11 October 2007

Is the market going too fast?

Almost everyone in the online video Industry agrees that its future lays on the monetization of content. So, in the last months we have seen an explosion of new services offering new opportunities for publishers and advertisers.

[note: while I was writing the post when I have seen the last post by Dan Rayburn where he states that advertising is just getting started though the environment is evolving: "
more niche competitors, the Viacom lawsuit, the big media companies entering the space (Hulu) and the problem with getting advertisers to spend money around UGC content."]

I think there are two axes of rapidly evolution of online video. Firstly, there is a ride to deliver the highest quality:

  • A couple of days ago Brightcove "announced a new service for delivering broadcast-quality Internet TV. Extending their widely adopted Internet TV platform, the new service, Brightcove Show, will give content publishers the ability to deliver instant-on, broadcast-quality streaming video to their viewers".
  • Youtube is planning to deliver content bases on the H.264 standard
  • The players (Silverlight and Adobe) figth is about to begin.
  • Etc...

Secondly, new ways to embed or to somehow include ads in videos. Not long ago, Google-Youtube announced they would embed ads, and now they point out their brand new Adsense Video Unit.



My question is,
may be advertisers and publishers overwhelmed by such a rapidly growing diversity of solutions and offers? The point is that since the first moment you offer a solution to the potential advertising client, up to the moment you really start developing the project, your solution is already old-fashioned. For most clients this noise is tough to understand, to feel comfortable with your solution and, eventually, get on this roller coaster and enjoy. They are used to "burn the windows of distribution" step by step. That is, they invest for a communication campaign and then they want it to work for a certain period of time.

My concern is that technology capabilities and potentials are going at light speed while advertising and consumers video literacy have a 1.0 speed.