Are Cable Companies Looking To 'Emulate' Web Video Sites, Or Destroy Them?

from the face-value? dept

A piece in BusinessWeek says that cable TV companies are "pushing to become more Web-like" by expanding their online video offerings and making their core TV product work more like the web than the traditional channel-delineated system. On the face of it, this is a good thing, since we've long argued that the TV channel is an outdated concept, and should be seen as being like a web bookmark more than anything. But the article largely glosses over one key point in the cable companies' push to grow their online video efforts: they want exclusivity. So instead of throwing things open and using an ad-supported model, like Hulu, they want to take TV shows and video content, and lock it up inside a walled garden for paying customers. That's not "web-like", it's exactly the same as their current business model. Of course, even if these plans don't work out, they've got another way to try and profit from online video: by introducing capped broadband plans that will charge customers based on how much traffic they use. Time Warner's CEO is quoted in BW as saying "we really need to look at what consumers want." It's hard to imagine they want capped broadband, and they want video locked up behind paywalls. The popularity of the likes of YouTube and Hulu indicate they want something very different from what the cable operators have in mind.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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NBC Proud That It Made It More Difficult For People To Watch The Olympics

from the really-didn't-think-this-through dept

We've already explained how screwed up NBC's Olympic coverage policy on the web turned out to be. Its use of proprietary technology and annoying restriction severely limited its online audience -- even though the company admitted that its own research found that the more people watched online, the more they watched it on TV as well. So, given all that, you have to wonder why NBC Universal's Rick Cotton is somehow claiming a "victory" in preventing other sites from showing Olympics coverage. After all, his own company admitted that online viewing didn't cannibalize TV viewing, but only encouraged more of it. By that measure, Cotton's efforts to prevent clips of the Olympics being shared elsewhere on the web actually shrunk NBC's audience. Yet, according to Cotton: "It was a great, great success." Then again, this is the same Rick Cotton who once tried to convince Congress that it had to stop movie piracy to help poor corn farmers and claimed that no one at NBC Universal could come up with a working business model for TV content without government help, so logic might not be a strong point.

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Google Expands Video Distribution Via Adsense In Deal With Family Guy Creator

from the confusing-enough? dept

Late last year we mentioned that Google was tiptoeing into the content distribution game, using its AdSense network. The program seemed very limited (and somewhat confusing). Basically, with all the various sites out there (including us) that used AdSense for some advertisements, Google would let them choose from a (incredibly small) selection of videos to include on their sites. The videos would run with ad overlays, potentially providing a little bit of revenue to the partner sites. The whole thing seemed extremely forced and not all that compelling. Most sites have plenty of options for adding content, and this didn't seem to add much of value.

Google is now trying to expand that by getting content creators to create content specifically for this program, kicking it off by signing a deal with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, who is creating new content just for this endeavor. It definitely helps to get a big name involved -- and we still think that it's worth watching what other services Google tries to provide to its AdSense partners, but it's still not entirely clear how compelling an offering this is. Yes, having good content in the pool will certainly help -- but Google is going to need to do a better job explaining why this is different than just embedding videos from YouTube.

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NBC's Online Olympic Video Not Even Remotely Compelling

from the sharing?-stuff-we-want-to-watch? dept

NBC is hyping up how it's really embracing the web this year in its Olympic coverage. However, the details suggest that (as per usual with NBC Universal) it's taking a very old school approach -- meaning the web is treated as a second class citizen and that it won't be either useful or interesting to people online. That is, there are some restrictions that make its online efforts close to pointless. First, the videos won't be embeddable elsewhere. In other words, one of the key factors for online videos these days -- the shareability of those videos -- won't be allowed. NBC is trying to control and hoard the content -- which goes against everything the web should have taught the big shots at NBC Universal.

Secondly, while NBC is talking up 2,200 live hours of competition being shown online, it's sounding like those 2,200 hours will be of the content that people aren't as interested in watching. That is, the stuff that's being shown on TV will not be simulcast online. In fact, it won't be available to watch online until after it's been shown on TV (so, hardly live). So, any of the big important stuff will have to wait until NBC has shown it on TV (most likely on tape delay). So the only really "live" content you'll see is the stuff that isn't particularly interesting.

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Hype And Reality For Joost -- No, Joost Does Not Lead The Way With Web Video

from the i-can't-believe-what-I-just-read dept

The online video company Joost gets a ton of attention, but mainly for the fact that its two founders were the guys behind Kazaa and Skype -- and the fact that it's raised a lot of money. However, what amazed me this weekend was two separate media reports suggesting that Joost was some sort of huge success, when almost every other indication was that it had stumbled massively. First, there was Crain's New York suggesting that it was a huge deal that Joost had chosen to locate its US headquarters in New York rather than Silicon Valley, calling the company "a top online video company." Ok. Perhaps -- though it seems like a stretch. In the online video world, there's basically YouTube and then everyone else. However, the real kicker was Information Week, which bizarrely declares: "Joost is still a leader in high-quality video by any measure" under a headline declaring "Joost Leads The Way With Web Video."

Well, first of all, Joost doesn't lead the way in web video because it still hasn't released a web version. Second, the claim of it leading "by any measure" seems hard to square up with nearly a dozen reports about Joost's prospects. In fact, about the only "measure" by which Joost may be leading the internet video space is in hype (or, possibly, bandwidth consumption). By nearly all other reports out there, Joost has been in serious trouble this year, with people not finding its limited content (and need for a download) all that compelling. In response, the company has ditched most of its ambitious plans to focus much more narrowly on a short-term strategy to help the company survive. The company has also had tremendous downtime and layoffs. Even Joost's own investors don't have much nice to say about the company. In other words, it's difficult to see how Information Week can declare in any way that Joost is somehow leading the market.

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