You are no doubt somewhat bemused by the hype over video search, the latest craze animating the titans of the new economy. Yahoo and Google’s offer to host your home videos seems both considerate and vaguely sinister. We all know, after all, the kinds of video most people are looking for when they jump on a search engine. But rest assured, home movies are a red herring. As more and more people illegally digitise and download broadcast television and movie content, the real issue for media companies will be finding an effective means to simultaneously secure and open up their material for public access.
It is still very early days for the industry, and not just because broadband penetration is far from uniform. The service offerings from Yahoo, Google and MSN are interesting, but by no means complete. Google's beta service is still limited and offers a small selection of clips sourced from broadcast television networks which are searchable using data from the closed captioning system. At present, these clips cannot be played, and are presented with a series of image stills and meta data. Yahoo has a similar service, which is less structured, but allows you to watch short clips. Microsoft's MSN is making similar moves, and has announced an agreement to publish videos distributed by iFilm.
With or without the help of the search industry, media companies are actively looking at ways of digitising their archives to reduce storage costs and also facilitate cross platform delivery. Where the portals can add value, however, is coming up with the missing pieces of the puzzle - a reliable approach for ranking video search results, and developing a commercial fulfilment backend to facilitate advertising and pay per view transactions.
A good search tool is important for the average consumer, because unless you are a user of peer to peer services, finding multimedia content on the web can be tricky and somewhat of a moveable feast, especially where the site hosting the feed has a lax attitude toward copyright infringement.
From the point of view of the industry, commercial fulfilment and digital rights management are likely to be showstoppers unless well managed from the outset. It is well and good for a million people to watch a 30 second clip of a some celebrity's wardrobe malfunction, but if you have to carry the bandwidth costs of hosting the feed, you will be very interested in ways to commercialise your audience either through pre-screened advertisements or a couple of dollars in payment. That might not sound like much, but as observed by Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley infamous born again analyst, Yahoo delivered 917 million streams in the fourth quarter of last year, 10 percent of which were pared with video ads. When that gets to 50 percent at reasonable impression yields - that is a business that makes your average TV network look kinda faded.
It should come as no surprise that sooner or later the video search space will begin to intersect with personal video recorders and the broader digital delivery of entertainment content. In the immediate term there is a logical distinction between using the web to find short clips playable on the computer, and using a PVR style device to timeshift and dial up TV shows which are passively distributed by cable or satellite feeds. This may not be the case for long.
Already there are rumours of discussions between TiVo and Google/Yahoo, which could potentially see search users being able to find video files on the web, and have these uploaded to their TiVo box for viewing.
That presents a conundrum for broadcasters. After all, once someone figures out a clever way of bridging the 'last meter' between the computer download terminal and the home entertainment display screen - all bets are off. At that point, when consumers can choose to search, download and pay for just the shows they want to watch - traditional broadcast networks may discover that audience loyalty truly does lie with hit content franchises rather than their rotating network logos.
