In a recent ars technical post “How Viacom can sink the pirates”, Anders Bylund argues that content producers are tackling the problem of content distribution, ownership and control from the wrong angle. While at the Seoul Digital Forum 2008, Sumner Redstone—who controls the twin media giants Viacom and CBS—came down hard on YouTube, calling the site out for piracy and demanding that ISPs and web sites take greater action to police content. Bylund challenges Redstone’s call to action asking:
Is it really fair to ask the service providers to beat piracy on behalf of the content producers?
According to Bylund, the best way to “subjugate these rebels” is “with the tools of free enterprise.” Content owners are increasingly aware that they need to create their own new, controlled distribution channels online. To overcome piracy content producers need a superior business model that takes into consideration how consumers choose where to view online videos; they consider price, quality and convenience. While content owners can’t beat the YouTube “price” for content, their video sites should play up the quality of the videos they showcase—a distinct advantage over YouTube. As for convenience, the new distribution channels should aim to provide a complete consumer experience; if a site offers premium content with state-of-the-art browsing and search capabilities, odds are users will remain engaged.
That is once you get them to your site. If your clip shows up first as a YouTube video in a Google search result, you still risk loosing brand control and consumer attention. The user may finish viewing your clip then move on to more of your content—or perhaps skateboarding dog videos—within YouTube. In order to fully compete, content owners must factor in the “convenience” of search. Video SEO is the key to driving site traffic because it enhances the discoverability of video content across the major search engines, where many consumers navigate the Web. And when quality content is more discoverable, content owners can set the terms of content consumption through ad models and brand management on their own sites. This way, everybody wins—content owners, viewers, and advertisers alike. And YouTube? Well, it will always be my pick for skateboarding dog videos.
Three reports came out last week from Radar Networks, StumbleUpon, and ClipBlast offering what Search Insider blogger David Berkowitz calls, “more clues on how search and discovery are converging and diverging.”
“Web video is asking to be discovered” according to the ClipBlast! survey, which reports that for online video, traditional search techniques fall behind “discovery” methods popular on the social Web.
In the survey ClipBlast! asked 1,000 online consumers how they get to video on the Internet. 530 expressed a preference while 470 did not. Among the 530 respondents who had a definite opinion, “discovery” is the primary mode by which they find video online (28 percent), followed closely by recommendations from friends (27 percent). About 22 percent rely on search engines and roughly 10 percent get video from people they know only online – through social networks and the like. Relatively smaller percentages receive video from unsolicited email and RSS feeds, to which they have subscribed (5 percent, respectively).
StumbleUpon is a site that lets users discover, vote on, and share new sites through the use of a toolbar. The number of “stumbled upon” links has climbed steadily in the last two years. In the first quarter of 2008, the number of stumbles reached 974 million, 160% more than Q1 2007’s 375 million. StumbleUpon recently reached its five billionth stumble.
Eric Shonfeld of TechCrunch explains that while many people think of StumbleUpon as a “socially powered discovery engine,” rather than a new kind of search engine, he sees the site as evidence that personal discovery and search are colliding. And StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp agrees:
Personalized search is just getting started. I think personalized crawling will start too. Crawlers now are trying to create the biggest map of the web, but implicit filtering and intelligent agents—that is where search and discovery will meet.
Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, says that as we move from Web 2.0 (2000-2010) to Web 3.0 and beyond and the volume of data keeps climbing, the productivity of search will decline.
But with respect to video, these surveys and predictions may be off the mark because by and large video search isn’t very good yet. Given the paucity of robust, reliable video search online, it is hard to conclusively argue that because users aren’t searching for video in great volumes yet, they don’t want to discover videos via search.
Search and discovery will inevitably evolve as the volume of content increases online. With online video, there will necessarily be a strong connection between search and discovery; publishers will use automated discovery in an attempt to hold consumer attention, while users will want the control and specificity of search for navigating between and within online videos. The true evolution will be a user experience that allows the seamless transition between search and discovery—but until video search consistently provides the same level and quality of results as text-based search, users will continue to “prefer” discovering video because frankly, they don’t really have a choice.