The NY Times’s Michael Marriott writes on online video, which is great, and appreciated, because any time a mainstream and respected publication writes on your industry, it’s a testament to leading the charge into new, exciting terrain.
But one part struck me:
Buffering … buffering … buffering. Seeing these words blinking at the bottom of the postage-stamp-size screen during a download of jerky video defines the annoying experience of entertainment on a computer monitor.
It’s not bad if that was a passing reference in the article, he starts off by that line!
I’m not the only one to object: Dan Rayburn adds on his blog:
in the very first sentence of the article it speaks to our technology as if it’s still 1998 by saying, “Buffering … buffering … buffering. Seeing these words blinking at the bottom of the postage-stamp-size screen…” I don’t disagree that there is buffering, that’s how streaming media works. But to say that the window of a video clip in is the size of a postage stamp is just flat out inaccurate. The average window size of videos on the web today is 320×240 pixels. That’s more than 8x larger than a postage stamp. Has anyone seen any video over the past few years in a window as small as the postage stamp above? Absolutely not.
I tend to agree with Dan here. When we launched WatchMojo.com, we went with a 340×190 player, we use a widescreen, anamorphic format. We’re about to relaunch, and see the video below and tell me if this new 480×270 size makes you think “postal stamp”?
Yeah, I didn’t think so!
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WatchMojo NewsletterWhen DCLK got bought by Google, and then aQuantive got bought out by Microsoft, I said independent of what you or I say about the prices paid ($3.1B and $6B respectively), aQuantive was definitely worth twice as much as Doubleclick.
Of course, like it or not, this might have everything to do with IAC’s Ask.com being a competitor of Google, now parent of Doubleclick. I had actually warned Google that it risked a publisher exodus… and now shockingly my prophecy there turns true. Hmm. For an overall rundown of the GOOG/DCLK deal click here.
Today, we see one more manifestation and argument supporting my claims - IAC drops DLCK for AQNT:
IAC owns Ask, Excite, Expedia, Hotwire, iWon, Live Daily, Match Ticketmaster, TicketWeb, Match.com, Citysearch and Evite. It characterizes its audience as “busy mothers, trendy singles, established professionals, tech-savvy consumers and affluent couples.”
The deal is a big win for Atlas and for Microsoft, which anticipates completing its acquisition of aQuantive by the end of the year.
“The relationship with IAC is a fairly comprehensive partnership that is, in essence, designed to take advantage of the Atlas Ad Manager technology for IAC publisher sites and manage the full spectrum of their business online in terms of inventory forecasting, analytics, targeting, etc.,” said Scott Ferris, Atlas’s senior vice president and general manager of the publisher and emerging media divisions. “It’s designed to encompass all of the IAC publisher and media property over time.”
It’s also a blow to DoubleClick and its likely future parent Google, though Google’s move to buy DoubleClick was not a factor in IAC’s decision. An IAC spokesperson said the deal has been in the works for a long time, pre-dating the merger agreement between Google and DoubleClick.
Sure, of course it is. I’d love for IAC to come out and say:
“Well, you saw how our search unit, Ask.com lost more share to Google, right? Well, it would just be stupid to keep our business in display with Google too, where pound for pound, at least for now, we’re stronger than Google… so we’re going with the lesser of two enemies, MSFT. Besides, let’s face it, one day, we’ll sell Ask.com to MSFT and get out of search. You do know Barry Diller’s modus operandi, right?”
Jokes aside, this is a smart tactical and strategic move for IAC.
Being a fairly large producer of video content over at WatchMojo.com, I’ve come to appreciate the need and desire to serve videos in a crips, quick and reliable fashion. Having viewers from Bombay to Boston, having a global grid that can serve videos is not an option, it’s a must.
Relying on a host is just not optimal, usually, and so enter CDNs, or content delivery networks.
Last year when CDNs began to capture both private and public investors’ attention, you knew the good times were back. But CDNs were commoditized the first time around for a reason. Should you invest in something that is, in fact, a commodity?
The leader in the space, of course, is Akamai. Akamai has had some competition of late from Limelight Networks, backed by $130M in financing from Goldman Sachs. Akamai managed to woo then startups MySpace and YouTube and rode their growth to an IPO. The stock’s performance has been clouded by legal liabilities stemming from a lawsuit from Akamai, which has proven to be a legal bully against startups. After the most recent slide, I bought a few shares… I’m not sure if I’m a long term investor in Limelight, frankly, because every day that goes by, I see more and more downward pressure on CDN pricing power. It should be noted, that just because there is pricing power on a stock does not mean the overall macro, fundamentals of a company or industry are bad. Limelight, for example, is seeing massive revenue growth, and if the lawsuit cloud disappears, then you can see the stock pop a few dollars.
But before you dive into the stock, note that there are upstarts crowding the space: former Doubleclick founder and managers launched Panther Express… who some say is doing to Limelight what Limelight did to Akamai: undercutting prices and winning over clients.
Today, a new player enters the space: Edgecast. According to James Segil, co-founder and president of the company: “We give the bandwidth to customers at cost and plan to make the profit on the services, such as reporting tools,” Segil says. “More important, we improve their performance, give them more features, offer dedicated edge space, and more - all while reducing their costs as much as 50 percent.”
Customers like IMAX Corp., one of a dozen businesses in entertainment and media, are not complaining and have signed up for EdgeCast to deliver streaming and downloadable video to their websites. Segil says he and partners pulled together enough private capital to launch the network globally, rather than regionally, “to compete better against Akamai and Limelight.”
Read more on NewTeeVee. Also, worth checking out this post on 10 P2P players in the CDN space.
Related:
- Why Limelight Networks Shot Up 27% Friday
- Akamai vs. Limelight Networks - Start Your Engines
- Grid Networks Tackles CDN market with P2P Solution
- Akamai and Level3 - Who will win?
Disclosure: I own shares in Limelight, my former boss Mark Jung sits on Limelight’s board but I have absolutely no insight into the company by way of that relationship.
From a NYT article on the shifting agency business. Some tidbits that stood out, then some links back to previous posts we’ve made on the agency world:
Mr. Kenny is reshaping the digital advertising strategy for the entire Publicis worldwide conglomerate, which includes agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and the Starcom MediaVest Group and the global accounts of companies like Procter & Gamble, American Express, Hewlett-Packard and General Motors.
The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television.
(…)
“There’s a chance to invest right now in China, India, Russia and Brazil, which will pay off big over the next five years,” Mr. Kenny said. “These economies are going to boom, and ads there are going to go directly to mobile and directly to the Internet.”
(…)
Greater production capacity is needed, Mr. Kenny says, to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads. He estimates that in the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand, whereas 10 years ago they might have run three to five versions. And he predicts that the number of iterations will grow as technology improves.
(…)
The Publicis digital plan can be viewed as a reaction to the changes in how consumers live, but it is also a response to competition among Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Publicis is trying to carve out a niche as a middleman between those online giants and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising. The role is not unlike the way agencies have long connected advertisers to offline media like television networks, newspapers and magazines.
“How do we see Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? It’s important to see that our industry is changing and the borders are blurring, so it’s clear the three of those companies will have a huge share of revenues which will come from advertising,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of the Publicis Groupe.
“But they will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium,” he added. “We will partner with them as we do partner with CBS, ABC, Time Warner or any other media group.”
Mr. Lévy’s view of the dominant Internet portals diverges from that of other advertising executives. Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, another ad agency conglomerate, has publicly called Google a “frenemy” and has recently acquired 24/7 Real Media, an advertising network that positions his company to compete more directly with Google and other online portals.
Mr. Lévy, who has a penchant for grand ambitions, says he does not plan to compete with Google — rather, he wants Google to need Publicis.
Read the whole thing here. From our vault:
- 2021: Web Ads Larger than TV Ads?
- Software/Technology vs. Advertising/Media, aka. If you’re old media, what do you do?
- Can AOL Take Behavioral Targeting from concept to reality?
Trust me when I say that a popular refrain we’ll be hearing in months and years to come is the following:
“They are also looking for original content producers to submit content to the service.”
Tech Crunch points to KnockaTV:
the latest from the inventors of ICQ, the web’s first Instant Messenger (www.icq.com). Building on our success with bringing people together on the web, “We’ve created a new form of Television!”. It’s social and real. It’s hyper-interactive and creative. Best of all, it’s democratic. Knocka lets the People decide what’s on TV, playing only original videos from the best web video producers in a professional TV broadcasting style.
When not a day goes by where there isn’t a sleuth of new enabling tools for broadband content, you wonder why this gets any press? Of course, when you realize it’s from the founders of ICQ, you can’t help but pause and take a second peek.
All to say, the barrier to entry of building tools for online video are really close to zero. The challenge will be in the content, and with TV companies not being too keen to move their libraries away from the $75B TV ad market for the smaller web video ad market, I wonder where all of that content will come from.
The firm’s raised $1M and built a cool application, one more in a sea of solutions for online video. Like Joost, this one has a fantastic pedigree, so we’ll keep an eye out on them.
- Understanding TV executives Angst and Envy
- Web Video Represents $150B market cap in 2011, but not for TV companies
- Digital Revenues are Never Incremental for Old Media
- Will TV companies face same fate at Print Companies?
- If You’re Old Media, What Would You Do?
