"Venture capitalists argued over just about everything, including whether there was any wisdom to investing in content, the Web term for created material."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-1125_webtvnov25,1,6300840.column?ctrack=1&cset=true
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ReplyDeleteIt was easy to feel a certain inevitability when a few hundred Web-video pioneers gathered in an auditorium here to discuss the future of television.
It seemed obvious, for that day at least, that television would migrate to the Web, that the dinosaur of network TV and the slightly younger dinosaur of cable TV had already walked into the tar pit, that the future of video would be one of an infinite, on-demand library.
And this library -- duh! -- would be just waiting for you to call up "Grey's Anatomy" or a lonelygirl15 video and play it on your living-room plasma screen, your kitchen laptop or your mobile phone.
Anybody at the inaugural NewTeeVee Live conference who tried to speak up for the proposition that the consumer might not want a world of endless choices, might not be all that disappointed in the status quo, might as well have been wearing Johnston & Murphy rather than Adidas.
"Sometimes, give people a little freedom from choice," said Henrik Werdelin, chief creative officer of Joost. But Joost is trying to be a destination site, like an old-line network but on the Web, narrowing customers' options down to a relative handful of video choices.
"It's not necessarily about us controlling our own Web sites," countered Mika Salmi, in sneakers, president of global digital media for MTV Networks, arguing for letting the video a company produces roam free on the Web, within certain copyright-friendly boundaries, to increase the chance that people will find it.
Salmi's colleague, Ty Ahmad-Taylor, an MTV Networks product development vice president, had a nice metaphor for the need to get video out there: "You can keep building really nice stores in Poughkeepsie, but most of the customers are on 5th Avenue," he said.
And most of the speakers and attendees at the conference agreed: Just get the video out there, and you may be surprised at what happens. One Web-only series, the twentysomething drama "Quarterlife," from the "thirtysomething" producers, was just signed for a second airing on NBC.
At rival CBS, "We now have 285 live partners on the Internet syndicating CBS content all over the place," said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive.
Smith, who did wear Adidas, served up what the conference-sponsoring NewTeeVee blog identified as the day's "money quote": "Old media executives have made more of an effort to learn new media than new media has bothered to learn old media."
The implicit warning: Don't bet on us not being able to catch up and, with our superior resources, power past all the more cutting-edge video efforts.
Mostly, the new stereotypes applied: Old media bad, new media good. Traditional studio bad, upstart Web site good. Professionally made content suspect, user generated content awesome.
"The worst mistake anyone can make," Smith said, noting that 70 percent of online video traffic is in short, clip form, "is to assume that it's just going to be about regurgitated television: 'Oh, yeah, wait till professional content comes online.'"
But that's not to say the conference, which drew everyone from a YouTube founder to the head of AT&T's mobile content to creators of JibJab and "Ask a Ninja," was simply a monolith of the current conventional wisdom.
With so much up in the air about online video, you couldn't expect near-unanimity, except on the biggest philosophical points. In the margins, people are trying to figure out what the ad model will be to make it pay off, where long-form video will fit into this world and how people are going to get video from the computer into the living room.
Video providers argued over which types of ads would work online, pre-roll (before the video), post-roll (after) or overlay (on top). Content executives argued over whether Web video needs to be offered in HD quality. Venture capitalists argued over just about everything, including whether there was any wisdom to investing in content, the Web term for created material.
One of those VCs, Dennis Miller, a partner in the Spark Capital funding firm, was asked if putting money into Funny or Die, Will Ferrell's comedy site, makes sense.
"The 'die' part does," he said, explaining that too often the proposition to would-be investors in start-ups like that is, "'Hey, you can hang out with Will Ferrell, and you should give us money.'"
Making video is "a treacherously expensive, tough business that I think gets a lot of flippant attention," said Miller. "There is already roadkill. There will be massive roadkill ahead."
Others on his panel, though, argued that video is relatively cheap to fund nowadays, and a little money seeded well might produce big results, even in content creation.
In this world, after all, shows themselves become the brands, rather than the networks that air them.
Money was definitely in the air. "Is this a thing where every time you hear 'Web 2.0' you have to take a drink?" asked a panelist.
No, suggested a voice from the crowd, the comically overused buzzword was "Monetization." If that speaker had been following his own suggestion, by that point in the afternoon, he would no longer have been able to pronounce the word.
But the point boils down to this: The chasm between the viewing for online video and the ad dollars it takes in is huge, many believe. CBS's Smith called it a "$26 billion online arbitrage opportunity."
Miller noted that the big daddy of Web video, YouTube, has largely failed to turn eyeballs into dollars. "The lack of monetization on YouTube is astonishing," he said.
Even Steve Chen, one of the YouTube founders, spoke of trying to "hopefully figure out a way that they can monetize all this content."
A big part of the problem, people seemed convinced, is in persuading advertisers to change their traditions.
"We've got to convince the advertisers, the media buyers, that there's more video on the Web than a cat flushing a toilet," said Dina Kaplan, chief operating officer of Blip.tv, a site that hosts and shares its revenue with popular video producers including Mahalo Daily and Ze Frank.
But patience here is probably a virtue. It's worth remembering that the video explosion has happened, basically, in the last two years.
CBS's Smith, for one, thinks the Internet model for delivering video ultimately will be a better business than the television model, because, with its community focus, it's about a whole evening out, rather than just one aspect of it.
It's "the dinner before the movie, the movie and the conversation afterward," he said. "That's actually a better model."
And it is, in all probability, as inevitable as people felt it to be, even if it may not be as imminent.
The conversation left one conference attendee, Thom Wallace of the green-themed video startup site emPivot, feeling he had witnessed "proof that it's not the dot bust of the late '90s. This is people saying, 'OK, this is the new reality for the delivery of content.'"
-immo1
In the end it will come down to who has the best story and who can tell it in the most compelling way on this new medium.
ReplyDeleteAt least I hope that is now it works!