JD on EP

Disclosures: Adobe has an Adobe Media Player, but I have no solid idea how this intersects with what Brightcove is attempting. I personally know Jeremy and many of the Brightcove folks, but haven't talked backchannel with any of them recently. Notes are written by me, from my own perspective, and others at Adobe would likely have different thoughts about possible futures.

First off, I really like his third paragraph:

But 2007 showed us that video isn't just for aggregators -- it's fundamental to the Web. The last 12 months saw an explosion in video publishing across a wide array of websites. Video is becoming so pervasive that if you have a web property without video something is wrong with it.

It's been a long haul to bring "the movies" up onto your own screen, rather than the screen of the movie theatre or the TV station. A picture tells a thousand words, and when you string pictures together in sequence, with sound, and then make them interactive... that all reaches more people, more strongly, than text.

Video is a real thing. It's not some freak thing which crept onto people's laptop screens, infected their phone screens, abuses their home screens. Video and text are both important parts of The Web and The Internet today. Neither can replace the other. And video is growing very rapidly right now.

Jeremy's essay describes two different types of current businesses:

• Aggregators: websites where content flows, to meet an audience;
  
• Platforms: tools which help people create their own video solutions, whether these are technical tools or audience tools or financial tools.

In the "aggregators" section he distinguishes amateur and professional video... most YouTube-type work is oriented more towards the creator's needs than the audience's needs, and doesn't have nearly as much editing and finesse as professional video, which by definition has a strong audience orientation. Both do communicate, but they have different dynamics.

In the "platforms" section he sees three different kinds: publishing systems which help people set up their own video distribution systems; "community" systems which help reduce the costs of setting up the audience's environment; and ad platforms which reduce the cost of getting money for selling part of that audience's attention to advertisers.

That last section contains a key quote:

If you weren't online in the spring you might have missed the buying spree that happened as the first generation ad serving platforms were bought up by major online media players. The flurry of acquisitions was part of a much larger trend around the development of what we like to call Uber Ad Platforms. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are the four big players in this category. They're all focused on building Uber Ad Platforms that provide a one-stop-shop for access to ad serving, ad networks and all sorts of strategies for optimizing yield. The Uber Ad Platforms will deliver ads in every major format across every major medium, and they are waging a battle that will reshape the technology and media industries in fundamental ways.

The advertising businesses seem like the new OS Wars, the new Browser Wars. We'll need neutral, universal ways to publish across those services.

Jeremy closes out with a section on likely trends for 2008:

Nice places for audiences to gather... Jeremy calls it "branded destinations". If you host the party, you get to choose the music. Being able to retain recurring attention from large numbers of people lets you do more things. "Nothing about the Internet changes the fundamentals of media -- value is created by controlling the content or controlling access to the audience."

Being able to reach large numbers of people... Jeremy calls this "audience networks". Some sites, like YouTube, are able to bring certain representations of content to very large numbers of people, even though your own richer site may have more compelling content for a more dedicated audience. Mobility within the audience space is an advantage in itself, so businesses are arising to serve this.

Developing a variety of ways to gain revenue once you have an audience: "To date the advertising focus in the Internet TV market has been on monetizing video streams. But this focus is both shortsighted and not nearly as effective as thinking about how to monetize audience." I think memberships, live-online and even live-realworld events may fit in here too. The digital video file itself isn't as important as how it connects with someone viewing it.

Better presentation... Jeremy calls this "contextual publishing". The digital video file, stripped alone and atomic, isn't nearly as interesting as when that video is a first-class system in a larger interactive media system. "One of the key insights from the last two years is that short-form online video does best when it's placed in a context. The context could be created by pages in a website, comments from users, line-ups in a player, etc."

He closes with an emphasis on high-quality video, which seems a sure thing. I'm not sure how quickly we'll come to multi-resolution video, or being able to satisfy audiences who range from laptop screens to pocket screens to home-theatre screens and environmental displays, but this year does seem the year when we'll break clearly beyond the 240 interlaced lines of broadcast TV.

If I read this article next week I'll see different things in it. What do you think?