Million Dollar Web TV News

If you are active in the online video scene, i.e. produce your own videos alone or with the help of sites like iMoondo this should be an easy leap.  

  

Especially, if you are also a seller on eBay the question becomes: Could adding videos to your profile and products bring you more credibility and sales? To find out, ask yourself:

1. How effective are your current classifieds?
2. Is it easy for you to produce your own videos?
3. Would you benefit from showing a video in your classifieds?
4. Would your profile be more persuasive with a video presentation?
5. How easy would it be to add video to each of your items on eBay?
6. Do you expect social networking sites to follow suit?
7. How soon will online classified ad sites include videos?
8. Should you jump in, prepare for, or dismiss this development as a gimmick?

I see video included in classifieds as a very positive development. While you certainly would not benefit from seeing a video about a baseball ticket you are purchasing (unless it links to a previous game in which your team pounded the living daylight out of their opponents), you would most definitely benefit from seeing a video about a piece of furniture, a vehicle, or some other more tangible product.

Much like virtual tours have allowed home buyers to be much more effective when searching for a property on real estate Web sites, the same could potentially be true for consumers of miscellaneous goods and services.Moreover, the challenges eBay is facing with less traffic and strikes by its sellers, this could be a great way for them to drive additional revenue. They could charge fees for hosting your videos or highlighting your items, service, and profile with them, as they do now with more “plain vanilla” listings. This would give you as a merchant and your visitors a more pleasant and hopefully informed shopping experience.

Enabling a better, more personalized look at you, as the merchant, is just as significant as researching the products the you are selling. After all, the feedback and ratings for sellers are so important for this online community.

Craig’s List is in a different proposition because of its lack of interest in fully monetizing the site; however it will be interesting to see if – more like when and how – they decide to leverage video as well. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are already hosting so much user generated video, they could easily build the web apps to integrate them with classifieds. Even better, they can have third party developers on their platforms create them.

The eBay and Craig’s Lists of the world should be concerned about the intentions of the social networking sites to branch into e-commerce. It would be a natural progression for them with a lot of profit potential for their users and themselves. 

Sphere: Related Content

The most-damaging, viewership-lowering, ROI-suppressing issue facing tv and video content owners today is that promotion, particularly for scripted series and episodes, does not work. At best, all it does is remind the relatively few people who watch a show to tune in again; by definition, it cannot motivate non-viewers to sample. How can you turn this around?

Ask yourself:

• Are We Set Up to Motivate People?
• Do We Have an Outdated Strategy That Keeps Our Content Hostage?
• Can We Achieve Effective Promotion Via Massive Sampling?
• Why Is a Hit the Rarity?
• Is Viral Sampling a Solution for Me?

and jot down your answers after reading this article, so you can analyze them.

Are We Set Up to Motivate People?

This leads me to ask: in an era containing hundreds of viewer options, what good is investing millions upon millions in content and delivery systems, if you can’t — or worse, are not set up to — motivate people to sample the content? In turn, why should advertisers invest in your content, unable to deliver effective advertising? After all, more people sampling your means more can become loyal.

Do We Have an Outdated Strategy That Keeps Our Content Hostage?

The role of promotion is to build value into your programming. The outdated strategy of keeping your content hostage until its debut falls well short of that goal. Look at ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC as examples. Each has a billion-dollar promotional budget in paid media plus the value of promotional spots on the network if sold to advertisers. Yet, for Disney, Viacom, News Corp., and GE, it is irrefutable that their promotional messages are totally ineffective. For cable and digital networks, the budgets might be smaller, but the results the same. As for VOD and Pay-VOD, getting people to watch or even fork over money for a huge special or “The Sopranos” is not that hard; the real challenge is: How do you get them to tune into or pay for a new series they have not seen?

Can We Achieve Effective Promotion Via Massive Sampling?

Without effective promotion from massive sampling, all your expensive content can do is maintain viewer loyalty after that initial trial. Everything else is a waste of time, money and effort. In fact, I’d argue that many canceled series do not fail; rather, their promotion did not take advantage of free viral sampling on the net — if they did, many more programs would have been successful.

Why Is a Hit the Rarity?

When you do not “know” the characters because you have not seen the show, the promotion might as well be in Greek for all the good it does to bring new viewers to you. With a comedy piece, you cannot find the humor. With a drama, you cannot appreciate the intrigue. So all the money spent on promotion only remind existing viewers, who “know” the characters, to watch a show again. This ensures lower viewership and quick cancellation. In this scheme a hit is the rarity, even for great content.

Is Viral Sampling a Solution for Me?

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. The pool of potential samplers must be dramatically expanded from just those few people who have seen the show (prior to its debut, no one is in the pool) to include those who have not. How? Through the adoption of a new promotional model reflecting today’s competitive environment. Holding on to the thinking used in the three-network 70s, both pre-premiere and episodic, is totally counterproductive and the single greatest suppressor of revenue and stock prices.

500% Gain in Online Viewership Is Very Feasible

Ironically, since loyalty to most tv programs is weak and the act of sampling is so easy (the viewer just has to click the mouse or hit the remote), viewership gains of 50-to-100% or more in broadcast and cable and 500% or more in digital are very feasible. This only requires one simple thing: a commitment to make adjustments in the outdated content development-promotion-sales model. Because once the promotional problem is addressed, you’d be amazed how many others will evaporate.

Sphere: Related Content

Online video is growing in popularity, but the vast majority isn’t getting anywhere near your TV screen.A survey conducted during December 2007 by Macrovision (commissioned by Harris Interactive) says that only a small number of adults who download video from the Internet play it on a TV or DVD player.

Specifically, the survey of 2,254 adults in the U.S. found:

1. 43 percent download some form of digital media
2. Over a quarter said that they download TV shows regularly
3. 15 percent download full-length movies
4. More than half said that they only watch the downloads on their PC
5 ONLY five percent said that they watch video on a TV or other video-playing device

No surprise here – most content providers use some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in such a way that it makes watching video anywhere other than the PC inconvenient, if not downright impossible. For example, video from sites like Hulu can only be watched through a browser, so the only way to watch it on a TV would be to use a computer connected to it (something that the majority of users don’t have).

While downloads from NBC Direct may not be limited to the web, they can still only be played on a single authorized computer at a time.Downloading from places like the iTunes Store or Xbox Live Video to the Apple TV or an Xbox 360 make this possible without having to use an HTPC. Still, even though these solutions make it easier to watch downloaded content on the big and small screens near you, they clearly have yet to hit it big with the general public.

Only five percent of those surveyed said that they watch video on a TV or other video-playing device regularly.In fact, while conventional wisdom says that users would love to watch downloaded video content on the television set, Macrovision found that only 10 percent of those surveyed said that they have any desire to do so. The company was surprised to learn this: “While people very quickly figured out the music scenario—either legally or illegally—they haven’t figured that out for video,” observes Macrovision chief evangelist Richard Bullwinkle.

As online video continues to expand, content providers will have to face the consequences of their own restrictions on how viewers use content. Making it easier to transfer files to portable devices and set-top boxes will help drive viewership.One way to do that is by mimicking the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) experiments by Canadian, Norwegian, and other European broadcasters, who offer completely restriction-free downloads. That might be a bit too much for most U.S. networks to swallow now. On the other hand, if they don’t drop DRM and embrace alternatives soon, they will continue to lose viewers to free-for-all video sharing sites like YouTube/Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN Video as well as other, less-legitimate ways of acquiring video content.

Sphere: Related Content

Well, what do you know? I learned this from Lori Moss of Cellfab, who decided that I was displaying too much ignorance during one of our discussions:

“Although no exact number can be given, the order of magnitude of the number of cells in a human body can be approximated to about one hundred trillion cells. Then there are about 210 known distinct human cell types. On top of that, the human body contains 20 times more microbes, which are single-celled organisms, than it does cells.”

I spare you the rest. Suffice to say it’s a pleasure to have Cellfab as a member advertiser!

Sphere: Related Content