July 22, 2008

Broadband Video Growth

By Jonathan Tombes

Developments in the online video market indicate that the supply of enabling technology is meeting growing consumer demand for content.

Today's announcement that thePlatform will serve the central backend video management system for Time Warner Cable's Road Runner portal is a case in point. Notable is how this arrangement with thePlatform, an application service provider (ASP) owned by Comcast, cuts upstream to Time Warner's content providers.

"In this particular case, what's happening is Time Warner Cable's content providers are using our system to move their content online, getting it into right format," said Marty Roberts, vice president of marketing at thePlatform. "We rationalize all of the metadata, and we allow all of those content providers to set business policies on that content."

Reducing the number of touchpoints is one way to describe what's happening here. "Once all of Time Warner Cable's publishing requirements have been met," said Roberts, "they push 'go' and that content moves up onto Time Warner's Web site."

A quick turnaround is the name of the game, especially terms of news outlets. Roberts said that from the time a clip from a customer such as CNBC is aired on television, it takes about 15 minutes to process that asset and deploy it to CNBC's internal and third-party Web sites.

As far as taking Road Runner live, Roberts said it was only matter of a few weeks. "There wasn't a lot of heavy investment to pick up thePlatform and start utilizing our capabilities," he said.

Custom fitting, however, appears to have been part of the equation. "We're working with thePlatform because of their versatility and ability to create solutions uniquely tailored to our needs," said Time Warner Cable Chief Strategy Officer Peter Stern, in a statement.

Big picture

That's an exercise that this Comcast subsidiary has repeated among MSOs and elsewhere. As mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article today, thePlatform is also working with Cox Communications and Cablevision.

Comcast began working the thePlatform on its original multimedia player called "The Fan" five years ago. Comcast bought thePlatform two years ago.

According to thePlatform, "hundreds of companies" use its software. Other marquis customers include Verizon Wireless, BBC, Gannett and PBS. It's not alone in this space, at least as measured in terms of the number of broadband videos viewed.

The top online such video property, as ranked in May by global Internet information provider comScore was - no surprise - Google, with 4.2 billion videos viewed. Fox Interactive Media (i.e., MySpace) and Yahoo! Sites came in second and third, at 778 and 346 million views, respectively. Each of these broadband giants runs separate content management systems.

Roberts makes a case, however, for including thePlatform in this mix.

"When you look across all of our customer base, we're managing about 270 million video plays every month," Roberts said. "We're not a consumer Web site, but if you were to stack us up there, that would basically put us in the No. 4 position."

The fourth top online video properties by videos viewed in May was Microsoft, at 246 million.

- Jonathan Tombes