Skytide's 7 Online Video Trends to Watch in 2012

In a recent white paper, 7 Online Video Trends to Watch in 2012, online video management analytics company Skytide outlined the emerging trends in the online video industry and the content delivery supply chain that serves it. If the last few years were any indicator of the hockey stick affect of rapid change within the video sector, 2012 promises to be full of twists and turns and major and disruptions. While predictions are a dime a dozen, they have much more relevance when coming from an industry expert and authority on the subject. I caught up with Patrick Hurley, VP of Marketing of the Oakland, California-based Skytide, and author of the white paper, to get an insider perspective on their online traffic projections, federated CDNs and why Telco CDNs will dramatically change the content delivery market. The white paper has been very well received, as Hurley noted, since it was first posted on Slideshare late last year where it's currently accumulated over 8,000 views to date and was featured among their 12 best presentations with predictions for 2012. It is also the number one search result on Google for video trends.



1. Online video traffic will continue to soar

Skytide says the first trend to watch in 2012 is that online via traffic will continue to soar. Hurley admits that while this is no big surprise, they have data to back that up, including Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI) that forecasts online video will account for 90% of all consumer IP traffic by 2013 and a compound annual growth of 32% from 2010-2015. Skytide's own large Tier 1 customers are very bullish on this and have seen growth rates exceed all industry expectations. Skytide is even more bullish and believes that it's possible for the coming years that online video traffic will grow 50% or more annually.

"The implications for that are really significant, for the Telcos and Communications Service Providers (CSPs)," explains Hurley. "Because that could compound an already serious problem that they have. They're caught in a vicious cycle."

The cycle starts with the fact that their legacy businesses (landline, telephony, etc.) which used to be their cash cows are really declining quickly and they can't count on them anymore. At the same time, consumers continue to have this insatiable appetite for online video, but that demand requires that the big Telcos, ISPs and CDNs invest heavily in capital expenditures to support their infrastructure. That would be great, if they could recoup those costs, but the problem is, the only thing their getting from online video consumers is a very modest monthly fee, which is your ISP bill, so they aren't able to monetize their capital expenditures.

Hurley says that CSPs need to extricate themselves from this vicious cycle and pursue new strategies. One of the trends we saw in 2011 will continue into 2012, says Hurley, and that is that the Telcos and cable companies are going to get into the content delivery business, which is an inherent strengths they can leverage as owners of the network infrastructure with direct relationships with end users and content owners. That helps them on both sides of the ledger and create new revenue streams.

2. Telco CDNs will make big waves

Owning the network is the biggest advantage that the Telcos have because they control the Quality of Service (QoS) over the last mile, and more importantly, there's a cost savings component there as well. In particular, CDNs like Akamai and Limelight have to lease the bandwidth from the network operator, and network operators don't have that issue.

Based on those advantages, we'll be seeing more of that in the next year, which leads to Skytide's next prediction, that Telco CDNs will make big waves in 2012. Over the last several years the Telcos have waded in the CDN waters slowly, but now they're diving in head first. Some of the world’s largest telcos have now deployed their own CDNs, which is diminishing the dominance of pure-play CDNs. Companies from outside the space (Amazon, Google) are getting into the CDN business and the trend by major content providers (Yahoo, Microsoft, Google) to operate their own in-house CDNs. Dan Rayburn lists many of them on his blog here: Updated List Of Carriers, Telcos and Pure-Play Companies In The CDN Business | StreamingMediaBlog.com.

3. Federated CDNs will finally shift from  
    concept to reality

The third prediction is that Federated CDNs will finally shift from concept to reality in 2012. This has been a hot topic of discussion at content delivery conferences over the last year, and Hurley says that's for good reason. As Federated CDNs move from concept to reality, it will cause a seismic shift in the CDN market.

"CDN Federation stands to be very disruptive, giving service providers an unprecedented opportunity to compete directly with market leaders like Akamai and Limelight in the global CDN arena."

In June of 2011, Dan Rayburn announced on his blog that a group of telcos had founded an Operator Carrier Exchange (OCX) to formalize the process and standards of interconnecting their content delivery networks. Just a few months later, Cisco announced at the CDN World Summit that it had completed a CDN interconnection pilot with several tier 1 telco providers (BT, KDDI, Orange, SFR and Telecom Italia).

In my conversation with Hurley, he skipped over the following three trends, but encouraged people to download the white paper to read more about how they'll be taking greater shape in 2012:

4. Adoption of Adaptive Bitrate protocols will grow 
5. IPTV providers & MSOs will extend reach into OTT models 
6. Multi-screen viewing will become the norm 


7. Online video advertising budgets will soar

And, finally the last trend is that online video advertising budgets will soar. Hurley says that it's created a virtuous cycle based on a confluence of factors that plays in its favor. First, technology is finally at a point where online video resolution and reliability is to the advertisers liking.

"Advertisers buy an audience," says Hurley. "They also buy adjacency to content and they have to have that in a quality experience, and that's what they're able to get now."

They're also able to to tap into new technologies like adaptive bitrate streaming which holds the promise of ad insertion into a live stream, and that mirrors the model of traditional TV advertising. But most importantly, advertisers go where the audience and the audience is increasingly going to tablets, mobile phones and laptops to watch online video. So that confluence of virtuous events is really poised make online video advertising budgets grow 27% in 2012.

To download the white paper, go to: Skytide website
Slideshare: 7 Online Video Trends to Watch in 2012

About Skytide
Skytide, the leader in Online Video Management Analytics, provides content delivery providers and digital media companies with the most complete operational view of their streaming video businesses, delivering the information necessary to make better-informed business decisions. Only Skytide's out-of-the-box analytics and reporting solutions can process massive amounts of disparate data sources and turn it into detailed reports in near real-time. Skytide is venture-backed and works with leading digital media and technology companies including: British Telecom, Broadpeak, Cisco, Clear Channel Communications, HP, Juniper Networks, Telecom Argentina, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telstra.

Update  2/21/2012: Revised copy, added numbers 1-7.

Getting Online Video to Measure Up - Dan Piech, comScore

2010 was massive year of growth for online video, throughout the industry and the way consumers accessed video content. Analysts are seeing a sharp rise in online video viewing compared to traditional television, which has huge implications for online video advertising and marketing. Digital media measurement firm comScore noted in its “The 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” that eCommerce spending in 2010 grew 9% to $227 billion in sales. Social networking site continue to drive views as audiences build, share and engage on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. For businesses, there's no other tool more important than online video analytics to capture how your video content is consumed on the web.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst with comScore says, the best way online video publishers and marketers create and sustain value is through differentiation, and the way you do that is through your data.

"It's not just about understanding your audience," Piech says, "but then putting together a pitch that sells that audience to advertisers."

Piech says that online publishers will not have the reach of a television audience, and for small publishers it will be even harder. So he suggests that publishers find that niche audience, develop it and sell that niche based on what you've learned about it from your metrics, because the agencies are not going to do that for you. He says that digital market intelligence services like comScore help you better understand your audience.

comScore believes that they have the most accurate methodology for measuring digital media. Each month, the digital media measurement firm comScore releases its Online Video Rankings from its Video Metrix service, with the most recent comScore May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings, that showed 83.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience (176 million) watched online video content in May for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer. Video ads accounted for 12.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

How comScore gets at the data is a secret sauce merged from two sources. The first source is a panel of two million Internet users worldwide that they track their behavior. One aspect of that behavior is watching videos. So they're able to understand where they are watching videos, how long they're watching videos, get a good sense of unique viewers , and project that to the total populations. The second source is census-level data collection method, commonly referred to as unified digital measurement, and comScore works with all the top publishers in the video and media space to get that data. In the method, publishers send data every time a video is viewed.

"By that we're able to get a very census-level, total population look at the video activity on that site," Piech says. "and furthermore, break that video activity down to very granular levels."

As an example, for clients like NBC, CBS or MTV, comScore is able to break down how people are engaging with those shows on a a census level from that unified digital measurement, as well as on the panel. Like Nielsen, comScore tracks that activity across all screens and as Piech notes

"Obviously we're paying close attention to the cross-media space and the three screen developments that are taking place. Because at the end of the day, content is king, as you always hear and to the extent that that's the case, we have to follow that content wherever it goes."

Piech says, currently that's mostly online but we're at a turning point in the space where mobile and OTT are growing very fast. So comScore is working on developing the indicators to know where the space will be in five years, mostly through surveys that help forecast audience perceptions. In a recent survey, comScore was working to understand the level of ad loads that users would be willing to watch, or rather willing to endure. What they found was that online viewers are perfectly willing to watch twice as many ads for their content. Piech says that when it comes down to it, the numbers are people, and by putting a face to the numbers puts an emphasis not just on numbers, but attitudinal changes happening in the space which helps publishers better understand how their content is consumed so they can best monetize it moving forward.




As the current trends in online video continue to show massive growth, so does the opportunities for online video publishers and marketers. Many analysts say that for the last several years we've reached a tipping point for online video.

"We've reached a state in the online video space now where almost everyone online is watching video at some point in the month," says Piech, "so we've now got that reach. But what's interesting that we're finding out is that now that everyone is watching online video, people are starting to watch a lot more."

He says it's more than doubled in the last year and is fascinated by the trend, because online video is still a small part of the overall activity of any individual day as compared to television, but what's happening is that's growing incredibly fast. Engagement levels are up, number of videos views are up and that's across all demographics and all across the board, and it's happening at a very high rate.

"So if you do a simple extrapolation that, in the very near future where online video is a major, major player out there," Piech notes, "and that's what makes me really excited about the space. We're not a dying industry, we're in our birth and really high growth state which makes this a very exciting space and a space that changes quickly."

This interview in this post was conducted at the Online Video Platform Summit where Piech was a panelist on the session, Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics. He was joined by an all-star panel that examined what type of important data you should be collecting and how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Piech also spoke earlier this year at OMMA Video on, The State of Online Video, where he provided a picture of today’s online video consumer which can be viewed in the video below.



Video streaming by Ustream

"Who is watching, how engaged are they and what has changed over time? Where are we seeing the biggest shifts – long-form or short-form videos? What impact is online video having on traditional TV viewing, and when it comes to online advertising how are consumers’ preferences shaping the market?"

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo. Follow comScore, Inc. (comscore) on Twitter

About Dan Piech

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President and Founder at evoxio. At comScore, Dan manages comScore’s online video measurement products and is responsible for ensuring that measurement insights support the growth and development of the online video industry. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. Follow Dan Piech (danpiech) on Twitter

Related:

• comScore Releases “The 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” - comScore, Inc
• Dan Piech of comScore: How To Best Practices Using Web Video In Green Marketing | Earth 2017
• The State of Online Video - comScore, Inc
• Cross Media Measurement - comScore, Inc
• comScore Releases May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings - comScore, Inc
• Larry Kless' Weblog: Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Without detailed information on who’s watching—not to mention where, when, for how long, and on what devices—it’s impossible to prove the business value of your video communications initiative. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach.  At the Online Video Platform Summit, this all-star panel that examines what is the important data you should be collecting and how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Paul Riismandel, session moderator, started the discussion by asking the panel, "What is the data that is most important for online video publishers? What drives ROI?"

Dan Piech of comScore, says that the most important metrics are the ones that differentiate you. What can you provide that is different from your competitors? You might have a different service, then prove it. What makes your viewers different from other viewers? Are they more engaged, in one thing more than another? That's where data helps show you those differentiation points.

According to Dan Berra of Unicast, engagement is primary metric they focus on in the advertising space. They are tracking how much are people interacting and spending time within that video environment to prove ROI to advertisers. AJ McGowen of Unicorn Media adds that the most important metrics are actionable, and helps you make good business decisions. It's not just about quality of service and did the video have a fast start of buffer, it's about the quality of the content and did people find it engaging – and for publishers it's about how to make the content better.

For Bismarck Lepe of Ooyala,  it really depends on the business case you're trying to solve to define how you measure success. Brett Wilson of TubeMogul says that in general, publishers that sell ads should care about the metrics that their advertisers care about, which is reach, audience and performance. Brand marketers aren't as interested in the real-time metrics as much as they are interested attitudinal metrics – what's the brand lift, what's the purchase intent, or recall? – and the industry could do a better job at creating standard metrics they understand.

The panel all agree that while the industry has similar measures for engagement and reach, it still needs to come together and agree on true key measures of success, even down to what is counted as a view. Data has to be meaningful for publishers to deliver the best possible viewing experience, and at the end of the day it's about a creating that personal experience with great content. It's the social nature of online video that makes it uniquely powerful.

Watch the video below for more of the discussion and to hear where we are going with video analytics, and how publishers can better track their metrics across the different screens.

Speaker bios:

Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University (Moderator)

Paul Riismandel has been working in online educational media for fifteen years, specializing in audio and video production designed for streaming. Paul is active in the educational media community as an advocate for online video and encouraging greater collaboration between the education vertical and the larger industry. He writes about these issues in the Class Act column for Streaming Media magazine. Paul is also a radio enthusiast, serving as advisor to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University, and blogging about the future of radio at RadioSurvivor.com. He also blogs and podcasts about other media stuff at mediageek.net.

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul

Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. Brett is undefeated at Risk, is the reigning Foosball champion at TubeMogul and a lousy (but aspiring) windsurfer, sailor and investor. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his MBA from the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Bismarck C Lepe, Co-founder and President of Products, Ooyala

As an Ooyala co-founder and founding CEO, Bismarck Lepe raised $10 million in funding and signed many of the company's early media partnerships before passing the baton to Jay Fulcher in 2009. Currently, as President of Product Strategy, he is responsible for marketing and driving Ooyala's product development vision. Bismarck sits on the Ooyala Board of Directors. Before co-founding Ooyala, Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager, developing and managing new products for the company's AdSense network. He launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads and Google's Intelligent Ad Server, which brought the company over $1 billion dollars in new annual revenue. Most notably, Bismarck managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising. Business Week named Bismarck one of its Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.

AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media

AJ McGowan is responsible for engineering the cutting-edge architecture that will deliver high-quality audio and video via a highly intuitive interface. Prior to Unicorn Media, AJ spent five years at Limelight Networks where as director of solutions engineering, he assisted the company's marquee customers with implementing their content delivery networks, developing best practices, and capacity planning. With a remarkable combination of intelligence and drive, AJ started his first company building high-end custom computers while still in the 8th grade. By age 14, he was an IT manager, and in between high school classes completed a highly technical token ring/mainframe to Ethernet/NT-Unix network upgrade and answered pages from distressed employees.

Dan Berra, Vice President of Business Intelligence, Unicast

Dan Berra leads Unicast’s Business Intelligence division focused on providing robust research, reporting and in-depth analysis of all Unicast-generated advertising campaigns. Under his leadership, clients gain greater insight into campaign results and the effectiveness of rich media and web video against other forms of online advertising As a respected industry veteran, Berra brings more than 12 years of experience spanning financial and marketing analysis at Dell Corporation and T3 (The Think Tank). Most recently, Berra served as the Vice President of the Customer Insight Group at T3, where he built media and search analytics teams from the ground up and created data integration process and databases tying together ad server data, web analytics and client-side data into one interface. Previous to T3 Berra served as transactional marketing manager, at Dell Corp, where he headed the development of segment-level online metrics, created forecasting models and managed transactional marketing. His expertise is in  media and web analytics and measurement,  rich media and online video, next generation web, online media planning and buying, ROI, online advertising and Third Party ad serving.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst, comScore Inc.

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President at Piech Productions. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all t>ypes, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in 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.

Related:

• Analytics, Analytics and More Analytics! | Unicorn Media Blog
• Ooyala Blog - Webinar Recap: Analytics That Drive Business Decisions
• Unicast Blog | Unicast Analytics Benchmark Report Q1 2010
• Cost-Per-Click Pricing Revolutionized Search Marketing. Our IAB Proposal to Standardize “Cost Per View” Pricing Can Do the Same for Video. | TubeMogul Blog
• comScore Announces Global Launch of Digital Analytix™, the Evolution of Web Analytics - comScore, Inc

Cord Cutting Explained: Telcos, MSOs and the Existential Crisis - A Conversation with Roy Peterkofsky, Skytide

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.

More evidence of this issue was seen even today, as AT&T announced a broadband cap of 150 GB per month for its DSL subscribers and 250 for U-Verse subscribers, which are similar caps made by Comcast and Charter back in 2009.



Telcos, MSOs and the Existential Crisis

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:

1. find a way to make it compensated 
2. 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.

Read Skytide's new white paper: The Four Keys to Telco CDN Success


Related posts:

• Skytide Sees Big Changes Within the CDN Market, Releases Insight 2.0 Reporting & Analytics Solution for CDN Providers and Resellers
• Skytide Shares Insight for Online Video Publishers, Identify the “Sweet Spot" and What is "Good Enough"

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.

Big Moves in Online Video: Ooyala Scores Yahoo! Japan

Last week Ooyala issued a major announcement that it has signed a multi-year agreement strategic relationship with Yahoo! Japan which will open up its access to 80 million users – the world's second  Internet economy. Ooyala CEO Jay Fulcher said that it's one of the largest, if not the largest industry deals at this point. Yahoo! Japan is the 12th most trafficked site in the world, and 1st for all Internet traffic in Japan – "about 60% of the Internet traffic in Japan today. The partnership paves the way for rapid evolution of the delivery, analysis and monetization of online video in the Japanese market." As far as video goes, Yahoo! Japan serves approximately 40% of its online video, about 200 million page views per day, and is growing 25% per year.

On the Ooyala blog, Fulcher wrote:

"Over time, Yahoo! Japan will standardize on Ooyala across all of its properties. They will leverage our advanced technologies for wide ranging video initiatives such as cross-platform video delivery, subscription, and advertising services. Yahoo! Japan will deliver rich video experiences on connected PCs, smartphones, tablets and ultimately TVs in the Japanese market."

Fulcher said that this deal is very complementary for both companies and Ooyala will help advance video delivery and monetization in Japan. Video is no longer just a business imperative, but a strategic imperative and the convergence is underway, as he says in this Ooyala video release:

Streaming Media industry analyst Dan Rayburn noted that this is a big customer win for Ooyala which will lead into big profits:

"While it will take time to get Yahoo! Japan up to scale, I think this deal could bring in a substantial amount of revenue for Ooyala twelve months from now. By substantial I mean multi-millions, especially since Yahoo! Japan's stream count is in the billions each year."

Rayburn added that Ooyala is a "clearly a force to be reckoned with":

"In the online video platform space, the market is currently dominated by Brightcove, Ooyala and Kaltura in terms of market share. For some time I've thought that it would be very hard for any company to really give Brightcove a run for their money, but Ooyala seems to have really picked up a lot of momentum as of late and this deal is probably one of the largest seen in the OVP space."

Just a few months ago Ooyala raised a $22 million fourth round Series D funding which was used to build up its presence in Asia. Since its founding in 2007, Ooyala has raised $42 million and has 120 employees with corporate offices in Mountain View, California with offices in New York, London and a new office in Sydney and is working on Tokyo. Ooyala reaches over 50 million unique users a month via their player from their 500 media and non-media customers globally.

See this paidContent post for more on Ooyala's investors and partners.

Related:

• Yahoo! Japan® and Ooyala® Form Strategic Partnership to Bring Professional Video to 80 Million Users in Japan
• Ooyala Blog: Ooyala partnership with Yahoo! Japan delivers professional video to 80 million users
• Ooyala Signs Yahoo! Japan In Big Customer Win For The Company
• Ooyala Lands Yahoo! Japan In Big Customer Win
• Ooyala lands Yahoo! Japan; investment in APAC region begins to pay dividends - FierceOnlineVideo

Related Ooyala posts from this blog:

• Ooyala Adds YouTube Video Management Tool to Backlot
• Online Video Platform Summit - Ooyala to Showcase Video Publishing, Analytics and Monetization Platform
• Ooyala Raises $10 Million to Fastrack Global Expansion
• Ooyala Sees Growth in the Crowded Online Video Platform Market
• Ooyala is Focused on Personalizing the New Media Experience
• The Joost-Ooyala Hookup
• Next Generation Ooyala Player Coming Soon to a Site Near You
• Ooyala Co-founders Featured in the Mercury News, "Sons of migrant farmworkers co-found promising Silicon Valley tech startup"
• Ooyala Is On A Mission To Make Content More Personal, Launches Innovative Video Advertising Feature Set

About Yahoo! Japan
Yahoo! Japan Corporation operates Yahoo! Japan, a search engine and online information portal. The company is based in Tokyo. Japanese telecommunications and web company SoftBank is Yahoo! Japan’s majority owner and the company is affiliated with US-based Yahoo!. Yahoo! Yahoo! Japan operates in a variety of divisions, including auction services, media development, Yahoo! BB broadband services, shopping and general business solutions. Users can also register for Yahoo! e-mail, personalized web pages, a social network (Yahoo! Days) and access to message boards.

About Ooyala
Ooyala is the leader in online video management, analytics and monetization. Our integrated suite of technologies and services give content owners the power to expand audiences and the deep insights that drive increased viewer engagement and revenue from video. Ooyala serves hundreds of global media companies and marketers including Telegraph Media group, Yahoo Japan, Fremantle Media, Vans, Endemol, Vice Magazine, and Glam Media. Visit Ooyala and follow @Ooyala on Twitter.

Online Video Conversations: David Burch, Tubemogul - Part 1: Why Video? Marketing tips, Online Video Industry Trends

In this latest installment of Online Video Conversations, I caught up with David Burch, Director of Marketing at TubeMogul, Inc., to find out why video is important for all types of businesses – small, medium and large – and how video distribution, analytics and social media marketing helps build brand identity and viewer engagement. He also talks about trends and the current state of the online video industry. Burch is well-known within the industry and is frequently quoted as an expert in online video in leading media outlets like AdAge, NPR's Marketplace and Wired.

Burch leads media relations for the Emeryville, California-based online video ditsribution, analytics and advertising platform. He also is the author of all TubeMogul's data-driven research. Prior to joining TubeMogul, Burch was a Content Manager at Delivery Agent, and worked on digital strategy for many top media companies, including ABC and NBC. He received his BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, which is where Tubemogul was born.



To start the conversation, I asked Burch one of those "what is the meaning of life?" questions by asking:

"Why video? What's so compelling about video that companies should get involved with it?"

According to Burch, there are a lot of good reasons, but the number one reason is that video is more engaging than any other media.

"Video is just a really powerful medium to convey branding messages. It's more effective than other formats, like banner ads or different mediums of advertisement. Why video? Why not video?"

Online video audiences continue to grow, with more and more people are watching more video across the board. According to Tubemogul research, people are more likely to click on a link if it's a video and on average audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg. He says people love Tubemogul's feature that sends a Tweet when your video is uploaded.

In addition, Brightcove and Tubemogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report, found that online video discovery is shifting from search to social media. Twitter and Facebook attract more engaged viewers than other sites and are growing faster than search engines, and while Google search is still king, social media marketing gaining ground fast.

Burch says that even though YouTube is the biggest online video entity – publishers, marketers and businesses of any size can benefit from distributing their videos to more than one site. Tubemogul provides a free video syndication service OneLoad, which is a single point for distributing videos to the top video and social networking sites. Tubemogul also provides InPlay, its free video analytics solution for publishers, online video platforms and video sharing sites. He says that publishers and marketers can learn a lot about their audience and their level of engagement from real-time analytics.

Burch says that if you're not using video, you should get started:

"A lot of small businesses get a lot of SEO benefit from video. Being in more places means – more people are watching. It's not like you're gaming anything, you're just becoming more popular."

In regards to the current state of the online video industry – and comparing the industry growth innings in a baseball game – Burch thinks we're in the forth or fifth inning.

"It's hard to remember, but YouTube's only been around for 5 years, so it is pretty young. I really think with the analytics space, we've got this technology that a lot of people are using – and I think the technology is getting there."

According to Burch the viewing experience is getting better and rebuffer rates (those annoying delays in the video loading) are going down. Fast load times are low rebuffer rates are crucial, as Tubemogul's research found that 81.19% of viewers choose to click away instead of waiting for a video to rebuffer.

"If you're willing to avoid that and want to pay to deliver professional quality video, there are solutions out there to do it. There's this while ecosystem of analytics built in, which is where we step in, advertising solutions which we recently launched, our PlayTime ad platform. It's a very developed ecosystem. HOw television will be viewed on the web and how mobile will fit in to that  – there's a lot of open questions – but I feel that it's evolved quit a bit." 

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my Online Video Conversation with David Burch coming soon.

About Tubemogul
TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences. TubeMogul's advertising solution is powered by the company's unprecedented data platform that tracks billions of video streams every month from the Internet's top publishers. This unique technology enables TubeMogul to help advertisers find consumers who want to watch their videos - and watch them longer. Advertisers and marketers never again have to choose engagement and accountability over reach if they use TubeMogul's video advertising and analytics platform.

Follow tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter

Related posts:

• TubeMogul 2.0 Democratizes Online Video Analytics, Sets New Standard for Viewing Metrics
• Streaming Media West 2009 Red Carpet Interview - Brett Wilson, TubeMogul
• How to Upload Your Video to Multiple Sharing Sites
• Online Video Platform Summit: Measuring Success
• Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics

Without detailed information on who’s watching—not to mention where, when, for how long, and on what devices—it’s impossible to prove the business value of your video communications initiative. The ability to measure video traffic beyond "views"-including audience dropoff, what sites and search terms are referring viewers, and audience geography-offers content publishers deeper insight into both the viewing habits of their audience and the extent of their video's reach. At the Online Video Platform Summit, our session, "Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics" examines not only what data you should be collecting but how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Confirmed speakers for this session include:

Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University (Moderator)

Paul Riismandel has been working in online educational media for fifteen years, specializing in audio and video production designed for streaming. Paul is active in the educational media community as an advocate for online video and encouraging greater collaboration between the education vertical and the larger industry. He writes about these issues in the Class Act column for Streaming Media magazine. Paul is also a radio enthusiast, serving as advisor to student-run WNUR-FM at Northwestern University, and blogging about the future of radio at RadioSurvivor.com. He also blogs and podcasts about other media stuff at mediageek.net.

Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul

Brett leads the strategic direction for TubeMogul. He spent the first three years of his career as a consultant for Accenture. Next, he founded and led YouCanSave.com, a profitable e-commerce company that obtained over $69 million in revenue and was successfully acquired. Brett is undefeated at Risk, is the reigning Foosball champion at TubeMogul and a lousy (but aspiring) windsurfer, sailor and investor. He is also married and has two beautiful children. Brett received his MBA from the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Bismarck C Lepe, Co-founder and President of Products, Ooyala

As an Ooyala co-founder and founding CEO, Bismarck Lepe raised $10 million in funding and signed many of the company's early media partnerships before passing the baton to Jay Fulcher in 2009. Currently, as President of Product Strategy, he is responsible for marketing and driving Ooyala's product development vision. Bismarck sits on the Ooyala Board of Directors.

Before co-founding Ooyala, Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager, developing and managing new products for the company's AdSense network. He launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads and Google's Intelligent Ad Server, which brought the company over $1 billion dollars in new annual revenue. Most notably, Bismarck managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising. Business Week named Bismarck one of its Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics and a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University.

AJ McGowan, CTO, Unicorn Media

AJ McGowan is responsible for engineering the cutting-edge architecture that will deliver high-quality audio and video via a highly intuitive interface. Prior to Unicorn Media, AJ spent five years at Limelight Networks where as director of solutions engineering, he assisted the company's marquee customers with implementing their content delivery networks, developing best practices, and capacity planning.

With a remarkable combination of intelligence and drive, AJ started his first company building high-end custom computers while still in the 8th grade. By age 14, he was an IT manager, and in between high school classes completed a highly technical token ring/mainframe to Ethernet/NT-Unix network upgrade and answered pages from distressed employees.

Dan Berra, Vice President of Business Intelligence, Unicast

Dan Berra leads Unicast’s Business Intelligence division focused on providing robust research, reporting and in-depth analysis of all Unicast-generated advertising campaigns. Under his leadership, clients gain greater insight into campaign results and the effectiveness of rich media and web video against other forms of online advertising As a respected industry veteran, Berra brings more than 12 years of experience spanning financial and marketing analysis at Dell Corporation and T3 (The Think Tank). Most recently, Berra served as the Vice President of the Customer Insight Group at T3, where he built media and search analytics teams from the ground up and created data integration process and databases tying together ad server data, web analytics and client-side data into one interface. Previous to T3 Berra served as transactional marketing manager, at Dell Corp, where he headed the development of segment-level online metrics, created forecasting models and managed transactional marketing. His expertise is in  media and web analytics and measurement,  rich media and online video, next generation web, online media planning and buying, ROI, online advertising and Third Party ad serving.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst, comScore Inc.

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President at Piech Productions. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses.

The Online Video Platform Summit is a two-day event designed to help organizations of all t>ypes, not just those for whom video is their core business. Held on November 2-3 in conjunction with
Streaming Media West in 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.

Video Publishing Platforms and the Value They Bring to the Market

This video is from a panel session I moderated at Streaming Media East 2010 on, Media Framework: Video Publishing Platforms, and features a diverse panel from the online video world, including Bismarck C Lepe, President, Products, Ooyala; Krish Melon, CTO, Synaptic Digital; Ron Yekutiel, Chairman, CEO, Kaltura and Jason Liebman, CEO, Co-Founder, Howcast. The goal of the session was to describe what publishers need and how much they should expect to play for managing content, what are the process and main features of publishing platforms, and the viability of build vs. buy. In the presentation, each speaker shared customer use cases that demonstrated how businesses are using online video, along with capabilities and new features available from their platforms.

I conducted separate video interviews with Ron Yekutiel and Bismarck Lepe, which you can watch for a demonstration of the new product features available from both Kaltura and Ooyala. I also spoke with Jason Liebman, in this Qik video interview, who gave an overview of Howcast, where it is within that market and why every company should be a media company.


A103: Media Framework: Video Publishing Platforms
Moderator: Larry Kless, Founder, President, OnlineVideoPublishing.com
Bismarck C Lepe, President, Products, Ooyala
Krish Menon, CTO, Synaptic Digital
Ron Yekutiel, Chairman, CEO, Kaltura
Jason Liebman, CEO, Co-Founder, Howcast


Session description: A number of vendors offer video publishing platforms, the features and functionality-not to mention cost-vary widely. Some vendors focus their solutions on content management and monetization, while others are geared towards enabling syndication and interactive advertising campaigns. Adding to the confusion is the fact that different platform vendors have different metrics for billing, and costs rise as content owners become more successful. This session will lay the groundwork for content owners to better understand what type of publishing platform they need and what they should expect to pay for managing content.

While the description of this panel session focused primarily on the cost perspective of video publishing platforms, the panel session took a different course, and the speakers described more of the core components and value that platforms bring to the market and shared customer use cases. The following is a summary of the highlights of the panel discussion.

What is an online video platform? What are the components and what are people asking for?
Ron Yekutiel pointed out video is becoming an integrated portion to everything on the web, and companies any size need video tools for the variety of business, training, marketing and e-Commerce applications. The core components of a platform that are needed to publish video for online and mobile experiences include tools to upload, encoding, manage, syndicate, monetize and view analytics. Important aspects of online video platforms are the ease of integration and flexibility to scale and customize the feature sets for specific customer needs.

Krish Menon spoke to the importance of businesses having delivery methods that best fit the communication need. He said that for his clients it's key to "create once and deploy many" and the overall platform serves the purpose of getting your content out to the right audiences in the right way.

Bismarck Lepe also emphasized that video platforms make it easier for customers to build businesses with online video, and that it's not just about on-demand content but also live streaming. He noted that video platforms are on the forefront of the market and better understand the consumer's video viewing patterns, and are best suited to help businesses better innovate with video.

Jason Liebman shared a different perspective with Howcast, and how they have built their own platform to help third parties tap into their ecosystem to create high quality content and syndicate it in a lot of different environments. Howcast thinks more of the video end-to-end video life cycle, and uses data on what people are searching for and viewing to drive creative and business decisions.

How do I get started? What's it going to cost?
Bismarck Lepe said that first and foremost, you need to ingest your content into a system and transcode it, then add metdata, apply permissions, syndicate it, monetize it using ad networks and analyze the viewing data. Ron Yekutiel pointed out the Kaltura has both a SaaS offering that is a good fit for smaller companies and you pay a monthly service cost but they also have a completely free Community Edition that you can download and put behind your own firewall. Overall, there was consensus among the panel the costs are varied, and can range from a few hundred to several thousand a month. Yekutiel also noted that all the platforms have a full featured 30-day free trial.

How about cost savings for using a video platform?
Liebman noted that analytics are key and getting accurate viewing data has helped drive their business decisions. Lepe acknowledged that not having to build out your own encoding and analytics clusters are huge cost savings to businesses – but we're getting to the point where it's not just about cost savings, but adding value. It's about creating more revenue using analytics and monetization tools, as he said, this has to be about the creation of a value center and not just about a cost center.

To see more videos from Streaming Media East, go to: http://www.streamingmedia.com/ConferenceVideos

VMIX Delivers Next-Generation Online Video Analytics

I caught up with Bill Curci, VP of Marketing at VMIX, at Streaming Media East 2010 to talk about the new video analytics and reporting suite available for VMIX customers. VMIX provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform with end-to-end support for online media management and delivery with customers in the media, entertainment, enterprise and non-profit sectors. The new suite of tools, which are now standard with the company’s online video platform, introduces real-time analytics and customizable reports that can be shared and embedded on any website. According to VMIX, the new features were designed to give online video publishers and their partners up-to-date, visual statistics that show how their videos are performing on their websites.

VMIX says that their approach to analytics, which they call 3D Analytics, offers the deepest data on views and reporting in the industry, and gives them the edge over other online video platforms. VMIX allows publishers to view aggregate data for multiple VMIX accounts, to track and respond to trends across multiple aspects of their business in a single view. Other platforms only show trends in a single account over time.

VMIX also allows publishers to filter data to make it more the reports more personal. For VMIX, it's not just about pretty graphs to impress stakeholders – it's about creating real value with tools to take analytics into reporting. Curci explained that their personal 3D analytics suite helps publishers make decisions on a predictive basis – to track what's working and what's not working and make changes to a campaign based on the performance of the specific video(s).

The specific features of the Analytics and Reporting suite include the ability to:

• Track and compare multiple metrics over time in a single graphic or data-table view
• Build highly focused, personalized reports that can be exported and embedded to display dynamic, up-to-the-minute data
• Create custom reporting dashboards on company intranets or any website, allowing stakeholders and partners to see up-to-date video analytics on any website, allowing stakeholders and partners to see  video analytics

VMIX had been gearing up for the release of its analytics and reporting suite and April and debuted the technology at Akamai's booth at NAB 2010. VMIX had been working with Akamai for over two years and announced that it had adopted the Akamai HD Network, for delivery of both live and on-demand video to a broad range of devices. VMIX also incorporates Amazon S3 cloud-based storage for a segment of their infrastructure.

VMIX was founded in 2005 is based in San Diego, California. The company is privately-owned and has  received $23.5 million to date. In the November 2009 Forrester Research Wave™ report: US Online Video Platforms, Q4 2009, that evaluated six of the leading online video platform vendors VMIX was recognized as a "Strong Performer"with its comprehensive offerings.

According to the report, "VMIX’s comprehensive package targets high-volume publishers with all-inclusive services, such as human moderation review for user-generated content, customized integration, training classes, and full technical support for all customers. Additionally, the platform has an internal syndication library of video content that it offers to customers to enhance their own existing video libraries. Given its focus on volume publishers, we believe that expanding the platform’s distribution and monetization capabilities will take the company to the next level."

In more recent news, VMIX named Patrick Burns as the company’s President and CEO, replacing Mike Glickenhaus who has been President and CEO since 2008. See Jim O'Neill's article, VMIX names Patrick Burns CEO, as online video platform plans for growth - FierceOnlineVideo, for a candid conversation with Burns just two weeks into the job and how he plans to take the company to the next level in an ever-changing space.

VMIX has also been focusing on mobile development with iPad and HTML5-compatible video apps. Last month, VMIX released an open source iPad app and just last week, VMIX released an open source Mobile Video SDK for the Apple iPad and iPhone and also announced plans to support Google Android-based devices within the next month.

About VMIX

VMIX Media Inc., (www.vmix.com) is a leading provider of online video and media management solutions. The company is the trusted partner of news, entertainment and enterprise companies including NASA, ESPN, Raycom Media, Penguin Books, The McClatchy Company, Toyota-Scion, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and Post Newsweek Television Stations.
VMIX (VMIX) on Twitter
VMIX | Facebook


Related:

• Analytics for Media Managers: Watch Your Videos Work
• Online Video Analytics and Reporting - VMIX
• VMIX Reviews | VMIX Features
• Vator.tv - VMIX company profile