Google's YouTube/Ridley Scott project, Life in a Day, has launched a video gallery making available raw footage from some of the 80,000 video submissions across 197 countries and 45 languages. The project, which YouTube calls a "historic global film experiment," is searchable by geography, time of day, mood and more. The channel also features a special LG Electronics "Smile" tab, highlighting the thousands of video submissions, as part of LG's support for the project. The newly launched video gallery, the "Life in a Day" channel also features updates on the making and process of the project, as Academy-Award winning Director Kevin Macdonald, Editor Joe Walker, and their team of researchers at Scott Free UK create the feature-length documentary. Life in a Day, directed by Kevin Macdonald and executive produced by Ridley Scott at Scott Free UK, enlisted the world's online community to capture a moment of their lives on Saturday, July 24. The clips are being assembled to create a video of life on the planet for that day. The project will not rely on community feedback from the submitted crowd-sourced content to determine the clips that get edited in to the documentary. The final video will become available in different languages via captioning on YouTube, according to a YouTube spokesperson. Twenty contributors chosen by director Kevin Macdonald, who make it into the final feature-length digital movie, will have an opportunity to attend the 2011 Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere in January. Those whose footage makes it into the finished film will also get credit as co-directors. The movie will be available on YouTube at the same time as the Sundance screening. Life in a Day remains one of several efforts by YouTube to push the boundaries of music, art, and now film, according to a blog post. YouTube Symphony Orchestra and the recently announced YouTube Play partnership with the Guggenheim are examples of the convergence of online video with traditional arts, and Life in a Day takes this effort into the cinematic realm.
Premium chocolate maker Lindt is taking an unusually humorous tack in its new TV spot featuring Swiss tennis star Roger Federer. The new commercial, created for Lindt USA by agency of record Gotham Inc., is Federer's first ad for Lindt since he became global brand ambassador for Swiss parent Lindt & Sprüngli Group last October. The 30-second spot, which is initially airing in a two-week national flight corresponding with the U.S. Open (Aug. 29 - Sept. 12) -- which Federer has won five times in the past six years -- shows two female airport security agents taste-testing the athlete's stash of Lindor Truffles and confiscating them for further "investigation" (as well as checking out Federer's well-toned posterior and considering a strip search). The somewhat naughty ad is designed as a complement to Lindt's more traditional, ongoing "Do You Dream In Chocolate?" campaign, which shows Lindt's Master Chocolatiers creating the rich chocolate Lindor Truffles. An extended version of the new ad and a behind-the-scenes video showing outtakes from its creation will also be featured on Lindt.com and YouTube, with social media/viral efforts, including Twitter promotions, to continue beyond the Open. The ad will also be seen internationally starting in November, when it will air during the Swiss Indoors Basel tennis tournament. Lindt & Sprüngli chose Federer as the 165-year-old company's first celebrity spokesperson because Federer "uniquely embodies" the company's "fundamental values of 'Swissness,' 'premiumness,' quality and passion," making Federer and Lindt "the perfect match," comments Lindt USA president/CEO Thomas Linemayr. In addition to showcasing Lindor Truffles in "a fun way," the new campaign is designed to employ Federer's likability and global recognition to extend and reinforce the popularity of Lindt chocolates in global markets, Linemayr says. On Lindt's site, Lindt/Federer fans can also enter a "Perfect Match" sweepstakes. The contest features daily chances to win prizes such as a trip for two to New York City to see Federer play, as well as a grand prize of a trip for two to Zurich to meet Federer, tour the Lindt & Sprüngli plant, and attend the Lindt Holiday Lighting Ceremony. In addition, the brand's site provides links to videos of Federer playing, his site, and his Facebook page.
YouTube and MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), the interactive media and Internet arm of Major League Baseball, announced a partnership Monday to offer baseball fans in Japan a way to follow the game. Fans in Japan will have an option to watch full-length MLB games on-demand, along with multiple highlight reels of every game from the 2009 and the 2010 seasons on MLB.JP's YouTube Channel. The ad-supported videos allow fans to watch free of charge, and games from the current season run within 36 hours of completion. The channel also will support the library's best moments, short-form video such as Condensed Games, game replays, and FastCast, a quick recap of every game played on a given day. The emergence of viewing options outside carrier networks and third-party TV services spells opportunity for ad-supported video. Of these three primary revenue streams, the ad-supported component will become the fastest-growing. eMarketer estimates that ad-supported mobile video revenues will reach a 60% CAGR between 2009 and 2014. The eMarketer report, scheduled for release this week, points to a staggering statistic. In July 2010, Google announced that it served 100 million videos daily on its mobile site and in apps. Like many of Google's HTML5-based mobile sites, the relaunched YouTube mobile now provides a distinctly app-like experience through the browser. Google and YouTube have begun to emphasize mobile, according to Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst. One of those deals revolves around the MLB and mobile video content. Elkin explains in the report -- Mobile Content: Games, Music and Video Take to the Cloud -- scheduled for release this week, that Major League Baseball built live-game online streaming into a $40 million business in 2009, and sales of its live-streaming MLB At Bat app for the iPhone also proved popular. Sales of the $9.99 app topped the $1 million mark early in the season. MLB At Bat returned for the 2010 baseball season with additional enhancements, including availability on the iPad, at a cost of $14.99. YouTube's MLB Japan deal represents the largest partnership for premium sports content in YouTube history and might provide insight into negotiations between Google's video site and Hollywood's movie studios to launch a global pay-per-view video service by the end of 2010. The ongoing talks were reported Monday by the Financial Times. Google will use its search technology and YouTube to direct viewers to the new service, according to reports. Negotiations have been ongoing for several months, but intense competition between media and technology companies over the digital delivery of film and TV programming sparked interest. This week, Apple is also expected to unveil improvements to its TV device.
As the Internet has developed and grown technologically, online video has been at the forefront. Consumers are tuning out of television and are instead looking toward the Web to catch up on the favorite shows they missed the night before. Millions of online users are watching live streaming news broadcasts from work (i.e. 4.6 million people watched Michael Jackson's live memorial service last summer via Ustream and are using YouTube to upload and share videos instantly with other Netizens. In short, online video is in high-demand with consumers and has been for many years. Some may even say that video is, and always has been, a step ahead of the Internet game plan. Let me explain: When people think of online video, many think YouTube. But before YouTube was even a twinkle in the eyes of its developers, online video was already in full force, just in the form of video chat. Ever since the early days of video chat, there were ideas in place to enhance the technology, taking text + image to text + image + voice, and so on and so forth. So, why might you ask, isn't video chat a bigger phenomenon than it currently is? The simple answer is availability. Video chat needs availability on every end point. Because it has had to wait on the availability of the hardware and bandwidth to change, it has had a slower start. Until recently, most computers did not come with preinstalled webcams or echo-canceling microphones, which made it more difficult for consumers to participate in video chat with quality sound. While video chat providers cannot control the pre-installed webcam and echo-free microphone issue (this problem is slowly starting to change with the offering of netbooks), video chat providers are fixing this problem by focusing on easy to use URL-based, in-browser video chat options. All of which brings me to my previous point. Online video has always been a step ahead of the Internet. Video has evolved with the Internet, some might even say a little faster. But the question has always been: How long will it take for the bandwidth capacity on the Internet to catch up with video chat technology? A few specific areas where this has occurred: multiperson chat, social networks and mobile. Multiperson video chat isn't a recent phenomenon, but some users are just now getting around to realizing how useful and inexpensive it really is as a communication tool. Two friends or family members who live on opposite sides of the world can see and talk to one another in real-time, and the technology is still expanding. In addition to one-to-one chat, many video chat providers also offer many-to-many chat, enabling groups of friends and family to all talk at once - regardless of the distance. Some video chat providers enable up to 5,000 people in one chat room, something that requires a significant amount of bandwidth and an idea that had to wait for faster bandwidth speeds before making it available to the consumer. Until recently, one of the limitations to video chat was that you had to build your network on the provider's platform. Sure, there are chat rooms that can host hundreds of people, but what about the friends who aren't using the same program? That¹s a problem that weighed on the minds of many providers, but solved itself with the advent of social networking platforms. Many video chat providers are now finding ways to not only reside on their own platform, but to integrate and evolve with its audience. As a result, many providers are integrating with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, creating branded video chat communities and allowing consumers to post their video chat links on their Facebook page and invite their friends and family with a simple click of a button. Mobile smartphones are quickly becoming the one-stop shop for all of the many users' online and offline activity, such as phone calls, text messages, email, social networking, search, and the list goes on and on with each new application. It is a natural progression for video chat to work its way onto the mobile platform. Video chat is evolving from a standalone service to something developed in concert with other technologies and is becoming more readily available to the consumer. Many chat providers already have apps on the BlackBerry and iPhone and, as mentioned before, have integrated with Facebook and other social networks. One of the biggest complaints during the launch of the original iPhone three and a half years ago and the iPad this year was the lack of video chat capabilities. Video chat providers forecast consumer demand and began building the appropriate functions for hosting video chat on mobile. Now, with iPhone's FaceTime application, video chat is accessible while on-the-go, albeit only with other iPhone users. Once again, the video chat technology was ready for this well in advance. The point is that while the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way we communicate with one another, online video and video chat technology have always been able to accurately forecast these new trends and capitalize on the changes that the Web has wrought. In fact, chances are that online video providers have already been thinking about the Next Big Thing and are perfecting their technology platforms as we speak.
I recently moderated a panel focused on the intersection of apps and video (it was the video part of an app conference). It gave me the chance to meet some new people and more deeply consider what's unique about building an app to support content distribution and monetization when the content in question is video. For the panel, we focused primarily on the value of an app strategy to publishers in terms of how they produce, promote, distribute and monetize video content. Here are the key takeaways: Apps mean distributed (but so does premium video). Most consumption of premium video already happens "off-site" -- probably the most significant difference between video and other content. A big part of an app strategy is understanding the value of your content (whatever it is) when it's lifted off of your Web site and distributed through a platform that offers portability and enhanced functionality. Premium video producers of all shapes and sizes already embrace distributed monetization, but what changes when the distribution is in an app and not a player? There are opportunities to produce a better viewing experience overall (Example: ABC's iPad app is beautiful and makes great use of the device). But there are also drawbacks tied to customizing apps and modifying ad serving by platform (Example: ABC's iPad App has an advertising experience far inferior to its full-episode player). The biggest functional advances that apps will drive for premium video are enhanced VOD through an overall better UI, seamless purchasing (see below) and tools that allow viewers to easily throw content around from mobile devices to wall-mounted devices (aka TVs) and back. Apps mean social and viral. Sure, apps and Facebook are synonymous. But when it comes to video in Facebook, you're probably watching a YouTube video. YouTube videos are already the most viral thing that the Internet has ever seen, so I'm not sure that the social aspect of video riding aboard an app is really what's exciting. There is the odd fact that, outside of music videos, the more highly produced a video is, the less likely it is to become explosively viral. If a premium video app that worked like a TV guide ever become very popular on Facebook, it could be a tool for TV networks to gain a more consistent audience online. Apps are mobile and local. Since most premium video consumption falls into the entertainment bucket (rather than the inform, search or sell buckets) it's hard to get excited about localization of content. It's a different story for mobile, especially for shorter form content that is better suited for smaller chunks of time. Anyone close to the mobile video space knows the current challenge of transcoding and serving video by provider and device, but also knows the potential of Android and iPhones. Apps are probably the interface of choice for IPTV. Not much further out, you're looking at a lot of TVs connected directly to the Internet and needing a new paradigm for browsing and watching video. For my money, this is the match you want a front-row seat at for the next five years. To some degree, control over the way we find, discover and watch ALL commercially supported video content in the future is starting to play out under headlines about Apple TV, Google TV, Comcast + NBC, Boxee, Xfinity, etc. Whoever prevails, there's obviously a good chance that this ends up being an app environment, with a major shift in how producers connect with viewers. Apps give producers more bites at the wallet. In an app environment, your content may find or unlock new opportunities for PPV or subscription revenue. Whatever platform we're talking about, the host already has your customer's credit card number, and that's a huge opportunity. Whether you're selling your video app, or you're selling the episodes riding on the app, you're just a click away from revenue (and, yes, revenue-sharing with the platform). Additionally, a new class of both vertical and horizontal premium content aggregators will soon appear, selling premium subscriptions over-the-top to iPads and IPTV. These guys will likely use apps to do this (as opposed to HTML5), and content producers will benefit. It's also worth thinking about how video plays a role in apps that are created and distributed by brands. Certainly, video gives branded app producers the opportunity for deeper engagement through entertainment. But as a consumer, I'm really going to have to be sold on the value that your brand brings to that entertainment. This isn't different from the logic behind any branded app, but when it comes to video, the bar will be set much higher. At my company, we feel pretty strongly that all premium video content (including TV and movies as well as independent content) is headed through an IP pipe in the not-too-distant future and that has huge impact on how video will be monetized. But more than just the pipe itself, there are plenty of reasons to think that the client on the other end will be an application and not a browser. For publishers, the potential implications are both good (more functionality, better monetization) and bad (more to build, potential for fragmentation) -- but significant enough to warrant a deeper dive into your video app strategy today.