Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The Video Web - Better, Faster and Cheaper

In a survey published in Sept. 2007, McKinsey confirmed that marketing executives around the world were moving online across the spectrum of marketing activities, from building awareness to after-sales service and that they see online tools as an important and effective component of their marketing strategies! However, the use of wikis and virtual worlds was more limited because of an absence of meaningful metrics.

Also, McKinsey reported that spending on digital advertising was set to increase significantly. The video ads category was the fastest growing with 74% of the respondents saying that they would increase spending over the next three years.

As discussed previously, I believe that one of the reasons for the expected growth is the maturity of content creation tools as well as more reliable delivery options (CDNs). Tools and services that facilitate the management and tracking of the digital assets (watermark, fingerprinting,…) at a lower cost and with a better experience for the viewers.

Akamai, with Stream OS, outputs video in multiple formats, so content provider don’t have to manually reformat outgoing content for each type of recipient. Moreover, the metadata attached to video and audio content includes rules and cue for how the content should be distributed, as well as description for search engines. BitTorrent, previously synonymous with digital piracy, announced early October a new enterprise CDN product called BitTorrent DNA. BitTorrent DNA is designed for publishers seeking ways to overcome slow downloads and choppy video streams. Brightcove is the first customer for BitTorrent DNA.

In addition many other more recent vendors like Joost, Babelgum, BitGravity and Rinera Networks continue to improve both QOS and Digital Asset Management at a frantic pace.

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