Bad News Day for BBC

There's been a dreadful earthquake in Chile and the BBC are reporting it by showing pictures from Ustream and reading out Tweets. Nice to know our £3.5bn is being deployed so effectively in the marketplace under the new cost cutting regime. Now here's an idea, why don't we get rid of the smug presenters interviewing each other and just get this news for ourselves ?

Vidi Act It !

Many readers of this blog have been intrigued by what we're up to at Vidiactive. Now I can reveal a little more about how this exciting company is changing the way we will consume television:

The Future Of Broadcasting Event

An interesting and convivial discussion occurred at the Future of Broadcasting event this evening. The subject was, perhaps, unrealistically broad and many of the usual themes appeared: business models, social television, discovery, regulation and rights.

Perhaps the most interesting change that I've seen from similar events five or six years ago is how accepting and comfortable everyone in the industry now is with the changes going on.

Perhaps the most revealing and shocking admission was from Ofcom on why they treat scheduled, on demand and online content differently. Apparently what it comes down to is whether someone chooses to access content or might 'happen' upon it. A truly mindblowing way of thinking, especially after what happened to Google execs in the Italian courts this week. The Ofcom representative was very game and eloquent, but I would argue that a service like YouTube needs more regulation than services like ITV, not less.

For my part, I rather brazenly took the opportunity to plug the companies that I'm involved with, but for a reason: I would not have invested money and time into these companies if I did not believe that they represented key technological pieces in the future of television.

VidZapper is a video management platform, like many others, but it has hooks, bells and whistles at a price that no other professional system can match. It deals with delivery.

Rights Tracker represents the big missing link in the whole online video ecosystem and the company is about to announce a number of new initiatives that will take online rights management to a new level. It deals with rights.

Vidiactive is a company that changes the way television is produced and consumed so radically, but so seamlessly that it's difficult to describe. Think of it as the ability to find any video content that's available on the web and watch it on your big screen, and then to share it with your friends and contacts. It deals with the social and delivery aspects of future TV.

Finally, TV Everywhere is currently investing in a 'discovery' company, which will be another key piece in the the TV landscape of the future.

So, these, I believe are some of the key elements that will define television in the future.

Key ruling against Google - execs do time (if they visit Italy)

Italian courts yesterday found 3 Google executives criminally responsible for breaking anti-privacy laws and they were sentenced, in their absence, to 6 months in prison. The offending piece of material was a video of teenage boys harassing an autistic boy.

Google have always argued that they are in no way responsible for any content published across their network.......which is pretty thin given that they are actively working with channel partners and have a variety of take down tools they can deploy if they wish. They are a digital content channel.

Italian judges, perhaps with the beady eye of Mr. Berlusconi on them, have ruled that Google and YouTube are to be treated as any other content provider / network and are thus reponsible for content published on their network via YouTube.

The example given by Google is that postmen should not be held liable for what they deliver. However, this does not seem quite right as Google (via adwords) have a direct financial interest in what is delivered across their network, which a postman does not, and a postman would not deliver a smoking, ticking parcel through a letterbox as he owes a duty of care.

European legislation appears to offer ISP's safe harbour - but this is not definitive and with the Digital Economy Bill waiting in the wings it seems that tide may be turning against the copyright infringers.

X-factor stars back Digital Economy Bill

Cheryl Cole's co-star on the X-factor, Simon Cowell, has backed a letter send to MP's urging them to pass the Digital Economy Bill and include a three strikes and you're out rule against persistent IP pirates. Other signatories included Sir Terry Pratchett, Tim Bevan, Paul Greengrass and Stephen Garret.



The text of the letter is below

Britain is admired for its creativity and its sense of fair play. British musicians, singers, actors, writers and directors are known and loved around the world and create some of our greatest assets. Together they contribute more than 7% to the UK economy.

The Digital Economy Bill brings both of these together. It will ensure that British creators, entertainment companies, and the 1.8 million people who work in and around the cultural sector are respected and rewarded in the future as they have been in the past, and that they are fairly paid when they put their work online.

Digital entertainment services are really beginning to take off: fans have never had so much choice as to how to enjoy their music, books, TV and films online. But for these new business models to develop, it is critical that more is done to prevent the illegal services providing easy access to free content.

We urge Parliament to pass this bill as a matter of urgency in order to secure the future of its creative talent and industries.

The Future Of Broadcasting

On Thursday evening I'll be taking part in a panel discussion on the rather heady subject of The Future of Broadcasting arranged by Intellect and chaired by Ved Sen of ThinkPlank. Anyone who is around in London is more than welcome and can register here.

Australian Rules

The recent case in Australia of Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd (No.3) brings into focus the challenges of policing the internet and the challenges involved in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill.

Basically the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft had notified iiNet that their subscribers had been repeatedly illegally downloading Hollywood movies using illegal sites and iiNet had taken no steps to prevent this. iiNet were successfull in arguing that they had safe harbour as they had not "authorised" this infringement. Clearly they were aware of the infringement but had not authorised it.

From a commercial perspective the rights holders and their representatives realise that it is very difficult to chase down hundreds of individuals and would much rather go after a corporation who might be able to pay damages (and legal fees) such as an ISP. From the ISP's perspective they don't really want the overhead of shutting down users and also the lost revenue........cutting off your own customers is never appealing.

Someone is going to have to pay for an anti-piracy service to avoid meltdown in this area but the tough question is who ? The content owners have the most to lose so they should pay something but at the same time there needs to be the ability to shut down the internet connections of repeat offenders as well as remove the ability of the pirates to make money via AdSense.

Policing Piracy is a cost to all in the internet value chain that is not going away - the difficult question is how to fairly allocate that cost.

Veoh Bites The Dust

Testimony to how difficult it is to get it right with online video, even Hollywood backing from figures such as Michael Eisner and Jonathan Dolgen couldn't save Veoh. The company did well a couple of years ago, but UGC critical mass went to YouTube and Facebook and the portal of choice became Hulu. One of the key factors was rights and a court battle with Universal: a bullet that YouTube has somehow managed to dodge (clue: Google's deep pockets). This leaves Metacafe and Dailymotion as the only major competitors left.

Seesaw Sees The Light Of Day

Seesaw (the erstwhile Project Kangaroo taken over by Arqiva) has gone live with what looks like a good mix of entertainment programming, all free to air and ad supported. The interface is clean and easy to use and should act as a lesson to many others.

I suspect this will be a bookmark I will visit regularly.

Google has 80% share of the online ad market in France

The anti-trust authorities are beginning to circle Google and ask the question whether the internet giant has abused its dominant position. As any publisher who has tried to sell online inventory will know it is vitually impossible to compete with the adsense model - mainly because from a buyers perspective it offers the best return.

Some models based on video pre-roll have started to work but as Google moves to make YouTube a profitable entity this may also come under pressure.

For me this raises an interesting question over whether Google should be "punished" for its success ? They have created a superior platform for advertisers which unfortunately takes a large slice of revenue away from traditional publishers and will doubtless lead to the closure of a large number of ad supported paper based publications.

As a buyer of adwords the system is excellent and much more effective than anything else out there - we should celebrate the success of the model and accept that we cannot indefinetely prop up outdated business models. The French have never really supported the free market however and are likely to take a different view.

Zen and the Death Of Hardware

I remember seeing my first HiFi stack and being awe struck (although some of the shine went when I realised that the amp, turntable, radio and cassette chasis were actually all joined together and not the expensive, separate high tech machines they appeared to be). We have been through an age where hardware has dominated, but the result of convergence is that pretty much every hardware device seems increasingly to do what every other hardware device does.

OK, your iPhone doesn't make tea, but there are plenty of places where you can use it to order tea; now set top boxes are being consumed by LCD screens, there is no longer any need for the satellite receiver, the DVD player, the Blu-ray player and the OTT box, and the cable modem, router and telephone might go the same way.

People (very well, men) like to buy 'stuff'. Now that we can't really soup up cars any more since the engine is sealed and the body work is under warranty what do we do ? The car already has sat nav, voice controlled phone, ninety speakers and a sound system that can bring down buildings.

We are at the beginning of the death of the device. With projectors being added to phones even the need for a screen is becoming marginal.

So, iPods did away with the rows of CDs, eBooks have been the death of my library and internet Tv has led to the demise of my DVD collection. Now the devices that used to serve all these media are morphing into one. Perhaps all we need is an iPad and an empty room....

An Appalling Idea

Having been in the eye of the storm for most of my life - first of all with multimedia, then the web and now internet TV - I've grown used to some of the ridiculous monikers that get adopted and the way that the English language is perverted in search of a soundbite that sticks (let's face it, I have myself been responsible for things like 'tv everywhere' and 'global tribes').

But the idea of a TV channel as an 'app' marries two totally incompatible concepts, in my view. Ghettoising content within an app makes it inaccessible and user unfriendly - everything from the Wii to Boxee seem to be adopting this ring-fenced, half-baked approach to content. Largely because it follows the currently-working business model.

Next broadcasters will become 'app factories' and programmes will become 'upgrade modules'.

Surely what users want is to be able to access all their content from one easy interface with functions such as schedules, playlists, search and centralised billing.

It'll never catch on... will it ?

Looking On The Bright Side

This week’s Economist magazine examines the concept of ‘broken Britain’, the contention that the country is ‘going to the dogs’ and comes to a surprising conclusion: overall things are better than they’ve ever been and it’s largely the fault of a sensationalist media that the public take such a doomed view of their lives.

Now, journalism, especially UK newspaper journalism, has always been full of doom and gloom. And this in turn influences other journalists. And naturally, moaning and groaning is the lot of bloggers, including the authors of this website, so this isn't an affliction restricted to the professional media.

In the US things tend to be reversed, where newspapers on the whole, tend to be held to a higher account of veracity whereas channels such as Fox News are able to display any editorial balance their editors and owners deem fit.

At a time when everyone is questioning the value of journalism and contemplating charging for content, this becomes a very important issue. The tendency is to become more competitive and more sensational in order to justify the charges being levied: the news gatherers become the news makers and the agenda is set on our screens not our ballot boxes. The Pulitzer v Heart newspaper wars that stoked the coals that lit the US Spanish war is a lesson from history (and there are plenty of other examples).

We are all more media literate today, but the pervasiveness of the negative news agenda is worrying.

Watching For Free

There’s more and more ‘spillage’ of restricted rights happening, especially when it comes to live feeds – my colleague Peter Lewinton has blogged on this site concerning the problems this causes. However, I think it’s worth doing a round up of some of the more notable sites, leaving YouTube to one side for now.

Justin.tv still confounds me. It a mess of a service - a video equivalent of the pop up hell that was current around a decade ago. But you can find stuff on it that you can’t find elsewhere. For example, I pay two Sky Sports subscriptions and still can’t access any games on the red button. My only recourse is to Justin.tv; the experience sucks, but it’s better than text only reports.

In the UK there’s an obscure law that allows live feeds to be re-transmitted - it was something to do with getting signals into the back of remote Welsh valleys at the time, but seems to remain a loophole as far as those advising a number of companies who capitalise on this get-around seem to be concerned. Zattoo was the first service to offer live UK telly over the web, now there are a few more services including TV Guide and TV Catchup.

In the US content has been more widely available, but has been geo-controlled, so unless you were a bit tech savvy or had a Slingbox you could only watch services like Hulu in the US. Now TV Gorge offers a wide range of programmes available on demand; they claim some kind of alliance with Hulu and I haven’t been able to figure out if the service is legal or not.

Now This Really Is TV Everywhere

We've been working diligently over the past couple of years at TV Everywhere to come up with the model for the future of television. We believe that there are three important pieces to this: delivery, distribution and technology. And we've been investing heavily in all of these.

Perhaps the most important issue of all is one that does not fall comfortably into any of the above categories, but impacts them all - rights management.

At Rights Tracker we're working on an API to enble rights for video across the internet. Indeed, we hope that this will become the real 'tv everywherel whereby anyone who has bought a right will be able to authenticate it on any device or medium in any format.

This is already what the software does for major TV rights owners in the UK. Now we're taking the genie out of the bottle...

Click Away

Some interesting research from TubeMogul shows that a sixth of users click away from pre-roll video ads; unfortunately the research doesn't comment on how long the measured ads were, or if there was a variance for different lengths - my own experience is that thirty second ads are a real problem as pre-rolls.

But the real issue is that video ads are increasingly be shown alongside video content within MPU slots; worse still, as ads are booked according to tracking cookies, media agencies see no value in contextual content, they simply identify a potential target and follow them around the web.

Ustream raise $20m - here we go................

One of the IP Pirates favourite routes to market for live streams has just raised $20m from Japan's well respected Softbank. Perhaps to defend the coming copyright infringement actions.

In any event this solid live distribution platform offers a 50% share of revenue to its content partners which could prove attractive and certainly offers some competitition to YouTube in its activities in live streaming.

With just a few clicks we can all go live and share whatever we can see on our TV's.......bad news for the traditional streaming providers but pretty good news for the smaller independent producer.

This will buy a lot of time to figure out how to make money from the model and may cause further concern for the live subscription and ppv operators.