Mobtown Labs

TV vs. Online Video - It’s the Same thing

Today I read an article on SAI about how Online video that was re-posted from Dave Rayburn’s Streamingmedia.com. The article inferred that online video will not replace TV in the near future because Akamai finally released some numbers on the actual number of live video streams during the World Cup and the numbers were underwhelming.

My thoughts are that there are some systematic problems with online video but this should not be confused with consumer demand for it.

Online video is pre-mature because of a couple things. First of all you can’t get a decent stream. Now this could be the CDN’s fault, the ISP’s fault for throttling bandwidth, or the content provider’s fault for purposefully not investing in decent quality video through the internet channels. But the truth is it goes through the same line so it’s more of a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

The counter argument of, well people prefer to watch things on TV….. I’m not buying it. Cable TV’s menu user experience is terrible. Boxee, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix, every one of them has a better UI, more selection and better customer experiences. Also, now any computer can be plugged into a TV with an HDMI cable and give excellent picture and an iPhone or Droid can be used as the remote, so saying people prefer TV is just wrong.

Just like everything else in media it’s tied to advertising and the attribution model. TV has a great racket going on for commercial spots. The fact that you buy on a spot basis or TRP or GRP measurement basis is just silly. The technology is there to buy and track it better, content providers, ISP’s and CDN’s are just choosing not to do it. Right now they have created a similar setup to homepages online.

The truth is Cable TV could be bought like exchange display advertising and the diversity and segmentation that’s going on in display will bring in a flood of new advertisers and faster moving transactions and I also believe competition will be driven up for the premium spot buys for national premier series like American Idol spots much like Yahoo’s homepage in Q4.

Right now companies like TidalTV and Simulmedia are working on solutions for this but don’t yet have access to do the transactions and sales (to my knowledge). I look forward to this opening up, but I’m not waiting for them.

Attribution can be done on Cable TV right now and we will begin modeling it out in coming months and I look forward to integrating this attribution model with online.