It remains the great irony of modern media that the company that represents the ‘long tail’, ie Google, is cleaning up against traditional media.

There’s a simple dynamic here. Media buyers still want to buy in multiples of 500,000 or more.

Now, there are very few brands who sell to more than 500,000 individuals in a year, so the wastage from this model is considerable.

The result is that ‘niche’ markets and local markets are largely ignored in the march for volume. Meanwhile Google, which has an effective medium for this market, gets the budget due to the effectiveness of its long tail, targeted, model.

But part of me asks: why have the agencies not realised what’s going on ? Why don’t they Googlise ? Why does a totally inefficient model dominate ?

The fact is that the status quo suits everyone. What should happen is that ad and media agencies are treated like online agencies – paid by results, not by volume. But they’re not. They are incentivised by volume and driven by volume.

Internet TV will only become commercially viable when the concept of targeted advertising has value.

Source:
Target Practice

What is it with TV programmes and reality ? Aussie soap Neighbours has long lost the shaky sets and the dialogue in American soaps is as believable as life on Mars, but the thing that really gets me is that every programmes on TV insists that everyone from bankers to forensic scientists use Macs. Sorry, they don’t. Only designers, TV editors and fashion victims who think they are rebels (and have far too much money to boot) use Macs.

Then, there was a comment in a brand new CSI about ‘using VB to track the IP address’. Oh dear. And what is it with that ability to clear up grainy CCTV cameras ?

In an industry now dominated by computing, the writers have yet to catch up with reality. ‘Technology licence’ is an all too common facet of modern TV. It’s not a big deal, but the intrinsic lack of understanding about technology in the TV industry is set to become a real issue.

Perhaps this manifests itself in TV coverage of the internet. I can only think of one programme on television that reviews the internet – Click Online by the BBC, which is shoehorned into slots on the BBC News 24 channel.

Isn’t it amazing that there is plenty of coverage of TV online, but hardly any coverage of online on TV.

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Taking Liberties

On2 (ONT), the company behind the Flash video codec, VP6, has seemingly announced an improvement of 40% in the quality of its codec. This either means better video or reduced bandwidth requirements, depending on how you look at it.

The company has been somewhat under the cosh recently with the introduction of H.264 (MPEG4) on the Flash platform.

I’ve yet to try out the new encoding and would weclome hearing about the experiences of anyone working with this or other server side encoding solutions such as Anystream, Autodesk Cleaner, Riva, Turbine, SUPER or Sothink.

Encoding to me has always been a bit of a dark art that involves time, patience and the right recipe; merely having a decent codec doesn’t make a difference as the varying implementations of Flash video encoding already on the internet testifies.

Accelerating the encoding with solutions such as Digital Rapids can also help, but my contention remains that you are better off encoding locally with a double pass software based encoder and then uploading the resulting files. It’s quicker and delivers better quality.

Still, I guess people want the convenience of server based encoding, which especially makes life easier for user generated video.

The rest is here:
The Dark Arts

As MPEG4/H.264 becomes a consideration for anyone broadcasting over the internet, the charges involved in using the codec is set to become a real issue. Now, I’ve spent some time researching this and the picture is as clear as a misty day up a mountain, as is the MPEG4 Licensing Authority’s website.

Microsoft’s VC1 codec is totally free (at the moment) as is On2’s VP6 codec used in Flash video (you can find a highly partisan comparison of VP6 and H.264 here).

However, MPEG 4 was developed by a consortium and all want their piece of flesh. But the audio and the video bits are licensed separately

The basic cost for anyone running a commercial internet TV service seems to be 2% of revenues or 2c per stream for sites with more than 10,000 unique viewers over the course of a year (yeah, go figure…).

This is a ridiculous burden on ad driven sites that may show a 3 min clip, an ad and then a three minute clip. That’s 6c; at $40CPM the broadcaster is receiving 4c before all other costs; although there does seem to be huge ambiguity around the actual rules.

There’s some useful information here on the Microsoft website.

The reality is that both MPEG LA and Microsoft have tried to bring in encoding and decoding prices in the past and have failed. This kind of technology simply does not lend itself to charging either the publisher or the viewer; the charging has to be included in the cost of the technology, if at all. Let’s face it, if Tim Berners-Lee had wanted a licence fee we probably wouldn’t have the internet as we know it today. Big Technology should learn when to be greedy and when to be sensible, or let MPEG4 end up in the same dump as Betamax and HD-DVD.

Continued here:
Codex Cogo

This is an interesting comment I received on the last blog which is worth repeating in a posting:

“You could try using pickaproxy.com service to see if that helps. We have recently setup tryouts to allow anyone to appear to be in either UK, US, France, Russia, China or Canada. To geospoof your UK presence set your browser proxy to uk.pickaproxy.com and specify port 8126.

As for the internet going forward, I am thinking that geospoofing services will help free users from geo restrictions, throw a wrench in geotargeting strategies, and maybe create a better world ”

I’d appreciate any feedback on how well this works for users out there. If you’re outside the UK try setting the proxy for the US and accessing Hulu. I can’t seem to get it to work.

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More Spoofing