The Video War

It's about to begin in earnest. Some Battles have already been fought. The time we've all been waiting for, the time we've all been talking about for a decade now, is finally here. The real battle is about to begin.

We're going to see two different sides of the war going on simultaneously; the hardware battle for living room dominance and the software battle for distribution systems. We've got some big players in this fight for video dominance and everyone wants to be the team that puts video/television (and their ad revenue stream) in front of consumers.

The hardware battle will rage on for years. Eventually video hardware and software systems will merge and the battle will continue. But that's not what I'm here to talk about right now.

The battle that is going to be fought this year that I'm interested in is the battle for distribution. Google showed us just how important the video-on-pc realm is with its enormous purchase price of YouTube. There are dozens of other video sites popping up all over the place. If you want to stay in the browser, then that's fine content for you. But the browser is going to go away as we know it. No time REAL soon I think (that's a topic for another post). And the king of the video delivery isn't going to be a website.

Enter the video player players: Joost, Adobe Media Player, and my favorite The Democracy Player. Apple has already gotten started as well with video delivery on iTunes and TiVo has got sime fingers in the soup with some download-able movie content, though that's kind of entering into the realm of hardware.

But Joost, AMP and Democracy are the players I see with the biggest potential. An important aspect of these players is cross-platform-ability. All of these are either platform agnostic (AMP runs on Apollo, a runtime for Windows, OSX & Linux; Democracy is tooled in Mozilla's XUL platform which runs on anything you want to throw it on) or has at least been built for the up-and-coming OSX platform.

How these players get their content to the people work in slightly different ways. The way the user interacts with these systems works in different ways. How content creators get paid for their content works differently. What advertisers can do to get their product in front of people is very different.

Joost is a pretty popular topic of discussion right now and I've been fortunate enough to do a bit of beta testing on the platform. I wish I could say I was impressed. They're trying to offer on demand video using peer-to-peer technology to move the content around. Because I'm pretty much "streaming" the video the quality really suffers. The interface is pretty cool, and if the bandwidth weren't an issue Joost could have some real promise. But until that happens I'm just not going to get excited about it. I'm picky and I've gotten used to my HD content.

This is where the other two options I'm excited about come in. AMP and Democracy both operate on a subscription model, rather than an on-demand model. I know the kinds of things that I like to watch. All I have to do is select the feeds to the content I'm interested in and the player will pull down the content as it becomes available. I'm not expecting to watch it right away, I'm more then willing to let the file come down from the server; or even from a .torrent or other peer-to-peer technology. When it's available to me (in all of it's 720p artifact free glory) then I'll watch it at my leisure.

Now Democracy is great; but it's just a little geeky. Subscribing to some feeds is a little tricky sometimes. It's completely open so that everybody can make a feed and have their own channel. But it doesn't have much in the way of corporate backing. This is where AMP is better and why I'm really looking forward to it. AMP's feeds allows content deliverers to really customize the experience. To brand it, to put in the station bugs, or non-interupting advertisements. The ability to "shop" directly from the video interface (a feature longed for by those with ad dollars to spend) becomes quite possible in AMP. And Adobe is on the hunt for some big video companies to get some content in there so that Adobe Media Player is THE place to be for video content.

XML feeds are obviously going to be a very important aspect to this battle. PodCasts have really taken off for audio, and video podcasting is really starting to gain momentum. Even content from content websites can be gotten from feeds (such as YouTube feeds). What the players allow the users, and more importantly the content creators, to do with this information is really how the battles will be fought.

I'm really looking forward to this fight!

-JC

(For some more very good reading on the topic, check out Nicholas Reville's essay on RSS and video distribution)