Developments in Video Platforms

Hamburg.
The next next09 panel is with Jeremy Allaire from Brightcove and Axel Schmiegelow from Sevenload - online video hosting companies in the US and Germany. Brightcove licences its video platform to a variety of partners; it now operates online video for some hundreds of media companies. Increasingly, this is used for syndicating and distributing content through a variety of social media Websites. Sevenload, by contrast, brings together communities and the content they are interested in, significantly also including user-generated content. They monetise for the content providers by running advertising on the site. (And the two companies have just entered a commercial partnership.)

Brightcove is a software company that licences its software as an on-demand platform, and it's positioning itself as the major horizontal platform used for such purposes. This is a substantially different business model from YouTube or other end-user platforms (who in theory could licence this technology). Sevenload, on the other hand, is mainly in the business of aggregating communities around content, and selling those communities to advertisers (with some of the proceeds passed back to the content providers). At the same time, Sevenload content is also available through YouTube and other platforms.

Such sites and services also strongly affect the future of television, of course. Television-type content is now ubiquitous on the Web, through video sharing services; it is also increasingly easy to transfer it across a variety of devices (from mobile phones to games consoles). By contrast, a TV set is a pretty dumb, limited piece of hardware, Axel points out, while interactive content is increasingly intruding into the conventional TV experience. This is moving substantially beyond older 'interactive TV' platforms, which were often very insular and limited solutions; the new generation of interactive TV is Internet-based and has access to all the material available there.

There's still a need for the advertising and content industries to understand these developments, and to respond to user demand. Right now, content industries still closely protect their content, and refuse to share it widely; however, if they did, this would also open up new advertising opportunities.

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