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Brushing the dust off long tail Video on Demand (VoD) titles
Addressing the problem of accessibility in ever growing VoD libraries.
By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your
feedback
is important to us!)
Created: August 20, 2007
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CED
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October 2007 |
Video on Demand has seen ever increasing numbers since its first deployments
in 1999 in route to the 250 million monthly views received by Comcast in
July 2007. However as the popularity of this service continues to increase,
VoD is becoming a victim of its own success in terms of rising denied
requests for video, increasing support costs for managing these aging
systems, and effectively marketing all the titles within its growing
library. While upgrading the aging VoD platforms and allocating additional
QAMs to the VoD service easily address the first two, the challenge of
marketing the far reaches of VoD’s growing library represents a problem that
cannot be solved as easily.
VoD Choice Eventually Becomes Limited by Screen Real Estate
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Long tail VoD titles can quickly become stale in a
VoD library unless they are related to something or can be easily
recalled by consumers. |
In VoD location, location, location is equally important in effectively
marketing a growing list of video titles. However the available screen real
estate combined with the lower “text” resolution in standard definition (SD)
television limits the number of titles that can be effectively displayed on
any resulting search to 4-9 programs depending on how much additional
information is provided (e.g. title, box art, director, year released,
actors/actresses, description, etc.). High definition (HD) television offers
a marginal improvement by allowing for 6-15 programs to be displayed as part
of a program search. But the high ranges of these numbers can be misleading
due to the fact that listing more programs on a display means less
additional information can accompany the program title in the display – thus
reducing the effectiveness of each title in the listing.
Besides marketing VoD titles within a dedicated search function of VoD found
in the Electronic Program Guide (EPG), operators have begun to weave
available titles into other areas of their EPG experience and are
experimenting with various ways to slice and dice their library of available
titles to make them more accessible (such as using Genres or Series). Genre
and Series filters are especially useful for accessing and listing available
programs related to currently running broadcast programs displayed within
the EPG or program schedule, but they don’t address unrelated long tail
content that can quickly become stale in the library due to its lack of
recollection by the consumer or association with another currently
broadcasted program.
VoD Choices Should Benefit from Switched Digital Video Deployment
VoD choices are also limited by how much memory individual STBs can dedicate
to VoD listing data. As a result, STBs limit how much VoD Meta data can be
stored and readily accessible from the EPG. The preferred choice is to push
this Meta data in a compressed format to STBs so that titles can be called
up quickly from within the EPG. However as the number of VoD titles expand,
this limits the amount of Meta data that can be associated with any one
title in order for all titles to be stored on the STB. "As the number titles
(linear or more pertinent, on-demand) increases, cable server-hosted search
scenarios become much more compelling." Says Sean Duggan, Sr. Product
Manager of Digeo. These remote search applications are now available from
every VoD vendor and provide adequate search capabilities for title
libraries too large to push down to STBs – which results in a viable interim
solution for VoD operators with greater than 1,000 titles.
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Competing with Netflix's growing title library is
out of scope for current VoD services. |
As Switched Digital Video (SDV) becomes ubiquitous a much more feature rich
VoD search interface should evolve at the data center with no more than a
100ms delay in registering remote control button pushes on the display. With
this “hosted” search interface, near AJAX like intelligent searches can be
completed allowing real time searches to take place with each key press – in
addition to many other optional drop down program filters by genre, release
year, etc. Such a display should enable VoD operators to expand their
libraries to several thousand titles while providing a respectable level of
accessibility. However, competing with
Netflix's
90,000 title (and growing)
library is out of scope for current VoD services with searches
limited to the confines of the television screen.
Second and Third Screens Expand Marketing Depth of VoD Libraries
In light of the low “text” resolution of either SD or HD from a VoD title
listing standpoint, VoD will need to look to second and third screens to
make its expanding library more accessible. “VoD movies scheduled via a
computer for some time in the future (like current Pay Per View) will
provide the high resolution screen needed to access large VoD libraries”,
says David Stengle, VP of Distribution at Black Arrow. It is believed that
offering such a second screen as well as a cell phone screen to tap into
more spontaneous movie selection requests such as those generated while
shopping, during a phone conversation with a friend who recommended a title,
or while reading a billboard could be a great way to maintain a "must watch
list". Such means of movie selections for VoD will provide an effective
means of mining the far reaches of a comprehensive video library while
further coupling multiple services – but in a different way than currently
utilized because such selections happen “off-line” or outside of an engaging
VoD session that ends with your viewing the selected movie.
 Such “off-line” selections would ultimately enter a Netflix type queue or
“my must watch list” that can be accessed from the living room at the
subscriber's convenience - like a digital video recorder (DVR)'s list of
stored programs. VoD "must watch list" could be recalled by the VoD user
interface so the consumer could select any title from their “must watch
list” (not all of which may yet be available on VoD) and watch it
immediately rather than run to the store or wait for tomorrow's mail
(depending on where it is in their queue). In fact, the same queue
technology could result in a pretty interesting pseudo VoD offering by
satellite companies if they could proactively download queued entries to the
customer’s DVR.
Number of Movie Titles May Ultimately Separate VoD Offerings from Rental
Offerings
With the sheer numbers of titles becoming available in multiple formats (SD
and HD), the notion of building out space for every available title begins
to raise an interesting business question. That question is, “At what point
does it cost more to buy and maintain the additional disk space for any
given title versus what that title will capture in revenue?” Clearly a VoD
title wouldn’t be added to the library if there wasn’t some chance that
people would rent it, but when it comes to long tail content, would one or
two views a year justify the cost of storing both formats of that title?
Well, maybe…
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The REAL costs of maintaining each title in a VoD
library will require it to be either make money (rent frequently) or
be overwritten. |
One might argue that once a title has been ingested and resources (disk
space) have been allocated to store it the major expense of hosting the
title is behind you. However, as disk drives begin to fail and need
replacing, current disk arrays need upgrading to faster ones, large video
libraries require dedicated 24 hour staffing, etc. the REAL costs of
maintaining large video libraries will become evident such that the revenue
opportunity versus cost of hosting each title will be a factor in whether
the title stays or gets archived or overwritten.
It is reasonable to assume that beyond the question of whether a title
remains in the library or not, additional storage conscious options will be
available to VoD operators. For example VoD operators may elect to only
store an SD version of the title rather than both HD and SD versions based
on its viewing popularity.
Figure 1.0 VoD vs Rental Divide
It is realistic that after further business analysis, VoD operators will
end up focusing on a very limited window of available titles (see Figure
1.0). In Figure 1.0, VoD will likely end up covering all new releases and
ride on the coattails of the marketing blitz that studios run as part of
releasing new titles for purchase - these titles represent those consumers
can most readily recall. These titles along with subscription VoD and other
content deals each VoD operator makes with their content providers will make
up a majority of its VoD library. Those titles that maintain some reasonable
rental frequency 5-10 rentals a month, would likely remain within their
video library due to popular demand where as those titles viewed much less
frequently would either get pushed to some archive or get overwritten with
more lucrative titles.
In Summary
To effectively market its growing library VoD operators must exploit the
best features of online movie rentals, providing the ultimate in convenience
all the while zeroing in on movie rental’s Achilles heel – time delays in
obtaining the next title from their queue.
While it may not ever be realistic for VoD to command an 90,000 title
library, a reasonably deep video library with instant access to 2nd and 3rd
screen maintained must watch list, opt out windows that would allow a viewer
to change their mind about a movie within the first 5-10 minutes without
paying for it, high quality viewing experience (at least equal to Blu-ray),
and instant access to the desired title with simplicity and not all the
“forced previews” of DVDs would provide a formidable service that would not
only compete with best in class online rental companies but beat them with
ultimate convenience.
Such a service could relegate the likes of
Netflix and Blockbuster to mere
niche players who provide deep libraries of hard to find titles. While this
too could also be a lucrative business for some time, VoD operators need
storage technology to get much better and significantly cheaper for them to
cost effectively build and maintain a 100,000+ title library.
Check out these other Birds-Eye.Net papers/products
regarding Video on Demand (VoD):
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