A few weeks I was struck by the unusual sight of a YouTube video embedded on a Yahoo! sports page. It appears that as video streams are increasingly syndicated across multiple outlets, we’re seeing more signs that video stream hosting and video stream aggregating are developing into two complementary but independent businesses.
YouTube is moving from a core competency in hosting user-generated content into the premium content marketplace via the rapidly growing number of YouTube Channel partnerships. The business models and monetization processes are still a bit of a work in progress as YouTube explores how much system integration is appropriate and YouTube’s content-owning partners seek a comfort level with how much content to syndicate. But what is clear is that as YouTube offers more licensed and copyrighted content on its Channel pages, and (as mentioned above) syndicates its hosted streams to often competing destination sites (such as Yahoo), we are seeing the company’s hosting and aggregating business models branch off from each another.
Take ABC/Disney: if you go directly to youtube.com/abc, you’ll find the YouTube ABC Television Channel. However, it’s still largely a placeholder page, with only limited content available from the Jimmy Kimmel show - and if you didn’t happen to already know the URL and had to search the YouTube site for an “ABC Channel”, you wouldn’t get there at all: instead, you’d get to a public broadcasting station from Australia that happens to be named ABC. That’s right - the search returns no mention of ABC/Disney whatsoever - clearly, YouTube and ABC are taking it slow here…
There’s also the issue of physical asset control - speaking on a panel the other day, ABC’s Albert Cheng acknowledged that any ABC/Disney content streaming from YouTube is actually being hosted from the ABC/Disney servers. In other words, rather than host the data and the stream it locally at YouTube, the content is merely pulled in from an external data center and wrapped in a Youtube ’skin’. Since the ABC streams still use the YouTube Flash player, this is all transparent to the user, but nevertheless, in this case YouTube is merely serving as an aggregator.
Now let’s look at CBS: games from this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament are being streamed live on the YouTube CBS/March Madness channel. As with ABC, these streams are hosted externally by the content owner (CBS) and are also available for streaming from the network’s own site. This year, however, streams of live games are being delivered via the Microsoft Silverlight format rather than YouTube’s streaming format of choice, Adobe Flash - a coup for Silverlight, and a first for YouTube (users will have to download and install the Silverlight player if they haven’t already done so). As can be seen from the screenshot at right, to the user accustomed to the familiar look and feel of YouTube’s Flash player, this a much more CBS-branded experieince.
In general, syndication makes a lot of sense: content owners tend to be more comfortable holding on to and hosting their own assets, and if a given partner has their own streaming infrastructure already implemented, there’s little point in reinventing the wheel. Furthermore, live streaming of events such as the NCAA games is especially demanding, and Silverlight has already proven itself as a very capable live platform during last summer’s Beijing Olympics.
All well and good - but for streaming video to make it to television hardware, these technologies will have to migrate to chipsets. Adobe already has a standalone version of Flash optimized for use in embedded devices, and the next verison of Silverlight (Silverlight 3, just entering beta testing) will be able to run outside the browser (it’s not known yet if a similar lightweight version of Silverlight for embedded devices is also planned, but I would guess that’s a strong possibility).
Stay tuned…
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