New Media Addict
By Dave Thomas
About David
Dave Thomas is the online editor-in-chief of E-Gear. When he's not tracking online trends he likes to make movies, eat pasta or just sit around watching Doctor Who.Silver's Screen
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SXSW 2009 Part Five - The Celestial DVR Cometh
IMDb founder Col Needham spoke in one of the most illuminating panels of the conference. IMDb's birth and growth were very much like Wikipedia's. User submitted information was (and still is) key. But for all the ground-up support, IMDb has had a much larger overseer for more than 12 years now. Amazon owns IMDb, but apparently has no problem with a rather shocking announcement Needham made during the interview.He said he wants to put a "play" button on every single movie and television show on the site.
Let me say that again.
Col Needham, the founder of IMDB, wants to put a play button on every single movie and television show listed on the IMDB. Since the IMDB database includes virtually every movie and television show ever made, he basically wants to make the entirety of filmed entertainment available for streaming online.
For free.
Amazon has no problem with this. Or, if they do, Needham made no mention of it, and had a smile on his face the entire time. There was no hesitation. No, "If Amazon says it's okay." Or even, "If NBC or Fox or Disney says it's okay." This is a purpose he has every intention of pursuing.
He freely admits that the business plan for such a pursuit is not in place, but remains convinced that a working one exists.
And he's already begun. There's a play button on 14,000 television episodes and 2,000 movies already. That's out of 1.3 million titles and counting, but it's a start.
What he's talking about is the video equivalent of something called the Celestial Jukebox, the Web geek pipe dream of an online repository of all music available anytime, anywhere on any device. Let's call Needham's version the Celestial DVR.
In other news, IMDb is going to start listing Web series as well. Like so.
Many of IMDb's full length videos are being powered via Hulu, whose CTO Eric Feng also held forth on the future of online video at his panel. They, too, are beginning to embrace content created specifically for the Web (you can find wine uber-enthusiast Gary Vaynerchuck on there now).
Feng outlined Hulu's design principle, which is "If you make media hard, users will find other things to do." Never a more user-experience wise phrase has been uttered. And it shows. The Hulu UX (geek lingo for "User eXperience") is fantastic. Compare it to ABC's online video UX sometime if you doubt me. This is how Hulu ends up with user comments like:
"My first Hulu experience made my head explode in a brain-spray of awesome." - Marisa Wegrzyn
Feng took us through the history of online video to show us how two major changes in technology helped allow the growth we see today. First, the adoption of Flash and Sorenson as standard Web video platforms (a marriage that came as an unexpected byproduct of attempts to improve videoconferencing) meant you no longer had to play 20 questions (What speed? What player?) every time you wanted to watch a video.
Second, the rapid improvements and adoption of broadband technology meant more information could be streamed more quickly. Of course, we still have a long way to go. The average broadband speed in the U.S. is 2.3 Mb/s. The median in Japan is 63 Mb/s. Ouch.
But the real leap forward is ads.
Revenue from online video ads are projected to grow 45% in 2009 to $850 million. And that's with the economy in the crapper. More importantly, Hulu commands higher CPM's for their online airings than the big networks do for the same airings on television.
Let me say that again (Feng did).
Hulu gets better CPMs online than the networks do on air.
That means that NBC charges one rate to advertisers for every thousand people that see their ad during a show on NBC. Hulu charges a higher rate to that same advertiser for every thousand people who see the ad during that same show on Hulu.
This is a game changer because the biggest barrier to the Celestial DVR was never going to be technology. That's been Moore's Law-ing its way to the finish line since the 90's. The biggest barrier was always going to be licensing. And there would be no motivation for corporations to license their content if they could command better revenue on their own channels. But if Hulu is proof of concept that online can do not as well as broadcast, but BETTER than broadcast, that's the ball game.
The other supporting evidence for the imminence of the Celestial DVR came from the Guy Kawasaki/Chris Anderson panel in which the former, ex-Mac evangelist, interviewed the latter, Wired editor-in-chief, about the concepts outlined in Anderson's upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
There's a good summary here, but the quick pitch as that as the marginal cost of digital products is approaches zero, so does their price.
The revenue models that then replace the pay-for-this-object routine are good old fashioned advertising (Hulu) or "freemium" models that charge 5% of customers to pay for the other 95% who use the free aspects of a service (think IMDb Pro vs. IMDb).
So if online video continues to follow this path, Col Needham's dream (and many of ours, too) could become a reality.
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