Having grown up in broadcast television, there is one thing I learnt above everything else. There are no excuses.

If you’re live, on air, to 6 million people you cannot cock up. However, the flip side of this is, if you do your job perfectly, no one notices.

One of the things that saddens me about internet TV is how cavalier the approach by ostensibly professional organisations is.

This evening, two hours after broadcast, ITV’s Headcases isn’t available – in fact no video seems to be playable; the BBC continues to throw out programming so blurred that someone should be arrested for wasting licence payers’ money (although this is improving as content is migrated to the iPlayer).

What is it about the internet that turns grown up organisations that have spent tens of millions of pounds on their services into amateur night ?

Perhaps it’s because broadcast TV always had engineering at its heart, whereas internet TV has developers, who care much more about functionality than the quality of the user experience. or perhaps the execs just care about getting away with it, rather than building the experiences that their viewers deserve.

The TV stations used to have – indeed, still do have people called Duty Officers whose job it is to log complaints. I had a couple of flatmates that used to undertake this thankless task and they either quickly turned to drink, or if they were sensible, left (in fact, I seem to recall that they did both). Getting through to the Duty Officer is one thing, complaining online is another. I dread to think of the time being spent by our major broadcasters in the UK in addressing emails asking why they are so bad at their jobs. And I encourage you to add to these complaints if the service online isn’t up to the standard that you’re used to on your TV set.

Remember, there are no excuses.

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No Excuses

There has been a lot of debate going on around the context of video on the web. Is it best in a stand alone player divorced from textual website content, or is it best linked into existing ‘flat’ stories (it’s fascinating how derogatory our view of a basic web page without rich media is these days – it takes me back to the ‘dead tree edition’ phrase – perhaps we should use ‘dead web edition’ as a moniker for non-rich media websites..) ?

The answer has to be contextual. I have widespread experience that, if you present TV, even on a PC, people will treat it like TV. That is they will sit down and watch sequentially for a long time. However, if all you offer is short clips linked from a flat web page, they will treat it like a webpage with video (yes, it’s really not rocket science..).

But, the argument seems futile to me. Surely you should do both. By all means contextualise the video on a web page; better still make images on the web pages clickable so that they become video and play in situ. But also consider launching a player that provides a more TV-like experience.

There’s a word that has come to be used in web marketing circles, it’s called ‘discovery’. Fundamentally, we live in an era where the choice of what and how viewers watch TV is their choice, not the choice of the broadcaster.

However, for an internet broadcaster it boils down – inevitably – to the financials. The reality is that if you can get viewers watching video for a long time, you can play in a lot of video ads, and despite the bandwidth costs involved, this will be more lucrative than three banner ads or MPUs on a web page.

So, for me the trick is to place video links all over the place, but to gradually reel the viewer into a TV context, where they can be better monetised.

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Context

sINCEREST fPORYouTube keeps spawning wannabees, from Magnify.net to the latest effort, StartYourTube . The latter is quite neat and well executed, if a bit confuing to administer. It includes blog elements as well as the usual upload and group functions found on UGC sites.

You can even control the domain name and the advertising on the service.

It does beg the question as to whether the business model of paying for upgrades will work (it won’t since 99.9% of UGC sites attract very few users), but I guess it’s another one example of ‘publish and be damned’ development. And as they point out readily in their blurb, it worked for YouTube..

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The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Here, as promised, is a brief overview of the services you can use to add advertising to your Internet TV channel.

First of all, the big guns.

Google offer Adwords. Adsense for Video (apply here) allows you to add video or text overlays on top of your video content. This is only available in the US for websites with more than 1 million monthly video views using Flash 7. I reckon that’s around seven websites… (only joking..), but you can sign up for their somewhat more prosaic banner and text Adsense services wherever you are irrespective of your viewer base.

AOL’s Advertising.com has just launched its PubAccess service. In spite of the excellent name (mine’s a lager), this service is also US centric (you can’t register without a US tax id and zipcode).

Yahoo also have a totally US centric service for publishers here.

Offline networks such as Tribal Fusion will also give you ads to serve provided you have a minimum of 2,000 users a day. You can sign up here. Or, again if you have scale, you can appoint an ad sales house such as the UK company Ad2One.

The specialist video ad sales companies all operate offline (ie you have to ask them to engage with you)

VideoEgg predominantely uses flat links to launch rich media ads, but does have a video overlay product. However “Please note we are interested in partnering with sites that demonstrate over 10 million videos streamed per month in the US/UK/CA/AU.” That would be three sites, then.. You can contact them here.

Tremor Media’s Acuedo platform looks very interesting, but is again totally US focused.

LiveRail is another video focused ad network with an emphasis on serving rather than selling

SpotXchange allows you to set bids for your ad space.

YuMe is a company that I haven’t yet engaged with, but plan to do so in the near future. Again, US centric, they seem to have an interesting proposition.

But, the bottom line seems to be that you’re best off selling your own ads using your own sales team. Unless you’re a major US based website with millions of viewers all watching video, your options are severely limited.

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Ad Roundup

Many of the major investors interested in the Internet TV market seems to focus on the network. I’ve spent ages trying to talk those that I know out of investing in Internet TV infrastructure company. There are many reasons, but the latest is the tsunami of lawsuits flying around the industry. There’s an interesting analysis of the latest one affecting Akamai, Limelight and others here.

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Net Negative