Topic: Video
Vine Is Dead: Twitter Pulls Plug on Short-Form Video Service – Variety (Jan 17, 2017)
This isn’t news per se – it was announced some time ago. But the shutdown is notable for coming in the midst of another big video push by Twitter, around live video. Vine was the hot thing back in 2012, but Twitter’s focus has become so much narrower in the past few months that it now doesn’t fit and must be discarded. That’s both sad and odd, because Vine had its legion of fans, it was particularly well suited to basketball highlights, and it made a few stars of its own. But neither those stars or Twitter made money directly from Vine, the experience was always very separate from the core Twitter app, and Twitter’s focus is now elsewhere. It remains to be seen, though, whether Twitter will actually be better served by offering the same live video available elsewhere rather than sticking with one of its most unique forms of content.
via Vine Is Dead: Twitter Pulls Plug on Short-Form Video Service | Variety
Facebook looks like it’s going to stop paying publishers to make live videos – Recode (Jan 17, 2017)
Facebook has made a huge push around live video, and still is on the consumer side, but it looks like it’s backing down from paying professional video content creators to produce more of it for the site. That can be read in one of two ways, and this article doesn’t make clear which it is: either Facebook has the product where it wants it and so can afford to take its foot off the gas, or the push hasn’t been working and it’s pivoting to other things. My suspicion is that it’s the latter – we’ll continue to see prompts for users to share live video, but Facebook is giving up on professional live video. I think that’s sensible if it’s the case – Twitter’s strategy of simply licensing existing linear live video feeds seems to make a lot more sense here, even if the revenue opportunities are limited. Professional live video on Facebook just doesn’t seem to be taking off.
via Facebook looks like it’s going to stop paying publishers to make live videos – Recode
Eyeballs Are No Longer Enough for Netflix – WSJ (Jan 17, 2017)
This piece is largely speculation – there’s no evidence presented that investors are impatient for Netflix to start churning out bigger profits or reducing its cash burn. Rather, those investors seem to understand that rapid international expansion at the expense of short-term profits is key to longer term success for Netflix, because it drives much faster overall growth and helps spread the cost of content over more users. Netflix’s domestic business is already very profitable on a contribution basis, while its international business is profitable on the same basis in some markets. Growing and getting past the early high investment in customer acquisition in other international markets should put Netflix in the black there too. Netflix definitely does need that growth – at the rate it’s increasing content spending, it has to grow revenues to stay ahead of costs – but on balance I’m fairly bullish about Netflix’s ability to make its strategy pay off.
via Eyeballs Are No Longer Enough for Netflix – WSJ
Amazon Launches Anime Strike Channel for $5 Per Month – Variety (Jan 12, 2017)
Here’s the second story today about a tech company expanding in the video business. Whereas Apple’s video investments have almost all been happening behind closed doors, with very little public indication of where its strategy is heading, Amazon has been taking a different approach: drip-feeding piecemeal announcements that are slowly adding up to an interesting subscription video business. On top of the Netflix-like service bundled into Prime, it now has relationships with a number of standalone content providers like HBO, Starz, Showtime, and Cinemax, and this anime channel is its first Amazon-branded channel. This whole approach has now been branded AmazonChannels, and it’s actually a pretty smart strategy for building up to a more fully-fledged pay TV-type service. Anime happens to be one of those categories that has a small but passionate audience, and AT&T’s Otter Media has also invested in this space for similar reasons.
via Amazon Launches Anime Strike Channel for $5 Per Month | Variety
Apple Sets Its Sights on Hollywood With Plans for Original Content – WSJ (Jan 12, 2017)
Apple has been investing in video content for a while now, with the unusual strategy of pushing most of it to subscribers through a music service, rather than a dedicated video service. On the one hand, it’s a way to set Apple Music apart, and to the extent that there’s been something of a music theme to some of this video content, that makes sense too. But I still think this investment is really laying the groundwork for an eventual subscription video service from Apple, using the Music investments as cover. At this point, Apple has to get into the video subscription business if it’s to protect its ecosystem around content, much as it belatedly got into streaming music. The exact shape of that service – whether Hulu-, Netflix-, or DirecTV Now-like, is still unclear. I suspect it’ll launch by the end of this year, however, and this kind of original, exclusive content is increasingly essential for differentiation regardless of which of these models it pursues.
via Apple Sets Its Sights on Hollywood With Plans for Original Content – WSJ
Netflix Wants the World to Binge-Watch – Bloomberg (Jan 12, 2017)
Though the headline is accurate, the whole point of this article is that Netflix isn’t taking a single global approach to expansion, but instead is focusing on creating localized content for various different markets, with the focus of this article its efforts in Brazil. One of the big challenges for Netflix as it expands is balancing the massive scale economies it gets by offering the same content in many markets against the need to provide culture- and market-specific content to differentiate in individual markets. The latter is of course potentially expensive, but it will be hoping that investing in one major market in a region helps attract customers in other markets in the same region, and Narcos is a great example of more regionally-oriented content. However it pans out, for now Netflix is streets ahead of any other video provider in providing locally relevant content in many markets around the world.
via Netflix Wants the World to Binge-Watch – Bloomberg
Instagram Starts Rolling Out Video Ads Inside Instagram Stories | Fortune (Jan 11, 2017)
As well as copying Snapchat’s Stories feature for the purposes of capturing more users and more of its existing users’ time, it appears Facebook/Instagram was creating a new channel for ads too. Instagram has already ramped up ads quite a bit to the point where roughly every 10 posts in my feed is an ad, and that’s probably about as far as it can go in the feed. But Stories offer another venue for advertising, and with users who have lots of Stories to view they’ll simply slot in between Stories from friends. Stories are easy to skip, so this shouldn’t disrupt the user experience too much, while delivering decent growth in ad revenue.
via Instagram Starts Rolling Out Video Ads Inside Instagram Stories | Fortune
Facebook is going to start showing ads in the middle of its videos and sharing the money with publishers – Recode (Jan 9, 2017)
Given Facebook’s massive push into video over the past year, it was inevitable that it would eventually begin monetizing – the question was always how. Since video autoplays on Facebook by default, pre-roll would never work, whereas post-roll ads simply cry out for abandonment. Some sort of mid-video ads therefore always seemed the likeliest option, and here they come – they’ll play at 20 seconds in or later. In an autoplay video, I suspect these will still be a user turnoff, but in the context of a longer live video they’ll be more palatable. As ever, the question is how many ads users will stand for – the beauty (for users, if not for monetization) of Facebook video is that there’s always more to choose from if one puts you off.
Facebook Developing Copyright ID System to Stem Music Rights Infringement | Billboard (Dec 31, 2016)
It’s been clear for some time that Facebook is setting itself up as a competitor to YouTube, and of course a big investment in video requires an investment in copyright policing too. Unlike YouTube, of course, much of the content shared on Facebook is private, which means it’s almost impossible to properly gauge the scale of infringing material. Instagram already does some of this for recorded music, but this article implies a lot of the infringing videos on Facebook are covers rather than the originals, which is quite a bit harder to detect.
via Facebook Developing Copyright ID System to Stem Music Rights Infringement | Billboard
YouTube Needs to Become a TV Star – Bloomberg Gadfly (Dec 29, 2016)
This analysis does a great job of breaking down a couple of specific challenges relating to ad revenue from YouTube – its relatively low revenue per user, and the need to break into traditional television to tap into a bigger video advertising bucket. YouTube has evolved – notably introducing a subscription model – since Wojcicki took over, but arguably not enough. And YouTube is critical for Google growing its overall ad revenue.
via YouTube Needs to Become a TV Star – Bloomberg Gadfly
Check out live 360 video on Twitter | Twitter Blogs (Dec 28, 2016)
360 video has been mostly the province of Facebook when it comes to social networks, but Twitter (and Periscope) is now getting in on the action too. It obviously lends itself well to VR consumption too, though the focus for now is consumption through traditional channels. At a time when the things I feel Twitter most needs to do remain undone, it nonetheless keeps releasing new features, especially ones focused on live and video. I’m not sure how much this will move the needle as far as monetization or user growth, however.
via Check out live 360 video on Twitter | Twitter Blogs
Twitter Embraces Its Role As A Media Company – BuzzFeed News (Dec 28, 2016)
Facebook has notoriously struggled with its identity, resisting until very recently the temptation to call itself a media company, and with good reason – media companies command far lower valuations than tech ones. But Twitter seems to be embracing its future as a media player, with a focus on news (or “live”) and video. This piece cites several new hires the company is planning to make as evidence of this shift in strategy and perhaps identity.
via Twitter Embraces Its Role As A Media Company – BuzzFeed News
YouTube Video Effects: Job Offer Promises Better Recording Experience | Variety (Dec 27, 2016)
This is an interesting potential new direction for YouTube, which would be moving into competition with Snapchat and other apps which allow users to apply filters. YouTube already does some of this, and this article is merely inferring this future direction from a job posting, but it seems a reasonable assumption and a logical next step for YouTube. The big question is whether users will want to use YouTube for the kind of casual sharing that Snapchat makes so attractive with its ephemeral nature.
via YouTube Video Effects: Job Offer Promises Better Recording Experience | Variety
Amazon Prime Video’s Global Launch Looks Soft, But It’s a Game-changer | Variety (Dec 27, 2016)
It’s clear that Amazon has felt the need to compete with Netflix’s global launch almost a year ago, but its own global offering is sparse and inconsistent. The lack of localization (or in some cases any local offering at all) is one of the most overlooked issues in consumer tech – so many services we take for granted in the US simply don’t exist or are pale imitations of themselves in other markets. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have all done well to make their offerings at least somewhat global, but Amazon is still very early in this game.
via Amazon Prime Video’s Global Launch Looks Soft, But It’s a Game-changer | Variety
Netflix never slowed down in 2016 – Engadget (Dec 23, 2016)
This is a decent summary of Netflix in 2016 – a rapid international expansion coupled with a paring back of purchased content and a ramping up of original content, which is a pretty good summary of Netflix’s strategy at the moment too. The challenge continues to be finding growth domestically, where growth has slowed quite a bit, and driving profits overseas, where growth is strong but loss-making.
via Netflix never slowed down in 2016
Disney-ABC to Produce Snapchat Original Series | Variety (Dec 21, 2016)
One of the biggest challenges facing Snap as it approaches an IPO is providing advertisers with the products and tools they need to make markedly bigger investments on the platform. Getting more professionally produced video content onboard is one way to go about that, and I’m betting this won’t be the last of these deals.
via Disney-ABC Snapchat Shows: ‘The Bachelor’ Watch Party Aftershow | Variety