Converging Technologies

The dust is now settling on the broadcast industry’s premier event in Europe now and certainly with regard to my own contacts and associates, it has been a great show. I’m not sure to what extent the major equipment suppliers and CE manufacturers achieved their objectives, but from an application provider perspective, there was certainly a lot of buzz.

I did hear that the event was not as well attended as previous years although the official PR seems to suggest otherwise. Due to my own particular interest in Second Screen, one of my own highlights was the Second Screen Society event held at the Okura hotel. This was organized through MESA and sponsored Kit Digital and Civolution, together with the likes of Blu Focus and Digital Smiths amongst others. That particular event including dinner was a great success and a sell out, which certainly showed the level of interest in the space right now.

Here is my roll up of the exciting news and great technologies that caught my eye and will certainly be the subject of further discussion.

• Motama (http://www.motama.com/)
  • This company has been around for a few years already, but it seems they have been quietly expanding their market and providing really unique and cost effective solutions for their customers.
  • The product is the result of the two co-founders research work as part of their respective PhD work. They have essentially found a robust and secure solution to the challenge of packet loss for video signals sent over public internet.
  • The demonstration at their stand showed how you can consistently obtain high quality video even at what would otherwise be completely unusable video streams.
  • Their customers can effectively cover as wide a range as imagination allows. The reason for this is because anyone who needs to get a good, reliable video signal from one point to some other, potentially distant location for small or large populations can use the technology. In fact, as long as there is some level of public internet access in the receiving location, you have the basis for the solution.
  • In fact, as we all know, although the major players in the world of CDNs are very well established in Western Europe, there are still significant regions of the world where they are not present. Motama seem to have found the solution.
  • You can see and hear some more details at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pW0YQjykWHk

Motama Solution Overview

• Miomni (http://www.miomni.com/)
  • We hear a great deal about Brightcove and Kit Digital these days, and their technology to enable multi-screen delivery to any device. However, I always enjoy finding companies that can challenge the giants and actually provide effective solutions for the small guys as well as the big guys. For me, small means agile and cost effective and generally means innovative also, because those guys don’t have the money to be anything less.
  • Miomni is one of those companies. Based in London, they are enabling customers to get to where their audience is and monetize eyeballs.
  • The work they did for Fishing TV is a great case study: http://www.miomni.com/our-work/fishing-tv/

•  Ooyala (http://www.ooyala.com/)

• • I probably should have already known Ooyala very well. They have been out there for some time providing great analytics and personalized video experiences. However, I had never really looked at them in any depth.
  • Well, having chatted with them at their stand and then hearing their founder, Bismarck Lepe give a seminar during IBC, I liked what I saw.
  • These guys are masters of analytics. And in these days of big data, people who can help us to make sense of data and then do something with it, are valuable.
  • They use a number of different components, which are brought together to deliver rich, contextual recommendation. Additionally, because they are so widely used, they can also leverage a user base of around 200 M to gather data on discovery.
  • The next phase of their evolution (due in early 2013) is to launch an automatically optimized ad load for individual consumers. I have to admit, from a personal perspective that is a nightmare scenario. However, I must live in the real world and I accept that from a brand perspective, that is getting to utopia.
• Nativ (http://nativ.tv/)
  • I caught a seminar by Nativ and was very impressed with what they had done for TV2 in Denmark. They talked about helping the business move to a tapeless workflow, albeit for short form content, but nevertheless a major undertaking.
  • Nativ were open and frank about what they had done. The things that went well and the things that did not go so well.
  • Here are the core capabilities of their Mio Everywhere solution. (from their web site)
    • Remotely ingest video and audio content – while validating that it’s in the right format (even before it leaves your desktop)
    • Manage all assets – with enterprise-class archiving, extensible metadata, tagging, shot-loggging, deep indexing and searching… it’s a fully-fledged enterprise DAM system
    • Automate all workflows – enable global media collaboration and accelerate every process while cutting costs
    • Collaborate with your own workspaces – with advanced social features for ‘real-time’ global collaboration; remote working; and increased visibility of cost and resources on a per-project basis.
    • Repurpose content, and distribute it – to all web channels, mobile devices, consoles, VoD platforms, in-store kiosks and beyond
    • Assess the impact – with easy-to-understand and relevant metrics

And then of course, there was the Second Screen Society seminar and dinner

The line up of guest speakers and panel members was excellent and although there was probably not as much lively audience participation as Guy Finley would have liked, there was enough decent debate and dialogue to provide a very interesting and informative afternoon and evening.

First up was Kit Digital’s Alan Wolk. He made an interesting point about a behaviour that would probably lead to most purchases happening after a program has finished. To that end, he spoke of an “ad locker” and that did seem to make a lot of sense.

Renaud Fuchs from Ericsson Broadcast business (formerly Technicolor), gave a great presentation about the Second Screen ecosystem and the evolution of the space. The slide extract below, gives a good overview of the five types of second screen players that he has defined.

Alex Terpstra from Civolution then gave a helpful summary of the two common types of Automated Content Recognition (ACR) solutions that exist. These are of course Audio Watermarking and Audio Fingerprinting. He noted that European broadcasters are now incorporating Audio Watermarking as a permanent feature for live and catch up content.

Audio Watermarking

Audio Fingerprinting

Then came some panel discussions and I think some of the key points that came out from the guest can be summarised as follows.

• Metadata is a key challenge to being able to leverage and monetize the second screen
• Second screen will not cannibalize existing channels (The Super Bowl showed that to be true)
• Helping people to find what to watch (easily) is a key factor in the success of any second screen solution
• Second screen applications need to be integrated with narrative editorial to get best engagement

The dinner that followed was great fun (with great food included). Each table had a designated host and I was privileged to be seated at Guy Finley’s table together with a great cross spectrum of industry specialists. Each table was also given a topic to debate. Ours was, “what do we think will happen to linear TV?” Our overwhelming verdict was that it is not going anywhere. They way it is consumed is radically changing. Second screen can even help it because if great content can be created, then second screen can help drive engagement and revenue and thus hep pay for more great content!

The summit was one of the many great events held by Informa through the course of the year. It provided useful insight into what the industry is doing and an accessible forum to network and talk to industry insiders.

When speaking with a friend after the summit, I was asked, what is so important about social (TV) anyway? My answer in fact was one of the key takeaways from the event. Two things are key, the first is DATA and the second is, getting friends to tell their friends about your brand and recommend that they purchase.

The diagram below was shared by Olivier Gers, CEO Endemol and was compiled by Value Partners.

The presenters included leaders and innovators from Trendrr, Endemol, MTV, Orange, Zeebox and Sky.  Here is my summary of what they had to say.

Mark Ghunheim. CEO Trendrr said that  according to Gardner, Infotainment will be a 3 trillion dollar business by 2015, with Social TV at its heart. He suggested that perceptive TV is the future, where it knows who you are and your friends.

He sees Twitter as the heartbeat of social TV and noted that advertising is being transformed by the following factors.

• Targeting
• Branding
• Valuation of media
• Effectiveness
• Integration and activation, which is where the brands want to be

Finally, according to Ghunheim, he saw the key drivers for Social TV as being Rewards, Compelling Content and Cast Talent.

Olivier Gers. CEO Endemol provided some great insight into his business. He noted the core elements of their social strategy were around Conversation, Multi-platform apps, Real time Participation and Personalization.

Olivier mentioned their experience around the Million Pound Drop and said it had now been replicated in 12 countries and broadcast in 41 countries. However, at this point audiences that play along are fairly small, with UK seeing around 12%. Indeed, his point was that they are focused on up selling right now and are not trying to make money from social directly.

He had the following insight on Social TV.

• Pace is important
• Live works best
• Make social, actually social
• Relevance and feedback. People want to feel part of something greater.
• We need to think about user experience

Miles Lewis, Ad Sales, Shazam provided interesting statistics about their experience over the last ten years and more recently, their venture into TV, which began at the last Super Bowl.

He noted that they have around 200M users of their service now and that 8% of users go on to make a purchase. They also have 6M tags a day for music and a whopping 65% click through rate!

Matthew Kershaw, content director, Bartle Bogle Hegarty noted that social helps to reduce what he called the desire decay time, from when you see the ad, to when you are out at the shop. His ultimate point was that, nobody knows yet where the money is. Nobody knows whether second screen apps will be specific or generic. There is a lot of disruption coming.

Omit Ashtari, Euro Bus Dev, Foursquare, walked the audience through their app. He said they now had around 20M+ users and 2Bn check ins. Seven of the top brands using the service are TV broadcasters.

He noted that the future of location based services will be passive. You will not have to check in manually. One challenge is that location services use a lot of power, so Apple and Android etc are all working to improve this.

Michel Dupont, SVP MBL, MTV, spoke about their strategy. They have a user base of 500M globally and noted that they bring around $1Bn of value to the operators they are partnered with from a base of 2.7M mobile users. He explained that the number came from simply taking the average RPU generated per customer for a 12 month period.

The MTV Under the Thump app was demonstrated and was very impressive. Michel noted that in the end, good quality content is key to engagement and use and to that end, they maintain 300 hours of content, which is refreshed regularly. The app was launched end of Feb 2012 and the campaign started two weeks ago with already 150K downloads. Main use feature is content. With an average two views per user. Co-viewing is used by 20% of viewers.

Andy Hood, Creative Development Director at AKQA, gave a very engagement presentation about what they have been doing for the UEFA Champions League. He noted that in the UK, 70% of the audience for the Champions League actually watch at home, on their own because of the timing. Also, many viewers don’t actually care who wins the particular match and are generally not actually watching the match all of the time. They therefore focused on match action as it plays and built games that were based on anticipation rather than prediction to ensure viewers stayed engaged.

A key takeaway from AKQA was that in the end, the platform and processes rest upon detailed knowledge of the sport in question, together with real people watching and triggering interactions. Unless you do this, you cannot hope to gain real engagement.

One of the other presenters that are finally worth noting was Patrice Slupowski, VP Digital innovation, Orange. He gave some interesting figures around the Social TV space and also noted that Orange see check in as the bridge between TV and Digital.