Peter Himmelman, Furious World: Online Video is Key to the Music Industry's Survival

I caught up with Peter Himmelman, independent singer/songwriter, at the Online Video Platform Summit following his panel discussion "How to Choose an Online Video Platform for Your Business", to talk about how video has helped extend his reach and engagement with his worldwide fan base. While Himmelman is not a familiar name to most, he's cultivated a long career as an imaginative rock musician, children's entertainer, TV and film composer, Emmy and Grammy nominee and for the past two year, the star of his own weekly webcast show, Peter Himmelman’s Furious World.

Himmelman is also Bob Dylan's son-in-law, being married to his daughter Maria Dylan, who he counts as one of his many influences. Himmelman is known for his conviction as an independent artist and for his unpredictable performance style (as evidence of this impromptu video interview). Most notably, as an observant Jew he does not perform on Fridays, and turned down an invitation to perform on the "Tonight Show" because it fell on Shabbat.

He broadcasts his musical web variety show, Peter Himmelman’s Furious World, from his Santa Monica, California studio every Tuesday at 7:00 pm PST on Ustream.tv using the Newtek TriCaster. The show features live music and spoken bits by the Himmelman and his cast of regulars, off-the-wall videos, and guest performers. Himmelman says that the portability of streaming production is a key in getting his artistic message out, in lieu of a demanding touring schedule.



As a music recording artist he says that hosting his webcast on Ustream's highly trafficked website has helped increase his visibility and brought him closer to his fans. He's using video because he says that, "the music industry as we had known it is pretty much done, the death knell has sounded," and he decided to try online video as a new and different way to put his product out there.

In an interview with Aiyanna Sezak-Blatt of the Mountain Xpress, he talked about how he got started producing his weekly Furious World webcast.

"It was just a fluke. This guy that works for me, Mark Jacobs, he said, “Hey, there’s this thing where you can broadcast live.” So we set up this camera and thought, “Wow, this really looks good.”  

It hasn’t lived up to where I want it to be right now. It’s not paying for itself, which is a huge problem, and I don’t know if it ever will or not. It’s a really great thing, it’s a cool idea, but without any money coming in — and I’ve done it for two years — I have to constantly say to myself, “What it’s for?”

But I always get letters and a lot of encouragement. Yesterday I met with a guy who was trying to help me with the show and he said (he’s from Israel), “Look, you have to remember what the president of General Electric said: Either fix it, sell it or close it. This is what I’m trying to help you with. Either we’ll fix it, or sell it or we shut it down.”"

Become a Facebook Fan: Peter Himmelman's Furious World
Follow Peter Himmelman's FW (furiousworld) on Twitter

Related:

• Winging it with style: An interview with Peter Himmelman | Asheville Arts and Entertainment | Mountain Xpress
• How-to Create Raging Fans!: Example- “The Song About ‘IV’” LIVE by Peter Himmelman!
• Peter Himmelman - IMDb

Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove: Reaching Viewers in a Complex and Fragmented Video Landscape

I met with Jeremy Allaire, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, at the Online Video Platform Summit to get a summary of his keynote address, where he shared his view of the increasingly complex and fragmented landscape for online video publishing, and the multi-platform distribution strategies organizations need to have in place to achieve success with their video initiatives. Allaire founded Brightcove in early 2004 with a vision for the transformation of television with the Internet. From his early days as CTO of Macromedia, where he was instrumental in evolving Macromedia Flash into a dominant platform for rich media applications on the web, Allaire envisioned that one day video would become as ubiquitous as text on the web. I spoke with him at length about his background and the early years of online video in this post from last year.



In his keynote, The New Video Landscape: Multi-platform Distribution, Monetization, and Fragmentation, Allaire described the rapid growth of online video in 2010 with monthly video growing to a staggering 30 billion views. He pointed out that online video is now more than 50% of Internet traffic in the U.S. and it's estimated that it will will grow to 90% by 2013. Some of the key drivers fueling that growth are ad supported online video, which continues to grow faster than any other area of online advertising, and also the brand marketing and retail applications which are really exploding. eMarkerter predicts that online advertising spend will be $28.5 billion next year, and that almost $2 billion of that will be online video advertising.

According to eMarketer's David Hallerman:

"The reason for the huge increase in video ad spending is that brand marketers will shift more of their ad budgets online. Since there is more professional video online than ever before, buyers have more inventory to choose from. Brand marketers realize how central the internet is to consumers’ lives than it was even two years ago. More important, they see how much of that video content is professional, so they trust it and as a FreeWheel study shows, consumers tend to watch video ads to the end when they are up against professional video content."

This is really exciting for the industry, says Allaire, because corporations and institutions are expanding and investing in video as a way to enhance their customer relationships and customer touchpoints. Data from Brightcove & TubeMogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report for Q2 2010, found that online video is a priority for brand managers and that more than 60 percent plan to spend more their website video initiatives in the next 12 months.

But while consumer demand, growth trends, and broad industry adoption introduce exciting new opportunity, Allaire says the complex and fragmented device landscape is introducing new challenges for online video publishers. In particular, Apple's release of the iPad started the HTML5/H.264 video vs. Flash debate over the future of web content and application runtime formats, which Allaire wrote about earlier in the year in a guest post on TechCrunch.

Allaire says increased bandwidth capacity and demand for higher quality video experiences have required publishers to render multiple versions of their content for multi-bitrate streaming. In addition, there is a tsunami of new connected devices consumers are using to access video which all use a variety of video runtimes creating a fragmented publishing environment.

"We've moved from the world of people publishing video to the PC web with Flash, to needing to have video on tablets and smart phones – both web browsing and native apps, that people do across a lot of different platforms – and the emergence of connected TVs are yet another set of platforms that are going to create these challenges for publishers. And then, the explosion of social media sites as sources of traffic and valuable forms of customer engagement. So really, the world has changed a lot in the last 12 months and that's actually created a huge amount of challenges and a huge amount of opportunities."

Allaire says that the recent release of Brightcove 5, the company's cloud-based online video platform, addresses many of the issues that publishers face in the fragmented landscape and helps expand their reach. The new features include: distribution and synchronization with YouTube, iPad reference app, Apple HTTP streaming for the mobile Web and apps, cross platform Smart Players, new advanced analytics for Adobe® Flash® and HTML5 video developed in partnership with Tubemogul, and wide-ranging productivity enhancements.

In a follow up TechCrunch guest post last week, Allaire further expanded on the outlook for 2011 – which promises to be yet another transformational year in the online video landscape – with connected TVs set to go mainstream, OTT (over-the-top) video adoption, the ongoing battle over video delivery standards, and the rise of social recommendations with Facebook and Twitter growing much faster as sources for online video discovery and referral compared to traditional search engines. According to Tubemogul and Brightcove's Online Video & The Media Industry report for Q3 2010, Facebook is now the second largest traffic source for media sites surpassing Yahoo! The report states that not only are social media destination driving more traffic, but consumers who find video through the recommendation of peers in the social networks are more engaged with the video content then content they find through other sources.

In his keynote, Allaire said that, "Everyone is an online video publisher," and that online video platforms have emerged as critical partners to publishers by creating solutions that help them navigate the complex and fragmented online video landscape.

"I think the really big picture is that we're just at the beginning. Video ubiquity is just emerging and we see a world in the next several years where every professional website in the world is going to have professional video applications, so it's a very exciting time for our company and the industry."

Related:

• Larry Kless' Weblog: CEO Conversations: Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove's Video Visionary
• Promises, Promises: Will Online Video Ads Deliver This Year? - The eMarketer Blog
• Brightcove & TubeMogul Release Q2 Online Video Research Report | Brightcove Blog
• Larry Kless' Weblog: The iPad Cometh - The Online Video Industry Gears Up for the Launch
• The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps
• Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars
• Brightcove & TubeMogul: Online Video & The Media Industry (Q3)
• Facebook Passes Yahoo To Become Second Largest Traffic Source For Videos On Media Sites
• Brightcove: "Everyone is an Online Video Publisher" | OnlineVideo.net

Jeroen "JW" Wijering: HTML5 Video Is Not Quite There Yet

Earlier this year, Mark Robertson and I met with Jeroen "JW" Wijering, Chief Digital Architect of LongTail Video at his office in New York City, to talk about the growing interest and hype around HTML5 video, and the most pressing issues facing its adoption. Jeroen is an online video pioneer and the creator of the ubiquitous JW Media Players, which have generated several million downloads since their launch in 2005.

In a post on the LongTail Community Support Blog (and also a guest post on Reel SEO), Jeroen noted that Apple's launch of the iPad along with Steve Jobs' arguements with Adobe over Flash accelerated HTML5 video development. He wrote that there's a lot of video tag euphoria within today's tech industry and the practical side of HTML5 video development has been overlooked and faces a major threat.

"The video tag is still in its infancy and misses certain core functionalities. As developers demand these features, browser vendors are tempted to implement incompatible solutions instead of agreeing upon standards. These hasty developments, already underway, are setting HTML video up for the same chaos as HTML styling in the pre-CSS era."

Jeroen says, the most pressing issues facing HTML video development are:

• Codecs - H.264 versus OGG debate is ongoing, but all browsers have placed their bets - Firefox and Opera favor OGG, Internet Explorer and Safari choose H264. Chrome plays it safe and does both. Today's HTML5 video format is H264.
• Streaming - HTML5 does not specify a streaming mechanism yet. While this is being worked on (W3C: Fragments, Media Multitrack API), it means that live, DVR and long-form video content cannot be played using a video tag.
• Fullscreen - While a small feature at first sight, fullscreen playback is essential to the success of HTML5 video. Without fullscreen, HTML5 video is mostly useful for presenting short clips.

Jeroen suggests that the addition of both captions and fullscreen support would be big steps forward for HTML5 video. He says that cross-browser support should be practical and compatible, or we risk web development regression.

"Browser vendors should be stringent when building solutions that are both practical and compatible. If not, crossbrowser HTML5 video will be too difficult, not to mention expensive, to implement. This presents the risk of web development regression.

In favor of its advancement, we cannot allow this to happen. Online video will go mobile and big screen. It also needs to become accessible and searchable. HTML5 video will advance the progress in these areas, if developed carefully and intelligently. However, without compatible solutions, online video is in definite jeopardy of a setback."

While Jeroen says that HTML5 video is not quite there yet, as the year comes to a close, there are signs of the maturing market:

• Google's release of WebM  (VP8 royalty-free video codec) several months ago which Jeroen says they'll be keeping an eye on, 
• Support for HTML4 in beta versions of all the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera HTML5
• Advertising solutions from mDialog, Brightcove and FreeWheel, MeeFeedia and Yume coming to market for Android and Apple iOS 
• Longtail's release of its JW player HTML5
• Adobe teaming up with Kaltura for its HTML5 player
• YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion all have HTML5 players, and Blip.tv is readying HTML5 to be its standard video player

These are but a few of the many innovations and growth of HTML5 video within the online and mobile video industry. As we move into 2011, we'll continue to see the technology evolve at a rapid pace, as well as the debate.


What is HTML5? (reprinted from HTML5 - Advertising FAQ)

• HTML is the mark-up language used for the World Wide Web. Almost all web pages you visit on the internet are based around HTML code. HTML5 is simply the fifth and latest iteration of this mark-up language that allows for more dynamic, animated and interactive web pages. Up until now web pages have had to embed content or plugins like Flash for items like video players or interactive animation. HTML5 allows for lots of this functionality to be done without an embedded file. This doesn’t mean the end of Flash however because Flash too continues to evolve - it is an alternative. See more on the W3 website. 

Resources:

• Dive Into HTML5 
• HTML5video.org
• HTML5 Video - IEBlog
• Introduction to HTML5 video - Dev.Opera
• 4.8.6 The video element — HTML5'
• HTML5 video Tag  
• HTML5 Rocks

Related:

• HTML5 vs. Flash: How will the battle play out in 2011?
• Why rivals Google and Apple agree on HTML5
• Dive Into HTML5 Video With The Masters – HTML5 ReelSEO Webinar Replay Video
• Apple Didn’t Kill Flash, HTML5 Did
• "The World is Moving to HTML 5" and Other Flights of Fancy
• Lift SEO with HTML5
• Top 5 Security Threats in HTML5

Updated 12/22/2010: Added my buddy Mark to post

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 Conversations: Steven Horn, Metacafe - Part 2: Metacafe and the Power of Premium Content

In part two of my interview with Steven Horn, vice president of programming for Metacafe, he further expands on our previous conversation about how Metacafe has decided to focus on premium short-from content, and how Metacafe's recent acquisition of action sports site Go211.com helps bolster its unique editorial voice within the online video entertainment genre. According to Horn, Metacafe has taken a different approach than other online video entertainment sites by the way it build packages around its premium content. In particular, as Horn previously noted Metacafe's editors provide "deep content experiences" by programming related premium content around new movie releases. For example, with Ben Affleck's recent bank robbery film, The Town, the editors programmed other classic band robbery films like Heat and Dog Day Afternoon to give context the bank robbery genre and made Ben Affleck the featured celebrity of the week.

"These are the things you can do with editors, versus, just a random collection of videos that people are expected to search and sift through themselves. We cherry pick the best and put them together in these compelling unique content packages."

Within the premium content space, Horn says, the Hollywood movie studios are the ones that have been playing the most online. They were the first on the Internet and have spent a lot of time and effort into their digital strategies. He reiterated that Metecafe's editors have those relationships with the studios and understand the content gives Metacafe the edge over other entertainment sites.

Horn also says that comedy has also been very successful for Metacafe, and that its approach is to put comedy into everyday situations. For instance, when Metacafe go to a film junket film to interview a celebrity – they don't ask the same questions that everyone else asks (because likely they could get those type of interviews from their partners anyway), so they send in comedians to do songs, interviews and create fun and unique ways to create exclusive premium content. For its "Iron Man 2" interview with Scarlett Johansson, Metacafe's Matt Zaller took the opportunity to get some make up tips from the actress firsthand rather than doing a traditional question and answer interview. The video was a success and had a viral effect getting picked up by Huffington Post, Gawker, StumbledUpon and other sites.

"When we think about what's working for us, we're hanging a lot of our strategy on comedy, and not only comedy, but a non-traditional approach to staged events... and the studios are loving it."

Horn is very excited by Metacafe's recent acquisition of Action Sports, Inc. the parent company of Go211.com, the popular site that features live webcasts of and video highlights from top action sports events around the world. Horn says that Go211 has carved out a really strong niche in live events and streaming, and Metacafe will be leveraging the expertise of Go211's digital video production team to introduce more original and exclusive content into its other premium entertainment hubs – Movies, Video Games, TV, Music and the recent launch of Metacafe Sports, that features Go211’s extensive catalog of action sports videos in Snow, Skate, Surf and Bike. According to comScore Media Metrix, July 2010, Metacafe, with the inclusion of Go211, will now reach nearly 17.5M unique monthly U.S. viewers.

"Anytime you take two mature content organizations and put them together – the amount of creativity that comes out of that from a programming standpoint but also from a technical background scales very fast."   

Regarding the current state of the the online video space, Horn says he's excited to come to work everyday because it reminds him of the early days of the Internet.

"We all know that there's something big here, we all know it, we feel it, we sense it. Everyone is trying amazing new things online. I feel we're way too early to know who's going to end up winning – and actually I don't know if it's a win-lose if not a zero sum. I think there's a lot of different positions that people are taking. Metacafe is taking this premium short-from position, and there's a lot of other players out there. 

In terms of where we go and where we consume this video – I don't even think we know – in 5 years we may have implants in our eyes that show us video or we see it in our refrigerators – the actual, where this content is consumed is a lot less interesting to me than to what that content is. So whether it's on my phone or on my TV or whether it's on my 3-screen, 4-screen, whatever – what it is and who's serving it to me and what they're doing with that content, I think, is where the most excitement is with this industry now. It's a blank slate and we're having a lot of fun."

See part one of this interview: Online Video Conversations: Steven Horn, Metacafe - Part 1: Metacafe's Editorial Voice Drives Consumption of Online Video

Also, see these related interviews:

• Larry Kless' Weblog: Online Video Conversations: Erick Hachenburg, Metacafe - Part 1: The Launch of Metacafe Movies and the Future of Online Video
• Larry Kless' Weblog: Online Video Conversations: Erick Hachenburg, Metacafe - Part 2: The Growing Opportunity For Online Video Advertising

For more information, go to: http://www.metacafe.com/