Adobe Systems and mobile video technology don’t go hand-in-hand, but with the acquisition of Flash graphic technology company Macromedia, Adobe is moving into the mobile video sector in a big way. The San Jose-based company announced today a deal with Verizon under which Adobe will build Flash animation technology into Verizon’s mobile phones.
In an arrangement that will offer the first Flash-based animation in a mobile phone service, Adobe’s technology will help make the delivery and retrieval of graphics and images quicker and easier.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:10 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Mark Cuban, who made his fortune selling his web video channel venture Broadcast.com to Yahoo in the good old days of the boom, has this essay about how hot the web video market is now. Whether you buy his arguments or not, his lengthy and somewhat pessimistic assessment is worth a read.
He makes one inarguable point: trying to recreate traditional TV on the Internet is a losing proposition.
What never worked back then, and what i dont think will work today or tomorrow is recreating a TV station on the net. Its not that its technically difficult. Its not, its easy. The problem is that there are no hits on the internet. A hit being defined as appointment viewing.
He makes another great point: video ads that accompany video programs on the web take forever to load.
Money is pouring in because its new , exciting and its not a 30 second ad on TV. But have you noticed the ads on some of the broadband networks ? It took 15 seconds of waiting for video on National Lampoons TOGA TV broadband channel before the commercials came on. As they do every time you load TOGA TV.
But then he makes an arguable point that the rise of web video will “dilute” the audience sizes for popular video programs, resulting in a situation where companies, accustomed to big ad revenues for their videos, start losing those revenues and then are stuck with fixed bandwidth costs.
But when ad dollars slow because of competition and audience dilution and they will, they will fall faster than the cost of bandwidth and content costs. It’s going to create a very difficult balancing act: Limiting your audience size , and the resulting bandwidth costs to match your advertising dollars over the long term that everyone seems to think that internet TV is going to be popular. That won’t be easy.
What’s missing from this neat scenario is the fact that once a web video provider starts generating decent revenues, it can pour those funds back into creating more and better content, thereby keeping up the ad revenue momentum. Those fixed bandwidth costs can just be applied to (hopefully) equally compelling product. It’s called competition.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:42 PM | Print | Comments (0)
(Note: Light blogging today and tomorrow…am on the road and in meetings.)
The much-watched San Francisco Wi-Fi bidding process has come to an end with Google and EarthLink, who teamed to offer the city free Wi-Fi service rather than bid against each other, emerging as top picks among the contenders. The two companies have to hammer out a contract with the city, which hopes to get the wireless broadband service up and running before year-end.
Google will offer ad-supported 300 kbps service that is free to consumers, while EarthLink will offer $20/month, 1 Mbps subscription options. Andrew Schmitt thinks that the $15 million in capex costs require that the venture captures 3,000 paying subscribers at $250 year to make a decent return — and that in a city the size of San Francisco, 3,000 is easy to achieve.
That’s not including opex expenses but it also doesn’t include Google’s ad revenues from the operations. All-in-all, it’s probably a pretty good deal for both Google and EarthLink…and San Francisco.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:18 PM | Print | Comments (1)
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