A Day Re-defining Internet TV

Ah, what a great day. When you spend your life trying to redefine an entire industry, finding kindred spirits is a tough thing to do, and I have no greater brother-in-arms in this battle than Raul de la Cruz from Vivocom, Spain's leading internet TV company.

Today, we spent the day in glorious Barcelona debating the last decade and the current state of our industry, devalued by pirates and opportunists like YouTube, but still looking for the ultimate business model in an industry where nemeses like Ooyala and Brightcove are still present, after years and years of losing huge amounts of money for their shareholders.

We also began to plan for the next generation of video production and delivery - the industry has only just begun a painful period of change and has a long way to go as production moves from ancient hardware into the cloud.

And then we discussed what the world will be like when every organisation will use video as actively as they use text in promoting their organisations. A world where a YouTube channel is just a tiny part of the marketing mix, not an excuse for a video strategy in an app and Facebook dominated world.

There were some interesting themes:

  • how to teach non-trained individuals how to use video as a tool (rather than pointing their iPhones and pretending this is video)
  • how to then cut, produce and add interactivity to the video enabling original delivery of content and messages
  • managing the video across an ever increasing range of outlets, from connected TVs to smart devices
  • distributing and measuring the video delivery to hundreds of destinations and feeding back to the organisation

It's a complex web that, in the professional form, involves tens of people working intensely at any point in the production process. But can this process be made available to the smallest company. Can organisations build their own professional broadcast solution ? And not use a camcorder and YouTube ?

Over two decades we've come close to defining and delivering this, but there is a fair way to go.

Still, being in Barcelona on an evening when the home side beat Germans Bayer Levekausen 7-0 in the Champions League bodes well, I reckon! And I also hope that I have convinced Raul to become a regular contributor to this blog to provide a unique insight from his perspective in the Spanish and US markets.