Jay Amato explains what makes a good user experience.
Kronengold: People talk a lot about the user experience in rich media and now again with video. What makes a good user experience?
Amato: In our world, a good user experience isn't just great content. Its great content and a great user interface for working with that content and the experience around it. So coming from an advertising background, I look at when we started putting up flash banners. It's like "ok, how good can this get? What else can we do with it?" So we're experimenting and playing with lots of things to continue to improve the experience.
The nice thing about being on the web is that we can get very good reporting and monitor very closely how people look at it -- anonymously of course -- what they click on, when they click, when they don't, when they drop out of the video, so we can continue to improve and cultivate the experience to be better. And that's what the networks like about us. They want to get great content up on the web, but they aren't really focused on all of this.
Kronengold: And that is PersonalScreen's niche?
Amato: We are going to be a provider of a great user experience. And that is really the place where we add value because we are looking at it much more holistically than other producers. The competitive advantage we have is the ability to focus on the overall experience and not just the content. There's nothing that stops anyone else from doing that, but we'll be out there early with a reputation for quality content and a quality experience. Packaging, just like everything else, is going to be important. We want to know how can we better package good content and make it more valuable to advertisers and viewers.
Kronengold: What about ad models? There's Roo and Broadband Enterprises and InStream, who have content in their own player with a lot of pre-roll. Do you look at them as potential distribution partners or potential competitors? Or is TV your competition?
Amato: They aren't really distributing these kinds of shows, yet, for the web. They are still more focused on traditional content with pre-roll like we've been seeing. But they will probably branch out into original content and we'll need to talk to all of them to figure out the best way to get out into the market.
If you go with one of the big three TV networks, in most cases they want to own the content. So they might buy the show outright and then share in the revenue from advertising. There's no way that the ABCs or NBCs of the world are going to just distribute the content. That's not their business. They want to own these things, just like a TV syndication deal.
I know things sound very fluid at the moment, but one of the beauties of starting PersonalScreen is that there is a lot of opportunity if you are willing to be flexible. We're financing our own productions in order to have that flexibility.
Kronengold: How would you like your business model to develop?
Amato: I'd much prefer for the model to go towards the interactive product placement rather than pre-roll. But the fact is, nobody you are going to talk to will do this without some level of pre-roll. That's all anyone understands right now. We went from people knowing how to sell a :30 pod on TV to selling a :15 pre-roll. I'm hoping that we can change that. Pre-roll is going to become as ineffective as banners or other things have started to become because people will get tired of them. But we'll see what happens over the next few months. As we produce some more episodes of "In Men We Trust", we'll have much more revenue coming out of the episodes themselves even before the pre-roll is factored in.
People stopped watching TV because they didn't like the programming and they didn't like the advertising. So if you bring back the same shows and same ad model to the web, you are going to alienate those people again.
Corey Kronengold has been an evangelist for the convergence, online video and rich media space since 1998, bringing insight and understanding of new and complex technologies to clients, analysts, media and the general public. A graduate of Boston University's College of Communication, Kronengold has worked with leading digital brands including Eyeblaster, Billboard, TDK, Launch.com, and NHL.com.