Internet TV Aggregators - Are They Building the Right Model
Posted on September 25, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Commercial Trends |
The success of JUMP TV in getting onto the stock markets is probably going to encourage more venture capitalists to back Internet TV aggregators. I’m not convinced. TVeXT was launched back in April and looks to be slowly attracting channels but it also looks like hard going.
TVeXT has the ambition of providing an eclectic group of channels on the web. Reuters Business sits alongside Al Aribiya and Agence France Presse.
At the same time Democracy Player is building up its channel portfolio and offering an open standard solution to IPTV viewing. Democracy Player currently boasts 700 channels.
Akimbo, Brightcove, Narrowstep, Permission.tv, and the more niche offerings (Africast, Viewdo,) plus the inevitable arrival of podcast aggregators for the IPTV set, make this a hugely competitive area.
My doubts though don’t focus on whether or not competition will weed out weak management teams. It’s more to do with - is this what viewers ultimately want? Leave aside the ethnic channels because they clearly have a diaspora audience, do people have the kind of demand for voluminous video content that the aggregation business believes?
My guess is they will want to do far more with video than watch it - they may want to do their own aggregation, they may want mash-ups but that’s a limited amount of fun, and I guess they’ll also want to create applications.
If I could come home and co-build a little application on my TV set with friends and colleagues around the world I’d be opening up a micro-audience for enablement TV. For example say I want to create a small application for parenting teens, or children’s exercise or home baking?
My argument is that I will see video as ancillary to solving a problem and right now all I get is video as a teaching aid like I get blogs as a discussion and resource. But if I and a few friends say want to create a way to discover if home baked bread using different types of ingredients has x effect on well being, sleep or weight. That’s when I’m enabled rather than taught.
The edifying effects of programme content will have to give way to the enabling effects of a TV that is also a computer. The lack of attention to that is surprising me at the moment.
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Haydn, that’s a very interesting supposition (Kevin at TasteTV, http://www.TasteTV.com) about enablement.