Adaptive streaming is all the rage. Lots of clients are asking for it, and why not ? The idea that you can have a stream that ‘adapts’ itself to the viewer’s bandwidth seems attractive, and is hardly new. Real had it in the the nineties and Microsoft in the naughties.

Now there’s Apple’s version, and Microsoft’ latest surestream in Silverlight.

But the reality is that it is almost impossible to get this technology to work. First of all, support from CDNs is patchy, then the implementation seems fickle. Sky seems to use surestream for their service, so all you see are weird ghost images the whole time, and TVCatchup seem to suffer from a similar problem with their iPad service.

At Narrowstep we developed a multi stream service that did not try to dynamically adapt. I still believe that this is the best approach, especially when deployed with an intelligent player.

The trouble is most web based video players are dumb as hell, and whilst load of investment has gone into video management systems, the real need is for better and more intelligent players.

And not just on web tv players – TVs will soon need this intelligence just to compete.

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Adapting To Conditions

The very sad news reached me yesterday that my former business partner Paul Robinson had passed away after a brief fight with the big C.

It is very unlikely that there will ever be anyone quite like Paul again.

I first met him when running Interactive1 and he came to sell the monitoring system produced by his company Jyra to our clients, which included Shell and PwC. I thought he was a salesman, it turned out he was the Chairman of NASDAQ’s most traded small cap company. It was 2000 and the height of the dot com boom.

A couple of years later, just after I left i1, Paul approached me with an idea for a streaming media company. By this point I had already formed Narrowstep Ltd, and we went on to form Narrowstep Inc together. Paul was a master fundraiser (read: salesman) but had a dereliction for detail.

Narrowstep was largely conceived and built around several rounds in the Toucan Bar round the corner from our first offices in an attic in Queen Anne St in central London. I never had so much fun establishing and building a company.

Paul’s background was as colourful as his character. From what he told me (and remember, Paul was a salesman first and foremost), he grew up in Ireland the son of a senior exec at EMI; he went to St Columba, which he hated, and then found his way to England, via Trinity College, Dublin, to a career in the nascent IT industry. He was variously a very early employee for Cisco, ran the Singapore office for Prime Computers and made and spent a small fortune. There are various hazy stories such as the Porsche he wrote off on the day he bought it, resulting in a hefty driving ban and the tax bill for several tens of millions for stock options in Cisco he had long sold at a meagre strike price. There was always something a bit rock and roll about Paul.

After building a number of companies and taking them public, including Jyra, Narrowstep and Mobestar, Paul moved back to the Far East, married a Thai lady and started a recording studio (or so he said).

When this all fell apart towards the end of 2009 he turned up at my business club in London dressed all in black with six guitars and three enormous suitcases, drunk as a skunk off the first class flight from Bangkok. Everyone thought he was an aging rock star. Naturally, we had a few more jars and I found him a hotel for the night.

A few months later I heard from him again. He was recovering from his first round of kemo and we discussed some new deals. I set up a day of meetings for him with some likely companies and we stalked around town like the old days.

But he looked frail and was wearing a dapper three piece suit and mackintosh in the Spring heatwave.

So, Paul, it seems that you have made your last sale (or is there another one to come at the Pearly Gates ?). It was great knowing you, mate. You made life interesting.

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Excerpted from:
Death Of A Salesman

Like many genres that were once ghettoised by broadcasters, business has become mainstream; from Dragon’s Den to The Apprentice, the drama of building, running and trying to make a business succeed has been turned into entertainment, for better or for worst.

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No Business For TV

These are serious times at BSkyB. The company has produced stellar results, ones which, ironically, will cost its major shareholder and CEO dear as Murdoch’s NewsCorp aims to buy the 61% of the company it does not own.

The company is still shy of 10m customers, and has had to spend £1.2bn on marketing over the past year.

It just goes to show what a high stakes games broadcasting is.

But BSkyB are making some cleverer moves. They’re putting money into Sky Arts and have even brought back the much lamented Melvyn Bragg arts vehicle, the South Bank Show (which I worked on in my youth). Now they’ve bought the entire back catalogue (or rather, catalog) of HBO, the company responsible for endless hit shows in the States.

They have also, of course, bought Virgin’s orphan channels.

It’s been quite a year for Mr Murdoch Jnr and he is showing all the media genius of his father with these moves.

Meanwhile, any potential threat from network operators (if ever there was a threat) has been nullified by Sky offering free broadband to customers.

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Read more here:
Sky Shinning Through

I was going to use the term ‘lemmings’ but the United Order of Lemmings have written to me and asked me to stop giving them a bad name.

How did ITV get Friends Reunited and ITV Local so wrong ? And where did NewsCorp managed to get MySpace from 100m to 5m users – and why are they now seeming to do the same with The Times online sites?

Yet, with video they have leveraged this positions well and become dominant in the provision of online video in the US and the UK. In the US no major TV company has tried to stray beyond what they do, and at the same time they’ve come up with concepts such as Hulu.

Collaborative ventures like this have critical mass in the US, but seem futile in the UK where only the BBC count.

Traditional media has great sales capabilities, good production discipline, but the content is what counts.

Great video content is much more difficult to produce than a great article. Volume of video content is even more difficult. For example, by my experience, a minute of high quality video takes an hour to edit on average.

Likewise, audiences now form themselves and generate their own ‘content’.

So why can’t old media monetize this ? This, perhaps, is the most valuable question in media.

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Excerpt from:
Why Is Old Media Being Perverse ?