April 5, 2007

Content Discontent

By Jim Barthold

There are two ways to pronounce and define content.

The usually structured telecommunications industry is plummeting into a free-for-all free fall over the first definition - "everything that is included in a collection." There is widespread discontent about who can distribute content and who should earn money from it that threatens everyone from broadband operators delivering bandwidth into homes to mobile operators pushing into third- and fourth-generation services.

Part of the turmoil is being caused by content owners who are ahead of the network operators in developing their products and are not content to wait for an invitation to ride the broadband pipe.

Vibe Solutions Group, which is introducing a new service called Pyro.TV, is a case in point. Vibe would like to work with the carriers, and particularly the cable operators, and does ... to an extent. On the other hand, it has something it thinks the public wants, and it's willing to go out on its own to make it happen.

A relatively safe model

Pyro.TV takes content from freely available sources on the Web and consolidates it onto a channel for busy Web browsers. Unlike some content accumulation services, it runs very little risk of infringing on copyrights or digital rights management (DRM).

"The majority (of Pyro.TV channels) are publicly available RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds content owners make publicly available to the world and (that) we package in an easy-to-view and share format. The second source is user support channels, your own multi-video channel that you can broadcast as your own network," said Brad Herrick, vice president of marketing and product strategy for Vibe Solutions Group.

The third piece - provisioned content - gets a little hairy, and Vibe is "actively engaged with a number of content partners for provisioned content based on very specific licensing deals," he said.

Pyro.TV is starting as an online service, although Herrick figures it will eventually move to IPTV and certainly to mobile where Vibe has a "whole mobile strategy that's under way. We do see mobile as an obvious extension of our content strategy," he said.

Pyro.TV touches on, perhaps even stomps into, the new user-generated content space that some more established content owners fear will cherrypick their protected material. Carriers look at these content packages with a degree of greed - because they offer new audiences to supplant the old linear television crowd - and fear because they consume ever-precious bandwidth.

Pyro.TV, Herrick insisted, shouldn't scare the content owners because they have already published the material, and "any content owner that doesn't want to be part of this, we can turn them off, and they're not shown."

Paying to be part

He expects that content owners will actually want to pay to be part of Pyro.TV's channel lineup - and advertisers will pay to put them there - because "we're trying to create an added distribution network for them, and we're trying to create a better user experience for the consumer."

Carriers are another matter. Vibe has deals with Comcast, Cox and RCN to rebrand and display a video mail product and is trialing a more advanced package product called Journal with Cox and Comcast.

The company has learned what anyone dealing with today's fast-moving telecommunications carriers already knows: "Fast-moving" is a relative term, and relatively speaking, an entrepreneur can go gray waiting for some carriers to adopt its latest, newest gadgetry. Just ask all those folks who jumped into cable telephony a decade ago.

So Vibe didn't wait with Pyro.TV. It's still talking to the carriers - has, in fact, "been in discussions with them for months ... mostly from a trial standpoint so the version of Pyro.TV is really relegated to the Journal solution" but it's pursuing the more direct route of putting Pyro.TV under its own URL.

"We still have some very valued partnerships ... but we feel that from an innovation standpoint, right now there is a need in the market to have a product like Pyro.TV where people can easily aggregate the channels that they want and only the channels that they want and very quickly access video content and personalize it for themselves," he said. "We found through our channel model the innovation was tied up in a lot of other issues, (so) we felt a direct model would really showcase the value proposition directly to the consumer, and then that value proposition would readily be apparent to our partners as well."

Put more bluntly, Vibe went over the top and bared its wares to the public. It's a risky way to do business, but in this broadband age where you no longer even need a keyboard to access the Internet, it's not nearly as chancy as starting your own pay-per-view service was 20 years ago.

Proving it out

Still, Vibe has to prove its model works to make money without any cable sugar daddies. As the old saying goes, those that have money, get money, so if and when the bucks start rolling in, things will be attractive enough to draw in the reticent carriers and content owners.

To sweeten the deal, Vibe offers a back-office administrative interface tool that mines information on who's viewing content, tracks the hits, and manages how it's shared and accessed.

"It's a very robust back-end tool that really gives content owners control and visibility over how their content is being shared over the Web," Herrick said.

That should be a selling point - once the network gets off the ground - but to sprout wings Pyro.TV must "make sure we have a better viewing experience and that the content owners really understand the value that we bring in terms of distribution and content visibility and tracking we have in the back end," he said. "If we have those two components together, we start getting traffic, and the advertising component will kick in in a few months."

And everyone, he intimated but did not say, will be content.

- Jim Barthold