Anthony Rose, CTO of Project Canvas—the joint venture among Arqiva, BBC, BT, Channel 4, ITV, and Talk Talk to build an internet-connected TV platform—will keynote day one. Project Canvas provides this description of his talk:
Steve Plunkett, Red Bee Media
Project Canvas is set to transform the daily viewing experience of UK television audiences and influence IPTV deployments globally when it launches in the early part of 2011. It will unlock a world of content and services, combining live channels with on-demand, bringing web-based services and interactive extras to the living room TV. Anthony Rose explains how Canvas is creating the right environment for Connected TV to thrive in the UK and beyond.
Day two offers Steve Plunkett, Director of Customer Innovation for Red Bee Media, which provides technology and creative solutions to help broadcasters, content rights holders, and brand owners engage with their audiences in traditional and new ways, including web and mobile. Red Bee Media’s client list includes Discovery International, BBC, Virgin Media, Nike, Lonely Planet, Motorola, and Siemens, and they’ve worked with media brands across the globe, including Sky Italia, TV Globo (Brazil), Star News India, and Canal+ (France). Plunkett will be discussing “Video Everywhere and In Everything:”
Check back soon for more details on all of our events—we’ve got speakers from Adobe, Akamai, Amazon, BT, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, the Football Association, GlaxoSmithKline, Limelight, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Zattoo, and many more.
The advance programmes for Streaming Media Europe, the Content Delivery Summit, and the Online Video Strategies event are all online. If you submitted a speaking proposal and don’t see your topic reflected, don’t panic. These are preliminary programmes that we’ll be modifying with more specifics as we get closer to the event. In particular, you can expect several sessions focusing on the hottest topics in online video: VP8/WebM, H.264, HTML5, and Flash 10.1 for Mobile.
We’ll be making our final speaker selections in the next few weeks and announcing the final programmes at the end of July.
Today Cisco Systems released its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI), and the results are intriguing if not exactly surprising. By the end of this year, Cisco predicts that video will exceed P2P as the top traffic contributor, making it the first year that P2P has not been the leading traffic type. The company also says that by 2014 all forms of video—TV, VoD, Internet video, and P2P—will comprise more than 91% of all internet traffic. That doesn’t mean that 91% of all internet traffic will involve video, of course, and the company notes that popular activities like VoIP are relatively light in bandwidth consumption. It’s also worth noting that the report doesn’t distinguish between uploading and downloading of video; we can only assume the 91% includes uploading, downloading, streaming, progressive download, and file sharing.
And of that video traffic in 2014, Cisco expects 42% of it to be made up of 3D and HD content, though notably the report doesn’t offer a definition of HD video, so we don’t know if it’s 1080p, 720p, or both (or a more nebulous definition.
See the graph below for a breakdown of 12 categories of internet traffic.
Cisco breakdown of 12 categories of internet traffic
Last week, Israel-based Tvinci announced availability of its MediaHub and MediaStore, which in tandem look to solve the biggest dilemma facing over-the-top video: how to monetize it. MediaHub is the backend of the platform, managing video assets, pricing, billing, and analytics. MediaStore is the consumer interface, which is designed to tailor offerings based upon each user’s personal preferences, which are determined by user input as well as viewing history and payment preferences. The system is designed to work with any device—game consoles, set-top boxes, iPad, iPhone, and other smartphones.
Tvinci’s products are already being used by MTV and Orange, and the MediaHub and MediaStore has been selected by Projector TV for the upcoming launch of its video portal.
US video aggregator Hulu has dropped plans to launch in the UK, reports the Daily Telegraph. According to the report, the UK expansion came to a halt when negotiations with British broadcasters collapsed.
With UK broadcasters Channel 4 and Five already having signed third party deals with YouTube and SeeSaw, the focus was on ITV as the leading UK content partner. However sources say that ITV – where incoming chief executive Adam Crozier started his new job this week – wants to concentrate on its own catch up service, ITV Player.
ITV refused to comment, but speaking last month, ITV’s director of online and interactive Ben McOwen Wilson said that “Hulu is a major success in the US but the UK TV market is a different place. It is much more consolidated, which mean there are fewer online locations than in the US, which users need to visit to get access to their favourite content –- therefore there is less need for aggregators.”
A source close to Hulu said that it was hopeful it could have a UK presence in the future.
5.5 billion videos were viewed online in the UK in February 2010, an increase of 37% compared to the previous year, according to new research from comScore .
Google sites, driven by the popularity of YouTube, grew 17% versus a year ago with 2.5 billion videos viewed in February 2010, further solidifying its position as the leading online video viewing property in the UK. The BBC ranked second with 140 million videos viewed on its sites followed by Megavideo.com with 53 million videos. Other properties in the top 10 were Facebook, Microsoft sites, Channel4, Dailymotion, ITV sites, Blinkx and Sky sites.
Facebook ranked as the fastest growing video property in the top 10, surging 205% in the past year to 43 million videos viewed. Blinkx was the second fastest, growing 204% to nearly 29 million videos viewed. BBC sites (up 143%), ITV sites (up 134%) and Sky sites (up 139%) also achieved triple-digit growth rates over the past year.
“The UK online video market continues to soar and is attracting a greater and greater share of Internet users’ attention,” said Mike Read, SVP and Managing Director, comScore Europe. “In particular, we’ve seen eyeballs move towards the online channel to watch more long-form, professional video content, such as popular broadcast network TV shows.”
Yahoo! has announced that it has secured the exclusive UK online highlights rights for the English Premier League for the next three seasons (2010-13). The rights are currently held by Virgin Media.
The deal means that from August this year, British football fans can watch five minute highlight packages from every Barclays Premier League match on Yahoo.co.uk, The highlights will be available from midnight on Sunday after weekend matches and at midnight the same day for midweek fixtures.
Yahoo! will also own the rights in the UK to syndicate all or part of the Premier League highlights content to third parties, which the company says will enable it to put together innovative video advertising packages for major brands.
In the US, Yahoo has similar deals to show major sporting highlights from the NBA basketball, PGA golf, NHL ice hockey and MLB baseball.
While video consumption and distribution has grown exponentially in the past few years, converting and preparing this content for the digital realm was largely a ‘black art’ until recently, when several enterprise-grade solutions came onto the market. In this session from Streaming Media Europe 2009, panelists from organisations that are utilising those solutions talked about their cost and benefit to enterprises large and small.
Moderator:
Matt Smith, Senior Director, Systems Architecture and Strategy, Inlet Technologies
Panel:
Martin Boronski, CTO, M6 Web
Jon Alexander, Manager, European Content Product Delivery, Level 3 Communications
Alex Nunes, Head of Media Services (iPlayer), BBC
Robert Senica, Manager Content Operations, SONY-DADC
There’s no longer any doubt that corporates must embrace streaming video as a core piece of their communications plan. But just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean that marketers and communications directors no longer need to prove ROI. This video, from a panel called “Why Are We Doing This? Developing an ROI Model for Corporate Streaming Communications” at Streaming Media Europe 2009, breaks down some of the ways companies can measure the success of their streaming media activities and use aspects of social media to expand the reach of their communications.
One of the key differences between the online video industry in the U.S. and Europe lies in the different approaches to content delivery, which Nigel Regan outlined in depth in The State of the European Content Delivery Market last autumn. Because these differences are so pronounced, we’ve added a new one-day event at Streaming Media Europe called the Content Delivery Summit, a one-day conference will bring together content owners, infrastructure providers, and the financial community to discuss the business and technology of delivering video online.
Watch this space for more information about the event, but if you’ve got an idea for a panel session topic, the call for speakers is now open, and we look forward to seeing your submissions.
In the meantime, here’s video from a Streaming Media Europe 2009 session called “Will The Cloud Rain On The CDNs’ Parade,” which examines the state of the content delivery market in Europe, particularly as it relates to cloud services such as Amazon’s CloudFront.
