The Fifth Network's director of business development reveals how content producers and their distribution partners can provide context to maximize a video's reach, relevance and revenue.
TV Networks' syndication of video programs and clips online is no longer spurred by a "How do we enhance our TV offering?" mindset. Content management and distribution networks are now in play (and growing daily) where the best programs can be pushed to a massive, relevant audience, and the content owners get paid handsomely for it. Though this content is trickling in from different entry points (iTunes, Revver, YouTube, Innertube, etc), the programs and clips are coming to the web because the business of online video is being realized.
The key to increasing and solidifying this revenue stream, of course, is the massive, relevant audience; and the key to that audience? Context.
Long-tail economics point to the "Economy of Scarcity," which we've seen in the physical world, evolve into an "Economy of Abundance" within our digital world. The Economy of Scarcity was governed by limited shelf space, limited touch-points with consumers and significant costs of inventory, leading to limited choice in the content the audience could watch.
The Economy of Abundance that the digital world is giving birth to enables unlimited choice and ideal supply/demand matching for pushing video to users whenever they might find it relevant.
With that in mind, unlimited choice can be a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, publishers can offer, and users can find, whatever content they want. On the other hand, users who don't know what they're looking for, or who aren't particularly looking for anything, aren't being optimally approached for up-sale on sites that offer little more than a glut of video.
Providing context through tools such as deep-linking, as postulated in a recent media equity research report by Bear Stearns, ensures we're always feeding and encouraging the audiences' compulsion to watch more video, and thereby making more inventory/revenue opportunity. (In other words, context is a major ingredient in getting users to watch eight videos instead of seven.)
Online video is a bona fide business that advertisers in mass are still in the process of evaluating. Distribution channels exist that make content storage, tagging, encoding and packaging simple; the question to answer is "How do the content producers and their distribution partners provide context to content and maximize reach, relevance and revenue for everyone while providing advertisers with undeniable value?"
Set it free!
Internet TV is the perfect platform for unrestrained, but carefully watched, content syndication. So long as content is tracked, monetized and quality controlled, trends can be identified that point to how the content is fitting into the lives of its audiences based on where it's being featured or requested from. A ubiquitous video strategy with data on the context-to-content relationship gives every publisher, portal, blog, vlog and social network the ability to provide their audiences with contextually relevant video and targeted advertising (as sold by a number of parties).
With the abundance of content, context will take shape not only at the hands of publishers, but at the hands of users. This context will be based on their own online viewing habits and the habits of their online social cohorts, to whom the video is also relevant.
The traditional model of syndication allowed for a lot more control over the distribution of content, but that was done as a means of controlling and tracking the money associated with it. In the online universe, this type of control can restrict the size of the audience.
Today's syndication opportunities mean extended reach in safe environments, with little-to-no investment and the prospect of being extremely lucrative. What's more, before making video available to the online masses (and soon, the mobile masses), as added protection for video content, a number of distribution-restricting technologies exist in order to satisfy most licensing models and Digital Rights Management guidelines.
The valuation of video will be based on how many people view the video and its contextual relevance to the groups viewing it. In the online world, making sure that content is as available and easily found as possible, and investigating the context-to-content relationship of the user-circles choosing to view the video are a key to lasting reward for content owners.
Brian Rosenberg is director of business development at The Fifth Network. Read full bio.