Video is having a kind of midlife renaissance. Having shaken off its early infamy in porn and exercise tapes – the medium is being reborn as viral broadband clips, iTunes downloads, and social networks. Hollywood is watching the space carefully. Sitting on hundreds of thousands of hours of raw footage, movies and TV shows – they believe their content will put them in a prime position to dominate once someone figures out a Googlesque model for making money out of web video. That may not be so simple, nor their advantage so pronounced. While there is lots of hot VC money chasing after kooky online ideas at the moment, early indications are that the space may play out in ways that the Titans of entertainment haven’t quite anticipated.
If you break down the online video market – there are three basic opportunities. Figuring out how to make money out of movie and TV show downloads is one, and is really just an extension of the existing VOD model. Although studio backed players like CinemaNow and the Apple iTunes Store are finally making some traction in this area – it ain't really revolutionary.
The reason for the long time between drinks is mainly due to bickering over digital rights management.
The second opportunity is around deploying a publishing, search and payment infrastructure to allow niche content creators to distribute to a wider audience. As you can imagine, this is big red target for the Google and Yahoo’s of the world, who are keen to expand the addressability of their search and entertainment functionality to non textual content. It will be a lucrative market too as millions of content producers suddenly connect with a global audience previously unavailable to them. And yes, somebody will make a fortune clipping the ticket each time.
The third opportunity is more subtle, but arguably has the most potential for disruptive change. It started with Flickr. Some bright sparks combined photo sharing with tagging, a clean interface and clever community building tools and voila – a new paradigm for aggregating consumer generated image content was born. Now the race is on to build the Flickr of video. There are certainly plenty of contenders – YouTube, CastPost, ClipShack, DailyMotion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo and vSocial. Some say Flickr would have done it themselves, if not for the Yahoo acquisition. Given the undeniable influence of photo sharing networks, most of the emerging video social media plays are fairly similar in execution. There are few differences – OurMedia is primarily aimed at free storage of a variety of video formats, YouTube converts everything to Flash for easy playback, while Revver inserts video ads and shares the revenue.
Ironically – in the end the emerging social video market may have precious little in common with photo sharing at all. Certainly if you take a look at the content on any of the major video aggregators at the moment what you will find may surprise you. Sure there are the predictable home movie clips of dogs, kids and parties. But there is also a staggering amount of anime cartoons reset to music (known in video circles as AMVs), illegally uploaded TV shows, and slickly produced trailers for premium content websites. Unlike the original user base of Flickr – YouTube is not just about people sharing content they have created entirely themselves – it is also being used as a platform for the distribution, appropriation and remixing of entertainment culture.
To understand what is happening with video requires thinking more broadly about what the medium now represents. Online video is no longer just dirty deeds done cheap. Like a word or powerpoint document, a movie file whether it be Quicktime, Windows Media or Flash – is a flexible moving image and sound format which can be used to display photos, talking heads, remixed pop culture, animations, podcasts set to images, or holiday snaps set to music. In other words – anything at all. That means Internet delivered video is actually an opportunity for consumers to redefine their approach to content creation.
That might sound overwhelming to the average Baby Boomer who has just mastered email and who still thinks RSS is muscular disorder. However there is an entire generation born in the last few decades for whom short form video content is not programming innovation, it is simply the
semantic language of media they best understand. Whether it be music videos, movie trailers or a viral email – there is a prevailing visual logic in short clips which translates perfectly to the new social media platforms. But here comes the rub. What Hollywood needs to come to to grips with is that for this demographic – there will never be a clean separation between programmed Studio content and the stuff that they and their friends make.
Stickam is a case in point. It is a new service that allows you to add a multimedia player to your blog or MySpace page which plays music, videos, or even a live personal broadcast from your webcam. The execution isn’t perfect – but you can see the writing on the wall. The future
of sites like MySpace is not kids decorating home pages with crazy fonts and tunes. It is in helping media savvy teenagers remix their lives, adventures,favourite scenes from movies, music and commentary into entertaining and addictive multimedia morsels which best advertise what they stand for.
It all makes a kind of crazy sense. If the big trend over the last decade was media becoming more personal, it was only a matter of time before the corollary also kicked in. People are becoming their own media companies.
