Video Non-demand

My neighbor, TVN Entertainment VP of Technology Dave Bartolone, built a chicken run on the property line of our houses — along the east (sunrise) wall of my office. After several false starts (and happy raccoons), the chicken project has grown into an elaborate chicken condo with many amenities and security features.

Among the security features is a webcam so that while Dave was at IBC, he could — in theory — tune into chickencam.tv to see and hear the chickens, much the way I see and hear them all day, every day. If I pop chickencam.tv open right now, I can get the chicken soundtrack in stereo delay — first through the window and then, about half a second later, from my computer. Talk about latency.

Dave is only half kidding when he says he's trying to work chickencam.tv up to the 500 page views a day that it needs to qualify for Google ads. The impulse to monetize his chicken network was unavoidable; it's what he does for a living on a much larger scale. TVN is the largest aggregator and distributor of video on demand (VOD) by volume in the country — 3,500 hours of MPEG-2 SD content per month, 200 hours of MPEG-2 HD, 150 hours (and growing) of H.264 SD, and a handful of hours (and shrinking) of VC-1. TVN does all its own encoding — most of it on a Digital Rapids pipeline — as well as providing secure encoding as a service to content providers.

Dave was at IBC in part to find high-quality emerging solutions for his next technical goal: HD H.264 encoding. He says that among other things, he was looking at systems based on core technology from the French company Ateme, as well as other increasing options for HD H.264. (On a related note, at IBC, Adobe announced it would now support H.264 in its Moviestar player — Flash Player 9 — and Flash Media Server, which significantly widens the reach of the codec at both the distribution and consumer ends of the chain).

TVN's customers are traditional content providers and distributors, plus emerging players in telco and the Internet. That's pushing TVN to explore what's next after VOD. The company is part of experimental trials to dynamically insert ads into VOD content; beyond VOD, it's developing new business models for distribution and monetization. The focus is two-fold: bringing what it knows about security and quality in the closed VOD delivery chain to the wide-open spaces of the Internet and developing new forms of content-driven commerce. It won't be chickencam.tv. Tune in at 6:15 a.m. PST to catch the rooster for a limited time only.