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Online Saturation

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

My wife is thinking of giving up her blog. A service which allows her to track her favourite hobby came online this year and has been adopted wholeheartedly by its target audience, thus diminishing the blogsphere and she feels she’s better off contributing to this as the number of visitors to her blog diminish.

I’m getting regular invites for professional social network, Naymz, but I ignore them since I already have a thousand contacts on LinkedIn.
Of course, there are winners and losers in any medium, and, as Friends Reunited showed, a winner can rapidly become a loser. However, the overall problem is that there are only so many hours in the day.
And the reality for the English speaking web is that the online marketplace is reaching saturation; any growth has to come from eyeballs moving from other leisure activities such as gaming and TV viewing. The ‘growing pie’ has become a ’shifting pie’ and everyone’s clamouring for a bigger slice.
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Online Saturation

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Global Trends

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

UK regulator Ofcom’s latest report on the international communications market makes for interesting reading. Here are some of the key findings:

  • There is nearly one broadband connection for every four people across the countries in this report. With 26 connections per 100 people, the UK is third among our comparator countries, behind the Netherlands (35%) and Sweden (31%). Average growth in connections between 2004 and 2007 was highest in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland, at 5% per year.
  • In the US, internet users in the US spend the most time online – 15 hours online each week; those in Spain spend the least amount of time online, at just 7.5 hours per week.UK users rank second behind the US, at nearly 14 hours per week. Internet use per user has risen the fastest in the UK over the last four years, at an average annual rate of 30%.
  • The internet’s share of advertising spend is highest in the UK (19%) and Sweden (17%). The US, Canada and Japan are the only other countries where the internet makes up more than 10% of total advertising expenditure.Concurrent media use, or stacking, is now common across our comparator countries. Between 70% (Italy) and 83% (Japan) of consumers across our comparator countries claim to access the internet while watching TV. In the UK the figure is 74%.
  • Viewing of TV shows over the web is growing rapidly. US consumers download the most streams per head (26), with UK consumers next (8). Growth in the volume of downloads reached 131% in France during 2007, and 69% in the UK.
  • Broadcast TV viewing levels seem to be least affected by the internet in the US. In the US, broadcast-based TV viewing appears more resilient to internet access than anywhere else – the net percentage of US people viewing less broadcast-based TV since having internet access is 7%, whereas in all the other countries in our survey the figure was between 15% and 21%; in the UK it was 15%.
  • Mobile broadband availability using HSDPA technology now exceeds 70% in many European countries, prompting operators to develop residential mobile broadband services, enabled by plug-in ‘dongles’ for laptops. HSDPA availability is highest in the UK (87%).
  • Digital recorded music sales grew by over 20% year-on-year in all our comparator countries except France and Italy. Mobile music downloads now account for over half of all recorded digital music revenue in France, Italy and Japan. In Japan, mobile accounts for over 90% of all digital music revenue, compared to 29% for the UK.
  • Mobile social networking is beginning to grow in popularity – 0.8 million mobile subscribers in the UK and 4 million in the US access social networking sites using their phones, thanks to improving handset capabilities, faster network speeds and bespoke SNS mobile applications.
  • Broadcast mobile television has had a mixed year. Italy is the biggest market in Europe with nearly 1 million DVB-H subscribers, though there have been service closures elsewhere

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Global Trends

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KIT Report

Monday, November 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

KIT Digital – formerly Roo – are posting improved, albeit still heavily loss making, results.

What this does seem to justify is the company’s move away from the US market, with a reported 91% of its revenues now coming from outside the US.
But, by my estimation, the company still needs to almost double in size again at its current run rate to become profitable, as it predicted it would be following a recent acquisition.
I have a niggly feeling that the company’s recent run of acquisitions is taking them back in the wrong direction – a video marketing company that owns encoding technology and which is possibly geographically over-stretched. In the world of Internet TV two and two sometimes makes three… 
Still, kudos for coming this far.
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KIT Report

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The Firepan & Fire

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The regulatory hurdles facing Kangaroo, the UK version of Hulu, seem to have frustrated former BBC Head of Digital Stuff, Ashley Highfield, who was ostensibly in charge of the new service, and he has decamped to Microsoft’s MSN.

The odds against Kangaroo being the all encompassing service it purported to be seem to have lengthened and Microsoft may be a safe port in the current recessionary storm, but it is an opportunity missed.
Microsoft will never re-invent itself in the online guise it knows it needs to adopt without new vision and leadership, and being the captain of an outlying and minor part of this American behemoth is likely to prove a salutary lesson in following the bottom dollar.
But Ashley does have a leader’s ability in surrounding himself with smart people and, who knows, if the fortunes of MSN can be turned around in the UK, the tail might end up wagging the dog.
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The Firepan & Fire

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If The Price Is Right

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Launching VidZapper as a ‘low cost’ video management system seems to have raised a whole debate out there on what ‘low cost’ means.

To me it’s a cost at which the costs do not prevent a viable business from growing.
The trouble is, this is an industry where the major players – Brightcove, Move, Maven, Narrowstep, the platform and KIT aim to make a minimum of $100k a year from their customers – smaller customers just aren’t worthwhile, although Brightcove has recently introduced a ‘basic’ package.
VC backed companies can afford to subsidise their customers, so there seem to be some low cost and free options out there.
However, there is one thing that is common to all VMS providers. To my knowledge, not a single one of them publishes their prices for any level of service.
So, let me start here by saying that an average deployment of VidZapper for a year, including storage, bandwidth, CDN costs, etc.. should be $10 – 15k.  I don’t think that’s a bad price considering all the investment that’s gone into the platform.
Now, any of you who know the pricing of other services, please post them here, so that we can start to establish a more open marketplace.
** Please use the comment field below to post any relevant pricing information anonymously **
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If The Price Is Right

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