The emergence of this new medium….

I’ve responded to a number of blog posts “Overlay.tv Adds Links and Easter Eggs to Music Videos” and “Hypervideo: Hyperlinking video content” and there is a lot of positive stuff being written about companies such as ours. Interactive video is here but it’s taking some time to sink into mainstream.  It’s ironic:  iTV has been talked about for years –> it was supposed to have emerged by now….yet online video is still a medium we haven’t figured out.  We’re still too far off that iTV phenomenon given that the online video market is still in a state of fragmentation and testing. Everyone’s still trying to figure out the monetization angle. There are still no standard CPMs for video advertising. Formats are continuously morphing in response to the user and advertising views on mitigating annoyance and increasing performance.  The video player is non-standard and the recent partnerships like FOX networks and utarget; Brightcove and Bebo; and AOL and ESPN  are results of attempts to spread the net as wide as possible to maximize audience reach. Performance is also another topic that needs addressing. TV has always been a branding medium –>product placement has been the only in-content-type-advertising that is both costly and doesn’t necessarily translate into revenue or traffic. Video has the ability to solve for this given its emergence from the online world, which records tonnes of data on user behaviour and determines likely user propensities. Google has already started this process and is moving quickly to figure this out when the digital home environment comes to fruition.

Most importantly, before all this settles the public has to become comfortable with the notion of video interactivity and the plethora of possibilities from exploring new ways of publishing to new models of revenue generation. The music industry can definitely benefit by creating new engagement possibilities for their artists. It’s a matter of time…hopefully just around the corner…