LoudEye Announces Media Syndicator

Audio/video content abounds on the web, but there is much more -- millions of hours of television series, movies, documentaries, concerts, animations, you name it - that simply can't be found on the Internet today. The creators and owners of this content aren't about unleash it onto the wild, woolly web without some means of controlling its flow and earning a steady revenue.

There is no shortage of potential customers: Websites of all flavors are hungry to purchase the rights to compelling audio/video content that can help to draw visitors and keep them coming back. What's been missing is an easy-to-manage system for payment of rights. The wait may now be over. Digital media solutions provider Loudeye today announced a new product and service line -- Media Syndicator --designed to meet these urgent needs. Media Syndicator, Loudeye says, will allow content owners to syndicate their content with confidence, and enable buyers to find and license interesting content easily.

Doug Schulze, minister of markets and solutions, and product manager Brad Sutton, outlined Loudeye's syndication application strategy in a face to face in LoudEye's penthouse suite at Streaming Media East 2000 with the streamingmedia.com editorial team.

Streaming Media: How does Media Syndicator fit into the Loudeye story? Aren't you still an encoding company?

Doug Schulze: Loudeye is built around taking people's content, in this case audio or video, and distributing it on the Web. Step one of that process was always the encoding process, so that began the toehold. But that was never the end of the road.

We have a large customer base and we've been doing the encoding work for them. Now they're in their second generation of problems, if you will, and that's what we're going to talk about today. The user of Media Syndicator has his or her stuff encoded, already has relationships with affiliate websites for their content, but needs a simpler way to get it out there - but with some assurances that they're not letting go of their content completely.

Customers were looking for the syndication process and distribution security. We had some technology both in-house and through others we had acquired. Media Syndicator is available as a stand-alone product that the customer can take back to their offices and use as their own streaming media infrastructure. Microsoft and Real and Apple and others are building the formats, and we sort of pick up the ball there. And there's a lot to fulfill within that space.

Streaming Media: What was the driving force behind the creation of Media Syndicator?

Brad Sutton: There hasn't been a good technology around streaming media to make a return on investment for streaming media content. (Our customers) look to us to come up with those solutions because we are the first stop in the streaming media hierarchy from encoding to hosting to distribution. They want to be able to distribute their content securely. What they want to be able to do is to be able to control the use of the content, so they can say, okay yes, you can have that content, but only for a year, or six months, or several plays.

They also want to be able to track how companies are using that content…so (they) can create more alike content to boost up revenues. The content owners -- the MTVs and the big guys -- are basically doing one-to-one relationships with a handful of companies. They want to expand their reach and create more business opportunities with more companies that want streaming media. We'd like to be able to extend the streaming media market so that a Sony Pictures can do business with a mywebsite.com or a smaller company, so that they can really distribute that streaming media across the Internet. So we created Media Syndicator.

I think there's a big market out there. One of the key things here is that there are 70 million hours of legacy content to leverage worldwide. This is going to give (customers) the opportunity to encode that and send it out to niche markets that may want, say, zebra footage, or whatever.

Streaming Media: What are the key features that target these needs?

Brad Sutton: It's cross platform -- it supports the Windows and Unix operating systems. It's media format independent. We're supporting Windows Media right now; when we launch, we'll support others relatively quickly. And to manage this in a database we'll support Oracle or Microsoft or any JDBC database.

We also wanted owner-defined business rules. So if I give you access to some content, to put on your website, after a period of three months, three days, ten plays, whatever, there's some sort of way to time-bomb the content.

(It had to be) e-commerce enabled: We wanted to be able to provide a complete solution without our customers having to integrate their own e-commerce solution or trying to figure out how to do e-commerce. They also wanted it to be a software solution, so if they wanted to run it in-house, they could do that, or if they wanted an ASP service model, they could outsource it to a company.

We are a business-to-business syndication product; we align ourselves with the broadcast syndication model similar to how NBC syndicates Saturday Night Live to Comedy Central. We want to be able to syndicate audio and video content to anybody out on the Internet. If you take a look at this model, obviously the revenue potential is great.

Streaming Media: Does it help for a company like a music label to come to you for encoding, and to receive hosting and syndication, as well?

Brad Sutton: That's a perfect segue. We're the one-stop shop from encoding to hosting to distribution to sale of content from one company. So if I'm Sony Pictures, I can get (content) encoded, I can get it hosted, and get its distribution and syndication done at one spot.

Streaming Media: Do you also assist those content creators in selling their content?

Brad Sutton: We're not getting into the space of a syndicator company, where we're hooking up companies. We want to provide technology so we can build the market, and companies like Sony and others can syndicate their content. We think that's a big market.

Doug Schulze: The product supports that concept. We are introducing (content providers) to affiliates. But we think it's largely push at this point, because when we talk to our customers, they're not ready to throw their content into a sort of club. They have a number of established business partners with rules, and they want to facilitate that. However, you can sort of see how this might turn from push to pull in the future, and this application can support that.

Streaming Media: So, how does it work?

Brad Sutton: We're encoding audio and video content and delivering metadata with that content. What we do is we deliver that content directly to your Media Syndicator Distributor application. The distributor actually takes that content and provides a hierarchy directly into its database. So you tell us the hierarchy of how you want to categorize your content. We'll encode that content, deliver it to you, in the hierarchy that you want for management, and we deliver it directly into the system.

Streaming Media: Will Media Syndicator customers then be tied to Loudeye's encoding service?

Doug Schulze: There are benefits to going from the Loudeye service and sort of keeping it in the club, if you will, but you can also certainly encode it on your own and transfer it. There's a wizard that you use to actually do the data mapping so that you can get your scheme up from your pre-existing database to this database. It makes for a smoother transition.

Streaming Media: Does Loudeye actually do the hosting, or do you have a deal with a hosting provider?

Brad Sutton: That's part of the service. The distributor would get the content into their system. They would create subscriptions or package content up into a price, and then make it available in their catalog. The affiliate would actually register and view that catalog up on the website, pick and choose the content that they want, and purchase the content. Through that transaction, the content is encrypted and delivered to the affiliate system. It's then sitting on their Media Syndicator affiliate system on their network. Now the affiliate has access to post the content to their website and deliver those streams directly to their users.

Streaming Media: You've mentioned that you will be launching with customers. Who are those?

Brad Sutton: CinemaNow, Eveo, and VideoNetworks Inc..

Streaming Media: What is the pricing and availability?

Brad Sutton: Right now we're running a preview program and we're capturing customer feedback. We'll be releasing this product after the feedback this summer, if everything goes well, which we're planning for it to do. Next, the Loudeye media syndication service will provide a turnkey solution for our customers, so if they don't want to host their content on their network they can use us directly.

Doug Schulze: On the pricing, there's a service-based model and a product-based model. The product involves a fee for distributed software and licensing associated with that. Obviously the complete food chain is the affiliates, but there's no charge for the affiliate function. We want to expand the network, if you will. Distributors are essentially buying lots of affiliates to connect to. The service-based model involves a setup fee, and a monthly annuity, and there's a transaction-based component.

This is the world's first streaming media syndication business rule, one-stop box solution, in our true opinion.