Content Delivery

by francine Hardaway on May 2, 2007

This AlwaysOn Hollywood conference reminds me that not all content is free. I think the owners of content are here, trying to figure out how to monetize what they already have. There’s so much going on in video, most of it in user-generated content that goes unmonetized. But some of it is owned by cable companies and studios, record companies, and producers. So this generation of technology has much to do with publishing video on phones, embedding it in blogs and websites, and giving it wider circulation on blogs. But not without a business model. This ain’t UStream.

I saw a widget that embeds in a website and plays video, another than takes video to the cell phone, and one that has its own Clip player that, when you click on it, opens a video and accompanying relevant ads.

A massive tsunami of video is about to hit the web, creating more business for Limelight Network and Akami. Streaming all this video will be huge, but peer-to-peer

Live quality video is here, doable and is going to be a big new trend. Kyte TV will let anyone with a phone create user-generated content on their phone, upload it immediately to their computer and broadcast it.

Each company tries to solve a little bit of the problem, and someone has to aggregate these tools into a real product that gives the user what he wants to see and then monetize that.

BuzInteractive is a personalized form of voicemail with both your voice and your music. GetaBuz records your voice and some music and combines it into a voicemail message for you. A highly engineered voicemail recording session. Who really needs this? Teenagers. Same consumers who buy ringtones in such great numbers. And OMG, also personalized celebrity greetings.

We are in Hollywood, remember, not Silicon Valley for this conference. So it’s all about content distribution and monetization. Pando is a large file-sending utility that is distributed free and is used to help consumers distribute and post large media files. It’s a managed peer-to-peer platform that supposedly has been very successful, but when I tried to dowload it from Pando.com during the conference, the servers were immediately overwhelmed.

In order to get better quality video, such as HD, over the Internet, you have to do multi-source streaming to keep the stream high quality and constant. Swarmcast produces this product.

Passalong Networks : platforms for distributing music over the Internet. Their StoreBlocks platform now powers EBay, Sam Goody’s and a bunch of other providers. But until now, they did only Windows Media player files with DRM. But now they are adding interoperability. They have a large independent catalog and all the majors. Their business model is about connecting the artist to the fan, focussed on business to business.

Here’s the PassAlong CEO doing his demo:
Passalong_ceo_2

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Pando Support May 2, 2007 at 1:42 pm

Hello,

Pando’s website has been working fine all day, are you still having trouble connecting to our site to download the client? If so email me at:

support at Pando.com

You can also download the client from download sites such as download.com. How were you connected to the internet at the conference?

Thanks for your coverage!

Peter
Pando Support

francine hardaway May 2, 2007 at 1:56 pm

I bet everyone at the conference was downloading Pando while I was…it wasn’t down, just very slow. Connected through Airport. I got it eventually. Thanks for being on top of it.

Sebastien May 3, 2007 at 4:48 am

As you mentionned in this article, you should see in the next years on Internet not a storm, but a HURRICANE of videos !

I would like to mention 1-Click Media (http://www.1-click.com) company, which is providing content delivery solutions based on peer-to-peer technology and has specialized itself in the delivery of videos (Video on Demand or with Push Delivery)

Talking about monetization, one interesting thing is that however the content is generally not free (for VoD), reducing the costs of distributing it has allowed our customers to offer free content to their users.

It is really great that Peer-to-Peer technology benefits both to companies and users in a WIN-WIN model.

Sebastien
http://www.1-click.com

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