Streaming Media West 2006 Keynote
AOL and “The Next Wave for Online Videoâ€
Timothy Tuttle, PhD, VP AOL Video
CEO & Founder, Truveo, Inc
(2 ½ years ago, Tuttle founded Truveo, which was been acquired by AOLin January. Tuttle remembers going to VCs before founding Truveo and VCs saying streaming video business “Is never gonna happen.â€)
New business models will emerge over the next five years, and legal battles will be fought. Some of the winners will be companies you know today, some don’t even exist yet.
The market for internet video is doubling every six months.
Consumers want access to video all the time: over half of all internet users regularly watch video online.
Technology can now support TV-quality video on the internet: broadband penetration has reached nearly three out of four households.
Content creators are looking for ways to distribute directly to consumers and bypass MSOs. Seven billion videos are streamed every month.
Advertisers demand better measurement and performance-based pricing models. CPMs are the highest in the business — currently about $25 – $35.
The recent trends:
2004: Hosted and licensed video (MSN Video, Yahoo Video,. AOL Video)
2005: Paid video downloads (iTunes)
2006: User generated video (YouTube). This began the biggest change. Nobody anticipated the explosion in brand and usage. More than any trend before it has changed video online. The Google acquisition served as a wakeup call to traditional media companies that have a vested interest in preserving their revenue delivered on television. Still — the “Wild West Days†of free and copyrighted video are coming to an end. YouTube will start to look a lot more like Google Video and police copyrighted video. Of course, because of that policy, Google Video never attracted the YouTube-sized audience. You’ll see shows like “The Daily Show†cut deals — it will be out there, it will just no longer be in one convenient place where you can find everything.
2007+: The One-Stop Video Shop. The evolution of a new kind of video place on the web — but all the video may not be hosted on that site. This video site will allow you to find whatever you’re looking for through search, browse, distribution deals, content producers looking for distribution deals. All the major players are working on building this (including AOL). There are challenges but they are all possible to solve.
The video center of the future will need to have a way to protect the rights of the copyright holders. Technology will have to make “both sides of the equation comfortable,†but it’s possible litigation will beat technology on this challenge.
Right now video search makes web search look like child’s play. Companies need to solve this problem. .The way users find video is different than how they find web pages, so it may not look like Google. It may be a combination of social networking, search and more.
There will be new business models that satisfy all members of the value chain. People don’t really want to pay to watch TV yet. And you can make some money from preroll ads, but viewers find them annoying — especially in front of “some kid lip-synching a Backstreet Boys song.â€
Need to improve the quality of video playback in the face of limited network capacity. Web video is better than it has been — but it’s not close to TV and HDTV. If video quality improves online, “we’re going to hit some serious bottlenecks in network capacity.â€
There needs to be an intuitive, simple way for people to watch video on TV, not their PCs.
AOL Facts: AOL is the #3 domestic advertising network — and the fastest growing ad network, with 40% growth in Q2 2006. It gets 25 million unique video views per month, making it the fourth-largest destination for video. AOL Instant Messenger as 41 million unique users.
The reason Truveo decided to join AOL a year ago: “AOL understood what it would take to bring video into the mainstream.†AOL has 20,000 major brand video assets right now — music videos, movies, TV shows in the past 18 months and has made them available for free. AOL Uncut, like YouTube, is a platform that allows you to upload and syndicate UGC video.
AOL’s video search platform searches across all major sites with video — not just its own. It has offered open video search APIs to the industry (September, 2006). Third party companies can benefit from the index of the millions of videos AOL has established. AOL is the first to do this. AOL’s video search powers some video destinations on the web.
AOL’s Video Search Director program is a self-service syndication service that allows content creators to submit a feed for search.
AOLVideo.com brought it together: free video, paid downloads, licensed content. “There are a whole bunch of changes right around the corner that are going to bring more content.
Q&A:
How do you solve the metadata problem? There are no standards and very little text surrounding video to search: There is very little metadata associated with video. “That is one of the challenges. The biggest challenge is that most videos aren’t even found. So the first challenge is finding the video. The second problem is to get better metadata, so users can find it. This is a hard problem and there is no technology silver bullet.†There is voice recognition to convert the audio to text. There is object detection, scene detection. All of these will improve the search, but none are a silver bullet. Speech recognition will improve speech-based video and podcasting, and AOL has a beta out now with speech recognition. I hope the industry will embrace better metadata standards.
How long do people watch clips? What is your audience breakdown: user generated vs. professional content? People gravitate toward short clips, 2-5 minutes, and they are grazing. When they have a couple of extra minutes at work or between homework assignments, they graze. You don’t see people sitting at their desk watching full-length movies. The vast amount of video online is user-generated. Tens of millions of videos are UGC, vs. tens/hundreds of thousands of pro content.
Do you know anyone using natural language search vs speech recognition? I don’t. I’m looking forward to the day when these technologies are used, but I don’t know anyone using it.