London Calling: Streaming Media Europe Preview
And since we’ve been doing video on mobile handsets for quite a while (at least 3 years now), we’re seeing more and more mobile consumption as handsets improve over time. We first launched mobile video content in the U.K. with 3 when it launched its first 3G video content. At that time we first started offering MTV video on demand downloads and streaming content, and now we’ve expanded to offering live mobile TV channels on most U.K. operators. We’re seeing that we’re consistently in the top 10 mobile channels, normally coming only second to sports and news, so we’re obviously very pleased about this.
What would you describe as the biggest challenge facing MTV Networks in terms of its online/mobile video initiatives?
I would answer that by saying I don’t think we have as [many] challenges as we do opportunities. For example, how do we better engage with the audience wherever they are? Media is a crowded marketplace, but our brand is very strong, our audience knows us well, they trust our content (both on the music and on the entertainment side), so we are able to serve a breadth of content as a trusted editor to bring the best and most relevant content to our audience. We also pride ourselves on the high quality of content available online, including a wide range of content repurposed from our TV channels, but also made-for-mobile content, extra content produced strictly for online series and the like.
What does MTVN see as the future of monetising (or building a sustainable future for) online or mobile video?
For us, monetisation has always been a mixture of sources. We have some ad-funded content, with pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and then we also have branded sponsorships. We are also able to use online video as a driver to traditional TV broadcasts and advertisers there, so our in-house advertising agency is able to offer complete packages (broadcast television + online/web + mobile) to advertisers as part of their sponsorships, and so our efforts are definitely paying for themselves.
Can you give us an overview of the MTV Overdrive initiative?
Our MTV Overdrive product launched in 2006, which was the first time we brought all of our video into an aggregated place that people could come to access. To enable this, we built internal workflows to manage the digital archive and the custom-built content, e.g., our MTV News team has a daily news package which we were able to make available. So again, we have end-to-end workflow processes to produce content cross-platform and then we don’t have to worry about the technicality behind the delivery process [to different platforms]. It’s a managed process end-to-end of a huge archive of online content now.
The MTV Overdrive platform was a great starting point for us to show some of our video content, and as that's evolved we're seeing the demand for video (especially in the U.K.) as extraordinarily high and we're very pleased with the results there. Now we’re in a process where we’re moving some of that video content so that it's not just in the MTV Overdrive area, but rather phased out so that the video content is wherever it’s relevant, such as MTV News video clips on the MTV News site and so on.
Can you tell us a bit about your experiences with streaming the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards?
Last year for the first time we were able to stream in high-quality Flash format, and to do this we used one of the very first commercially available hardware products that supported Flash video streaming, the ViewCast Niagara Pro Encoder, provided to us by Garland Partners Limited. As it happens, we met and engaged with Garland Partners Limited as a result of their exhibitor space at Streaming Media Europe 2007. They were previewing the ViewCast hardware, and that’s when we established contact and engaged with them for the MTV Europe Music Awards show to take place a few weeks later.In any event, the ViewCast Niagara Pro Encoder allowed us to take the broadcast feed from our Camden (London) studios receiving the show feed from Munich [Germany] and then live stream that in high quality Flash format. At the time, that was really the only commercial product to deliver high-quality video/audio over a sustained period of time (such as the 3-plus-hour-long Music Awards show).
Additionally, our team was able to produce inserts to use during the ad breaks, and we were able to send footage back from Munich (such as Wyclef Jean interviewing stars backstage) to drop into the ad breaks.
Our team was definitely pushing the envelope and innovating and testing along with ViewCast, Garland Partners, and Akamai, and we’re very proud of what we were able to accomplish. That streaming video feed was for 19 TV channels in Europe, the U.S., and Asia, and where our TV broadcast had 30 million viewers, we also had 3.2 million video streams online, which is an absolutely phenomenal success. And of course we were then able to offer all of that content available as video on demand after the event.
The event was such a success that we won the “Best Streaming Event of 2007” awarded by the IWA (International Webcasting Association).