On Syndication, CODECs and Content Consumption
Colin Dixon, Practice Manager, Broadband Media
March 19, 2009
On Tuesday, I moderated a panel at SXSW (South by Southwest) in Austin entitled “Beyond Apple TV: Building Next-Generation Systems for Acquiring Content.” We discussed new technologies and business models and how the new Internet Video economy might impact the old TV economy.
The panelists were:
Marcia Zellers – Digital Media & Entertainment Consultant
Jason Meil, EVP and Director, Innovations Unit, Initiative
Richard Bullwinkle, Chief Evangelist, Macrovision
There is a good summary of some of the panelist comments on Gearlog under the title SXSW 2009: XBox, AppleTV, and Hulu Take Center Stage in IPTV Talk so I won’t repeat what was said there here. However, I did want to highlight a couple of things which I thought really stood out in the talk.
I asked Jason whether content syndication or aggregation was a better approach. He said that one of the salient differences was that it was easy to count ad impressions when you aggregate but very hard when you syndicate. An interesting observation indeed, particularly when the only way we seem to have found to monetize content on the web is through ads.
I was disappointed to hear from Richard that we do not seem to be converging on a single CODEC standard yet. This is a real problem for TV manufacturers. Since TVs last in the home 8 to 10 years, if they don’t know which CODEC is “the one” in order to support the Internet they need to support them all. This increases the cost of the box considerably.
Marcia also said a couple of things that really rang home to me. She pointed out the fact that most video monetization is the combination of ad AND subscription revenue. This seems obvious but she went on to point out that in the Internet world we only seemed to be relying on ads. She just didn’t see how the same amount of revenue for the content could be generated without the subscription part. I must say, I’m inclined to agree with her. The question is, on the Internet, should content providers expect to be paid for access to the content and to be paid again for when we actually watch? Only time will tell how this conundrum plays out.
Thanks
Colin Dixon
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