The Future of Web Video, by Scott Kirsner is a comprehensive study about the global shift evolving with on-line video as a new form of conversation between content creator and audience. Check out the ToolKit section of the site for more information. In addition, Scott and I will be taping an interview in the coming weeks.

The Future of Web Video by Scott Kirsner will become an important source of imformation to a new generation of content creators, much like Film Lighting, by Kris Malkiewicz was to past imagemakers.

To purchase the book, The Future of Web Video

Scott’s blog

GigaOM has a very good first look (with screen shots) of The Venice Project, from the boys who co-founded Skype.

Back in 1999/2000 there was an app that pushed hugh bandwidth content to users. I recall using it on a broadband connection at my office at the time, it was a pig, very slow and crashed a lot but it reminds me of this, does anyone remember that program?

Bear Sterns research published their Long Tail assessment of the state of Television which they see as shifting to content owner. Among other observations they feel that “Aggregation and Context” will be king and not content.

Slide 11 has an interesting comparison of the "Economy of Scarcity" verses the "Economy of Abundance" matching unlimited content with an optimal supply/demand mix.

While there is an unlimited amount of content chasing eyeballs, the question from my perspective is in creating networks and applications which allow for content convergence, to enable media to follow people from platform to platform in an easy to use fashion. Currently, the technical sophistication for the average citizen, still the vast majority of TV viewers is too high and complex. After all, from the latest reports I've read only about 9 or 10% of the public are using DVR's and that figure may be less for Slingbox or NeuLion type devices.

On slide 13, one of their questions is "Will Niche User Generated Content Find a Audience" Of course that has already been answered, the question is can content creators afford to create content for Internet TV and IPTV distribution for niche audiences? Business Week had a very good article in the December 4th issue, "You Oughta be In Webcasts" While there were examples of low budget, professionally produced niche content projects resonating with audiences, there still is the challenge of making a living. In talking about the show, The Burg the article spoke to the financial obstacles still facing Indie producers.

" Advertisers, including Dewar's, have approached the shows creator, Kathleen Grace, about running video ads ahead of the episodes. The rates are competitive with those of rich media ads offered on other sites, she says, but since they're based on the hits a site gets and her audience is only about 10,000 per episode, any ad revenue generated won't even cover her bandwidth costs, let alone pay the cast and crew. (The show is currently self-financed.)"

What changes to the mix are required in order for this show to succeed financially? A few thoughts come to mind.

- Audience share goes up, which translates in to increased ad revenue and more advertisers
- Equipment costs comes down (they are likely already shooting on low cost DV gear)
- Bandwidth costs comes down (not likely in the short term)
- Show generated significant media buzz and gets picked up by a studio
- Other?

The rest of the Bear Sterns report covers market players, size and share metrics and is well worth reading.

Nokia along with MSN will webcast a five city live concert on New Year's Eve in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Berlin, Rio, and New York. The event will be produced by Control Room, a company formed by the producers of AOL's Live 8 concert and will stream the acts on MSN Video.

Featured artists include:

New York performers include Rihanna, Ludacris, and KT Tunstall. In Hong Kong, Atomic Kitten and Hacken Lee will play. Mumbai will have Nelly Furtado; Berlin will have The Scissor Sisters; and Rio will have the Black Eyed Peas, Sergio Mendes and John Legend.

If I were at Nokia, I would equip dozens of viewer in each of the the five cities with their N93 video camera phone to record the event from "the ground" and upload video live to a site. The video mashups would be available alongside the professional webcast and create a "Night in the Life" of New Year's with a global community feel.

In a 3-to-2 vote, a divided FCC approved a plan to make it easier for local Telecom companies to enter the delivery of video to the home market and make it more difficult for local municipalities to delay the approval of franchise agreements.

“This means an end to the automatic skyrocketing in cable prices and means greater choice in service and programming,” said David Fish, a Verizon spokesman.

The two dissenting Commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein both indicated there was a lack of direct evidence that localities were impeding telephone companies' rolling out new TV services.

The moment has arrived. After combing through hundreds of submissions, we are proud to announce the results of IPTV Evangelist’s first-annual IPTV Top 50. We would like to thank everyone who participated and to congratulate those whose names adorn our list. All the usual suspects are there, along with more than a few surprises.

Also, the site owners would like to congratulate everyone named and to thank everyone who contributed, especially Anastasia Wylie, who nominated Mike Hudack of Blip.TV. She is the winner of our random drawing who will receive a free case of wine courtesy of WineLibrary TV.

I was at the New York Video 2.0 Group Meetup last week and after the formal presentations had an interesting conversation with Ari Paparo, VP Rich Media - DoubleClick. According to Ari, there are there are few sites and content creators who are going to benefit in the short term from pre-roll revenue from major advertisers. His reasoning is there is less inventory chasing content then people think and that advertisers are still very concerned over the placement of their spots.

Recently, I came across TurnHere, a company based on the premise that low-cost video advertising can address local needs and even national brands. Their mantra is if the quality is good, the message is clear and compelling, content is not be placed against inappropriate user generated media and local crews can offset travel overhead then it becomes a compelling channel for local advertisers.

Having looked at their site, this is nothing like the local cable Ad spots that come to mind and adding Google maps of establishments with inserted video spots is a very convenient and compelling way to browse different stores while getting an idea of where they are located. If this moves to cell phones and PDA's via Flash mobile then you will really have a mobile Yellow Pages. Add an onboard GPS, such as with the current Sprint Blackberry and you can do a lot more then "let your fingers do the walking" as the old slogan went.

So back to pre-rolls and content producers. If it is going to be tough sledding for producers to generate any meaningful revenue from online distribution companies like Blip, Brightcove, Revver, or similar models, perhaps TurnHere might leverage this talent base adding to their spots, local flavor stories to included select entertainment content?

As companies look for meaningful, content they should reach out to the on-line community of Indie producer who are looking to make a living on-line and get their content shown.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired Magazine and author of the business best-seller, "The Long Tail". In the book, he argues that cumulatively, all of the non-hits and specialized offerings in "the Long Tail" represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Levi Shapiro of IPTV Evangelist spoke with Chris prior to his Keynote address at NATPE, the article will appear in Video Age magazine

VA: In 1953, the biggest hit on TV was "I Love Lucy", with 70% of TV household. Today, the number one show on Monday nights during November sweeps was "Deal or No Deal", with six million viewers. Is the hit dead?

CA: I don't think the hit will ever die. What has changed is the extent of choice. For fifty years, distribution scarcity drove behavior rather than genuine consumer preferences. Now that viewers have a real choice, they clearly don't necessarily want their programming in 30 minute content blocks. So the hit will survive, but the long-tail can also thrive.

VA: Who will be the winners in a world where the long tail is a viable economic model?

CA: The internet diminishes the scarcity of access to distribution. Once upon a time, the only programming I could watch were the shows using the spectrum on the three national networks. In the present environment, I think small and medium sized content owners have a great chance of reaching niche audiences. We coined the term "Slivercasting" to describe the opportunity for monetizing niche micro audiences.

VA: What is Slivercasting?

CA: Sliver-casting is leveraging lower distribution costs to reach a specific niche and audience. Even these niches can have millions of people, like immigrant or expatriate communities. There are thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have highly dedicated small audiences. It is a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting. One example is the clip "Evolution of Dance", which was viewed over 35 million times on YouTube. By any measure, that is an enormous audience. The Long Tail starts with a million niches, but it isn't meaningful until those niches are populated with people who want them.

VA: Is there a long-tail opportunity for the big guys, too?

CA: After a hit show airs, it immediately moves further down the long tail. I think we are already seeing hits like LOST being viewed by smaller audiences on platforms other than television, such as video iPods, ABC.com and VCast.

VA: Is this just about the internet?

CA: The internet is important because if has reduced the scarcity of distribution to a point where viewers now have inventory on demand. However, this is really about pent-up consumer demand that was too costly to meet. The real opportunity of television programming is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests. That wasn't possible in the previous distribution model.

Besides the video-sharing sites like Grouper, Guba, iFilm, Metacafe, Revver, Veoh, etc, there are now profitable, specialized video services serving specialties like poker, bicycling, lacrosse, photography, vegetarian cooking, fine wine, horror films, obscure sitcoms and Japanese anime.

VA: Is the Long-Tail bringing people together?

CA: Instead of the office watercooler, which crosses cultural boundaries, we're increasingly forming our own tribes, groups bound together by affinity and shared interests. These days the watercoolers are virtual and the people who gather around them are self-selected.

VA: What does the long tail mean for incumbent content creators?

CA: Infinite choice and convenience means we will inevitably watch more television, just as the average amount of time spent watching TV increased with the transition from broadcast to cable to digital. Hit shows will endure but will be smaller in an environment of unlimited choice. We have already seen branded content redistributed to other formats and platforms, such as the SNL "Lazy Sunday" sketch, which was seen by exponentially more viewers on YouTube than NBC. Niche, user generated content will have an audience because, in some form or another, everybody's taste diverges from the mainstream.

VA: Who will be the winners and losers in a world of unlimited choice?

CA: The real winner is the consumer, who finally has a market structure that reflects an abundance of choice, rather than a scarcity of distribution. The value of aggregation, whether through YouTube or Yahoo or someone else, will increase as consumers seek assistance to connect with content that appeals to their specific interests. The smaller content producers will also benefit as they finally have access to distribution.

Quoting their news release "Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus On Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities".

In a not so surprising move, Lloyd Braun, head of media operations is leaving however, he is not mentioned in the release. What is surprising, is that Dan Rosensweig, Chief operating officer who is highly regarded within the firm has decided to leave Yahoo!, at the end of March.

You can read the full release Yahoo! News Release

Wall Street Journal (subscription required) by SVP, Brad Garlinghouse entitled The Peanut Butter Manifesto suggested some of these changes.

As for the release, the main thread seems to read as a tighter reporting structure along with a new focus on specific market segments, namely

Expand customer-centric culture and capabilities:
They are indicating a change in focus to reflect audience segments as opposed to product segments in addition to leveraging community and search. In addition, they talk of tagging, sharing and consuming media..

There will be three Operating Groups under the new structure each lead by a senior executive reporting directly to Terry Semel, these include:

Audience Group
The Group will be charged with building on network and off network audiences and relationships. Of note:

"Open more opportunities for users to take advantage of Yahoo! tools and services off network and through mobile and digital devices".

Perhaps this will mean Yahoo! Groups might see products geared specifically for group circles and social networking? Certainly, tools like JumpCut come to mind. In addition, the idea of media meshing has been talked about for both mobile and fixed platforms, perhaps they have some thoughts in this direction.

Advertiser & Publisher Group
Lead by current CFO, Sue Decker

"This group will lead the transformation of how advertisers connect with their target customers across the Internet, with the goal of driving more value for more advertisers and publishers than any other company".

"We will concentrate key engineering talent and shift investment towards the development of high-impact, scalable, global platforms and infrastructures".

The Yahoo! and Reuters Citizen Journalist initiative Basically, Yahoo! and Reuters are banking on an army of citizen journalists who will submit photos and video taken from camera phones and submit the bulk of them for free with a small percentage generating a yet disclosed "relatively small" amount of money.

The Citizen Journalist movement is a very compelling trend that I hope expands to decentralize and diversify coverage from the insulated media machine. While this movement is not specifically within the scope of IPTV and this site, I was intrigued by a quote by Lloyd Braun, who runs the Yahoo! Media Group. Mr. Braun said,

"People don't say, 'I want to see user-generated content', " said Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo's media group. "They want to see Michael Richards in the club.

Granted and there a many YouTube pages dedicated to Mr. Richards and people are fascinated with celebrity however, this does not account for the 80-100Mil downloads per day much of which are of average events by regular people. Mr. Braun as you may recall was brought into Yahoo! to build their original content creation division for IPTV, a bold idea that the company soon abandoned,

The photo to the left was of the moving of the Intrepid

this morning, taken during my morning ferry commute into New York City. There were a dozen people snapping photos and perhaps video with their cell phones but I doubt the networks with circling helicopters and trucks on the shoreline are going to be interested in paying for these. What will likely happen is that people will upload them to MySpace, YouTube (in the case of video) and share them with other people.

If the networks, Yahoo! and Reuters want your photos, or video of news events then make them pay for them, after all their production crews are not working free, unless you want to?

If you are looking for a more equitable arrangement, look at Scoopt, which indicates a 50/50% rev share model.

Unlike give away most of your rights with Yahoo!, Scoopt has a more straightforward arrangement.

'We don't 'sell' photos at all. Instead, we re-license them for publication in a number of different ways. This is an important distinction because it means the photo remains your property at all times. In legalese, you retain the copyright".

Some of the fine print of the agreement to their service:

You retain ownership to Your Content that You submit for inclusion into the Service. However, by submitting Your Content to Yahoo!, You hereby grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable and transferable rights and licenses:

Yahoo! reserves and has the right to sell, license and/or display any advertising, promotional and distribution rights in connection with Your Content, and Yahoo! will be entitled to retain any and all revenue generated from any sales or licenses of such advertising, promotional or distribution rights.

There apparently is a termination portion however, if you actually obtain the next big news story this would be put to the test.

The foregoing licenses granted by You shall terminate once You remove or delete, or request removal or deletion of, as applicable, Your Content from the Service and the removal has been processed on Yahoo!'s backend.