Around the World in 80 Clicks

Acquisition Strategies

But while all travel video providers agree that the content itself is key to busi-ness, just how to go about acquiring or producing that content is a subject of some debate.

HotelView produces most of its own video, acquiring only 10 percent of its archive from individual hotels. HotelView prefers self-production because it has found that some of the prefab video content is dated or too long. In addition, some repurposed video won’t work online because of poor quality and lack of distribution rights.

Another content provider, Travelago, actively pursues pre-produced video. This lowers the cost of production for Travelago and its clients. The company acquired 80,000 hours of footage from the International Video Network (IVN), a San Francisco-based television programming and distribution company that has since declared bankruptcy. After culling through and editing this massive archive, Travelago only ends up producing 20 percent of its video catalog.

Taking still another approach is Travel Video Network (TVN). TVN produces and edits no video. The company simply approaches hotel and destination locales — say, for example, Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, Fla. — and offers to host vendor-produced videos for free on its site, www.travelvideonetwork.com. While the industry average for an online video is 30 seconds to three minutes, videos on TVN sometimes range up to an hour. TVN’s objective is to amass the largest travel video library at the lowest cost.

Since TVN doesn’t produce any video, the company chooses to differentiate itself through its delivery mechanism. Using its parent Neuron Technologies’ proprietary encoding hardware and software, the system can automatically detect the user’s speed and return the optimum video. A video on TVN needs only one link and no pre-installed client player. Up to 12 different speeds can be encoded, ranging from 28Kbps to T1, in just one pass. Conversely, the competition often encodes video for as many as four connection types (28Kbps, 56Kbps, ISDN, T1) and three players (Real, Windows Media and QuickTime), resulting in a whopping 12 different user choices just to play one video.