Sorry, just zoned out for a minute there, and I forgot what YouTube was, or that it was like really, really important. Yawn. But really perhaps we are all missing the point when it comes to shifting Internet Video to the TV set.
Sony this week announced that the $300 Bravia Internet Video Link service can now get you access to YouTube, Wired.com and Crackle. Crackle is the renamed Grouper which Sony paid $65 million for last July and promptly renamed, and since then it has dropped off the map. It seems that Sony thinks that it can have some say over exactly which sites do work with its new Internet video devices and which ones won’t.
Back in March when the link was launched, Sony said it would ship in July and give access to AOL, Yahoo as well as Sony properties Grouper, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG Music. Sony has since added Sports Illustrated, blip.tv, Style.com, Men.Style.com, Epicurious, Concierge.com channels, the Minisode Network.
Sony also said that the majority of its new TVs coming out this year will be Bravia Internet Video Link-ready. So at least this is something that won’t cost the consumer anything noticeably only that Bravia TV sets will come down in price slightly less this year, than last.
Similarly Apple with its Apple TV, now in its second edition, specifically won’t allow certain competing video formats, like Adobe Flash, to work with the device.
And a few weeks back Netflix introduced a device from start up Roku which only gives access to its own Netflix video service, over the internet, but not other video.
If we go back to the creation of the now defunct Akimbo, and the bankrupt and acquired assets of Disney’s Moviebeam, they too tried to make a connection to a device or a single service and keep control of it.
What the world actually wants are two separate things. They want an iTunes class video service (with both free to air and paid options) which streams or copies a carefully selected aggregation of video files over the internet to any device. And the world ALSO wants a device which can view ANY internet video file that a browser can show, preferably integrated into a TV set.
If you look at those two separate requirements there are lots of separate jobs going on. There is format conversion, up and down scaling of the video, a set of streaming protocols to be supported and a variety of DRM clients to be installed. So in the end this is likely to split into multiple efforts, from multiple companies in just as complex an array of technology layers as something like true IPTV, with its EPGs, quality of service protocols, encryption servers, billing services, VoD servers, multicast routers, and real time encoders.
But at the moment, what every vendor seems to want to do is that instead of having an unqualified success, where the system ‘just works,’ they prefer to get a repeat of iTunes, where it works, but only on their devices, or only with their content, or only within their DRM, so that they can control the market. And while this attempt to create yet another type of walled video environment continues, which is the antithesis of the internet, then none of them are going to take off.
Sony, of all companies has the ability to do something radical here. Take the Nokia Comes with Music initiative for instance. Sony could bundle a variety of subscription services of quality professional content into the price of a Bravia TV set, including a film service made up of all the Sony film libraries in Columbia and MGM and those TV series it has made under the name of Sony Pictures. It could be a kind of ‘Comes with Video’ offering free for the first year on all of its TV sets. Then it could offer open access to the free stuff on the internet like YouTube and facilitate any other video business model such as paid subscriptions, so that the customer could find something, subscribe to it and enable it on his own TV set.
Sony could then let Samsung in on the idea and Philips and other TV makers. Apple which doesn’t make its own TV set could either license it through Apple TV, but more likely would compete on its own through iTunes and Apple TV with a slightly varying the business model.
Effectively this was the idea that Sony had when it bought Grouper/Crackle, except it has filled it with trailers and incomplete content, rather than full, up to date shows that already air on the TV.
Earlier this week another new entry got some press coverage, pre-launch, in the form of a new ‘PoD’ device from Verismo Networks. The PoD is a small device which can handle content from YouTube, BitTorrent, vTap, Amazon Unbox, CinemaNow and virtually any internet video service. Which is fine and that type of device will complete half of the requirement that we defined earlier, except that the marketing to bring this to the attention of a wide enough audience may well be beyond a start up. The PoD will sell later this summer for $99 and hopes to get a marketing leg up from YouTube, which could be the difference it needs.