Connected TV

US company Brightcove is a white-label platform media companies use to publish, distribute and monetize online video using the Flash video format, and its brand is becoming increasingly familiar in Europe: in the UK alone, it can now count BSkyB, Channel 4, ITV, Five and STV amongst its broadcaster clients.

Brightcove’s insights into the online video distribution sector deserve to be taken seriously, which is why I met up at IBC with their senior vice president of marketing and strategy, Adam Berrey.

He provided a barrage of statistics to place our conversation in context. First, according to a Pew Internet study released last summer, 75% of US Internet users watch video online - a well-publicised statistic. Less well-known, perhaps, is that the same study showed that 62% of them say they prefer to watch “professional” video (so it’s not all about user-generated content like You Tube, despite the hype).

Other research from eMarketer suggests that more than 50% of US homes will watch online video in the US this year, while Lehman Bros has reported that the US online video advertising market is currently worth $1.1 billion, and will rise to $2.4 billion by 2010.

Berrey had some interesting observations to contribute to the mix, arising from Brightcove’s own position across this sector. For instance, he claims, “most content watched on PCs is catch-up TV,” typically advertising-supported, and usually delivered as broadcast-quality video. Moreover, “broadcasters get more revenue per viewer in catch-up TV than in broadcast, because they’re able to charge higher CPMs.”

Why is that? “Because recall is higher,” says Berrey. One reason for that is that the prevalent model (at least in the US), is to sell sponsorship around a branded player, with the sponsor also inserting its own ads into the breaks. Crucially, these ads are ‘compulsory’, so “recall is very good.”

Berrey also confirms that consumers define the “quality” of a video experience in a different way when they are online to when they are watching TV on their living-room set. “In broadcast mode, it’s about resolution,” he says. “But quality today in terms of streaming video is about continuity - they’re not so worried about [resolution].”

Brightcove was demonstrating some clever dynamic bit-rate management techniques for streamed video at IBC which illustrate the point. As the consumer increases the size of the ‘window’, the bit-rate ramps up to offer a better picture. Conversely, as the window is shrunk or the bandwidth is suddenly constrained, the bit-rate dynamically decreases and picture quality degrades, the essential attribute of the system being to keep the video running at all costs without stuttering or freezing. (Berrey claims, incidentally, that Brightcove is the only company using such techniques for streamed Flash video).

So - what lessons can broadcasters learn from Brightcove’s experience? Berrey believes that a key distinction lies between the different attributes of long-form and short-form video. Popular long-form content tends to be episodic - as in the case of series such as Heroes or Lost - and tends to be watched episode after episode. This means that it provides its own context, and is viewed in an essentially linear fashion: not much interactivity is required.

“Short-form video is totally, totally different,” he assets. “Each video is like a scene in a story, but the story’s in the viewer’s head. So the best way to programme short-form video is to give [viewers] lots of options on every ‘page’. Short-form video clips get meaning from context, which the users create: the mistake is to try and make it linear.” Such context might consist of ratings, comments, number of views, and so on.

The long and short of this is that broadcasters should not just “put video on their website - they need to put together a web strategy first,” says Berrey.