The Big Bang: Media & Entertainment Year in Review

When a television broadcaster’s new media representative said at Streaming Media West 2007 that he liked YouTube because it provided a place to put all the stuff that they didn’t want to broadcast, a counterargument was offered by Mark Hachenburg, CEO of Metacafe, who said that user-generated content (UGC) will play an even more extensive role moving forward, not just provide a place for broadcast media’s castoffs.

"Fragmentation is an important—and inevitable—trend in the overall consumer video viewing microcosm," said Hachenburg, "which means that very few sites are going to be considered ‘must-view’ sites. It’s about a dozen sites now, and may rise to a few dozen, but not beyond that. So getting content across many sites is key to both UGC and traditional professional content."

Hachenburg went on to say the appeal of sites like YouTube is precisely because the content doesn’t look professionally done. "User-generated content isn’t successful because it’s quality content," said Hachenburg. "It’s successful because it appears authentic."

Portable Media Players
We’ve already mentioned the iPhone, but two other portable entertainment media players are also in the news. First is the iPod Touch, an iPhone without the phone that has wireless capabilities, integrated YouTube, and a full browser but that still lacks the social and content-sharing options that Microsoft’s Zune possesses. The Zune, launched in late 2006, was further validation that Apple’s iPod Video and iTunes online store were on the right path, and Microsoft struck a royalty-sharing deal with at least one media conglomerate, while also using 2007 to launch Zune 2.0 in a lower-price, higher-capacity model.

Syndication Deals
Syndication deals also continued to make news throughout 2007. Two categories, though, deserve special interest: "made for internet" video content and podcasting. Both of these nascent markets have seen rapid growth in the short term.

GoFish Corp., which dubs itself as an internet video network, partnered with a syndication network with more than 1,800 affiliate websites called Broadband Enterprises. In addition to providing distribution services to deliver GoFish’s "made for internet" video content, Broadband Enterprises also handled ad insertion, serving, and tracking. Deals like this are interesting because they allow independent content producers to effectively broker their own distribution deals—and to share revenues from both the original programming and accompanying advertisements. At the time of the partnership, Broadband noted its comScore MediaMetrix score of 40 million monthly unique users and 800 million video streams per month.

"The explosive growth of online video has prompted content creators and advertisers to look to this medium as the next frontier in entertainment," said Broadband Enterprises CEO Matt Wasserlauf. "[Our] distribution and ad serving capabilities, combined with GoFish’s original video programming, create an extremely compelling platform with which to capitalize on this medium as the next frontier in entertainment."

In March, Wizzard Software announced it had acquired the podcasting company Webmayhem, Inc., which was doing business as Liberated Syndication. The goal, according to Wizzard, was to "create the largest podcasting distribution network in the world," which is no small feat as the companies (and podcasting in general) have only been around for a few years. At the time of acquisition, Liberated delivered almost 2 million audio and video shows per day for a customer base of nearly 6,000 independent and commercial content producers. The content, which Liberated dubbed as "radio- and television-style internet shows," included almost one-third of the top 25 podcasts in all iTunes categories, including Tiki Bar TV, IndieFeed, and Keith & the Girl, as well as various 2008 presidential candidates and companies such as National Public Radio.

Wizzard intends to monetize podcasting content with a blend of speech technologies, which aid in automated advertisement selection, and geographical targeting capabilities.

Another aggregator, of sorts, also made news in 2007 as Sling Media’s Slingbox concept first drew the ire of Major League Baseball with its Clip+Slip clip-sharing technology, then was scooped up by Echostar, owner of the Dish Network, in a move that will put Sling technology into Echostar boxes while also dividing Sling’s entertainment division and Dish into a separate company from the technology-focused main company.