Streaming or Forward/Store?

I wonder sometimes about the debate as to whether the Video Internet will thrive on streamed content or downloaded and played back content. Well, since my theme here is my acknowledged mastery of the obvious (i.e. as plain as the nose on my face) let me just put it this way: It reminds me a bit of the ice cream question: chocolate or vanilla? My answer: yes to both and btw, I like strawberry too.

ESPN Motion has been a big success. The guys at DIG (Disney Internet Group) deserve a lot of credit for both their foresight and their execution. MTV Overdrive will include a similar capability. Maven, Kontiki, Red Swoosh, Trusted Media and others are building forward and store applications and evangelizing products that will enable efficient management of the bits and bytes in the distribution of content and the efficient management of the media on our PCs. Its great stuff – in fact, my company, Lightningcast, has relationships with all and common-customer projects underway with two of them.

More efficient use of bandwidth than streaming. Great for premium content – movies, hi-def, other highly produced content or content where visual effects are critical to the user-experience. Great for portability, mobility, viewing in a disconnected environment. But there are challenges here too – corporate network admins block them, the masses are uncertain about how they feel about similar applications that live on ones PC (Spyware paranoia) and there is the immediacy problem. Instant gratification and the frenetic way we’ve become accustomed to finding and consuming content on the fly on the Page Internet will have a big impact on our behavior on the Video Internet (along with the broadcast corollary of channel surfing) and will be a limiting factor. So, streaming, which well suits much of the content consumed today is going to continue to be a principal method for consuming free video content on the Video Internet.

What we need are tools that don’t care. Tools that enable publishers to create, publish and distribute content for consumption in a of variety ways, tools that enable rights management, transactions and advertising in a variety of ways agnostic to the distribution/delivery method, the platform/ screen or the user consumption environment.

For example, consider the approach we’ve taken at Lightningcast. Our goal is to help audio and video content owners and other rights holders monetize their content with advertising in the emerging media world. So we built a platform-agnostic, standards-based software system to manage and deliver targeted, audited audio and video advertising into audio and video content in an IP environment. We’re a market driven company and go where the need is. So, the first thing we did is make this “core” ad insertion system work in the Internet on-demand world. Next, we built the hooks to tie live streams into the core (and, if needed, strip out any existing offline ads and replace them with new ones). Now we’ve built the capability to tie downloaded and played back inventory into the core (the ads are constantly updated whenever the user is connected to maximize timeliness and relevancy until the associated content is consumed and the audits synch up when the user reconnects after a disconnected play). So an ad revenue driven Lightningcast customer doesn’t need to worry about these things in terms of monetizing his content: it doesn’t matter if some of his inventory is audio and some video, it doesn’t matter if its Windows, Real, Flash or Quicktime, it doesn’t matter if its on-demand, live or cached/ played back offline. It matters to us, but our customer doesn’t have to worry about it wrt to managing its advertising -- it can manage, target, report on all its Internet audio/video advertising thru a single platform.

The same goes for media center pcs (and their derivitives), pvrs, cable VOD, wireless or IPTV. Its just a matter of building the enabling hooks to tie that environment into our core and tie our customers content and ad inventory together so it can be efficiently and effectively sold, delivered, tracked and reported wherever and however it’s consumed.