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Blockbuster streams video to the TV

Pete Wylie — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:33:47 -0500

Blockbuster announced its into the internet delivery of movies to living room set-top boxes Tuesday. The offering, "Blockbuster on Demand," will require users to purchase a set-top box made by 2Wire Inc., but customers can get it for free if they purchase 25 downloadable movies in advance for $99.

Movies will be available for $1.99 after the initial movie credits are used up. No other plans are available for the service, which means that not only did Netflix beat Blockbuster to market by three months, but it offers customers lower, more flexible pricing and distribution to BluRay players, TiVos, and Xbox 360s that save consumers from the purchase of a set-top box. Plus, Blockbuster's plan only offers more than 2,000 titles, while Netflix offers more than 12,000 with its IP-delivery system.

But, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes was quick to point out the advantages of its service. He said Blockbuster on Demand will feature mostly new releases, but by "new" he really mean "30 to 60 days after the film's DVD release." Does that still count as new?

Also, Keyes asserts that Blockbuster's pay-as-you go pricing gives customers more flexibility, but Netflix offers the streaming service as a bundle with DVD home delivery, with packages starting at $8.99, so if you want to watch more than four movies a month, Blockbuster is not the best bargain. Keyes also touts the ability to deliver HD content - a most interesting concept given the taste for bandwidth caps AT&T and others have.

In addition to a staunch challenge from Netflix, Blockbuster has to compete with Amazon and Apple for the direct-to-TV movie streaming market.

Sounds like too little, too late.

For more:
- the Chicago Tribune has an article

Akamai buys acerno, gets targeted ads

Pete Wylie — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:45:02 -0400

Akamai, the Cambridge-Mass.-based CDN, announced a foray into targeted advertising Tuesday with the acquisition of acerno. The transaction, slated to be completed by the end of the quarter, will integrate acerno's shopping and purchase data capture technology into Akamai's Advetising Decisions Solution, which was also announced Tuesday.

Anonymous data generated by acerno's technology will allow advertisers to select appropriate slices of viewership to market their products. According to Akamai, the partnership allows advertisers to streamline ad offerings and generate the most ROI possible. Attempting to allay privacy concerns from the start, Akamai assured customers that the data used in the targeted ads is completely anonymous end-user purchasing and browsing information.

Many top retailers give anonymous data to acerno so the company can generate its predictive reports about online consumer behavior. These reports indicate all steps in online purchasing and analyzes each to determine how consumers find a product, put it in to their online shopping cart, and eventually purchase the item.

Better metrics allow advertisers to star feeling better about placing this ad around online video content. So expect acerno and Akamai's collaboration to be a popular, and profitable one.

For more:
- see the Akamai press release here

YouTube adds Click-to-Buy

Pete Wylie — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:38:37 -0400

Google announced in a blog post entitled "I clicked to buy, and I liked it" that it has added a click-to-buy feature to YouTube's community features. When a user hears a song they like in a video or sees a video game demo that looks interesting, Google will provide links to Amazon.com or iTunes to enable a purchase.

Google is presently partnered with EMI Music, Amazon, and Electronic Arts in the project and said in the blog post that it wants to expand the program if initial feedback is positive.

"Our vision is to help partners across all industries -- from music, to film, to print, to TV -- offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos," the blog post said.

The large, targeted audience is certainly there on YouTube, and advertisers could benefit from the additional revenue generated by viewers of their videos making impulse purchases. Decreasing the time from interest generation to closing a sale is a big part of growing online economies.

YouTube also needs to diversify its revenue streams to justify Google's large investment.

For more:
- see the Google blog post here

SMW: Amazon's CDN - "The only thing you need is a credit card"

Doug Mohney — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:28:52 -0400

San Jose, CA - Speaking before a packed room at Streaming Media West, Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels said companies could purchase Amazon's new content distribution service in a matter of minutes with a credit card and also rapidly scale it either "up or down."

Vogels spent the first half of his keynote positioning Amazon beyond its role as one of the world's largest online retailers. "It's hard to think of Amazon as a technology customer... retail is possible due to the technologies the company has developed."

Initially, development groups within the company set up and ran their own servers. As Amazon grew and started new projects, its in-house developers continued to run into "undifferentiated heavy lifting," such as dealing with hardware acquisition, maintenance, and keeping sites and services up. A decision was made to develop and use a shared platform "so developers could focus on development."

Today, Amazon offers the same services to outside developers and companies. Over 400,000 developers have registered to use Amazon's various web services, and outside applications services now consume more bandwidth than Amazon's own brands. Startup companies no longer have to buy their own servers, but can purchase services on an as-needed basis. "Maybe the VC would give you money for 5,000 servers, but you wouldn't have much equity left," Vogels stated. "You push CapEx to Opex... it's a tremendous shift."

Online video has gone though a "a pretty big revolution," with a big cost reduction on production tools, a low-cost distribution mechanism through the Internet, access to "billions" of customers, a better understanding of effective business models and a big increase in content products. "Consumers are aware of different products," said Vogels. "The time they consider broadcast as the only choice is gone."

Providing the CDN as a service provides numerous advantages, Vogels asserted. Service can be turned on in a "matter of minutes" and scaled up or down; scaling down due to drops in demand (during the night, for instance) is just as important as being able to scale up. It's cost effective, can be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis, uses a reliable and proven (Amazon) infrastructure and is also secure. "The only thing you need is a credit card," he emphasized.

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Amazon to launch CDN

Pete Wylie — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:13:50 -0400

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced a serious entry by the online retail giant into the content delivery network space early Thursday morning. The service, currently in private beta testing, does not yet have a formal name. Vogels said it will use localized edge points on three continents to give app developers and businesses the lowest possible latency for content delivery to users and customers. He expects the service to be offered publicly before the end of 2008.

Vogels said customers can make one call to an API, then "store the data in an Amazon S3 bucket" that can be used to register the content with the CDN. The stored data will be tucked away under a new domain name that customers can use in links to provide the content to end-users.

Another intriguing part of the Amazon CDN model is no minimum requirements or registration fees; Vogels insists the service will be pay-as-you-use, rather than pay-before-you-play. Keep an eye out for findings from Amazon's private beta to see if Amazon Web Service's CDN model can compete with existing (and successful) ones offered by Akamai, Level 3 and Limelight.

There are more than 50 companies with CDN offerings currently, according to Streaming Media. It may be tough to wrest market share from entrenched offerings that have had significant lead time and development investment without a clearly superior offering. But if anyone has the established infrastructure and cash flow to fund a major expansion into this fast growing space, it certainly is Amazon.

For more:
- read Vogel's bold pronouncement of Amazon's beta CDN. Blog post.

IMDB gets online video

Pete Wylie — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:28:17 -0400

IMDB, the popular destination for movie trivia and Hollywood minutia owned by Amazon, announced the addition of an online video component Tuesday. The site will host 6,000 free television shows and movies, embedding some CBS and Hulu content on the site and also hosting some of its own content.

Links to the video will be part of the extensive entries the site maintains on everything from TV series to foreign films, to actors and cinematographers.

Although the addition of online video to the site is an exciting development, Techcrunch.com blogger Jason Kincaid wishes the site were more streamlined and searchable. Also, the video interface lacked necessary features, such as a browseable database of videos.

Currently, only the top videos are browseable and all other content must be found through search. Kincaid also notes that the search results are sometimes less than perfect, and TV series especially are often grouped incorrectly and labeled erroneously.

For more:
- see Kincaid's blog where he discusses the IMDB's new feature here.

Net Neutrality, Big Glass Rooms and DVRing

Doug Mohney — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:47:17 -0400

A lot of companies are betting on 1) a significant number of consumers with a lot of bandwidth and 2) the ability to either have or negotiate some sort of quality of service for said service. Crazy? Or not?

Netflix believes it will have around 20 million worldwide streaming customers down the road. It is cutting deals left and right with Sony and Microsoft and Roku to put affordable devices in the home to tap into online content. If the latest skirmish between the FCC and Comcast doesn't get thrown out by the courts, broadband providers will either have to let all traffic go through unhindered or result in inflicting "consumption based billing"--bandwidth caps.

Bandwidth caps wouldn't seem to go too well with a video on demand service, be it from Amazon.com or Netflix or anyone else. Reading between the lines, Time Warner has proposed charging $1 per GB for traffic exceeding the cap, so that would price a typical DVD-quality movie download at around $4, in addition to whatever monthly subscription fee is charged by Netflix (or per movie fee by Amazon/iTunes).

Now, $4 for a DVD download sounds suspiciously like the $5 you pay for a typical movie rental, less the gas and time it takes to go get it. Make it an HD download and life gets ugly at $20-40 per movie, so maybe Time Warner wants to breath life back into snail mail and Blockbuster?

Mark Cuban says the way to cable company happiness is for everyone to adopt the ‘60s era data center model where video content is centrally stored and archived by the service provider and we shell out another $5 per month on top of the other monies we send to them. I'm seeing Comcast work a variant of this scheme locally with mixed results.

On the other hand, centralized storage and management flies in the face of the decentralized nature of more power at the edge going on since the PC revolution of the ‘80s. By and large, people like to have things when they want them and not be dependent upon the network/servers to provide them upon demand. And there's always the "We don't trust the big company" streak that runs in a lot of folks.

- Doug

SPOTLIGHT: Battle for the TV

Doug Mohney — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:34:07 -0400

There's a war over who will supply online video to the home TV starting to build, with three major players and lots of others wanting to buy in says GigaOm.

Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are named as the front-runners for their brand name recognition, deep pockets, and infrastructure. Amazon has a large user base, a new VOD service and an "online locker" model to store purchased movies, but had trouble on its first VOD go round and doesn't currently offer HD. Nextflix is moving out of its DVD mailing model to online streaming, but it only has 10,000ish titles and doesn't have HD.

Other players include Microsoft and Sony's game consoles doubling as home streaming boxes, TVs with Internet functionality built-in, and the cable and telecom companies who control the pipes to the end-user.

For more:
- GigaOm draws the battle lines for TV's future

Related articles:
Netflix: 20 Million Future Streaming Customers, DVD Peaking
Amazon Joins the Instant-on VOD Club

Amazon Joins the Instant-on VOD Club

Doug Mohney — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:18:57 -0400

Amazon.com has announced a new online store for TV shows and movies, joining Netflix in the battle of instant-on video gratification.

The new store will have 40,000 movies and TV programs available for immediate streaming; no waiting for downloads. It also appears Amazon has worked out some sort of bundle or tie-in deal with Sony, allowing Sony Brava HDTV owners to access the site through a $300 wireless broadband device; future TVs are expected to have the capability embedded and Amazon says it will work with other hardware manufactures for both streaming and bundling in the future.

One feature is an online "locker" allowing users to buy a TV show or movie without actually downloading a file to a PC hard drive, allowing customers to watch shows from any PC, regardless of location.

Current content seems to be just about anything except for HBO, Disney, and ABC; since Disney is pretty tight with Apple.

This is Amazon's second shot at the video-on-demand market; Amazon's Unibox wasn't successful because it only worked with Windows PCs and TiVos and also required a download of special software. The company is not expected to make a lot of money on its new service due to infrastructure and royalty costs, but Amazon Video on Demand provides a "footprint" into consumers' living rooms that leads to more Amazon.com traffic.

For more:
- New York Times Amazon video on demand scoop
- PC World gets a look at the Amazon VOD beta

Related articles:
Netflix Streams Past the Mailbox & PC
A Little Stream From Amazon

A Little Stream From Amazon

Doug Mohney — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:53:39 -0400

Jeff Bezos let slip that Amazon.com will launch a streaming video service in the next few weeks, but gave no details.

Speaking at a Walt Mossberg-hosted conference, Bezos spent more time talking about Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader than about its new offerings. Spokespeople at Amazon.com aren't saying anything.

Amazon has been beefing up its digital media offerings, building a digital download store for music, movies, TV shows, and videos. The company also has cut a deal with TiVo to allow users to rent videos from Amazon's Unbox service.

How streaming will fit in with the Unbox download service is an interesting question, since Unbox already allows for movie rentals and purchases. Bezos says it will be an a la carte, instant-on, no waiting for viewing service, but will this be enough to attract enough customers away from a downloadable format that takes longer, but is more convenient for viewing?

Last week, Netflix unveiled its set-top box for live streaming to the home TV set, so Amazon won't have a free ride in trying to secure market share.

For more:
- ZD blogs Amazon preps pay-per-view movie service

Related articles:
Netflix Streams Past the Mailbox & PC
iTunes Wins Equality with DVD Releases