Archive for May, 2007

YouTube and other video sites lets you upload any content for free.

What’s in it for them? Well, they make money from the frame of the video placing banners, text ads etc.

But what’s in it for the producers? Well, for most of the producers it’s just a way to get the word out or getting famous. But what’s in it for the professional producers? Right now, nothing really. Maybe they can create buzz for their other media channels.

My question is, why are non of the content producers putting up clips with ads on the different video sites? The revenue share model is perfect, the site gets the income from the ads around the video, and the content owners from the ads in the content/video. I don’t think YouTube would complain.

This is another small piece of the Fri TV project, packaging the ads/value in to the content and then setting it free.

The question below is somehow the core of the head ache that the TV-industry is having right now:

How will or can the TV industry in the long term capitalize on the content they own on the web and reduce piracy to insignificant levels?

This is a question that the Fri TV project is aiming to try to solve (I know it sounds naive). So here I present my view if the problem and hope for some nutritious comments.

There’s a lot of TV-content around on the web today.

The different torrent sites are all dominated by TV content, mostly TV series. According to the survey I’ve done at MMS, 30% of the downloaded moving pictures viewed are TV-series and 20% are movies. The content owners are not in any way connected to this distribution and are not getting anything back from it.

On the other side, the best parts of these series or TV-shows are often user distributed on different flash video sites such as YouTube and MetaCafé. Also here, the content owners are missing out on the whole cake.

The work with the “Moving pictures 2007″ project at MMS, left me with three strong conclusions:

1. Young people, especially young men, watch a lot of moving pictures on or through their computers, more than i thought. The young men between 16-30 years watch streaming and downloaded video for 74 minutes daily! The same figure for TV was 180 minutes meaning that the computer viewing equals 40% of the TV viewing. By the way, they are also watching less and less TV every year. And remember, young men tend to show the way for the whole population with these things (remember the VCR, computers, the webb?).
2. There’s no common perfect or preferable way to watch moving pictures. Have you heard these before: “Wait until people can connect their computer easily to their TV, then EVERYBODY will use their computers to watch TV”, “Joost will have EVERYTHING for EVERYBODY, it’ll kill TV” or “TV is dead in five years”. None of these are true, because people have different behaviours. People have different interior design, different equipment and different preferences all leading to different behaviours. So, there will never be ONE solution, like Joost or whatever that will solve everybody’s needs, instead, there will like always just be more and more ways to consume moving pictures.
3. People do not WANT to act illegal, even though they are today. The problem today is the enormous gap between the legal and the illegal, where the legal many times is inferior or non existent. Besides, people are very content and happy with the mix of illegal systems they use such as torrents or other video sites. They offer them different solutions that fits them in different situations. So, if they’re to act legal, there’s a must be many different types of legal alternatives, competitive with the current illegal market.

So, the TV-industry is in a hurry. While the young men are watching less and less TV, they are watching more and more on/through their computers. And other groups will follow them. What they need is NOT to pimp up their own site (www.tvchannel.se), but a combination of different sites, technologies, platforms etc. in order to be able to satisfy the needs of the viewers. They also need to give the service that the illegal systems are giving today: the freedom to copy, high image and sound quality, social functions, ease of use and if including ads, making sure they are non obtrusive.

Then, and only then, will the legal alternatives be a competitive alternative to piracy and the content owners will have a chance to regain the power and get paid for their work.

This is basically what Fri TV will be all about, so I’m happily waiting for all of your thoughts and comments!

Well, the hardest thing is to get started, and now I’m there!

There have been a lot of questions before starting this blog: personal vs professional, domain, topic, Swedish vs English etc. I guess I just realised that this should be flexible and dynamic and changeable with time, but this is the way it turned out.

Professional
The blog will mostly function as a playground for thoughts around video on the web. This fits well with the plans with the Fri TV project that I am currently working on.

blog.fri-tv.se
Since the Fri TV project will use Fri-TV.se, Im using the subdomain.

Topic: Ad-funded TV-distribution on the web
This blog will focus on the Fri TV project that aims to solve the long-term issues with online video. One of the two long-term solutions will be ad-funding.

English
Having a project that probably is one of its kind in the world (if it ever get realised that is :)), it’s important to think ahead and get help from the entire online community. I’ve almost never written in English, so bare with me as I develop my skills.

So, I guess i’ve gotten started now. See you around!

Cheers
/Sorosh