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Online TV contents drive viewers back to television
The content TV networks put online actually drive viewers back to television. And the viewers who watch TV programming via the Internet and are then driven into or back into TV are younger that the average TV network viewer and pay more attention to advertising. This is what Disney-ABC co-chair Ann Sweeney says .
In addition, she says that its streaming video users remember ads 87 % of the time. “Great content draws great audiences, and when we pair that content with digital technology, we can create a more direct connection to the consumer,” she said, “and deliver more targeted messages, and collect better information about who our consumers are and what they want.” “We will continue to take strong positions to shape the digital world, with a clear focus on promoting and protecting our brands; creating and delivering great view experiences; and being extremely strategic about where to put our content.”
Silverlight gains momentum inking a deal with Move Networks
Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is cross-browser, cross-platform Flash-like software plug-in, is gaining momentum with a new deal with Move Networks, which helps power video on ESPN360.com, Discovery, Fox, and ABC.com’s high-definition video.
Move Networks CEO says: “Our main focus with media companies is really taking quality to the next level. We think that really stimulates viewing and, thus, stimulates better metrics, and better metrics stimulate more relevant advertising and better, more intelligent programming.”
American Fork, Utah-based Move developed an innovative encoding scheme called “simulcoding” that creates multiple profiles of a program at different compression rates.
So far, there are about 30 million unique Move plug-ins deployed in the marketplace today.
Every time a user downloads Silverlight, they will also download the Move plug-in.
Silverlight is already being used by the National Basketball Association and CBS to improve the look of their Web sites and offer new advertising opportunities through graphical overlays.
It seems that the era of static Web pages is getting behind.
Integrating syndicated content into its content management system
Broadcast Interactive Media (BIM), one of the leading providers of locally-focused Web solutions for television and radio broadcasters, will integrate Mochila’s syndicated content into its content management system.
Using Mochila’s open-standard RSS Atom API, BIM will fully integrate with the Mochila platform, automatically connecting BIM’s content management and Web publishing systems to access Mochila’s content.
By connecting with Mochila’s API interface, BIM will provide its stations with direct access to relevant news from the Mochila content repository. BIM will also customize real-time feeds through this open standards XML-based API using keyword, category, byline, source and many other parameters.
YouTube’s earnings for 2008
YouTube earned around $31 million in revenue during 2007 and will reach $90 million in revenue for 2008. That number will grow to $227 million by 2012. The entire online video market is expected to bring in $1.35 billion this year and reach $4.3 billion by 2011.
This is according a Bear Stearns issued 70-page study of the online video market.
Oprah’s super live broadcasting experiment failed
Oprah Winfrey opened on March 5 the first episode of an experimental live weekly web show saying it was “the most exciting thing” she has ever done. 500.000 viewers tuned in to share the excitement, only to have the site crash within minutes. Viewers were left with frozen screens.
Officials at Harpo, Winfrey’s production company, issued an apology. “Harpo recognizes that interactive Internet broadcasting to a mass audience is still an emerging medium, and we’re proud to have been pioneers in pushing the industry forward”.
Experts say that the demand that an Oprah-sized audience put on the Internet and the related infrastructure was just too great and the system crashed. Does it mean that the Internet is not suited for live streaming at scale?
An executive tied to the project disclosed that they were up to about 800,000 users when a logical error in the caching servers caused the system to crash. (Only way to ever find a coding error like this is to put a system truly under stress. You cannot simulate it in the lab).
Therefore the crash was not caused by a lack of bandwidth, and overwhelming number of users of any infrastructure issues at all. It was a simple coding error. The error is now fixed.
They used Move Networks as online distribution platform, and Limelight as CDN. And serve it up on Oprah.com. The webcast was available in 149 countries. The current limit on a Move Networks/Limelight CDN system is about 2 million simultaneous users.
