sINCEREST fPORYouTube keeps spawning wannabees, from Magnify.net to the latest effort, StartYourTube . The latter is quite neat and well executed, if a bit confuing to administer. It includes blog elements as well as the usual upload and group functions found on UGC sites.

You can even control the domain name and the advertising on the service.

It does beg the question as to whether the business model of paying for upgrades will work (it won’t since 99.9% of UGC sites attract very few users), but I guess it’s another one example of ‘publish and be damned’ development. And as they point out readily in their blurb, it worked for YouTube..

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The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

Many of the major investors interested in the Internet TV market seems to focus on the network. I’ve spent ages trying to talk those that I know out of investing in Internet TV infrastructure company. There are many reasons, but the latest is the tsunami of lawsuits flying around the industry. There’s an interesting analysis of the latest one affecting Akamai, Limelight and others here.

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Net Negative

A nice follow up to my last post about internet peering points can be found here (thanks Pete!). It seems that Black Holes don’t just occur in space…

It seems that the feedback to date is that I’m being paranoid about network peering performance, but I still think that net neutrality is on its last legs, not helped by the attitude of the BBC, Google and others.

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Black Holes

Maybe the naysayers were right and the web is running out of steam. I’ve increasingly been coming across serious peering issues between the UK and the US – especially the West Coast with connections sometimes taking 30 hops and over 150ms per hop.

Peering points are where networks hand over traffic to each other – the more peer points your hosting or network provider has, the better, since if traffic becomes stuck via one route it can then re-route.

As mor and more fibre connections are laid to the home, this becomes the bottleneck for the internet and is, obviously, particularly problematic for video delivery.

After years of carefully monitoring this situation it seems to have become significantly worse over the past few weeks. Or perhaps I’m becoming paranoid..

Any views on this would be gratefully received.

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Peer Pressure

Last week I finally caught up with an old friend who runs a company investing in the TMT space out of France and a lively debate ensued about the future of paid for content.

Current wisdom has advertising paying for the lion’s share of future content delivery, but he contended that cable and satellite companies were doing better than ever at getting money from the viewing public. This I could not dispute. Clever packaging has resulted in ever increasing revenues for companies such as BSkyB.

But we then reflected on the cable companies and noted that, despite a fantastic market position, Virgin Media had singularly failed to become the cash cow that it should be and that, in the US, Comcast had failed to use IP delivery to extend its reach beyond its FCC curtailed maximum. Why Comcast was not a partner in Fios or U-verse remains a mystery. It may be that Verizon and AT&T think they can cut it in the content world on their own.

For me, here’s the rub. Existing broadcasters remain in a strong position to leverage and rebuild their audiences on new platforms, where they can monetise them through advertising, sponsorship and ecommerce. Other players will need to build content brands and that’s easier said than done as Joost, Babblegum, Deutsche Telekom and BT have found

However, existing platforms will skillfully have to retain – and grow – audience share of pocket whilst delivering to new platforms and devices.

In a hugely disrupted market it’s easy to see the upside for an upstart, but difficult to see this as anything other than a threat to existing businesses.

A lunchtime wasn’t long enough to interpret the future of this complex industry, but the debate is one that must resonate through the boardrooms of many major media companies.

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Future Fulminations