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

NewsCorp are selling down their majority holding in conditional access company, NDS. This is a very profitable company that provides the security for Sky’s set top boxes, but they have been held back by their parentage – NewsCorp’s rivals are naturally reluctant to let one of their major competitors run their security. The majority shareholder now will be private equity house Premira, who also hold a significant stake in Germany broadcaster ProSiebenSat and UK production company All3Media.

So, a surprising deal in these illiquid times, but a very good one for all the parties involved, I suspect.

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Top Deal

After a recent catch up with Microsoft, and in light of the recent retirement of its founder, I thought that it may be worth reflecting on what role Microsoft are likely to play in the future of the Internet TV industry.

In general, the company seems to be leaning toward the enterprise and appears to see the move of applications away from the desktop to the server as a done deal. However, their approach and pricing for this market – especially for their excellent database products – remains restrictive. Aaded to this is the fact that the media sector is a very thin slice on their revenue pie chart, so has never really commanded enough attention.

Silverlight seems to have been a success and the Expressions Encoder, which replaced Windows Media Encoder, is a very, very impressive application, although restricted to the VCV1 codec. However, video players developed in Silverlight, such as those from Narrowstep, seems incredibly slow to load and have problems on pre-Intel Macs. Adobe’s Flash technology is proving to be ubiquitous and even powers the video on MSN – an admission of defeat if ever there was one.

Microsoft’s DRM remains the only real option on the market – I’ve yet to see really successful implementation of rival solutions such as WideVine on any scale. This is a real strength that the company does not seem to leverage.

Microsoft IPTV has been less of a success and I’ve heard nothing but horror stories about its implementation including the first customer, Swisscom’s decision to quietly drop the technology.

On the desktop Windows Media Centre Edition was a real let down. It was difficult to develop for and even more difficult for users to set up. Most people who bought computers with this OS just ignored the EPG interface and this has continued with its integration into Vista.

There’s little doubt that Microsoft has figured out that it will not be able to charge top dollar for its products forever in a world where things are increasingly free or advertising driven. This is why they have persevered with the millstone that is MSN and bought Accipiter and their Atlas online ad system.

Now, this is where things begin to unravel. Microsoft is never going to catch up or even compete with Google in this space, even teaming up with Yahoo! would not have brought them the clout they required and would have turned them into something they will never be – a media company.

The reality is, Microsoft are going to become increasingly dependant, as many, many major corporations are, on Google for their future.

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Microcosm

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