamMedia), and 79 million users watched videos on YouTube in Jan 2008 alone.

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Good news all around, right?

Wrong.

Internet video is a shaky area to be in. Because the business of Internet video is unsteady. In the most simplistic of analogies, the site with the largest volume of video content on the Internet, and the highest number of eyeballs on the Internet, is unable to turn profitable.
Into its fifth year now, and charging upwards of $100K/day for an ad on its homepage, YouTube exemplifies everything that is wrong with online video: there is no business model.

The business of Internet video is not quite the same as the business of the Internet. Delivering a quality Internet video service is a lot more intensive than delivering a good web service (a la Twitter, Disqus...)
The challenges are a-plenty:
- technological barriers (transcoding, content management)
- user experience issues (keeping users engaged, encouraging social distribution)
- infrastructure (storage, content delivery)
- monetization (ads? PPV? premium? fremium? subscriptions?)
- rights management(protection, regulation, revenue distribution, visibility)

These are all critical issues that come back to haunt content owners, one way or another. The sharpest ones of the lot end up building some of these components, sourcing the others from vendors, and piecing it all together in building up their online video platforms. Others do a half-ass job, building up a business strategy around their technical limitations. Yet others push too hard on a few aspects of their platform, in order to compensate for the deficiencies.
And of course, some are still waiting to get on the Internet video bandwagon.

Is it any wonder that online video is now being classified as a not-so-opportune market, yet again? No one's created a highly profitable online video venture yet. Not YouTube in the online publishing world, not Brightcove in the enabling world(granted, they arrived only two years ago..), and certainly not Revver in the social distribution world(Revver's as dead as.....dead).

So...? Is it all just a little bit of history repeating?

Show me the money!!

Cynicism aside, I love it when Chris Anderson returns with some meat to fuel the tail. It's incredibly refreshing, and helps me keep focused on the future.

So this time around, I'll deviate from conversation on 'the tail', and focus on a slide that one of my comrades had cooked up a few years ago.
The title of the slide, of course, was: "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" (and I'm not sure if we should be thanking Jerry Maguire here, so to be safe....thanks, Jerry Maguire!).

These days, I'm officially scared of using the phrase 'business model'(we'll go into that another time), but Chris uses it, and he's entitled to, so I'll ride his tide on this one:
"What does the media business model mean?"

[Revenue models for INTERNET TV PUBLISHERS]
(with mild value-added categorization...)

ADS
* CPM ads
* CPC ads
* CPT ads
* Sponsorships
* Streaming Video Advertising

LEVERAGING THE KING
* Subscription revenues
* User generated (value)content
* Live events
* Licensing of brand
* Licensing of content
* "Souvenirs"/"Merchandise"
* E-commerce

SYNDICATION & REDISTRIBUTION
* Affiliate revenues
* Upgraded service/content
* Alternate output
* Custom services/feeds
* Listings
* API Fees

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Have been reading a lot lately on Hollywood griping about how there's not enough money to be made on the Internet(which, frankly, is rubbish) and Bollywood running around looking for eyeballs, pretending like that's the real scarcity(which, more obviously, is also rubbish).

So I figured the above(with much thanks to Michael Cader, Fred Wilson and Chris Anderson) could go some way in laying out some ideas for how to make money(ahem...monetize).

Disclaimer: we're still talking monetization. The profitability equation involves a longer, deeper strategic analysis, and it took us seven maids with seven mops sweeping for a few years to build the profitability road map.
Which we are happy to share with our patrons.

We are India and we are in love

Rajshri Films just announced their foray into mobile content creation.

I think we're in love with these guys. They've pioneered Indian film distribution on the web, and now they're pioneering mobile film distribution as well.

Their humility is refreshing: "I hate to use the term first. I would rather say that we are among the first to make a serious attempt at doing this."- Rajat Barjatya.

We're going to go out on a limb here and say that these are the first(and only) people in the Indian cinema space to have understood Distribution 2.0 right. They've started simple, they've started early, and they've started with an open mind.
They understand content is king, and they understand long tail economics.

But then, to call a hat a hat, their website is terrible, and they're missing the social touch they need to complete their online presence. Their site isn't user friendly at all, and seriously...who runs ASP now-a-days?!!
I could get harsher but this post is about love, so we'll keep things nice 'n easy, sunny side up.

Official word: Come talk to us, Rajshri. We will help you start a (r)evolution.

A quarter life on YouTube

I was reading this article by Brian Stelter, in the NY Times this morning.

The title is an indication of everything that's wrong about how people view online video: "Can NBC do for 'Quarterlife' what YouTube could not?"

What YouTube(a la the online video marketplace) can do for you isn't measurable in the same time frame that NBC(a la TV markets) are measured. Remember that if the space is different, then surely there has to be some variance in the temporal context as well.

I think Quarterlife on the web is a brilliant idea. If nothing, even when the show has reached its shelf life on NBC, and is still circulating on the web, there will always be someone watching it. And maybe buying or renting the DVD of the show thereafter. And that's just my simplistic view of a potential opportunity in the Web >> TV space.

Truth is, there's plenty of room to innovate in this new world, and to be really successful, one has to shed every inch of old school in them, and approach the opportunity with a great deal of imagination.

Off the top of my head, 4 strategies for building the first quarter of shelf life for Web >> TV content:

[a]. Diversify your Internet markets- don't just bank on YouTube. Use other videos sharing sites, build your own platforms, cross promote, moblog, vlog, flog...whatever. Leave no stone unturned in reaching different audiences(markets), just like you wouldn't when promoting your exclusive TV content.

[b]. Incentive-ize creation: Don't worry about mainstream viability. If you produce top quality content, it'll be a hit right away. If you produce mediocre content, it won't be a hit, but over a little longer time line(depending on the level of mediocrity...! =) ), you will probably still make as much money as you did from the hits. (says Chris Anderson, Editor-in-chief at Wired Magazine).

So your best bet, even on the creative front, is to encourage content creation. That's one thing that'll probably never change, no matter how grand our business models get....content is king.

[c]. Understand Distribution 2.o: Anything YOU can distribute, millions of web users can distribute better.
Think of it this way- the first thing you'd do before you build your marketing and distributing strategy is to identify(and we know how much fun that can get) the best possible markets/audiences for your content.

Well, I'm a relative nobody in the Internet space, and I have about a few hundred friends on the Internet(who I also happen to know in real life...), each of whom, on average, will at least have a couple o' hundred friends each. Do the math on the orders of magnitude...what happens when I send out a video to all my friends, and some of them decide to do the same to all their friends?

And then remember that I'm a relative nobody in the Internet space. I'm just one guy. There're millions like me all over.
Reach out to us. We'll distribute for you- with no incentive at all. And at no cost to you. Beat that.

[d]. Help make connections: The more handshakes you can facilitate, the better the chances of people re-connecting a second time, over similar interests. This is probably only feasible when you're building your own distribution platform, but a lot of people don't think too hard about this. And it's totally worth some thought.

Technology makes it possible today to group people with similar tastes, preferences, viewing history, etc. It's a really cool way to stimulate virtual on-demand markets. If you help me find 50 people just like me on your network, then chances are that when I see something that's interesting to me, I'll share it with those 50 new friends I've made...first.
And the same applies to each of those 50 friends. And each of their friends. And their friends' friends.
Think about it.
And all you did was help people identify folks with similar tastes.

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I could probably cook up a few more. But then, I'd have to move into consulting and leave behind our startup. And that wouldn't go over too well, of course. :)

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