TV, IPTV Roundup

Posted on October 22, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Commercial Trends, Advertising/Marketing |

The week was marked by growing interest in how the future of TV will pan out on the web.

There was the realisation by Robert Scoble that vidcasting is less economic than he first thought, covered here, and a rumination by Mark Evans on how the web and TV together engage viewers better.

Mark was also making the point that some high volume productions like Endless Europe seem to crack the problem of lowering unit costs, i.e. getting a very cheap per minute product which also engages audiences.

That’s also playing out in the USA of course at Soup of The Day and other Iron Sink projects. Iron Sink co-founder Scott Zakarin was a pioneer of the web’s first online soap: The Spot. Latenitemash also has a hint of the low cost-engaging quality. Broken Saints and Phoebeworks have similar types of projects. Not to mention the Ze Frank and Rocketboom type vids. And two weeks back we had George Lucas say enough movies, the future is about volume.

The Register reported this a couple of weeks back, which may also offer a solution to high bandwidth cost.

“The Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom-backed Venice Project is in internal beta, and should be going to public beta soon. Viewers should be able to watch, well, something before Christmas.” It’s a peer2peer system, copyright cleared. There’s also Rawflow which seems to get overlooked.

There is of course the other issue - which is that TV even on the web now has competition from a multiplicity of content types - you can catch up with those here.

That leaves the issue looking like this: TV on the Internet has distribution costs that are higher than any other form of communications on the web. And it has more competition than ever. It’s going to be tough to work out how to make it profitable. So Endless Europe was, I believe, sponsored by Nike (though there is no record of that on the site, and Xolo gets backing from BMW as well as creating its own aggregator and videocast production facility.

Direct corporate involvement in programmes instead of corporate advrtising around programmes is one way to go. Or content producers finally get to share in Google’s profits! Or do a xolo, create platform and support services. Some of the new TV to webnetworks were covered here but of course there are more not least a series of impressive arts related TV projects.

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