Archive for June, 2007
MySpaceTV challenges for the title
June 28th, 2007
MySpace has relaunched its video service as MySpaceTV, complete with its own URL - www.myspacetv.com and individual versions tailored for 15 different countries.
The site will be totally independent so that people can visit to share and watch video, even if they’re not signed up for MySpace.
MySpace currently attracts 110 million users a month and this new, or revamped, service will also offer ways for members to easily integrate the videos that they create into their personal profiles.
However, MySpaceTV is also set to move away from user generated content (UGC) and place more emphasis on professionally produced material, including programming from News Corporation’s NBC Universal and Fox channels.
To date UGC has not been a big money spinner in terms of attracting advertisers to video, and if your focus is monetising video, well of course it is, then the safest bet is professional clips.
Furthermore, MySpace has the advantage here, as although it will need to invest in content deals in the same way that YouTube has, it already has access to content from the News Corp family, see above.
So how far away is MySpaceTV from YouTube? Well, according to a Hitwise survey measuring US visits to video sharing sites in May, YouTube is still very much the leader with a 60 per cent market share. MySpace came second with 16 per cent, and Google Video third with 8 per cent.
Pretty far then. But expect that gap to fall dramatically.
The NY Times has the full story.
Internet TV battle hots up…with Apple sidelined
June 27th, 2007
The BBC’s development of its on-demand internet TV catch-up service has been plagued with delays…until now. This morning the broadcaster announced that it was bringing forward the launch of its iPlayer, to 27 July.
The service will give broadband users free access to TV and radio programmes that the BBC has broadcast over the previous seven days. Uers will also be able to download programmes and save them on their computers for up to 30 days.
The phrase ‘content is king’ is still very true for the UK’s evolution of internet TV, but at the moment the market looks very fragmented. The BBC is apparently talking to potential distribution partners including MSN, Telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo, Myspace, Bebo and Blinkx. Interestingly, the iPlayer service will not be available on Apple computers at launch.
The plot thickens. I’m feeling a bit sorry for my computer at the moment, having to handle video content from a range of different players and services. I was thinking about going all Apple until I heard this!
What’s that? Contextual online video advertising you say…
June 25th, 2007
A considerable leap in online video advertising has taken place today, and it may have come from a source that you were not expecting.
blinkx, the video search engine, has introduced AdHoc, a video advertising platform that reviews video content and places relevant advertising against it.
According to blinkx’s press release: “AdHoc leverages blinkx’s patented speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis technology to understand video content more thoroughly and effectively.” Got it?
AdHoc also offers options that include pre-, post- and mid-roll placement, (Ad placement at the start, middle or end of the video), and works with a range of ad systems including Google’s AdWords, which is a smart move to make the platform more universally accepted.
blinkx claims that the AdHoc platform will revolutionise video advertising in the same way that Google’s AdSense transformed advertising on the Web.
AdHoc certainly seems to be breaking new ground in contextual online video, and whilst I’m sure other providers have been working on similar advertising packages, blinkx has beaten the likes of Google, MySpace and Yahoo! by introducing the first contextual online video advertising platform. Hats off!
However, there does seem to be a slight draw back. According to a piece on the Register; “The video hosters, who allow the search engine to index their content, won’t necessarily get a say on what product their users are being associated with, which could see some interesting conflicts emerge.”
If this is true, comparisons will surely be drawn with blind networks where advertisers place adverts on a network, but do not have control over where the final ads will be served.
Interesting times are ahead in the online video advertising space, and as with all aspects of the online world, monetisation remains the focus.
June 22nd, 2007
Hot on the heels of The Times’ best 50 business blogs, last week, Technobabble 2.0 has published its top 50 analyst bloggers league table.
Well, to be honest, Technobabble 2.0 has since republished an updated version, I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake.
The top three positions are taken by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at Forrester, Stowe Boyd at /Message and James Governor at Redmonk, who also take three of the top 10 spaces.
Congratulations to Heather Hopkins who is in at number eight and is also the highest ranked Hitwise analyst, closely followed by Bill Tancer and LeeAnn Prescott.
As Technobabble 2.0 points out, this table not only highlights the experts, but also asks questions of those analysts that aren’t on the list, specifically - ’how reliable is their advice in this area if they haven’t mastered it themselves?’
The league table was developed by ranking analyst blogs based on values from Google (measuring pagerank), Bloglines (measuring subscribers), Technorati (measuring links) and Technobabble 2.0’s own subjective measure looking at frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content and comments.
User backlash against Facebook applications
June 21st, 2007
A storm is brewing in the blogosphere today over the number of new applications - both commercial and user-generated - being touted on online community Facebook.
The Facebook application platform is open to all developers, and so as you’d expect, a mixture of good and not so good applications are springing up.
The fight back surprises me, as it is a complete u-turn on the open source debate that has typically been a part of social networks and communities such as Facebook and MySpace. The trend in opening-up application platforms to developers can only help to speed-up the progress of Web 2.0 as we know it. Why else would Apple be opening-up it’s iPhone platform to outside developers?
I have been impressed with the creativity in commercial Facebook applications in particular. I would far rather have the option to install a Tripadvisor ‘where I’ve travelled’ interactive map on my profile for example, than have my page bombarded with banner advertising.
While the industry continues to debate the to advertise/not to advertise issue in relation to social networks, surely the way forward is to investigate the creative alternatives more deeply.
Is Facebook a flash in the pan? Well we’ll have to wait and see. But the opportunities now for it to lead the online advertising industry in monetising online communities are endless. It will be interesting to see how this argument develops.