Following on from my last post a former colleague has pointed out Ply Media who seems to have some neat overlay tools which work cross platform (thanks, Pete).

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Plying

The video tools market is an interesting one. I have long expected some clever online editing tools or overlay-based technologies to appear which, in particular, make a link between the temporal feature of videos and related online content (e.g. click to put the bike in your shopping basket’, ‘see the best off for this product’, etc…

The reality is that tools like Microsoft Producer have long allowed you to sync, for example, powerpoint presentations with video, but the potential to add hotspots to videos to enable shopping has still not been realised. Of course, Jumpcut is also a veteran of this market and I’ve blogged previously about MovieMasher. But a new generation of clever, commercial tools

As the Internet TV market matures and services like iPlayer continue to grow in popularity surely the next generation of internet video companies will focus on this area. The one stumbling block is that people have traditional seen TV as a lean back medium and are reluctant to interact – red button services have hardly changed the industry (although services such as QVC and Teletext show what can be done with the right approach). The good news is that all the experience I’ve had shows that viewers are more likely to inter-react with Internet video than they are with traditional TV.

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Opening The Tool Box

There are only three media companies that count now in the UK, they are the BBC, Google and Sky.

Small things are sometimes harbingers of a wider picture. The above conclusion was precipitated by the news that one of the presenters of one of the UK’s major TV channel’s longest running programme is resigning after reportedly having her salary cut by 90%.

This shows that UK commercial channels are having to face reality. The only place ‘stars’ will be able to find the salaries that they have grown accustomed to will be the BBC, who can liberally spend taxpayers’ money as they see fit, paying ludicrous salaries that would never be matched in the commercial sector.

So, where have the commercial channel’s stars’ salaries gone – well to largely to Google. The vagaries of TV advertising have been replaced the measurable certainty of click thru advertising.

Sky is largely immune to the advertising model, deriving much of its income from paid for TV and using sports as the leverage for this.

The media world is set to become a much poorer world, unless you tax your viewers….

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New Order

So, as I write this Bll Gates will be logging off and leaving work for the last time.

He has long been admired and derrided in roughly equal measures, but I have nothing but huge admiration for him, the way he has conducted himself and for his ongoing mission.

Microsoft under Steve Ballmer is a corporate beast that is unlikely to innovate again and is increasingly ‘getting it wrong’.

Gates was never the fashionista that Steve Jobs is and has never really attracted the praise he deserves for creating one of the best companies in history, ranking with GE and his original nemesis, IBM.

Of course, without him we might now be living in a different world. Better or worse, who can really say. I reckon better.

The only thing he didn’t perhaps do was create a more democratic information society, but what does IT matter when so many people have no food, water or shelter.

At the end of that day I quite like the idea that I’ve been taxed by Bill and much of that money is now being funnelled into good causes. It sure beats letting governments do it.

But the one industry where Bill must be considered a failure is TV. Cludgy attempts at IPTV, seriously poor technologies and an obsession with the OS did the company no favours. The only successes were the quality of the codecs and the DRM. Having long ago lost the creative community, the rest was just pushing water uphill and the forays into content (MSN) and advertising (Atlas) are cursory at best. When the history of TV is written, Steve Jobs’ name will loom large, but Bill’s will be missing.

As Bill clears his desk and takes his cardboard box home on the bus from Redmond I don’t think that he’ll give a second thought to this, a minor failure in the overall scope of things.

Curing the world of TB, now that’s a whole different matter…

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Eulogy

It’s good to see the infamous Internet TV ‘entrepreneur’ David McCourt returning to the roots of his dad’s company digging up roads to lay TV cable with the purchase of a company that sells cable clips.

After his sojourn in the Internet TV industry, during which he destroyed one of the pioneering companies in the sector, Narrowstep, and then sold it off in a firesale, he’s gone back to basics. Now he’s had to dish out a load of cash from the money he raised from a bunch of schmucks such as fellow Narrowstep director and ex-ESPN exec, Roger Werner, to make his next move.

Internet TV software to satellite dishes and TV cables. Not a bad idea for someone of such limited business ability and intelligence.

Yes, I have a vested interest, but business is about building something. Using your ego to destroy a business is all too easy and a sin we should all be wary of. I certainly will make sure that I never become beholden to a person of such limited ability and intellect in the future, whatever his or her bank balance.

This said, it might actually be true that there’s more money in satellite dishes and cable clips than in software that transforms TV. Maybe I’m the idiot after all…

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Back To Basics