Word reaches me that Maven have turned down one of the world’s largest travel companies and one of the world’s largest publishers as clients because they ‘are too small’. It seems that my prediction that Yahoo! would take them downmarket was very wide of the mark.

In the meantime it seems that the company has won Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cableco, as a customer, displacing the long running relationship with troubled Narrowstep.

So it seems that Yahoo! are using Maven as a platform for a major content play by aggregating through stealth.

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Rumour Mill

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

Now, I know that Wales has its own version of the UK Channel 4, but it seems that Channel 4’s 4OD service has decided that I’m not living in the UK or Ireland.

Now, I did sleep rather well last night so could have missed the uprising in the street as my countrymen achieve independence and cast themselves adrift from the British Isles, but I doubt if this was the case.

A far more likely explanation is that Channel 4’s geo-targeting database has gone awry.

Now, I do run Tor, the geospoofing application, but I restarted my router and PC and switched off Tor and could still not gain access. http://www.ip-lookup.net/ clearly tells me that I’m in the UK, so either a cookie has blocked me or the problem is an ongoing one.

It made me ask – is there a better way to geo-restrict content, since all content providers seem to be under the misapprehension that restricting their content by territory is a good thing to do.

Current geo-restrictions tend to use a database lookup either using a downloaded database or a web service. There are problems with this. For example, my wife works for an American corporation therefore has a US IP address, which is great for watching Hulu, but not very good if you want to use her PC for the BBC iPlayer.

Also, the database is being continually changed, so it’s easy to come a cropper. The move from IPv4 to IPv6 is likely to make things even worse in the short term, although should improve matters in the longer terms.

Another issue with this approach is that major service providers such as AOL can assign their IPs to users from another country, thus causing content to be blocked locally.

Some other alternative are:

To trust the user (!)

To use a credit card as a key-in device

To use location based authentication on a mobile phone

To use the ISP to authenticate a location

Or, to give in and recognise that we live and operate in a global market and virtual barriers are as welcome as the return of the Berlin Wall.

Anyhow, enough on geo-targeting, I must dig my old TV set out of the storeroom so that I can watch Countdown on Channel 4!

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Geo Trouble

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