Congrats to the colleagues of thebrainbehind. It’s an comprehensive update to IPTV Benchmark Study. This years edition was again published in cooperation with Nokia Siemens networks and is assesing relevant IPTV rollouts around the globe as well as a number of the most interesting video streaming websites. In both cases business models have been analysed in terms of product offer, ease of use and the range of content that is available as well as the usability of the services.

The following chapters have been contributed by eyetag media engineers network

• WebTV: Reassessing Potential for Value Creation
• Top-tier type of content:
  Positioning in a platform driven environment
• Second-tier type of content:
  Growing maturity for business designs
• Independent, Niche and Prosumer content:
  Platforms coming of age

Following up some snippets out of it:

WebTV: Reassessing Potential for Value Creation

It took no longer than a bat of an eyelid to change the arena of web entertainment forever. Yet, despite all large and small moves by industry majors, there is still a staggering amount of trial and error going on. But with content owners embracing the opportunities arising from a growing focus on relationship-driven business, a number of underlying strategic trends can be observed.
Again, this year saw transactions from investors towards online video services and software companies of $461m in the pioneering market for the industry, the US (Dow Jones VentureSource). In web video, growth is expected to triple by 2011, as can be seen in the diagram below.

[chart removed]
Despite video ads being a relatively new form of advertising, they generated revenues of about $1bn last year in the US alone. It will increase to $2.9 billion by 2011 at an average annual growth rate of 48%, according to Strategy Analytics. As such it will be the growth factor No 1 for the segment. Worldwide and for all online video business models researcher InStat predicts a growth from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $4.5 billion in 2012 (CAGR at 39%).

In the meantime social web, still a major factor for internet usage of geek dimensions (and WebTV’s ‘structural complementor’), will capture some $3.8billion until 2011 in advertising.

The tremendous uptake of pull media is also shown in that more than a third of all US TV households are forecast to subscribe to or regularly use VoD on various platforms by 2011 (Informa), generating revenues of more than $11.4 billion.
But besides all this progress being made on networked media, one should not forget that DVD usage is a well embedded habit. DVDs have been used by consumers for years. And to most the format is just perfect. This behaviour will only change gradually, usecase by usecase. Plus, despite the raw numbers of growth and usage, social networks are still trying to come up with successful ad models. It will certainly remain a key question in coming years how profits can be made from the massive amount of users’ time spent on MySpace, Facebook and Co.
As the following ranking of online properties in the US suggests, traditional media is still lagging behind the internet world’s incumbents.

Another aspect, the widespread fear of converting analog dollars into digital pennies, has some considerable truth in it. As Will Richnond of the TDG Group stated recently as an example, NBC would earn a loss in value of up to 80% for one episode of ‘Heroes’ placed on hulu.com, instead of pouring it out via their network outlets. This might even be higher, if sales fail to harvest a double CPM for the piece.

On the other hand such assumptions only become reality if conversion from push to pull media would evidently cause linear loss on traditional outlets. Except for younger audiences, which may never have been as connected as the old measurement model was suggesting, the decay remains yet hard to prove. And of course broadcasters here are great in proving the strength and vitality of connectedness with their audiences. Efforts to establish an integrated measurement system for the multi-screen landscape suggest that many players are hoping for more transparency on such questions soon.
Summarising trends, it can be noted that an increasingly mature pull media is now a cornerstone in strategic decision-making. Video works as driving force behind the internet’s popularity and, accordingly, for advertising revenue growth and migration.

[...]

Independent, Niche and Prosumer content:
Platforms coming of age

This class still counts for the largest amount of content deployed throughout the web.
It is these new platforms that are putting enormous disruptive pressure on traditional content owners. In an ongoing “tsunami of self expression” (New York Times), people are looking for ways to share their life and to draw attention to themselves. One of the most striking figures is without doubt the 10 hours of video being uploaded to Youtube every minute.
The following chart underlines the stellar advance of Youtube in this domain.

Top 10 Video and Multimedia Websites (US), Source: Hitwise marketingcharts.com

Myspace is expected to generate $1bn this fiscal year (ending June 2009). WebTV platform provider Brightcove has closed deals with hundreds of independent content owners and is reaching out to attain a global presence with their increasingly mature SaaS services.
Mainstream media’s alignment to aggregation platforms is of course a primary measure for meeting fragmentation tendencies. As content opportunities proliferate, capabilities in connecting audiences with highly relevant contents will become a source of growth, even if this leads users outside the former product’s boundaries. The task must be to absorb the consumer’s involvement and to create complementary assets around it. Mashups of user generated content are one way of achieving this. Hulu, for example, lets users compile their own rough edits of episodes of their favourite shows. In addition, Youtube has just recently launched an annotation tool where users can add notes and comments to videos. Not long ago, these features could only be found on specialised platforms features list - another indicator for the growing maturity of the segment.
By introducing more and more of such features, prosumer communities and independent fan bases are changing not only entertainment from bottom-up, but brand communication as a whole. Whereas top-tier contents are attracting users in the first place and second-tier contents are setting the pace for community engagement, prosumer and other highly vertical platforms will continue to drive buzz and lead to a real pervasiveness of the magic of a video enhanced web 2.0.

As the cold days come by, eyetag is back on the blog. There are a few things coming up soon. First and foremost the blog will need some overdue frontend polishing and a major wordpress upgrade. I’m still figuring out to what extend i will re-design the project. But one thing is for sure: There’s enough fuel to fill the pipes. Certainly we will have some more re-blogging over here in future. Eventually one major benefit of micro media brands and blogs is this very simple function of being a repository for all kind of chunks. From information to irrigation. And sometimes you make it to create valuable context (read also Umair’s noteworhy read on the issue). Um, the role of context and it’s valuation/exploitation in a micro media environment. Maybe I should put up a dedicated section for this one..? Let me think…

In den USA vollziehen Unternehmen bereits diesen Schritt. Laut dem Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, MA, weist Inc. 500 Index der schnellst wachsenden Unternehmen weißt dort einen Anteil von 39% Unternehmensblogs (2007: 19%) aus. Selbst wenn ein dort zu beobachtendes Wachstum um 20% beim Einsatz von Video innerhalb der Unternehmensabläufe auf 45% dieser Unternehmen nicht direkt übertragbar auf hiesige Marktverhältnisse sein muss, sehen wir zumindest einen deutlichen Indikator für das Gesamtpotential. So prognostiziert Forrester zb. für das Jahr 2013 einen Weltmarkt von 4.6 Mrd US$ für Unternehmensanwendungen basierend auf Web 2.0 Technologien.
Der Hype-Zyklus neuer Technologien

Gartner beschäftigt sich in einer Studie mit dem Hype-Zyklus neuer Technologien. Hier heisst es, die Einführung von Web 2.0-Anwendungen ist nicht gleichzustellen mit der Zufriedenheit.

Das Papier sagt 27 Technolgietrends voraus, die sich mittelfristig in Unternehmen etablieren werden. Acht davon sollen sich besonders stark auf Unternehmen auswirken. Dazu gehören vor allem: Green IT, Web 2.0, Soziale Netzwerke, Cloud Computing, Virtuelle Welten, Videoconferencing und Microblogging.

Viele der Technologien müssen allerdings erst von den Endkonsumenten erlernt werden, bevor sie im Unternehmen angewendet werden. Firmen sammeln Erfahrung im Einsatz der Technologien, spüren den Erfolg und die kulturellen Auswirkungen spüren werden. Jackie Fenn von Gartner meint:

Later — in between two and five years — cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is moving up the Slope of Enlightenment, will deliver transformation in terms of driving deep changes in the role and capabilities of IT. Finally, public virtual worlds, which are suffering from disillusionment after their peak of hype in 2007, will in the long term represent an important media channel to support and build broader communities of interest.

The following chapters were contributed by eyetag media engineers network:
- Web TV: Vertical disruption in times of Web 2.0
- Top-tier type of contents: Struggle over channel and platform control (including reference case “Anti-Tube”)
- Second-tier type of contents: Finding a viable business model
- Independent and prosumer content: Absorbing the trend and leveraging assets on the edge
plus snapshot chapters on Joost and Babelgum, Brightcove and Youtube.

Order your copy now. And buy one for your little sister, too..!

UPDATE: unsuprisingly the video has been removed from motherload as well as from youtube. here is a copy, case you haven’t seen it yet…

The paradigmatic changes of consumers’ value prop - all of which are regular subject to this blog and thus shall not be repeated here - affect a number of related industries and throw up a plethora of questions on the future distribution of filmed entertainment.

“We are searching for the new platform or the new channel that will drive the profits in the future, but there are so many unknowns . . . What we do know is that the entire model is up for grabs.”,

said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group already in 2005, marking a change in executives’ mindsets that is almost common sense among industry leaders today.
The thesis focuses on processes, operations and questions of a strategic innovation management resulting from the tectonic shift filmed entertainment is undergoing these days. Extracts of data from all important segments are being collected, agnostic of platform or delivery method, since market segmentation in IP’s advent to TV needs to embrace a new scope of competition. Underlying core belief is that markets are substantially driven by customers’ sets of needs and attached value propositions and hence products can only be developed by careful exploration of those needs. Ratio of argumentation is that by building up excellence in meeting those needs, traces for exploiting customer base and benefit from such engagement can be found.

Core interest of the paper was to discover differentiation options by leveraging open network services and their multicast and participation capabilities in comparison to linear broadcast service offerings of the past. What drives users of mass market numbers now to the Internet and its myriads of communities and social networks?
What can managed network operators and content providers learn from this migration? How can they incorporate success factors into their own environments and drive market evolvement actively?

In order to reach to those findings, the opening chapter of the paper is concerned with a basic description of the platforms competition, their respective service propositions and fundamentals about the essence of value add.
Basic usage patterns and distinct user types in the fragmenting media landscape where examined in the next chapter. Seven key trends in digital individualization helped in the later course of the research at determining success factors and framing disruption to industry incumbents. Following up background information on changing motives and value capture within networked media was provided.

Chapter 3, Service Analysis, added more insights to the industry. It investigated more of the specific structure of each market and general industry independencies by analyzing value chains and business webs, generic payment models and exemplified offerings of digital TV (“Best of Breed”), IPTV (“The Pioneers”) and Broadband TV (“The Trials”). Basic assumptions for pre-requisites to success at on-demand content provision where drawn and lead to three key success factors. Content range, value add by functionality and achieving convenient media experiences. Broadband TV brings strong complementary capabilities to the area of broadcast, so in a summary to the service analysis chapter the evolutionary effects of broadband video to the industry where illustrated.
In Chapter 4 resource-based perspective was added to the examination. Variables for a successful differentiation where collected in here.
But what path towards achieving innovation advantage can be chosen? The essence of paradigmatic changes examined was subsumed in the last part and the findings are attached to three types of new aggregation services (Microplatforms, Aggregators and Reconstructors, following Umair’s classification).
Network effects occurring out of distributed economies of scale waited to be explored. Absorbing of users’ value propositions and inviting them to participatory engagement turns out to be a likely way to go. Analyzing incorporation potential requires to look distinctly to
barriers of technical, economical or other structural and cultural origin. Although broadcast and pay TV still yields by far the largest share of exploitation of TV contents, signs are for change. TV companies should use their strengths in building up relationships because of their high competence in creating emotion and involvement. In the course of the thesis its being demonstrated that they are lacking capabilities to develop thoroughly and sustainable better relationships to their audience. It is being recommended for them to increasingly acquire resources that are not only asset driven, but aim to support engagement in the relationship business element of networked media of the future. By improving customer relationship, the degree of control enforcement will loose its exclusive importance.
Arguable approaches are shown in the following depict.

This assessment frames two central dimensions of change being discovered in the thesis. Competency in relationship engagement with audiences on the y-axis and channel control or degree of customer ownership on x-axis. Those two dimensions shape basic occurrences of business approaches and draw the line between the traditional media model and the new, networked media environment. The arrow describes the evolvement of the business models and indicates market lifecycles from maturity (broadcast) to introduction (broadband TV).
In the paper it is suggested for media companies to incorporate “three pillars of the paradigm shift” (Business logics, Service Types and Business models) to their strategic agendas and thus to their innovation processes.

For mastering the manifold challenges of a networked, heavily Micromedia influenced and thus hyper competitive TV landscape, they will clearly need to perform better on the variables that determine industry disruption.