Tuesday, 30 January 2001
Breakout: Technology
Streaming Video: A Real Alternative to TV?
David Pescovitz, moderator
Eileen Quigley, Real Network
One of the things that's very difficult for me in terms of the groups that I work with is getting their voices heard. We do a lot of very interesting content and I'm very fortunate to be at Real Networks, which has a lot of traffic on its sites. So when we do promotion across the Real Network sites, we tend to drive a lot of traffic to our clients. But as soon as that promotion stops the traffic's gone, which worries me a lot. Who's going to control access is how I would rephrase it. And, as mentioned earlier, there is a fight to make sure that a certain percentage of the DBS channels be available, and to secure that space for independent organizations. I am worrying about this now, because otherwise in ten years we'll be sitting here saying there isn't enough access for all this content. I think this is crucial. We talk about it all the time inside our company, certainly in my division, because what we are about is enabling as many voices as possible.
There is a big difference in that people can access the content at any time on demand. That was, is, and will continue to be one of the most important reasons why streaming media is so transformative.
But, using the technology and the statistics that we watch very carefully, we're able to tell how users interact with the media. In this way we can test all kinds of different appeals. We'll put a long version up, then a shorter one, testing to see how long people's attention span is, and then we just keep on refining the campaigns and the messages till we get to the point of maximum effectiveness. And that's a level of interactivity that is very helpful to those of us who are interested in using this tool for advocacy.
The statistics show that we get a fair amount of traffic in our larger live events because they're heavily promoted. The fact that the clips remain available over time is very important when you are trying to effect social and political change.
One of the clients I work with is the Humane Society of the United States. There are people at HSUS with a background in television production and film production, very sophisticated in the art of media production, and they have embraced streaming media. I don't find this often in speaking to my clients. I often have to argue the case for multimedia, let alone streaming media. But HSUS very quickly saw the possibilities of this technology as compared with their usual practice of sending out countless video news-release tapes and countless cassette tapes in the hope that the media would and put it up on some PSA slot.
Craig Ellins, Hello Network
I founded the company in 1994. What HelloNetwork has done is build a set of proprietary streaming-media products that allow the end user to view thm without having to download a plug-in or a player. We saw that Real Networks had 170 million registered player users. All of us who have used the medium before know that the problem with player-based systems is that they create a barrier for the end user. There are frustrations involved in downloading players and plug-ins, along with the advertising that comes along with them.
| "I anticipate that independent filmmakers will one day finance their films through product placem
ent." CRAIG ELLINS |
Our cost of streaming is very cost effective because of the way that we are put together. It's less than a penny and a half per megabyte passed, which makes it possible now to stream all kinds of content where the economic values were not there before.
When I started out in the infomercial business, I learned that TV time was very expensive. That's attracted me to the Internet, which allowed me to hit niche markets. It allowed me to stream cost-effectively and pay only for those people that were actually viewing the content.
I anticipate that independent filmmakers will one day finance their films through product placement. These kinds of events and this kind of interactive programming on the web can build audience, so that when the actual programming comes on, you have a readymade audience. What we need to do is figure out a way, through product placement and other methods, is how to create a commercial offer for our sponsors without intruding upon or interrupting the entertainment value.
TiVo is really, I think, a glimpse of the future. It's the first merging of a television set and a computer. TiVo begins to track your watching habits, then goes out and selects things that are on and encodes them or records them on the box for you. I think the whole issue of how we find the content we want depends on the ability to set parameters and have intelligent agents doing that kind of thing for us.
Paras Shah, Mighty Eyes
All this essentially points to the shift from the exotic to the mainstream. Streaming media is no longer a specialty. It's something that everyone should be able to use, and it should be cheap and easy.
| "All this essentially points to the shift from the exotic to the mainstream. Streaming media is no longer a specialty." PARAS SHAH |
Having a cable television show here in the United States doesn't give you exposure to people in Indochina for instance, or in Australia. The Internet allows you to do that. You can cheaply and effectively target a worldwide audience. The downside is, it might be a worldwide audience of one! Where I was, at Home Networks, we linked a lot of streaming to ethnic Indian and Chinese television and radio content markets. We got the okay by arguing that there were niche markets out there, not serviced by traditional media but starving for radio and television content, as well as for other, more independent documentary and other films.
Right now the procedures are very complex. You have to worry about encoding. You have to worry about who's going to host and stream your content for you. You have to worry about who will publish onto your website. And how are you going to manage all these different contents? Including streaming content. Who's going to keep count of all your clips, and where they are, and what their byte rates are, and what their formats are? It can be a quagmire.
Even if you've been able to figure all this out by yourself and you've moved on to the next step, your worries are not over. Who's going to protect your content? You put a film out there, a documentary, a short. Who's to say someone's not going to download, misuse it, you know, show it for commercial purposes and not pay you? Digital rights management has become an issue that everyone is thinking about, and independent filmmakers should also be able to avail themselves of digital rights. That's where our product, Media Scaler, comes in. Media Scaler is essentially a unified system that's going to help independent filmmakers get onto the web and exhibit. It's a full-service solution, and it's web-based. We offer content management. It's a completely empowering tool that lets users upload their content; it helps them generate a link; it helps them publish onto their website and it distributes over a global content network, puts it right on the edge and lets filmmakers exhibit around the world.