Video On Demand: Distribution is Key

15 years ago I remember taking one small step, though it seemed giant at the time. I downloaded a postage stamp sized black and white clip of the moon landing to my Windows 3.11 desktop which took up a good chunk of the 100 meg harddisk. 12 seconds of Neil's crackling transmission barely decipherable through the 2" PC speaker.  Today's G-search resulted in over 1m hits for NASA moon landing, whose video results whisked me off to a 2 minute full screen clip with crystal clear audio of the historic moment. (BTW, today NASA broadcasts 15 live feeds in 4 formats  here)

15 years ago I remember taking one small step, though it seemed giant at the time. I downloaded a postage stamp sized black and white clip of the moon landing to my Windows 3.11 desktop which took up a good chunk of the 100 meg harddisk. 12 seconds of Neil's crackling transmission barely decipherable through the 2" PC speaker.  Today's G-search resulted in over 1m hits for NASA moon landing, whose video results whisked me off to a 2 minute full screen clip with crystal clear audio of the historic moment. (BTW, today NASA broadcasts 15 live feeds in 4 formats  here)

To be sure, Video on Demand is eternally linked to Video on Supply (My ECO professor would be proud).  Our ability to serve the ground swell of video-based messaging requires streamlining production and distribution [tip cap to Henry Ford]. Although U2B makes it look easy [Yes, am-cam producers abound, no shortfall in sight, and it's habit forming], let's focus on professional video production, shall we? 

In keeping with the times, great emphasis must be placed on a flexible approach to producing a wider variety of video content whenever and wherever appropriate. So production is under pressure to deliver more content to more people more often. How?

Distribution Automation.

There are few subjective decisions following the video production. The choices are usually simple and predictable. You want to serve a product demonstration on the homepage? That's an embedded flash animation. Pushing the new promotional trailer to 5000 distribution sites? Better get several hi-med-lo versions in Quicktime and WMP along with those 5sec ad spots in ubiquitous flash. At the end of the day, the channel dictates the packaging. If you automate the packaging, you can focus on production. This results in immediate and significant increases in the amount you can produce and decreases in the time it takes to reach wide distribution: more content, more often, to more people.

Oh yeah, don't forget the DAM. For the storage, availability,  organization, and  categorization of this growing video collection! Must have: high quality source videos associated to all of it's clips (which are associated to all of the various copies of it in QT, WM, flash, and jpeg thumbs). Can't live without it.

The DAMS plays an important role in inventory control, product availability, and your ability to reach fully automated distribution. Having one that focuses on consistent, flexible, and precise accessibility of assets (usually through service oriented architectures) will lead to automated distribution on a wide scale.

An equally important role is played by video transformation services. Taking a produced video asset (after several rounds of comment, collaboration, and updates) and flipping it into all the appropriate renditions suitable for delivery. Transcoding engines play a key role here in  'dressing' you video for distribution, offering a multitude of options on format, compression, frame rate and size, audio-quality, DRM, watermarking, the list goes on. More importantly, the transcoding engine automates the conversion of distribution-ready video into a wide variety distribution forms. Most typically, you apply distribution standards that impose formatting rules that will be automatically applied based on simple to complex rules of delivery. Once established, these configurations are consistently applied like robotics in manufacuring. It just happens.

When you hook up these asset and transformation services to dynamic distribution channels, the result is a dramatic push-button automation of content  delivery.  In an instant, a single status change in an asset (e.g. 'approved') can result in global availability of content. The website dynamically retrieves associated thumbs, previews, and full video renditions and places them into appropriate locations. Product catalogs and sites are magically updated in real time. Content consumers get rich content that refreshes continuously. Authorized video distributors have immediate access to controlled content. Life is good.

So the end of the digital media supply chain is ready: distribution is automated through dynamic and systematic access to published content, readied for service through automated video transformation services and a service oriented dam.

Next time I'll discuss the distinct, and often ignored, challenges of video publishing:  collaboration and workflow in a push-pull world.

Thanks for being here!