(Great event today — you can watch the event on a loop right here. Daisy's live blogging is below, Andy)
We're live now at Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable, live from 30 Rock. Our Twitter hash mark is #livebeets. You can watch the roundtable at LiveStream, on PaidContent, or here by clicking on the extended entry so you can watch and follow our live blog below.
Our very cool live page with Twitter integration is here.
3 pm ET:
Andy Plesser kicks off the event…The goal is to bring together leaders in the business into a "salon" environment to discuss the online video market.
3:03 ET: Last year's roundtable occurred in the midst of financial crisis. Andy says environment is better now and will share some new stats as well as info on TV Everywhere updates.
3:05 ET: Andy says Beet.TV is growing and that he just announced an NBC Local deal earlier today. MSNBC's Charlie Tillinghast has been a big supporter of Beet.TV and is hosting today's event. YuMe is sponsoring today's event. The next conference will be Dec. 1 in Washington, D.C.
3:09 ET: Rafat Ali takes the microphone and asks the publishers about how news usage is holding up despite economy. Are things opening up now on ads or subscriptions?
3:10 ET: Charlie at MSBC says market is strong for video advertising. In terms of usage as a news site, MSNBC had a big year last year with election. But Michael Jackson's death kept people coming back to the Web and video traffic held up.
3:11: Mark Larkin from CBS News says their site relaunched in June with new focus on video and consumption has been strong.
3:12: Time Inc. Vivek Shah says social media traffic is one of top referrers to video and news on its site. He adds that mobile is also a driver of usage on site.
3:15: Wall Street Journal said financial advertising market has been strong. WSJ spends most of time sold out on premium CPMs. Pre-roll is working well, says Brian Quinn at WSJ.
3:16: Most videos on WSJ are free, Quinn says.
3:17: Rafat asks why NYT doesn't allow embeddable video. William Gonzalez at NYT agrees and says it's been a rights management issue and the NYT is building out capability right now to release by end of year.
3:17: MSNBC is about to launch a next-generation embeddable player, Tillinghast says. You will be able to embed just the segment you want.
3:19: Rafat asks about iPhone apps. He likes the MSNBC and NYT ones, but isn't wild about WSJ app. Says he loves CNN app. He asks what trends are with iPhone apps.
3:20: Vivek at Time Inc. says you need volume, scale. But don't put up longer form content on apps. It's not appropriate for mobile device.
3:23: Execs say they are experimenting with live coverage and how that works best. Mark at CBS says live works online, but more traffic comes from on-demand viewing.
3:25: NYT says it's smart to use social media to bring people to live programming. You can use live programming to help promote other types of content.
3:26: Andy says because last year's roundtable was maximized for search, it landed 200K views overall. So live doesn't end with an event. It lives on in a loop and with on-demand viewing.
3:27: Rafat asks about download versus streaming. Do downloads have a chance anymore? Charlie at MSNBC says no, especially for news. Plus, rights issues are complicated with downloads.
3:28: Microsoft says consumers want instant, best viewing.
3:29: Adobe says we as an industry need to develop best practices around live events online.
3:30: Rafat asks what type of content works best? Vivek says it's a combination of usage, shows, and predictability, knowing a show comes out every Monday for instance. He seconds/thirds that on-demand volume exceeds live viewing. He says one of the things to grapple with is the usage. What viewers watch in a month online is what they watch in a day on TV.
3:33: Group M CEO Rob Norman says online video is half a percent of TV spending. He says it will leap forward. Big advertisers need big scale.
3:36: Discussion on aggregated model on subscriptions. It's a logical extension to what consumers expect, Brightcove says. Discusses payments around how to drive revenue to content owners.
3:38: Frank Barbieri says long-form episodic TV shows do well on mobile. That surprises him as he didn't expect it to be so strong.
3:40: Frank says YouTube will get religion on pre-roll in early 2010.
3:40 YuMe CEO talks about using equivalent ratings online to TV ratings to help achieve scale. Gotta talk the same language!
3:41: Rob Norman says advertisers still want reach and frequency.
3:42: Brian Quinn says TV viewing is not going down. Still strong.
3:46: Rafat discussed show interactivity through social media.
3:47: John McCarus at Digitas says the challenge on the Web is transitioning from a campaign to a conversation. How do we do that? How do we restructure and rethink the opportunity?
3:47 Kevin Delaney WSJ editor says he is going to lead conversation now on the web video technology, what it enables for users, etc.
3:48: How do you get viewers to your videos, Delaney asks. What are the tech challenges with that?
3:49: YuMe president Jayant Kadambi says widgets help. Challenges come in where content lives, what it's next to, the environment. Widgets help with consistency of player across all the places where the video is placed and can be sent back to advertisers to confirm placing an ad is "OK."
3:51: Brightcove says most successful syndication comes with trusted partners so content providers know video is going in safe environment.
3:54: Delaney asks if search has replaced aggregators for finding video content online.
3:54: Adobe says you need to create video in such a way that's it's always findable, always searchable. You want to help people know what they are watching, where video is from, etc. All that data needs to be there when the content is created.
3:56: Brightcove says search is a huge focus for partners and they need to have their metadata embedded deeply in their web pages.
3:57: Microsoft says you need to make sure metadata is correct.
3:58: YuMe says the technology to surface Web video via search needs to be brought to advertisers more. How to get that metadata out and target it?
3:59: Microsoft discusses Silverlight adoption two years into the market. The longer people view content the more opportunity to inject ads and Silverlight is helping with that — with longer time watching. Microsoft delivered huge engagement times for Beijing Olympics, then for March Madness and now for NFL with average 60 minutes engagement. That creates more ad inventory.
4:01: Microsoft will add social media integration, time line annotations, cool new features for next Winter Olympics.
4:02: Microsoft discussed offline rights management to take content with you as you go to gain offline distribution.
4:03: Adobe says Flash is on 98% of all PCs and that Adobe updated 90% of Flash players in ten months. The goal is to get that penetration on mobile as well on 19 of 20 smartphones starting mid next year. BUT, the lone holdout is iPhone. Adobe says it's still talking to iPhone about using Flash.
4:08: Frank Barbieri at Transpera discusses fragmented distribution for mobile web sites. Value proposition is one platform to use for multiple devices. Even if Flash were ubiquitous, there are still complexities or reporting, targeting, cookies on handsets, etc.
4:11: Ogilvy says owner of content should handle transcoding of content. Agencies run tests on content quality on various devices. Does delivery on iPhone look as good as delivery on a Nokia, for instance? Transpera says that's part of complexity of mobile video marketplace.
4:14: Transpera tells customers to NOT have a sole mobile strategy. Mix it up!
4:16: Brightcove discusses syndication to Vudu, Boxee and says it's excited about Yahoo's Connected TV Program.
4:20: Microsoft can deliver assets across Xbox, other devices. Windows 7 is launching with a Media Center device.
4:21: YuMe hears whispers of Hulu charging for content someday.
4:23: Mark Larkin says costs for CDNs are going down, making it easier for publishers to get a good rate.
4:24: MSNBC says content costs scale nicely on Internet. Charlie says if you can hook computer up to TV, who owns the pipe is powerless. If you hook PC to TV, you've got it on the TV; it's that simple.
4:26 Andy discusses benefits of search optimization versus posting videos on YouTube.
4:27: For CBSNews being on YouTube gives a chance to reach new viewers, brand lift. You can reach people who might stumble across it and start watching CBSNews online then.
4:29: MSNBC says it made its player easier to use and embed than YouTube's specifically to deal with competition vis a vis YouTube.
4:30: Taking a brief break. Back by 4:50 ET.
4:54 We are back and Andy is interviewing YuMe president Jayant Kadambi on the challenges ahead for the company. YuMe says advertisers are looking for scale and they want data on where videos are consumed, embedded, etc. The key is giving advertisers as much info as possible to achieve the scale. YuMe can detect if video plays in a safe environment and other videos it plays next to.
5:01 The whole ensemble is back at the table, which is a U-shape, but still we call it round! Andy says we will focus on ads and monetization now. Michael Learmonth at Ad Age leads this conversation. He says online video us up 40% this year but it's still a tiny portion of market.
5:03 YuMe CEO says pre-rolls are popular because they are available.
5:04 YuMe says pre-roll is everywhere; you can't get up and go to the bathroom without watching it.
5:05: Ogilvy says goal is NOT to turn Web into TV 2.0. Do different things with spots. He says pre-roll is not end-all, be-all.
5:06 John McCarus talks about using the Web as a three-way communication medium. If all we do is watch TV there we are not taking advantage of what is unique about the space.
5:07: Ogilvy says brand strategies are tightly wrapped with social strategies right now for brands. Once they get their feet wet, the idea of becoming part of the conversation becomes more important.
5:08: Michael asks if pre-rolls becomes the force driving spending.
5:09: Rob Norman answers saying there is a consumption of similar programming on new devices. But there are new uses of video for marketing online.
5:10: Digitas says it looks at Hulu and its success and says it's being subsidized by cost of TV programming. On the Web there is no established finance model. Says there are creative ways to be a part of this and online video is critical to marketing mix going forward.
5:12: Ogilvy says YouTube is 40% of market and Hulu 2% according to comScore. Nobody comes close to YouTube eyeballs.
5:16: Looking into immersive experiences for video.
5:17: YuMe said advertisers are scaling back experimental budgets.
5:19 Brian at Microsoft talks about CMOs and budgets and how they figure out what to do with the digital budgets they do have. He says there is a lot of experimentation. There are a lot of dollars coming in without a set destination.
5:21: Ogilvy said creating content for larger ad units, for display ad units, is growing. He says display is a great use of video.
5:22: Auto play debate. Do users hate it? Digitas shies away from autoplay when it's pursuing engagement.
5:24: Do the ads need to be attached to the videos, Time Inc asks. Is there another model where you have to watch ads to consume next video and it's not skippable? Is that a model that would work?
5:28: Please keep watching! Live blogging ends for the day, but the roundtable continues until 6 p.m. ET. Enjoy!
