Why Digital Asset Management Projects Go Wrong

So the BBC has spent £100 on trying to digitise its operations, something that far from providing a dose of schadenfreude, sends a shiver down the spine of those of us involved in the video digital management industry.

This is failure on a massive scale, but the reasons for the failure of such projects are common to many such initiatives.

Over-ambition - often called 'scope creep'. This is where a good idea becomes a big idea and everything, including the kitchen sink, are thrown in.

Not invented hereism - where companies build from scratch when off the shelf solutions exist. This also leads to:

Exceptionism - a company tries to fit a system to its working processes rather than thinking how both processes and technology can be streamlined.

Specification and management by committee - too many cooks invariably spoil the broth.

Not prototyping - start small and make small mistakes!

Lack of experience - at least try to use someone who has been there before: managing video data is totally different to managing financial data, for example.

At TVE we built and delivered a media asset management system for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad in three weeks and then amended it to the client's needs. A few weeks later it had been used to deliver over 30,000 media assets to over 212m viewers (according to a University of Liverpool study).

The TV Tipping Point

An amazing statistic appeared today - two companies make up half of all internet traffic in North America.

They are, of course, YouTube at 17% and Netflix at 33%. But what this shows, more than anything, is how far other services are lagging behind. The major broadcasters have been criminal with their head in the sand strategies - ABC is taking some shows online a decade after pioneering broadcaster in the UK and elsewhere did so.

But what about Hulu and Amazon (OK, Netflix does use the Amazon network so they make a small cut) ? And Microsoft and Apple ? 

As with most markets these days, one or two players get to the tipping point and the rest is history. I feel that we've reached one of those points in the TV industry.

Shop Til They Drop

A rather self-serving bit of research by Samsung predicts that shopping on Smart TVs is set to boom, and despite the hubris, I wouldn't disagree.

In fact, it's shocked me how little store online TV services and IPTV services have put on vCommerce as a revenue source.

Most of the projects I've been involved with have seen great returns from as selling online.

I think the problem is that telly selling has become a nasty, albeit lucrative ghetto on our EPG and this has tarnished it as a commercial medium.

But the traditional television sales channels generate over a £1 billion in sales every year, so this is not to be ignored.

Indeed, the opportunities online are much greater: the same regulatory rules don't necessarily apply, it's easier to point and click to buy than to have to call on the telephone and delivery can be personalised.

Video is likely to play a much greater part in retailing in the future and some of it may well be on Smart TVs, but it will also be as much join tablets, smart phones and PCs.

Indeed, as our high streets decline, video is set to become the new retail shop front.

You Couldn't Make It Up...

I've spent the day answering an RFI (request for information) from a government quango about a media management system. The majority of the questions were about health and safety and corporate feasance - hardly a concern for a company that operates virtually in the cloud. There was not a single question about tax and if the company was in compliance with tax codes.

I then go to their website and see that they are using YouTube all over it, I suspect that there was no competitive tendering before they gave their video content to the tax avoiders in chief (and agreed to their terms and policies which I suspect would be very much in contravention to their stated policies, and most probably illegal).

Another reason why Europe is a very bad place to start a tech company.

It's War!

The UK TV industry may finally see a real shaking up following today's announcements by BT about its BT Vision service and the three new sports channels it proposes to launch: BT Sports 1, BT Sports 2 and the recently acquired ESPN.

The decision to make the games free to subscribers and to set the subscription fee so low is taking BSkyB on at their own game: £15 compared to £42.50 is a significant gap, and with Freeview snapping up hard up viewers, Sky is fast becoming a premium product in a not so premium market.

What Sky has achieved is astounding. They took as essentially free product and got 10m homes to pay up to £500 a year for it. And the main tool in doing this was football rights.

Now BT are taking them on at their own game, further inflating the pay packages of top footballers, but increaing choice to viewers and, hopefully reducing costs.

The Rights Cloud

This week has seen two very significant announcements for those of us involved in the world of online video.

First of all it was revealed that YouTube is to trial subscription services for its channels, ostensibly meaning that anyone can become a Netflix - provided that you can somehow stand out in the mire that is planet YouTube.

Secondly, Adobe has stepped up the ante on its Creative Cloud - although we have commented previously on this blog that Adobe often over-promise and under-deliver. In this case, though, I believe that their strategy is bang on.

But there are some gaping holes in these models. One of the major ones is in tackling rights. To date, most online models deal with cleared rights and are pretty unsophisticated. But the reality is that the vast majority of good produced content carries with it a plethora of rights, from music to artists to producers and financiers.

What YouTube and Google have done is solve some problems that much smaller companies already offered a solution for, but their Achilles' Heel remains the fact that in the cloud, assets are not such a big deal, but rights are.

Exit Opens To The US

This week has proven that Europe is a bad place to build and run a tech company.

First of all Shazam decides to list in the US and now the French government has stepped in to prevent the sale of Dailymotion to Yahoo!

The major problem Europe has is that it does not have any real exit opportunities. The continent's largest tech companies are either in dire straits (Alcatel Lucent), telcos that act like utility companies or are legacy companies that have yet to get to grips with the cloud based future (SAP). the tech deal flow in Europe is tiny compared to the US and the only real exit open is either to an American tech giant or to a US market since the European secondary markets have long been discredited for lack of liquidity and profile.

So, the French have yet again shot themselves in the foot and can only be encouraging the conveyor belt of entrepreneurs who go first to London and then California.

If they want to make a difference then they should work on establishing a liquid European tech share marketplace.

Why Is TV Like Operating Systems ?

I grew up in the mountains of Wales. We couldn't receive English radio, so we listened to Irish and Manx broadcasts (which made my musical tastes different - I discovered Springsteen in 79). And they worked 24 x 7.

Television, yes, we got a set around '72 and a colour one around a decade later. We had to put an aerial wheeey up the mountain with boxes called 'boosters' so that we could see anything but snow. And it worked 24 x 7 (unless a wild goat ate the cable).

And then came cable and satellite and digital and it seems that television is hugely fragile, and that IPTV is even worse. Why do things only sometimes work ?

Orange TV in Paris is a joke. It is a service used by millions, but barely works and goes down almost daily. Fibre is meant to deliver a 120Mbps but gives 3 or 4Mbps. The service, interface and remote is laughable compared to TV services from the past. And the stupid French pay for this because the alternatives are so bad.

In London we have Virgin Media, which seems down every time I visit. It was down for three days on a previous visit and for two evenings this week, and the Tivo system is a bad joke in terms of UI and functionality. but we put up with it because we are in a conservation area and not meant to have aerials or sat dishes...

Meanwhile here in Wales we get 2Mbps in the dead of night and 14Kbps on a Sunday night from those superstars at Sky. At least the telly works most of the time, but only for linear channels.

The Brits make the French seem sensible. We are gullible idiots...

So, the world has gone backwards. just like Mac OS and Win 8, nothing works properly. And we pay these idiotic companies a fortune...

I Am More Than One

Following recent security failures by Twitter, Foursquare and others, the concept of 'double login' is now becoming a Big Thing.

But the very idea of a login is fast becoming the biggest issue and vulnerability of the internet. Like many organisations, at TVE we've implemented OAuth and OpenID, which means that users can use single sign one on any system supporting these protocols.

However, this has an issue. I have multiple logins for most services since I am a private person and a business owner. Indeed, I could be ten personas or more.

And trying to switch these personas on key services such as Google, who, to be fair,  have done a great deal to sort out issues around this subject, is still a nightmare.

We need a new system of  authentication that is at once more secure and more flexible. Using emails as usernames is the norm, and is convenient and flexible, but hugely unsecure - you have immediately given away one of the two bits of information a hacker requires.

The current delay in the shipping of the next iPhone seems to be over supply chain issues with a fingerprint detection component, and this points to the future.

A physical attribute is very difficult to replicate, but this still leaves the issue of personas: this is falling into the same category as batteries - something too difficult for technology to fix.

A Narrowing Gap

The gap between digital and TV ad sales is fast narrowing and WPP boss Martin Sorrell today admitted that Google will shortly overtake NewsCorp as the world's largest ad agency's largest media property.

What is apparent, however, is that a lot of the digital expenditure isn't working, and the challenge now is to find formats that engage.