A year of evolving technologies for a dynamic market
With the close of 2009, we’re gearing up to enter our tenth year of operations at thePlatform. Yes, that’s a long time for an online video platform to be around, but I’ve never been more excited about the market and our position in it. 2009 brought several themes into sharp focus that should make for an exciting 2010.
First, the foundation of the online video industry continued to mature. Video quality and performance improved for both live and on-demand online video, and credit goes to our friends at Adobe, Microsoft, and Move Networks. Complementing this rise in quality is a steady reduction in delivery costs across the board. The net effect is a better experience at a lower cost. I think both of these trends will continue in the right directions throughout 2010.
These trends are also key drivers of the sudden rise of “TV Everywhere” which, as a concept, took the industry by storm in 2009 and became a rallying point for operators and cable programmers who had historically struggled to find the right online strategy for premium content. Like many people in the industry, I think this is going to be a major theme in 2010, since we’ve really just begun scratching the surface in 2009. We will see concept and trial evolve to product and scale. It wouldn’t really be possible without a great, high-quality viewing experience and the software to handle the more complex business logic of efficiently and securely extending subscriber access beyond the set top. We’re excited to be a part of that, and we will continue to invest heavily in TV Everywhere throughout 2010.
The “everywhere’ part of TV Everywhere should get more interesting in 2010, as well. With the iPhone leading the way, we finally have a critical mass of devices that enable a great, more reliable consumer experience for mobile video. This will become increasingly relevant and interesting as WiMAX begins to proliferate and content rights negotiations consider mobile as a first-class citizen. Along the way, the challenges of DRM, advertising, and dead-simple authentication will have to be ironed out, but that’s what we get paid to do.
Another trend that hit big in 2009 is viral distribution on a massive scale. We of course had YouTube as an early leader, and its growth in 2009 continued to stun. One billion streams a day is something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago. But beyond YouTube, the continued growth of Facebook and the emergence of Twitter as platforms for distribution of media became real, and really interesting. It opened the door to achieving viral scale while maintaining control of media monetization, which has been a critical requirement for premium content owners. Leveraging these platforms became part of the playbook for media companies, and I think those playbooks will become progressively sophisticated in 2010. Making this easy and fruitful for media company businesses is going to be increasingly important, and we’re definitely treating this as a high priority in the coming year.
Overall, these trends create a very dynamic, exciting market that is sure to continue evolving rapidly. I’m happy to say that we’ve never, ever taken our foot of off the R&D pedal, and that many of the longer-term projects that we’ve been investing in will come to fruition at a time when they are needed and more relevant than ever. We’ve combined our experience and our development prowess to make sure that the next decade is even better than the first.
Ian Blaine is CEO of thePlatform, and SVP of Content Publishing, Comcast Interactive Media
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