• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 6, 2008

Ever hear someone talk about their new baby? I always find it interesting that people talk about their babies in terms of how many months they are, even when they get past the first year: "13 months," "22 months," etc. At what point does it make sense to start saying age in terms of years?

Online video is our little baby. At first she crawled, then she started walking and just recently she's getting into the running-around stage, where she's harder to control and learns really fast, sponging up everything that she possibly can! Soon our little baby will be a little adult and will have all the problems facing every other adult, or in this case every other mature industry!

It's been about 24 months, or two years depending on how you count it, and our baby has definitely grown! She gave birth and started to crawl via YouTube. You Tube was the spark that lit the fire, but the networks companies like ABC, NBC, CBS, and Viacom have been the kindling and logs that are truly stoking and raising the fire. Of course, the fire started to spread, but that spread has been contained -- because of the simple issue that the powers-that-be with the best quality video cannot accurately control and monetize the syndication of their content and the ads associated with that content. The fire won't spread because companies likes Viacom are too busy suing YouTube, and the peer-to-peer networks are fighting with the ISPs, where lots of the Web's video is actually viewed in the first place! 2008 is the year that this gets fixed. 2008 is the year that our baby gets runnin'.

If you remember, about five to six months ago I wrote that there was no apparent solution for the dynamic distribution of video ads based on demographic data, only contextual data, alongside video content. Then I heard from Broadband Enterprises and Tremor Networks and YuMe and a number of other folks who have professed to handle that part of the problem. Cool; apparently that problem is solved. Our baby is definitely crawling now.

Next I decided to look into a solution for dynamic video ad generation, based on user data, and companies like QMeCom now seem to be handling that. Awesome! The baby is up on her big two legs and standing steady.

Next I went into the tracking and tagging of video content to ensure that the ads associated with it are stronger and more relevant -- and along comes ScanScout to make sure that works effectively. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty good! Our baby is running around now!

The next item is syndication; how do I syndicate my video content across the Web to where the users are watching, manage the video distribution and manage the monetization of those videos with video advertising? Last week there was lots of press about the launch of Freewheel, which was led by a bunch of ex-Doubleclick people. The company offers a product that allows you to manage the monetization of your syndicated advertising alongside your syndicated content to any site on the Web, and with any combination of the targeting and delivery tools offered by Broadband Enterprises, Tremor, YuMe, QMeCom and Scanscout. What they are not doing is handling the syndication of the content itself, which is something you still need to work with a content delivery network to handle. Companies like Akamai, Limelight Networks and CDNetworks still appear to be the three leaders in this space, but there are many more to go around. Our baby is getting ready to drive a car and go to the prom now!

The last area of the space that needs to be addressed is the P2P networks. These are never going to go away, so at some point someone will come across and demonstrate the old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Someone is going to come along and work out a proper way of inserting video advertising into the copyrighted content in the P2P space, and at that point a publisher will be able to control the monetization of ALL their online video content. At that point our baby will be getting married, buying a house and having babies of her own (probably little mobile video babies).

I wonder if that will happen at three years or 36 months? Whichever comes first, I guess.