VON - Business Models for Web TV
Rob | March 20, 2008Today marked VON’s last day of conferences. This was my first VON and I now have a better understanding of the VoiP industry than I could have imagined. This entire week, tough, I was hard pressed to find discussions that were relevant to the industry in which I belong; namely, the online content delivery industry.
Perhaps the most relevant session I attended was yesterday’s discussion on Business Models for Web TV. The VON website described the session as follows:
Whether it is providing innovative digital marketing through streaming video ads, applications that measure audiences for Internet TV or working with content partners to provide unique programming options to your web TV portfolio mix, Web TV is creating a new industry of vendors, applications and services for the delivery of Video on the Net. Hear about the unique new applications and services these panelists have brought to market and see why you might want to take advantage of the business opportunities in Web TV.
- Who is making money off of Web TV services?
- What are the applications that help to drive profits?
- What are the new technologies driving Web TV success?
Fellow attendee, Kfir Pravda, summed the session up very nicely in his blog posting, “VON Live blogging - Business model for Web TV.”
As Kfir stated, the only business model really discussed in was regarding advertising.
From all the new media conferences I’ve attended over the last few months, advertising seems to be the topic to discuss in terms of how to monetize from online content delivery. Regardless of the core topic, there seems to be a natural gravitation towards the discussion of advertising.
To encapsulate what’s being said about advertising in a nutshell, the overall consensus is that advertising works here in the U.S. (Europe is a slightly different story, where they are used subscription-based models). The time-shifted model is ever popular because of the convenience of being able to access the content you want and people don’t mind having to sit through a few ads if the content is free.
Of course, this summary can branch into a hundred different debatable threads of discussion, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
Hulu, which launched last week, is a perfect example of this model. And when someone I know in a completely unrelated industry sends me an email that says, “You gotta check out this site! Free movies and TV!” I think that speaks volumes of a company that is on the right track.
