Online video, online video publishing, streaming media, OVP, OTT, web television, video advertising, marketing, startups, gadgets, social media, videoconferencing, collaboration and related topics are discussed here. Thanks for stopping by the "Klessblog."
Trying to keep up with latest video workflows, video codecs, algorithms and the variety of delivery methods for multiple screens can be a daunting task for anyone. Even the experts agree that the process and tools for video content creation, management and delivery is constantly changing – and can be a challenge to master, let alone understand. Not only do we have to know about every possible screen size and resolution, device and platform, network bandwidth connections and constantly shifting “standards" to deliver any content, anytime, anywhere and on any device.
Multiscreen delivery, connected device platforms, hybrid IPTV/OTT systems, HTML5 and Flash Player customization controls, mobile app development, multi-upload content ingestion and management, advanced adaptive transcoding, mobile-ready encoding, intelligent device detection, user moderation and permissions setting, contextual social media extensions, intuitive ad server and network integration, extensible APIs, automated deep linking and media asset syndication, viewer engagement and geographic distribution reporting, etc... it's enough to make your head explode!
This amusing video pokes fun at the technical jargon that online video consultants say that makes your head spin. The video stars web video experts, Jan Ozer and Lisa Larson-Kelley, and is actually a humorous digital short to market a one-day web video workshop, Encoding, Serving, and Player Development for Multiple Screen Delivery that Ozer and Larson-Kelley are teaming up on again, in New York City on April 10, 2012. This Web Video Workshops session is a joint venture between Streaming Learning Center and LearnFromLisa.com. It's presented in two sessions and covers video encoding and video serving and player development and will provide video compressionists, web developers, content producers, and video professionals end-to-end knowledge to achieve the best playback across desktops and devices.
Ozer, author of Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5, will cover encoding for multiple-screen delivery and review the fundamentals of producing H.264 and WebM streams, adaptive streaming and single file and adaptive playback capabilities of Flash and HTML5 on the desktop, and iOS and Android devices, other mobile handsets and tablets and prominent OTT platforms. He'll also detail transmuxing technologies like those provided by the Wowza Media Server and Adobe Flash Media Server.
"This workshop will provide an overview of the online video landscape today, map out where its going in the future, and provide clear approaches to achieving the best quality playback on the widest array of screens. I’ll give a detailed overview of the current video capabilities of HTML5 and the Flash Platform. We’ll discuss the various devices on the market today and outline their overall classifications and critical specifications. I’ll also outline systematic approaches to reaching targeted classes of devices, with the aim to provide high quality content to the widest audience."
The session is on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 from 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM (ET), New York Plaza, NY
Streaming Media West was abuzz this past week with Adobe's surprising announcement that it will abandon future development of Flash Player for mobile devices following the next release 11.1, and will be more aggressively contribute to HTML5 innovation with key players, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM. Adobe will continue to support its current Flash development. Over the last few years HTML5 and H.264 video have been gaining momentum as an emerging standard for online and mobile video, spurred on by Apple's exclusion of Flash on its popular iDevices and negative press it received from Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash. Adobe had developed Flash Player to run on Google's Android and other non-Apple mobile platforms, but its official statement from its blog post now says,"HTML5 is the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."
While Adobe had a strong presence at Streaming Media West with its Platinum sponsorship of the conference, prominent spot on the exhibit floor and usual pre-conference session with Kevin Towes, the company was tight lipped about why it decided to withdraw Flash from the mobile market. I caught up with Jan Ozer, Video Producer, Writer, Publisher of StreamingLearningCenter.com and author of Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5, to get his perspective on the implications of the announcement for the online video industry, mobile developers and consumers.
Ozer says Adobe made this move for three reasons. Number one, they were fighting against the current at least with Apple, and then with Microsoft's recent announcement about their tablet oriented operating system, they can't fight this. Number two, Ozer says, Adobe wasn't getting then support it needed from Google and other vendors to make Flash work effectively on mobile platforms. The last thing he says is, as computers get more powerful people are building applications that require more power and faster CPUs to run smoothly, and Flash-enabled tablets and phones simply don't have the power to run smoothly and deliver a quality experience.
This doesn't mean that Flash on the desktop is going away anytime soon, and Ozer says that it will actually create a tale of two websites, with a web version that is completely immersive Flash experience, and the other more simple and targeted for mobile devices.
"That's already being done by some vendors like Converse, who, if you visit it with an iPad, sends you to a simple e-commerce site, but if you visit with a computer, sends you to an immersive Flash experience. The other is that many vendors, seeking to minimize development costs, will produce a single site using HTML5 that lacks much of the immersion that Flash can provide."
While many are saying Adobe's announcement is significant, Ozer points out:
"In terms of video, remember that HTML5 doesn't have many key technologies now being used or implemented by the primary distributers of non-UGC video on the web (networks, studios, etc). These include adaptive streaming, digital rights management (DRM), peer-to-peer delivery, and in the enterprise space, multi-casting. Remember also that at last count (November 9, 2011), the penetration of HTML5 compatible browsers on connected computers was under 60%. Streaming producers are going to need a plug-in based option for several more years, and Flash is the obvious choice. "
He described the implications in greater detail on in this blog post, Adobe to Discontinue Flash for Mobile, and offered this advise to online video publishers.
"If you're a web producer trying to access these mobile devices, your strategy doesn't change much either. You've had to deliver to desktops with one technology and iDevices with another, Android has always been a fractured market. Now you'll likely deliver to all mobiles using a single technology (let's hope) and all desktops with another. Certainly Google's adaption of HTTP Live Streaming in Android 3.0 is a good sign."
In his keynote address at the Online Video Platform Summit, Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Chairman of Brightcove discussed the broad themes involved in the complex and fragmented landscape for online video publishing and the strategies organizations need to have in place to achieve success with their video initiatives. Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen provided a great summary of Allaire's keynote in his post, Brightcove: “Everyone is an Online Video Publisher” on OnlineVideo.net, which highlights Allaire's view of the changing face of video and content monetization, as more and more publishers look to expand their video initiatives to all three screens.
Allaire pointed out the rapid growth of online video in 2010 grew to a staggering 30 billion monthly views, and is now more than 50% of Internet traffic in the U.S., and it's estimated that it will will grow to 90% by 2013. Some of the key drivers fueling that growth are ad supported online video, which continues to grow faster than any other area of online advertising, and also the brand marketing and retail applications which are really exploding.
eMarkerter predicts that online advertising spend will be $28.5 billion in 2011, and that almost $2 billion of that will be online video advertising. This is really exciting for the industry, says Allaire, because corporations and institutions are expanding and investing in video as a way to enhance their customer relationships and customer touchpoints.
According to Allaire:
“Everyone is an online video publisher. Retail, small businesses, foundations, non-profits, and of course media companies. The use cases for online video are now as many as the use cases for the web in general.”
He added that online video platforms have emerged as critical partners to publishers by creating solutions that help them navigate the complex and fragmented online video landscape.
“For businesses, it’s less about the technology—which should be invisible—but about the business value."
Allaire said increased bandwidth capacity and demand for higher quality video experiences have required publishers to render multiple versions of their content for multi-bitrate streaming. In addition, there is a tsunami of new connected devices consumers are using to access video which all use a variety of video runtimes creating a fragmented publishing environment. Allaire said that the recent release of Brightcove 5, the company's cloud-based online video platform, addresses many of the issues that publishers face in the fragmented landscape and helps expand their reach. The new features include: distribution and synchronization with YouTube, iPad reference app, Apple HTTP streaming for the mobile Web and apps, cross platform Smart Players, new advanced analytics for Adobe® Flash® and HTML5 video developed in partnership with Tubemogul, and wide-ranging productivity enhancements.
Jeremy Allaire founded Brightcove in early 2004 with a vision for the transformation of television with the Internet. From his early days as CTO of Macromedia, where he was instrumental in evolving Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the web, Allaire envisioned that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. As CEO and Chairman of Brightcove, Allaire leads the company’s technology, marketing and business development strategy. Prior to founding Brightcove, Allaire worked as a technologist and entrepreneur-in-residence for Cambridge, MA-based venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he worked on companies and investments in broadband media, mobile content, e-commerce software and digital identity.
Before General Catalyst, Allaire was Chief Technology Officer of Macromedia, where he helped define and launch the Macromedia MX platform for Rich Internet Applications, helping to evolve Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the Internet. Allaire joined Macromedia with its merger with Allaire Corporation, where Jeremy was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. Founded in 1995, Allaire Corporation was a pioneer in using the web as an application platform, and its industry leading and award winning products power millions of websites, online services and business applications on the Internet.
The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with Streaming Media Westin Los Angeles, the Online Video Platform Summit is designed for video publishers of all types and sizes, whether small businesses looking to publish content for the first time, independent entertainment content creators, large media organizations, or anywhere in between.
This week Kaltura announced that it has secured $20 million in new financing led by new investors Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Intel Capital and existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures, and technology lender Silicon Valley Bankers. The open source online video platform has been on a steady growth path over the last 18 months and boasts over 100,000 publishers in a variety of markets and verticals in media and entertainment, enterprise, education and service providers. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of its open source video platform.
I caught up with Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's CEO and Chairman, at NewTeeVee Live in November 2010, where he initially announced the C round funding with details to follow. We discussed Kaltura's 2010 year-end review, which for Kaltura was a phenomenal year of growth with 80,000 downloads of its code in 2010 alone, which he said is 60 times all the other industry combined. Part of that growth is measured with Kaltura's Community Edition, first released in 2009 at OSCON Open Source Convention as a completely free and fully functional self-hosted version its video management platform. Yekutiel said that with implementations in web management systems like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress and learning management systems Moodle, Sakai or Blackboard Kaltura's platform is not just one application, but a myriad of applications, all of which have different parts of Kaltura connected into them.
When I spoke with Yekutiel earlier in the year at Streaming Media East 2010, he emphasized that Kaltura's two key differentiators are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. For Kaltura, this is how it sets itself apart from the rest of the OVP market.
In terms of Kaltura's growing customer base, Yekutiel noted many big name companies like Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, HBO, NBA and a long list of others have become customers and are consuming not only licensed software but also development, maintenance and support. Kaltura also saw customer gains in the enterprise with Bank of America, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, Best Buy, Siemens and in the education space, there's been a "landslide" of universities joining, with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, NYU, Columbia University and all the Ivy League schools but Brown University, which they are working on.
Yekutiel said that a lot more service providers that have their own cloud and want to offer solutions are joining Kaltura as resellers of its OVP. An example he gave is Sport One in Europe, a large sports channel that many of the OVPs had bid on, but lost out to a local hosting provider that bundles and resells Kaltura's offerings. While Sport One didn't choose Kaltura directly, they became a customer through the local reseller, which Yekutiel referred to as small "Kaltura Mini-me's" that become OVPs in the local markets, and are really disrupting the industry.
Other key highlights for Kaltura in 2010 included, a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. This led to big news with Adobe's announcement last October of its HTML5 video player widget based on Kaltura's HTML5 Media Library – already in use by Wikipedia – that works in all major browsers and includes a full set of HTML5 video tools – video and audio players, uploader and editor.
Yekutiel said Adobe's adoption of Kaltura's open source code creates great opportunities for the industry:
"This was a very historical release saying that Adobe's not anymore just about Flash, but also about HTML5 and after serving the whole industry and choosing if they could build their who le thing from scratch, they actual decided to adopt our code and offer it to everybody as the Adobe code. Which speaks volume on our ability to provide best of breed solutions."
Kaltura has been an early supporter of HTML5 video and earlier in the year, and with the Open Video Alliance and other partners, launched two new websites – Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia and HTML5video.org, an industry resource for all things HTML5 video-related, including news, technology demos as part of a mass campaign to bring video to Wikipedia.
"This is one small example of a bigger trend, that is, people understand the benefit of an open source solution. Not only being inclusive of all the innovation that's happening out there, but being able to rope in the power of the crowds and the wisdom of of thousands of people that are developing on top of our system. And I'm proud to say that we started off the year with maybe a few hundred developers that helped us externally, and today we have more then 6000 developers in the community that are building. So the pace of innovation is second to none."
Yekutiel noted that in regards to the $20 million C round investment, the new investors symbolized the power his company has as an open source vendor. Naren Gupta from Nexus Venture Partners called Kaltura, "a company that is hugely successful by combining the best technology with a powerful open source business model", and Maria Cirino of .406 Venture called Kaltura "a juggernaut" that is "led by a passionate group of world class entrepreneurs" and well positioned serve the exploding online video market.
Yekutiel believes Kaltura is disrupting the online video space "in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat™ and MySQL™ have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases," and said the new investment will be used in the following way:
"To continue its momentum in the market and keep ahead of the curve, Kaltura is looking to further grow its team to increase development and professional services. We are also looking to expand into additional markets, including Europe, the Far East and India."
About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 100,000 media & entertainment companies, enterprises, SMBs, educational institutions, service providers, platform vendors, and system integrators use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities. Kaltura's features and products enable easy deployment of custom work-flows involving video creation, ingestion, publishing, management, syndication, engagement, monetization and analysis. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York based Kaltura is a founding member of the ‘Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video. For more information: www.kaltura.com, www.kaltura.org and http://exchange.kaltura.com/. Follow @Kaltura and join the Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
Updated: 2/20/2011 Additional quote about what the money will be used for.
Kyte was founded in 2006, and offers advanced mobile distribution and social media integration capabilities through its cloud-based publishing platform for live and on-demand video. I've covered Kyte on this blog for several years and it has both a free UGC platform and a premium service for major brands and recording artists. 50 Cent was a early Kyte adopter, and with the Kyte player brands have been able to create a “micro websites” that are virally distributed on many platforms. Kyte has differentiated itself from other platforms as "an enabling technology" for branded mobile destination sites through Kyte’s multimedia chat, RSS, Twitter and Facebook notification services. Kyte was named Streaming Media Editors' Pick for its technological advances in the growth of the online video industry, as one of the “the most innovative, most important, and just plain coolest stuff in online video.”
I spoke with Gannon Hall, (who at the time of this interview was COO of Kyte and is now Executive Vice President of Global Marketing for KIT digital ), at the 2010 Online Video Platform Summit following his panel session on, Delivering Content to Mobile Devices. Kyte had just released its live streaming to iOS devices capability which fully enabled the ability to live stream to both the web and Apple iOS devices at the same time in native apps and over mobile web in HTML5. Kyte also released new monetization capabilities built into its HTML5 solutions to allow publishers to integrate with third party ad platforms like Doubleclick DART to deliver pre-roll and post-roll video advertising and companion ads.
Hall commented on the importance of mobile for video publishers and consumer:
"Mobile is important, because for one, it's become the fastest growing video segment of video consumption – it's not the largest by any means, but it's one of the fastest growing. So we're seeing increasing demand from our customers to be able to make it much easier for them to deliver full featured, high-quality video experiences to mobile platforms, both as native applications as well as just making sure that their websites playback and function properly on mobile platforms. This is actually something we've been doing for quite some time and we've had a mobile delivery capabilities as early as 2006. Some we were one of the earliest innovators in mobile video delivery and we're continuing to push the envelope as much as we can."
On January 25, 2011, KIT digital acquired the privately-held Kyte for approximately $5.7 million, including $3.1 in cash and $2.6 in KIT stock. It reported a $3.7 million revenue in 2010, primarily from SaaS platform fees and had raised more than $23 million.
In a post on the Kyte blog, Hall said the company was pleased to be joining KIT, and noted:
"We are confident that this partnership will give us the opportunity to bring even more value and exceptional customer service to your organization. More than ever, we are committed to helping you reach, engage and converge your audience with live and on-demand media, wherever they are. Merging the two businesses and our complementary technologies together will enable us to offer a more robust, end-to-end solution portfolio to better meet the full breadth of your video delivery needs."
KIT digital CEO Isaza Tuzman said:
“Kyte is recognized as having the most advanced mobile publishing technology in the marketplace, and has an aggressive and talented management team. We plan to leverage Kyte’s proprietary platform and application frameworks to serve and expand KIT’s global client base. The acquisition also adds a strong West Coast presence in the U.S., which we will use as a R&D and business development hub.”
About Gannon Hall
In his new role as Executive Vice President Global Marketing, Gannon leads KIT’s overall global marketing strategies. Gannon brings nearly two decades of entrepreneurial leadership experience within the emerging and established consumer Internet and enterprise software industries. Prior to joining KIT, Gannon was the COO of Kyte, a leading online and mobile video platform, where he led the company’s product strategy, marketing, business development and operations. (more)
I met with Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, at the Online Video Platform Summit to get a summary of his keynote address, where he shared his view of the increasingly complex and fragmented landscape for online video publishing, and the multi-platform distribution strategies organizations need to have in place to achieve success with their video initiatives. Allaire founded Brightcove in early 2004 with a vision for the transformation of television with the Internet. From his early days as CTO of Macromedia, where he was instrumental in evolving Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the web, Allaire envisioned that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. I spoke with him at length about his background and the early years of online video in this post from last year.
In his keynote, The New Video Landscape: Multi-platform Distribution, Monetization, and Fragmentation, Allaire described the rapid growth of online video in 2010 with monthly video growing to a staggering 30 billion views. He pointed out that online video is now more than 50% of Internet traffic in the U.S. and it's estimated that it will will grow to 90% by 2013. Some of the key drivers fueling that growth are ad supported online video, which continues to grow faster than any other area of online advertising, and also the brand marketing and retail applications which are really exploding. eMarkerter predicts that online advertising spend will be $28.5 billion next year, and that almost $2 billion of that will be online video advertising.
"The reason for the huge increase in video ad spending is that brand marketers will shift more of their ad budgets online. Since there is more professional video online than ever before, buyers have more inventory to choose from. Brand marketers realize how central the internet is to consumers’ lives than it was even two years ago. More important, they see how much of that video content is professional, so they trust it and as a FreeWheel study shows, consumers tend to watch video ads to the end when they are up against professional video content."
This is really exciting for the industry, says Allaire, because corporations and institutions are expanding and investing in video as a way to enhance their customer relationships and customer touchpoints. Data from Brightcove & TubeMogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for Q2 2010, found that online video is a priority for brand managers and that more than 60 percent plan to spend more their website video initiatives in the next 12 months.
But while consumer demand, growth trends, and broad industry adoption introduce exciting new opportunity, Allaire says the complex and fragmented device landscape is introducing new challenges for online video publishers. In particular, Apple's release of the iPad started the HTML5/H.264 video vs. Flash debate over the future of web content and application runtime formats, which Allaire wrote about earlier in the year in a guest post on TechCrunch.
Allaire says increased bandwidth capacity and demand for higher quality video experiences have required publishers to render multiple versions of their content for multi-bitrate streaming. In addition, there is a tsunami of new connected devices consumers are using to access video which all use a variety of video runtimes creating a fragmented publishing environment.
"We've moved from the world of people publishing video to the PC web with Flash, to needing to have video on tablets and smart phones – both web browsing and native apps, that people do across a lot of different platforms – and the emergence of connected TVs are yet another set of platforms that are going to create these challenges for publishers. And then, the explosion of social media sites as sources of traffic and valuable forms of customer engagement. So really, the world has changed a lot in the last 12 months and that's actually created a huge amount of challenges and a huge amount of opportunities."
Allaire says that the recent release of Brightcove 5, the company's cloud-based online video platform, addresses many of the issues that publishers face in the fragmented landscape and helps expand their reach. The new features include: distribution and synchronization with YouTube, iPad reference app, Apple HTTP streaming for the mobile Web and apps, cross platform Smart Players, new advanced analytics for Adobe® Flash® and HTML5 video developed in partnership with Tubemogul, and wide-ranging productivity enhancements.
In a follow up TechCrunch guest post last week, Allaire further expanded on the outlook for 2011 – which promises to be yet another transformational year in the online video landscape – with connected TVs set to go mainstream, OTT (over-the-top) video adoption, the ongoing battle over video delivery standards, and the rise of social recommendations with Facebook and Twitter growing much faster as sources for online video discovery and referral compared to traditional search engines. According to Tubemogul and Brightcove's Online Video & The Media Industry report for Q3 2010, Facebook is now the second largest traffic source for media sites surpassing Yahoo! The report states that not only are social media destination driving more traffic, but consumers who find video through the recommendation of peers in the social networks are more engaged with the video content then content they find through other sources.
In his keynote, Allaire said that, "Everyone is an online video publisher," and that online video platforms have emerged as critical partners to publishers by creating solutions that help them navigate the complex and fragmented online video landscape.
"I think the really big picture is that we're just at the beginning. Video ubiquity is just emerging and we see a world in the next several years where every professional website in the world is going to have professional video applications, so it's a very exciting time for our company and the industry."
Earlier this year, Mark Robertson and I met with Jeroen "JW" Wijering, Chief Digital Architect of LongTail Video at his office in New York City, to talk about the growing interest and hype around HTML5 video, and the most pressing issues facing its adoption. Jeroen is an online video pioneer and the creator of the ubiquitous JW Media Players, which have generated several million downloads since their launch in 2005.
In a post on the LongTail Community Support Blog (and also a guest post on Reel SEO), Jeroen noted that Apple's launch of the iPad along with Steve Jobs' arguements with Adobe over Flash accelerated HTML5 video development. He wrote that there's a lot of video tag euphoria within today's tech industry and the practical side of HTML5 video development has been overlooked and faces a major threat.
"The video tag is still in its infancy and misses certain core functionalities. As developers demand these features, browser vendors are tempted to implement incompatible solutions instead of agreeing upon standards. These hasty developments, already underway, are setting HTML video up for the same chaos as HTML styling in the pre-CSS era."
Jeroen says, the most pressing issues facing HTML video development are:
Codecs - H.264 versus OGG debate is ongoing, but all browsers have placed their bets - Firefox and Opera favor OGG, Internet Explorer and Safari choose H264. Chrome plays it safe and does both. Today's HTML5 video format is H264.
Streaming - HTML5 does not specify a streaming mechanism yet. While this is being worked on (W3C: Fragments, Media Multitrack API), it means that live, DVR and long-form video content cannot be played using a video tag.
Fullscreen - While a small feature at first sight, fullscreen playback is essential to the success of HTML5 video. Without fullscreen, HTML5 video is mostly useful for presenting short clips.
Jeroen suggests that the addition of both captions and fullscreen support would be big steps forward for HTML5 video. He says that cross-browser support should be practical and compatible, or we risk web development regression.
"Browser vendors should be stringent when building solutions that are both practical and compatible. If not, crossbrowser HTML5 video will be too difficult, not to mention expensive, to implement. This presents the risk of web development regression.
In favor of its advancement, we cannot allow this to happen. Online video will go mobile and big screen. It also needs to become accessible and searchable. HTML5 video will advance the progress in these areas, if developed carefully and intelligently. However, without compatible solutions, online video is in definite jeopardy of a setback."
While Jeroen says that HTML5 video is not quite there yet, as the year comes to a close, there are signs of the maturing market:
These are but a few of the many innovations and growth of HTML5 video within the online and mobile video industry. As we move into 2011, we'll continue to see the technology evolve at a rapid pace, as well as the debate.
HTML is the mark-up language used for the World Wide Web. Almost all web pages you visit on the internet are based around HTML code. HTML5 is simply the fifth and latest iteration of this mark-up language that allows for more dynamic, animated and interactive web pages. Up until now web pages have had to embed content or plugins like Flash for items like video players or interactive animation. HTML5 allows for lots of this functionality to be done without an embedded file. This doesn’t mean the end of Flash however because Flash too continues to evolve - it is an alternative. See more on the W3 website.
The video codec format war heated up last week, with the announcement by the MPEG LA, that it has freed up the license of the H.264 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) codec, and will not charge royalties for any content that is free to consumers. The MPEG LA is the firm that manages the patent pool for AVC, and earlier this year, it announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015 (PDF link). But now and forever, it has made it free for the life of the license and will only charge for AVC encoded video content sold to end users in any form for a fee, on a title or subscription basis.
H.264/AVC video format is the digital video coding industry standard H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC used widely in set-top boxes, media player and other personal computer software, mobile devices, Blu-ray Disc™ players and recorders, game machines, personal media player devices and still and video cameras. Apple has become most outspoken proponent of AVC, and backs it as the standard video codec used for its HTML-5 video compatible mobile iDevices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, as well as for iTunes videos, and Microsoft also announced support for H.264-encoded HTML5 video in IE9 earlier this year.
Many have speculated that the move by the MPEG LA was spurred on by Google's release of VP8 as an open source royalty free video codec, a new rival to H.264/AVC and potential replacement to the open source Theora. Google announced the release of the VP8 video codec under the WebM Project at the i/O developers conference in May, with broad industry support. Absent from the list of supporters was, of course, Apple.
"There is little doubt that the most recent announcement by MPEG LA is, in part, a counteraction against the potential inroads that WebM may make in the online video space."
"54% of respondents who were considering HTML5 support rated the lack of single codec either a serious concern, or a very serious concern. Lack of HTML5 browser penetration was rated even more of a concern, but that will resolve in time. The codec issue appears to be a permanent problem which will force producers to encode in as many as four or five different formats in the short term, and at least two in the long term."
Rounding out the analysis from Streaming Media is Dan Rayburn who acknowledged that while the MPEG LA's royalty free license is good news for content owners, it does not address the future market needs for subscription based content services and device manufactures who will continue to pay to license the codec.
Rayburn also agreed that the lack of a codec standard is a major sticking point for the industry:
"The news also does nothing to address what I consider to be a bigger issues which is the need for browsers to give us a single codec we can call use. Companies like Mozilla and Opera are still going to have to pay for a license if they want to support H.264 which means we are not any closer to have much in the way of video standard on the Internet."
As far as browsers go, they are waging their own war. Safari supports H.264, Firefox, Opera and Chrome support WebM, and IE9 will support both as well as its own VC-1. Mozilla has refused to support H.264 as a codec for the HTML5 video tag in Firefox, and it's unlikely it will in the future. Theora plays natively in FireFox 3.5, Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 and Opera as version 10.50. All browsers can play H.264 encoded video presented in Adobe's Flash plug-in, but as everyone knows, Flash doesn't play within Apple's iOS on its iDevices. According to current global browser market share and trends of the five major browsers, IE 6.0-8.0 leads with 52.68%, followed by FireFox 3.0+-3.5+ with 31.49% and those numbers are growing steadily as people migrate to the newer versions. Chrome has grown to 9.80%, Safari has about 5.09% and Opera is 1.90%.
Ultimately, it's all not just about patents and licenses, there's a much bigger back story. I like this post by Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps, which provides a detailed industry analysis on the codec format and browser wars. He says video is a cornerstone issue and the emergence of the mobile device industry has brought the issue to the forefront:
"With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities."
While many big video websites, like YouTube and Vimeo, have rolled out their own HTML5 video players, we are held at bay by the big browser developers that can't agree which video codec to support in HTML5. The MPEG LA's move has brought us closer to a standard - with the two dominant video codec standards AVC and WebM - the tug of war continues and we're caught in the struggle. Until there is broad support for all codecs and containers across the industry, we won't be reaching a web video standard anytime soon.
About MPEG LA, LLC
MPEG LA is the world leader in alternative technology licenses, enabling users to acquire worldwide patent rights necessary for a technology standard or platform from multiple patent owners in a single transaction as an alternative to negotiating individual licenses. MPEG LA’s initial licensing program for MPEG-2 digital video compression helped produce the most widely employed standard in consumer electronics history, and the MPEG LA® Licensing Model has become the template for addressing other technologies. Today MPEG LA manages licensing programs consisting of essential patents in 57 countries. MPEG LA is an independent licensing administrator; it is not related to any standards agency and is not an affiliate of any patent holder. For more information, please refer to http://www.mpegla.com.
At Streaming Media East last month, Kaltura Co-Founder and CEO Ron Yekutiel illustrated the key differences between his company from the other online video platforms on the market. The two key differentiators Yekutiel emphasized are flexibility and control for online video publishers, with full control of Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 video content, and the flexible new Kaltura Exchange which fosters third-party development for their open source video platform. Kaltura offers a SaaS solution, a complete self-hosted solution and a free community edition of their open source video platform.
Over the last several months Kaltura has released a number of new features and capabilities, in response to the latest developments within the online video ecosystem, such as HTML5 video playback. As a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, Kaltura and open source partners launched HTML5video.org to promote the growing community and development around the HTML5 video open standard. Kaltura also developed a full HTML5 Video Library, available for download at: www.html5video.org/kaltura-html5. Kaltura also recently announced full support of or Microsoft Silverlight, including the Silverlight-based player and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming available with their hosted and self-hosted editions.
Kaltura has been on a steady pace to integrate open source video extensions into its platform, with the release of Joomla and Moodle video extensions earlier this year. As Yekutiel noted, the company recognized the rich innovation within the third-party developer community, which led to their announcement of "Kaltura Exchange", the virtual marketplace for video applications built to expand on the Kaltura platform. Applications within the Exchange, are in specific categories, such as skins, themes and language packs, plugins for the video player, remixer, and other video tools, client libraries in different programming languages, and stand-alone widgets and apps. Dozens of companies got on board at with the launch this past April, including Adap.tv, Tremor Media, TubeMogul, PLYmedia, Artivision, Taboola, YuMe, LiveU, HD Cloud, Market7, encoding.com, 3Play Media, TikiWiki and more.
Dr. Shay David, Kaltura VP of Business and Community Development noted that:
"The Kaltura Exchange facilitates a convenient and simple-to-use marketplace where publishers can find new apps and services to enhance their video experience, and developers and service providers can promote and generate revenue from their apps, services and unique expertise."
At Streaming Media East, Kaltura announced the commercial release of their self-hosted platform, which Yekutiel stressed, is the control publishers need to secure and manage their video content – and differentiates Kaltura from the other online video platforms.
Yekutiel described Kaltura's value proposition in this way:
"Our open source offering presents a highly attractive alternative to both 'build' and 'buy'. Kaltura's self-hosted platform enables customers to enjoy code ownership, flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, and cost savings, with a robust platform that is supported by a leading vendor and backed by a global developer community that ensures an unmatched pace of innovation."
Kaltura offers the following editions of its online video platform:
Kaltura SaaS Platform (Kaltura hosts it) - including Kaltura support and services such as tier-1 hosting and streaming, transcoding, syndication, advertising, security and more.
Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Commercial Edition (customer hosts it, gets support from Kaltura and can resell services) - offered either under an Enterprise license for organizations that need an online video platform for their own media, or an OEM license for organizations that want to support multiple sites and resell OVP services. Both licenses are offered with 3 levels of Kaltura maintenance and support services.
Kaltura Self-hosted Platform Community Edition (customer hosts it, gets it for free, gets support from community and must give all developments back to the community) - developed through the combined efforts of Kaltura and the community.
About Kaltura
Kaltura provides the world's first Open Source Online Video Platform. Over 52,000 web publishers, service providers, and developers use Kaltura's flexible platform to enhance their websites, web-services, and web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities, including publishing, management, syndication, monetization and analysis, as well as content uploading and remixing. The free community-supported self-hosted software and source-code is available for download at www.kaltura.org. A commercial version of the software can be obtained at www.kaltura.com along with Kaltura services such as streaming, hosting, transcoding, analytics, ad serving, support and maintenance packages, and professional development. Founded in 2006, New York-based Kaltura is also a founding member of the 'Open Video Alliance' (www.openvideoalliance.org), a coalition of organizations dedicated to fostering open standards for online video.
This past month at Streaming Media East in New York City, Brightcove announced a partnership with video ad management and monetization company FreeWheel to bring the first HTML5 video advertising solution for the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The new solution combines Brightcove's support for HTML5 video, including intelligent device detection, playlist rendering and playback of H.264 encoded video content, with FreeWheel's Monetization Rights Management (MRM) product to automatically push of HTML5-compatible, contextual advertising content into the Brightcove player experience.
I spoke with Jeff Whatcott, SVP of Marketing at Brightcove, who demonstrated the new HTML5 video advertising solution, available to Brightcove and FreeWheel customers in June 2010. Whatcott expanded on the new offerings announced at Streaming Media East in a post on Brightcove blog, "Solving the Online Video Monetization Puzzle," which also included expanded support for VAST 2.0 and VPAID IAB advertising standards. He summed up these product innovations and ongoing investments as important pieces to a broader monetization puzzle, which involves questions of strategy, content and audience.
In an article on USAToday, "Apple-Adobe Flash feud helps video solutions companies," Whatcott noted that the video format war has been "really great for business," and has pushed companies like his to innovate solutions for the iPad. He added that, "our customers want their sites to be seen by everyone now, not later."
Brightcove Chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a press release announcing the new solution and partnership with FreeWheel:
"While we have seen tremendous interest from our customers in rolling out HTML5 video experiences, the ability to effectively monetize the content has been hurdle for early adopters. Together with FreeWheel, we are committed to helping these customers extend their ad-supported strategies to every screen and capitalize on the fast-growing audiences using HTML5 devices."
Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel added:
"It's clear that HTML5 will become a pervasive standard for Web video and we are excited to partner with companies like Brightcove to bring this advertising solution to our clients."
Brightcove's online video platform is used by major publishers like The New York Times, the Discovery Channel, A&E and Sony Pictures, and offers publishers a way to publish video across the web, mobile and connected TV platforms. FreeWheel's clients include Turner Broadcasting (TBS, CNN, TNT), the Discovery Channel, Major League Baseball and CBS.
Both companies are privately held and each recently raised new rounds of funding in April 2010. FreeWheel raised $16.8 million from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, and existing investors, Turner Broadcasting System, Battery Ventures, and Foundation Capital bringing the company’s total funding close to $30 million. Brightcove raised $12 million in a fourth round of funding bringing their total funding to more than $100 million, and according to PaidContent.org has been talking about an IPO as soon as next year.
About Brightcove
Brightcove is a cloud-based online video platform. Media companies, businesses and organizations worldwide use Brightcove to publish and distribute video on the Web. Founded in 2004, Brightcove has offices across North America, Europe and Asia and customers in 42 countries. For more information, visit http://www.brightcove.com.
About FreeWheel
FreeWheel offers the most formidable system for digital video ad management and monetization. Built from the ground up by a handful of former DoubleClick executives, FreeWheel's solution-set has already armed companies like Turner Broadcasting System, Warner Brothers, CBS, VEVO, Discovery Communications, and others with the tools and services necessary to make more money from their video content. For more information, please visit: http://www.freewheel.tv/. Follow the company on Twitter @FreeWheeldotTV.
After much anticipation, big news came from the Google i/O developers conference today as Google announced the release of the VP8 video codec as a royalty free open source license. The announcement is aimed at making high-quality, open video freely available to everyone as noted by Google's vice president of product marketing Sundar Pichai who said, “We think video should be a great, free and an open option for all.”
Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch appeared at the i/O conference, and said Adobe will be incorporating VP8 into Flash, "We'll push it out to a billion people within a year of the release."
Notably absent from the list of supporters is Apple which backs H.264. But Microsoft, on the other hand who recently announced support for H.264-encoded HTML5 video in IE9, just followed up with an announcement that the company will support VP8 as well.
WebM defines the file container structure or container format. Video streams are compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska (.mkv) container and will have a .webm extension. VP8 uses 14 bits for width and height, so the maximum resolution is 16384x16384 pixels. VP8 places no constraints on framerate or datarate. Google, Mozilla and Opera are all adding WebM support to their browsers and all videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube after May 19th will be be encoded in WebM as part of its HTML5 experiment.
Google acquired the VP8 codec, when it bought the video codec company On2 Technologies last year for $124m and ultimately threw in an extra $26.5m for a total of $133m. Ryan Lawler broke the story last month that Google would open source VP8 at the annual developers conference. Many have speculated that this move would cause major disruptions within the online video space, and ultimately challenge H.264 as the de facto web video standard for HTML5.
Over the last several months HTML5 and H.264 video have been gaining momentum as an emerging standard for online video, spurred on by the announcement earlier this year of Apple's new iPad. The device will be available to those who pre-ordered early later this week on April 3rd, and new orders will ship in two weeks. It has been touted by Apple as the future model for online publishers, even though like its predecessors the iPod touch and iPhone, it doesn't support Flash. Apple pre-sold 120,000 units on the first day, with 51,000 of them purchased in the first two hours on sale, and analysts predict that 10 million will be sold in 2010.
There has been a great deal of discussion on why Apple chose to exclude Flash, which has been the dominant format for video on the web with Flash Video having approximately 75% market-share for online video. But according to Steve Jobs, Flash is a "CPU Hog" that would drain the iPad's battery and it's "full of security holes". In speaking with the Wall Street Journal he reportedly said, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology," and suggested the WSJ to abandon Flash for the H.264 codec.
Jan Ozer though recently disputed the "CPU Hog" comment, and ran a series of tests and found that Flash actually was not a CPU Hog. He noted that Apple blocks Flash from accessing hardware acceleration which helps with efficient video playback. Fair or not, the turf wars wage on with all the big players Apple, Google, Adobe and Microsoft taking sides and looking to expand their market-share. See Tim Siglin's post, Commentary: Working Around the Web, where he provides some great commentary on Apple's "pure HTML" approach vs. Adobe "standards-based" plug-in approach. While Flash is not going away for the foreseeable future, up and down the stack the online video industry is adapting to HTML5 as an emerging standard, and the opportunity that the iPad brings, with a number of announcements made in the last few days.
Brightcove unveiled its new Brightcove Experience for HTML5 -- a framework for publishing and delivering interactive and advertising-supported Web video for HTML5-compatible devices. The platform is available free to Brightcove's more than 1,000 customers and provides support for intelligent device detection, playlist rendering, and transcoding and playback of H.264 video content from Adobe Flash video, analytics tracking, social sharing controls, advertising insertion, and other capabilities. Customers who are using Brightcove's HTML5 solution include Time Inc. and the New York Times (a Brightcove investor).Brightcove says it's platform agnostic and has been supporting HTML5 and H.264 since 2008.
Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer said:
"The Brightcove Experience for HTML5 fills the gap between the current playback capabilities of the emerging standard and what our customers need to operate successful online video businesses."
A few days prior, Brightcove rival Ooyala announced that it will support full video delivery to iPad when it launches on April 3rd. For over a year, Ooyala has had iPhone support in the form of an intelligent video embed lets the Ooyala player automatically recognize each device and adjust video quality and format for the best possible viewing experience.
According to Bismarck Lepe, President of Product:
"The iPad is more than just another connected device. It's an innovation that will drive new ideas in portability and personalized media."
Kyte announced an iPad SDK and HTML5 support for developing Kyte-powered iPad apps for distribution through the Apple iTunes App Store, as well as web-based support for the iPad through a new, universal embed code that outputs HTML5 video. The new SDK and HTML5 support provides customers with the flexibility and choice to build native iPad applications, or extend compatibility of their new or existing Kyte-powered websites to the iPad.
Gannon Hall, COO, Kyte said:
"Representing the next phase in media delivery and Internet connected devices, the iPad is a platform every video publisher needs to plan for," "Kyte has long been focused on delivering innovative, forward looking functionality that gives video publishers the ability to reach and engage audiences no matter where they are. Our support for HTML5 and our release of an SDK for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch is the next step in this progression."
Like Ooyala and Kyte, Delve Networks announced that it too will support full video delivery to iPad when the tablet device launches. Customers will be able to content for their iPad readers using the same easy-to-use Delve video platform where they currently manage their website videos.
Encoding.com, one of the companies in particular best suited to cash-in on the need for HTML5 video transcoding services. today announced support for HTTP Live Streaming for Apple's iPhone, iPod touch, and the soon to be released iPad mobile devices. HTTP streaming enables publishers to provide users with a better video experience by continuously adapting the video stream in real-time to match the user's available bandwidth.
"The Codec format war that's been brewing between apple, Google, and Flash and all of that together has created a perfect storm for a business like ours where we're automating a very complex process and taking it off the plates of our clients. We're making it simple for our customers and, timing-wise, our new service couldn't be better situated
Limelight Networks announced it will support rich media content delivery to the iPad on day one of the product availability. Customers of the Limelight REACH and Limelight ADS services will automatically have their mobile distribution and monetization services updated for the new device, enabling them to present a brilliant and properly formatted media experience to purchasers of the widely anticipated tablet.
"We will be formatting content for the best playback experience on those shiny new Apple toys. And the best part? We’re not reinventing the wheel here or coming up with a new application just for the iPad launch. Our existing technology and infrastructure is specifically designed to adapt content for delivery to any new devices that pop up. Our targeted delivery profiles change, but the process stays the same. Which means we’ve got you covered not only for the Apple iPad, but also for whatever product launch event comes next." - Apple iPad – We’ve Got You Covered, The Limelight blog
Rounding out the announcements is MeFeedia with its HTML5 video pre-roll solution. Currenty, the All Player™ platform powers over 50 million monthly video ads across web and mobile devices (including where flash is not supported) and can show video ads to any browser that supports HTML5 natively.
Look for more announcements in the days to come as well as more on the format wars. In particular, the tensions have also been building between Apple and Google, and Google fired back the other day with the announcement that their Chrome browser will ship with an integrated Flash Player plug-in.
Trying to keep up with latest video workflows, video codecs, algorithms and the variety of delivery methods for multiple screens can be a daunting task for anyone. Even the experts agree that the process and tools for video content creation, management and delivery is constantly changing – and can be a challenge to master, let alone understand. Not only do we have to know about every possible screen size and resolution, device and platform, network bandwidth connections and constantly shifting “standards" to deliver any content, anytime, anywhere and on any device.
