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."
How long has it been since you've had an Internet tune up? Are you using the same Internet router that you've been using for years? Are you getting the biggest bang for your buck on your Internet service package? In our online world where network services and work are interconnected, I recently did a tune up of my home network, and after numerous complaints of dropped Zoom calls and low network speeds, let's just say, it's been life changing.
It's faster and more stable and reduced the FOMO related to not being able to get online. For so many students who moved to online learning there has to be a solid stable Internet connection. For remote workers who’ve been working at home for years now quality of service is a must to get the job done. After tuning up my home network, I was able to get a significant boost in service. If you haven’t done a tuneup in a while, I highly recommend that you do this for yourself. Why put up with terrible service? Your family, your coworkers, your colleagues and managers will all be appreciate your initiative and your online video and live streaming experience will be better.
As I was researching the subject based on my own experience, I found some helpful and practical tips in Nelson Aguilar’s article, “Boost Your Internet for Free: My Secrets to High-Speed at Home”. He talks about planning when you move do some research before you relocate and upgrade or shop around for The best service.
For streaming, you may not know it, but you might be sacrificing quality for convenience if you’re using Wi-Fi rather than a wired, ethernet connection directly to your router. See this article from Hailee Seltzer’s article, “What I Discovered Testing Wi-Fi vs. Ethernet Performance in My New Place” for an in-depth review on why you should be using an Ethernet connection for video streaming. She found extremely higher rates and quality of service than Wi-Fi by using a wired Ethernet connection.
Speed test by Ookla
My home office Internet speed vastly improved with a new Xfinity XFi Gateway and upgraded service. My old router couldn’t even handle the amount of data throughput that I had been paying for which was just a big waste of money each month. I’m now getting download speeds over 900 Mbps and upload 40 Mbps on the wired connection. AT&T fiber is available in my service area with speeds up to 5 Gbps at the introductory cost which is more than my Xfinity triple play monthly service cost. So, I’m not ready to make that jump and switch services at this time. The one gigabit per second AT&T fiber service is the same monthly cost as my Xfinity package, which includes television and a landline service. This recent Forbes article compares the cost and services of broadband service providers, “ Best Internet providers of July 2024.”
While searching for a good thumbnail for this blog post I used copilot to search this topic which generated the following tips.
When it comes to tuning up your home network, think of it like giving your Wi-Fi a thorough checkup. Here are some practical steps you can take to speed up, stabilize, and secure your Wi-Fi:
Check Wi-Fi Channels: Ensure that you and your neighbors are not all using the same Wi-Fi channel. Overlapping channels can cause interference. Use tools like Wi-Fi analyzer apps to find the least congested channel and adjust your router settings accordingly.
Optimize Wi-Fi Settings: Explore your router’s settings. Adjust the channel width (20 MHz for less interference, 40 MHz for more speed), enable Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritize certain devices or applications, and update firmware for security and performance improvements.
Secure Your Network: Change the default Wi-Fi password to a strong, unique one. Also, consider enabling WPA3 encryption for better security.
One of the biggest stories of 2011 is what the future of television will look like as service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and content aggregators all jockey for the prime position in your living room. One company seeking to help consumers "cut the cord" is Seattle-based ivi, an online cable company, and it's been embroiled in a lawsuit with broadcasters seeking to stop it from rebroadcasting their content online. Earlier this year in February, a New York federal judge ruled that ivi was infringing on broadcasters copyrights by not paying retransmission fees and ordered ivi to shut down.
Todd Weaver, CEO and founder of ivi, has been working on an appeal to overturn the ruling and says that ivi is not breaking the law, but fighting the same fight that as cable did when they first started and fought the broadcasters, and then satellite 25 years later fought the broadcasters and ivi is now the third source of distribution, fighting the broadcasters.
ivi launched its disruptive subscription-based Internet TV service in September 2010 as an alternative to cable and over-the-air TV. ivi TV subscribers could download ivi's player and pay $4.99 a month and had access to 70 channels of network TV stations – including ABC, NBC Universal, CBS and 60 other major network affiliated and owned-and-operated stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. However, a week after its launch, ivi received cease and desist letters from the major broadcasters claiming copyright infringement, and demanded immediate removal of the over-the-air channels.
Can ivi be defined as an Internet "cable system"?
Todd Weaver, CEO and founder of ivi, says that broadcasters are distorting their claim that his company is violating copyright law.
"The purpose of copyright law is to strike a balance between protecting copyright holders' rights and fostering innovative methods of disseminating the copyrighted works to the public," argues Weaver. "The ivi TV system was specifically designed to conform to the compulsory licensing provisions of the Copyright Act, which ensures that the networks' statutory copyright protections are maintained while simultaneously offering consumers a revolutionary new method to watch television." (From Ivi TV: Looking forward to moving court case along - FierceOnlineVideo)
Weaver says that ivi is an online cable company, according to the 1976 U.S. copyright law that defines a “cable system” which consists of “a facility” that “receives signals transmitted or programs broadcast by one or more television stations… and makes secondary transmissions of such signals or programs by wires, cables, microwaves, or other communications channels to subscribing members of the public who pay for such service.” (From Memo To TV Networks: FilmOn And ivi TV Are Different Companies | paidContent)
Weaver asserts that ivi pays royalties to the Copyright Office (the payment for a Section 111 compulsory license) and that Congress wrote the statute deliberately broad to accommodate new technologies.
"The U.S. Copyright Office is paid by 16,000 cable systems, including ivi, for a license that clearly states it is a non-infringing act to retransmit broadcast signals. That royalty payment is then dispersed to all the broadcasters whose signals were retransmitted. The license and payment gives every cable system the right to retransmit legally, including ivi. While the congressionally enacted U.S. Copyright Law defines ivi as a cable system and provides a license for legal retransmission, the FCC does not have a classification for ivi, due to the nature of ivi's Internet distribution. Even though ivi is in full compliance with copyright law, we don't have the same assurances and benefits as other cable companies because no category exists within the FCC to classify ivi at this time, a fact the FCC fully acknowledges." (From Copyright vs. FCC vs. The Industry: ivi.TV slices through a Gordian Knot - FierceIPTV)
Revolutionizing Content: Is TV Everywhere Going Anywhere?
I caught up with Weaver at OTT Con earlier this year where he discussed what the PayTV operator and online video experience will look like in the OTT era.
"Over-the-top, or OTT, has been an merging market for some time and that market has been stifled by a number of issues, and today, those issues primarily relate to content."
Weaver says that the industry has overcome the technical hurdles of content protection and delivery across multiple devices, and while issues of scale still persist, it's really content that has a number of hurdles to overcome for an OTT provider to carry it on the Internet. One of which is the percentage penetration, where content owners, like ESPN which the most expensive cable channel that's out there, or all the way down to the Hallmark channel which is the least expensive channel, are in various tiers that relate to percentage penetration, and the larger the percentage penetration a cable channel has the more it can charge, which in turn is passed along to subscribers. That's a bubble that's going to burst, says Weaver, and that's something existing OTT providers have to address.
"Do they adopt that model? Or do they have content owners agree to another model? Content owners actually control an awful lot of that, so do they want their content available on every single device, not protected or do they want it protected? The good news is that we're at least to the point when content owners are starting to consider this."
One fear that content owners are grappling with is the "cannibalization" of their existing cable TV subscriptions with their Internet subscriptions. As more content moves online, Weaver says, content owners will to figure out the pricing models and OTT providers are going to have to either educate or cooperate with content owners to set and adjust prices to help settle out the disturbance in that area.
It is obvious that the future of television is the Internet, says Weaver:
"The outcome is entirely related to contracts that the content owners have with their existing distribution, and the control in which they want to keep."
But there isn't a direct line in the sand drawn, he says, since different terms apply for the different content owners, since they all negotiate their contracts at different times. So there is no set date that all content will be available online across all devices.
"It is going to happen, that's an inevitability, the question is when, and when applies directly to what those contracts are."
ivi continues to fight the injunction from earlier this year and has Weaver appealed to Internet for help in a recorded message and launched campaign to raise funds for its legal battle on Indiegogo.com. Weaver says that the impact of its appeal will shape the future of Internet TV.
"Our case is going to decide if the Internet will compete with Cable and Satellite. If we win, all popular channels will be able to be carried on the Internet immediately and you can cancel your high cable bill and watch online. If we lose, the Internet will probably never compete directly with Cable and Satellite, and you will be stuck with your current cable company, forever paying outrageous fees for a lot of programming that you probably don't even watch."
About ivi
ivi TV endeavors to make the world a better place by providing a high-quality viewing experience while offering consumers what they want in the way they want it, with more choices, less hardware, and higher standards than other modes of online content delivery. At the same time, ivi TV increases eyeballs for channels and advertisers, continuing and adding to the live television tradition in an innovative and sustainable manner. Consumers, broadcasters and advertisers alike will agree that live television, most notably sports and news programming, is here to stay. The solution is ivi TV. And the time is now. ivi, Inc., is based in Seattle. For more information, please visit http://www.ivi.tv.
We're in the end game of the of the great unbundling of video services, says Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, as next generation television channels shift from traditional models to IPTV video networks. Experts agree that the overall TV experience and PayTV business model will see dramatic changes over the next five years. The emergence of cloud-based services, OTT (over-the-top) content delivery, multi-screen entertainment, and the unbundling services are all driving that change.
I caught up with Louderback recently at the TV Next Con 2011 where he spoke on the executive panel session, Executive Panel Discussion, "MSO, Satellite and Telco Operator 2.0 – The Rise of the Next Gen Service Provider". He shared some of his thoughts on the changing video landscape and the great unbundling of services.
The Great Unbundling
The internet is all about unbundling, says Louderback and the print and music industries have been unbundled. Why buy the entire newspaper or magazine when you can read it for free online, or buy a CD when you buy the track online you want from iTunes or Amazon? According to Louderback, Cable TV is next.
Louderback says, "We’re in the early days of a great unbundling of services from transport. Over the past 30 years, TV services and the cables they run upon have been inextricably linked — you paid your cable bill, and got wire and channels together… I see these unbundled cable services giving way to direct relationships between video content providers and customers." (from How YouTube Wins in the Great Unbundling of Cable TV : Jim Louderback)
Louderback maintains, that within the next few years most of the video we consume will be delivered over an open IP network, ending the long monopoly of proprietary services delivered through cable, satellite and broadcast streams. But even though our favorite shows will be delivered mostly on-demand, we'll still have bundles of services - but it will just be offered in new ways.
"Every screen, every glowing rectangle in your life is a television. You're going to want to watch television on it, and the viewers that watch Revision3 very clearly tell us that they don't care about the screen size."
Viewers are going to watch video on the best screen available. When they're on the go, they may want to watch Epic Mealtime on their cell phone, but when they get home they'll want to watch it on a big screen. Louderback says that those two things – all video delivered over IP networks, and on any screen – leads to what he call "the great unbundling."
All these video services will be delivered direct to all these screens wherever they are all around the world that provides, "anytime, anywhere, any device, any session, so session shifting joins time shifting and place shifting and devices shifting." But the really interesting thing Louderback sees happening is that everything is going direct to consumer.
Super-Premium Channels, Super-Premium Bundles and Premium Independents = The Future of TV?
Louderback sees three distinct services emerging that he calls: Super-Premium Channels, Super-Premium Bundles and Premium Independents.
"Right now," he says, "your video services, your channels are bundled to the transport. So you get cable, you buy the network and you buy the video channels – that's all starting to break apart. In this IP world, I believe we're going to have types or three tiers of services."
Netflix is one Super Premium Channel, he says, and HBO is well positioned to be the second. "These single brand services provide libraries of unique and aggregated content to consumers for between $8 and $20 a month." He thinks Showtime, Epix and Amazon have potential and Hulu's future is uncertain.
Louderback says that as TV Everywhere matures, Super Premium Bundles will emerge and be offered directly to consumers from the likely suspects: Time Warner, ABC/Disney, NBC/Comcast, Viacom and Fox. These five companies will build direct billing relationships with consumers and offer a broad set of networks and shows that will appeal widely across all demographics, "and will deliver a mostly on-demand service over traditional broadband networks - with live sports, news and other events serving as anchors."(From MediaPost Publications Get Ready for the Great Video Unbundling 09/21/2011)
He says YouTube now wants to be the sixth Super Premium Bundle of services delivered direct to the consumer via IP, sitting at the same level as Time Warner, ABC/Disney, NBC/Comcast, Viacom and Fox. YouTube has been reinventing itself for some time, with its recent announcement of new channels of original entertainment coming to YouTube by A-lister stars and content producers from the TV, film, music, news, and sports fields Hollywood, its complete overhaul of the site today into a more TV-centric channel design, and that it now serves 3.5 billion videos each month, it's clear that Google wants to take on the traditional broadcast and cable networks. According to Louderback, "They want to be the Mall of America for video, with folks like us and the other independents as anchor tenants."
Louderback sees a huge opportunity for Premium Independents to build billion dollar businesses as content becomes unbundled from transport. These are companies like Revision3, Blip.tv, Ion, BBC America, the Hallmark Channel and others, that offer free programming over IP direct to consumers and they look very different from today's independent cable networks.
"In the end it's all about shelf space. All of us are racing to build a session-shifting experience that lives as an icon across everything from the smallest smart-phone to the biggest smart TV. Because in the next five years if it's a glowing rectangle, then it is a video consumption device - or what we used to call a TV." (From MediaPost Publications Get Ready for the Great Video Unbundling 09/21/2011)
About Jim Louderback Jim Louderback, Chief Executive Officer, Revision3
Launched and managed operations at cable channels, magazines, websites and online video companies including Ziff-Davis, TechTV, PC Magazine and ExtremeTech.com. He started his career at JPMorgan Chase, and has also done work for Pepsi, National Semiconductor and Citibank. He's been CEO of Revision3 since 2007, and has guided the company to profitability and more than 40 million views a month. Jim has an MBA from The Stern School at NYU, and a BS in Mathematics from the University of Vermont. He is a fan of cooking, music, movies, companies with extraneous letters in their names and anything with a 3 in it. Follow @jlouderb
What is cord cutting? The term cord cutting is commonly used to describe the trend of consumers who cancel their cable and satellite television subscriptions and "cut the cord" in favor of receiving their television programming from Over-the-Top Television (OTT) solutions available through the Internet. While this is a growing trend fueled in part from the wide availability of content from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and millions of other video sites, there is an existential crisis facing the telcos (telephone companies) and cable companies, also known as MSOs (Multiple System Operators), that could threaten the continued growth of the next generation television industry.
I spoke with my friends at Skytide, an Oakland, California-based company specializing in performance analytics for large scale content delivery and digital media providers, to get an inside perspective on the current situation. According to Roy Peterkofsky, Skytide's VP of Product Management, this issue came bubbling to the headlines in the mainstream press with the news that Netflix accounts for 20 percent of network traffic at peak times in the U.S. along with the feud between Comcast and Level 3, which is all about the impact of that amount of traffic on the ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
Peterkofsky pointed out that in the Comcast vs. Level 3 feud, Comcast is wearing its ISP hat and not its hat as a cable paid TV operator. Comcast claims that it's being swamped by all the traffic coming from Level 3, the ISP that serves as the backbone of Netfix's content delivery. Level 3 says that Comcast is charging unfair fees for the right to send data to its subscribers. As video consumption continues to grow at astonishing rates that could occupy 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2014 – that's a lot of traffic getting dumped on the ISPs of the world and is generally uncompensated traffic.
Peterkofsky noted that if you look at the historical context of the companies that are ISPs, which tend to be the telephone company and the cable company, you really start to see what a huge existential crisis this may turn out to be. He explained that once upon a time you had only one line that came to the house and that was your telephone line. Back then the telcos once held a monopoly because the telephone was a necessity. Consumers were locked in either through a governmental or regulatory monopoly and the telcos could upsell them on other services like long distance plans, voice mail, call waiting and Internet access.
At some point this other line got hooked up to your house, which was the cable line, but it was no big deal to the telcos because cable was only for video entertainment and never in a million years did the telcos think they would ever have anything to do with video entertainment. Peterkofsky said, that was before deregulation, competitive access, cable companies offering the triple-play which included the Internet and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone services and before mobile phones and people thinking they didn't need a landline anymore. It was obvious that the the core revenue source of telcos was under attack.
Peterkofsky clarified:
"You hear the term cord cutting thrown around a lot lately, but it's generally used in relation to cable companies, and it cant be taken literally. Because it usually talks about people who are going to stop paying the pay TV subscription but they would still keep the cable line typically as their ISP in order to bring in the OTT video services that allow them to no longer want their pay TV service. So it's not literally cutting the cord. But if you look at the situations that the telcos are facing, you could take the term cord cutting quite literally. Because a lot of people just have no need for the telephone company anymore and they could completely sever that relationship; and once the telco loses that customer relationship they lose that ability to upsell you on more and more services – that's their whole growth model completely out the window."
Peterkofsky said that some telcos have started to offer IPTV services over their networks to regain some of that revenue turning the tables on the cable industry that was once the nemesis of the telcos, and now finds itself under fire from two directions – the IPTV services and the OTT video services that lead to what is typically referred to as cord cutting. So, in many ways the telcos and MSOs are in the same boat dealing with loss of revenues from subscribers canceling their services and the uncompensated cost of delivering OTT video content which continues to rise.
"What you have there is a cost-revenue squeeze, and that is why I call it an existential crisis."
A disruptive solution
So, what can they do about it?
Peterkofsky pointed out two options:
find a way to make it compensated
reduce the impact of it as a cost driver.
He described that the second option is one that many network operators have figured out that they could through something called, transparent proxy or reverse caching, where an ISP will use caching on its servers to de-duplicate traffic traversing their network.
One example of this could be any popular movie available from Netflix's Instant streaming catalog that may have originally come from a CDN can be stored locally on the near end of the ISP network closer to the end user, and all other requests are served from that same cached file, rather than making another file request or thousands of requests to the CDN serving up the original content.
So buying a few servers to cached with is a great way for ISPs to reduce their network costs and much more cost effective then building out their networks by laying more fiber lines. But if this approach becomes more widespread and on a greater scale, Peterkofsky said, "you might start to see some interesting second order effects."
Effects which Peterkofsky said, can become highly disruptive for the CDN industry. Since the ISPs can use local caching to reduce the amount of traffic traversing over the Akamai, Limelight or other CDN's network, they can disrupt the revenue models between the content owners and CDNs, which are structured primarily on the amount of content delivered over the network. So if you're a content owner, Peterkofsky said, "you're either paying a whole lot of money for a whole lot of nothing, or you may just not be paying."
A classic case of disintermediation
Peterkofsky maintained that the ISPs decide to get into the CDN business they offer a couple of key advantages over the incumbents in the space. One is a cost advantage because they own the underlying network, not the Akamai and Limelights of the world that lease their bandwidth from network owners and tack on their own margin.
According to Peterkofsky:
"This is classic disintermediation. This is cutting out the middle man. Network owner providing the CDN services themselves."
ISPs also have a serious quality advantage over CDNs because ISPs own the connection or "last mile" all the way to your house and can provide better Quality of Service (QoS) through deeper caching. This becomes more important when you're talking about online video taking the place of conventional cable and satellite TV because QoS directly affects viewer engagement.
Overall, Peterkofsky thinks that the cost and quality advantages that ISPs have over CDNs will drive a lot of these network services providers to running their own CDNs through an invisible CDN through transparent caching, a commercial CDN or internal CDN to support their own IPTV services or if they're a MSO, their own TV Everywhere services.
On the consumer side, Peterkofsky doesn't believe that getting consumers to pay for the added content delivery costs will work either. Comcast is trying to push the cost back in the other direction toward the content owners but at some point it will circle back to consumers, but it won't fly. However, as Peterkofsky pointed out, with the music and video industry consumers will pay for content if it's convenient and inexpensive. But if it becomes too inconvenient or expensive for consumers they will either find ways to get content for free, or cancel their subscription.
Peterkofsky concluded that:
"The real solution is things that take cost out of the system by clever applications of technology."
As cord cutting continues to be a growing trend among consumers, it's likely that more ISPs move into the CDN business in 2011 and big changes in the space are expected in 2012.
About Skytide
Skytide is a privately held, venture-backed company founded in 2004 and headquartered in Oakland, California. Customers include Accenture subsidiary, Origin Digital; British Telecom; Cisco; Clear Channel Communications; Comcast subsidary, thePlaform; MTV Networks and Qwest. Skytide enables leading content delivery and digital media providers, like British Telecom and MTV Networks, to precisely measure and optimize the performance of their streaming video businesses. Its out-of-the-box reporting & analytics applications are built on top of Skytide's patented platform architecture, which devours massive amounts of highly diverse data and quickly turns it into actionable insights.
Skytide Insight for Content Delivery Networks uses server-side log data to provide CDNs and IP video networks — and their customers and business partners — with deep insight into streaming media performance.
Skytide Insight for Video Players uses client-side log data captured directly from the video player, enabling a detailed understanding of quality of service (QoS) and viewer engagement metrics.
Consolidation within the online video space has been a serious trend in 2011, and that fact was evident today with CBS announcing that it has acquired Clicker.com, the "Internet TV Guide to What's on Online" and hired Jim Lanzone as its new President of CBS Interactive, who will head up CBS Interactive's worldwide operations and roster of Internet properties, including CNET.com, TV.com, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com and Gamespot.com. Lanzone replaces outgoing President Neil Ashe, who had led CNET Networks which was sold to CBS in June 2008 for $1.8 Billion. Ashe announced in December 2010 that he would be stepping down and leaving the company once it found a successor and it looks like CBS has found the right man for the job with Lanzone and it has big plans for Clicker.
Lanzone was previously CEO of Ask.com, where he and most of his team came from and he founded Clicker in January 2009. The Los Angeles-based company was in stealth mode until it's official launched at NewTeeVee Live in November 2009, as the programming guide for this new era of television. Clicker has roughly 2.5 million monthly visitors and catalogs all broadcast programming online, along with TV-quality Web originals and contains more than 1,000,000 episodes, from over 12,000 shows, from over 2,500 networks, 30,000 movies, and 90,000 music videos from 20,000 artists. Just 3 months after it launched in February 2010 Clicker raised $11 million to build out its revenue model for lead generation. Earlier this year Mashable named Clicker one of eight top tech companies to watch in 2011. Terms of the CBS Clicker deal were not disclosed but Techcrunch noted several sources that put the deal somewhere between $50 to $100 million. Other sources cited the deal only in the tens of millions range.
"It’s been an amazing 2+ years, first in stealth as we built the product that would become Clicker, and then the past 15 months or so after we launched to the public. Clicker has built a peerless navigation and discovery experience for online programming, from core search to our proprietary recommendation engine to our social integration with Facebook. As we look to the future, CBS has the kind of platform that can take Clicker to the next level as we look to create a lasting, meaningful brand and destination."
CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves praised Lanzone a leader and innovator:
"Jim is a dynamic, creative executive who knows the interactive space and its key players. In just over a year, Jim has created one of the leading navigation and discovery tools for video programming on the Internet. Clicker's products and proprietary technologies add firepower to our existing portfolio of entertainment properties, and if we can help grow Clicker to its full potential in the years ahead, the strategic value could be tremendous."
"In making the acquisition, CBS Interactive highlighted Clicker’s recommendation engine, Clicker Predict, and its social integration with Facebook, which claims that it offers 2.5 million monthly users an “instantly personalized guide to what’s worth watching online.” Clearly, CBS will hope to leverage that to get some more views for its online video, which still remains outside of rival broadcaster-backed Hulu’s system."
"I'm sure he's a very capable executive and here's the supportive way to articulate the significance of the news: a respected internet leader will now be charged with helping move into a new, unknown and disruptive technology economy a large, century old institution, rich with accumulated history and talent for creating high-production content that speaks to hundreds of millions of people. A less charitable take on the news: A man who helped bring the cultural sedative of mainstream TV to the glorious frontier of the Internet will now be in charge of extending that winning recipe of shimmering vacuousness made web-friendly to a much larger audience."
I spoke with Lanzone last year to hear about how Clicker got started cataloging what's on online, how the website works, what actually is Clicker's revenue model and, his general thoughts on the online video and Internet television space. I've republished my interview with him from Streaming Media East 2010 below.
Also, in related news, earlier this week Rovi acquired Slidereel and launched AllRovi.com, a YouTube-like video and music site now in beta that uses a search and recommendation technology in a similar way as Clicker. Based on their activity on AllRovi.com users can receive customized recommendations, find favorites, review ratings and make new discoveries based on their entertainment preferences. Read more on: Vator.tv - Executive brief: Battle for the online remote.
About CBS Interactive
CBS Interactive is the premier online content network for information and entertainment. Its brands dive deep into the things people care most about across news, sports, entertainment, technology and business. Leading properties include CNET, CBS.com, Gamespot.com, CBSSports.com, BNet, CBSNews.com, TV.com and much more. With hundreds of millions of unique visitors from around the world each month, CBS Interactive is a global top 10 web property and the largest premium content network online.
About Clicker
Clicker is the ultimate guide to Internet television. As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers are entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Great! Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed amongst billions of random videos. Clicker culls all broadcast programming, and TV-quality Web originals, from these silos and delivers them in one seamless, organized experience so you can easily find, save, share and even contribute content for any show or episode online. Check out Clicker on Facebook or Clicker on Twitter.
I caught up with Jim Lanzone, founder and CEO of Clicker, the "TV Guide for the web", at Streaming Media East 2010, to talk about how Clicker got started cataloging what's on online, how the website works, what actually is Clicker's revenue model and, what are his general thoughts on the online video and Internet television space. Lanzone was previously CEO of Ask.com, where he and most of his team came from and he founded Clicker in January 2009. The Los Angeles-based was in stealth mode until it's official launched at NewTeeVee Live in November 2009, as the programming guide for this new era of television. Clicker catalogs all broadcast programming online, along with TV-quality Web originals and contains more than 650,000 episodes, from over 10,000 shows, from over 2,000 networks, 30,000 movies, and 80,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.
"a hybrid of many other kinds of information and entertainment sites: one part directory, one part search engine, one part Wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR. At the heart of it all is a massive structured database, created by a team of people from search, media, data and content management backgrounds."
Lanzone said that when Clicker began cataloging Internet television, no data existed. So they had to create it by plugging in their technology into every website with premium video, and then pull down and normalize all the data structures (title, description, air date, duration, actors, etc.) and automate it thereafter. Clicker's database is then able to track the videos as they disappear online or when free content moves behind paywalls.
Clicker does not do an unstructured crawl of the web or search through voice recognition, as Lanzone explained:
"It's metadata driven. Where it doesn't exist, we'll create it. So we'll actually construct a feed for a website that puts in our data structure, and that's something we actually give to websites for free just so that we're able to get it and they're able to construct a feed for it. Other sites have feeds already constructed. But we want to keep things organized.
We think to do TV Guide of the web the right way is, it's got to be comprehensive, it's got to cover everything that you'd want to watch on your 10-foot experience big screen TV, it's got to structured and organized in a way your can easily navigate and not just search for, and it has to be unbiased."
Lanzone clarified that unbiased means, that Clicker is not competing with the sites they are sending traffic to, Clicker doesn't host the videos, but they are sending you directly to the destination sites, like NBC.com, to watch the video. Lanzone said Clicker’s revenue model is based on lead generation rather than advertising and that they get paid through the unbiased referrals to paid partner sites.
"We're TV Guide, not TV. We just want to send you to the site to watch it. So we don't have the videos, so we don't have video ads and videos that we don't have."
Clicker recently announced that it now catalogs all live broadcast programming, and has also built "People Pages" that catalogs available videos of more than 75,000 actors, writers, producers and directors. So if you're a Zach Galifianakis, Tina Fey, or Felicia Day fan, you'll find it easier to see every program they've been in (that’s available to watch online), from starring roles to cameos, as well as related people. Also, at the recent Google I/O conference, Clicker launched Clicker.tv, a HTML5 interface of the website optimized for the "50-inch/10-foot viewing experience".
Lanzone commented on the current state of online video and Internet TV, with an analogy that we're in the brack (or brackish) water period between the old world of cable and the coming world of online television. He noted that there are a lot of in between solutions right now, with many different OTT solutions, boxes along with TV manufacturers, cable companies, online portals all fighting to control your experience and that the future will become more dispersed and more fragmented in terms of content providers, while destination sites, like the ABC.com iPad app will grow stronger as they consolidate the viewing experience and disintermediate (cut out the middleman) the market.
In a recent study, Clicker revealed that what's online doesn't always stay online, and the free broadcast content is only available online for a limited time. With their structured database they were able to track ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and The CW videos from the 2009-10 broadcast TV season, and found 90% of TV shows became available online, 50% of episodes came online within a day of their original air date, and 60% of episodes went offline within three weeks of their original air date.
Clicker has raised $21 million in funding since September 2009, from venture capitalists including Benchmark and Redpoint, and in a short time has branded itself as the complete programming guide for Internet television. As the market matures over the next few years, Clicker plans to be a key player in the space.
Update 7/23/2010: Clicker Launches New Social and Mobile Apps
Today, Clicker announced the launch two new brand new social and mobile apps in the form of Clicker Social, which allows you to discover, share, rate, discuss, and check-in to shows on Clicker, Facebook and Twitter and other third party partner sites. A new Clicker Check-in button can be embedded on websites and video players to help spread the word on what (and where) people are watching online. Leading online video platform providers Brightcove, Ooyala and thePlatform along with many technology sites and content partners, including PBS, Koldcast TV, Revision3, The Onion, TechCrunchTV, VatorTV, are integrating the Clicker Check-in button into their video players, extending the feature to thousands of publishers. Clicker Mobile introduces a brand new mobile experience on the Android and iPhone (coming soon) for users to connect with Clicker anywhere.
"Since day one our mission has been to help people discover what's available to watch, where to watch it, and what's worth watching in the new world of Internet television. Clicker Social now gives our users the tools to assist each other in the discovery process -- all centered around our uniquely comprehensive, unbiased, and structured guide to online programming -- while Clicker Mobile gives them the ability to connect with Clicker, and each other, from anywhere."
About Clicker
Clicker is the ultimate guide to Internet television. As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers are entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Great! Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed amongst billions of random videos. Clicker culls all broadcast programming, and TV-quality Web originals, from these silos and delivers them in one seamless, organized experience so you can easily find, save, share and even contribute content for any show or episode online. Clicker | Facebook Clicker (clicker) on Twitter
Clicker's them song: http://tr.im/Q39C
About Jim Lanzone Jim has spent the past 13 years in the Internet industry, starting as co-founder of a startup called eTour and most recently serving as CEO of search engine Ask.com. In between he had adventures with such colorful characters as Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri and a butler named Jeeves. After leaving Ask in 2008, Jim took a position as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures, the investors behind companies like MySpace, Tivo and Netflix, and got the bug to start a company again. He called a few of his former Ask compadres, added some new ones, and got to work building Clicker. Jim grew up in San Carlos, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. He likes to brag that he went to the same high school as Barry Bonds and Tom Brady, and by all accounts it appears to be true. Jim holds a BA from UCLA and a JD/MBA from Emory University. Jim Lanzone (jlanzone) on Twitter
Additional interviews with Jim Lanzone on Vator.tv
