Challenges in the Global On-Line Video Industry
Colin Dixon, Broadband Media Practice Manager
March 26, 2009
Another week and another panel to moderate! This one was at the Future of Television Forum West in LA put on by Ned Sherman and Digital Mediawire. The subject for this panel was “Online Video: Global Opportunities and Challenges” although I have to say we leaned pretty heavily on the challenges. This was a big panel for its allotted 50 minutes and we covered a lot of ground. The panelists were:
John DeMarchi, Director Distribution, Saavn
Alistair Jeffs, Exec Producer & COO, Oil Productions (creator, Routes, Channel 4, UK)
Brett Wilson, CEO, TubeMogul
Eric Garland, CEO, BigChampagne
Joy Marcus, US General Manager, Dailymotion
Sharon Metz, VP, Vertical Marketing, Macrovision Solutions Corporation
There were several broad issues that became apparent as the discussion progressed. Firstly, Sharon Metz pointed out that metadata (the data that describes the content) needs to be provided for each piece of content made available on line. She went on to say that if you want to distribute the content in other non-English speaking markets the metadata has to be translated into each target language in order for the content to be searchable. If you want to release your content to the global market this becomes an incredibly onerous task. Everyone on the panel agreed that this was a problem that was going to get a lot worse.
All the panelists were frustrated with the current methods employed to count content consumption. With no standard way of counting or presenting the data it is almost impossible to render a meaningful, consistent numbers. This is critical for companies such as Dailymotion, Tubemogul, Saavn and Oil Productions which must report the data to content providers and advertisers. Joy, Brett, Alistair and Mike called for an-industry wide effort to solve this problem.
In the last few minutes of the panel I asked about the effectiveness of geo-blocking (enforcing geographic content consumption restrictions.) I posited that this was encouraging people to search for and watch illegal content to beat the restriction. Eric Garland went even further than that. He said that you cannot control the release of premium content at all this way. Once a movie is released in one format in a specific geography it is immediately copied into many different formats and made available everywhere illegally.
So perhaps the meta-lesson from all of this is simply that when you release your content on the web you are releasing to a global market whether you like it or not. Better to plan for this ahead of time rather than have your content enter the underground economy.
ShareThis