PUSH/PULL – THE EVOLUTION OF CONTENT DISTRIBUTION IN THE BROADBAND AGE 

PATRICK SEAMANVP Streaming Media Solutions

AudioVideoWeb.com

AGE OF PRINT

• Throughout the cycle of history, Civilizations have risen and fallen, taking accumulated knowledge with them. Knowledge, writing and books were tightly controlled

• Moveable type resulted in vastly cheaper books -- and an explosion of available titles

• The choice of which books were printed and distributed was on a "push" basis – the choice of which books were to be published was, mostly, in the hands of a very few people

• Push

PUSH

Content is designed and created by a small group of people with specialized skills and

technical infrastructure, and distributed to an audience that has little input into what is

being published – or how it will be consumed.

AGE OF MEDIA (Radio/TV)

• Print, Radio & TV are expensive to produce requiring expensive infrastructure and specialized professionals and technicians. After production, media required complex distribution infrastructure

• Advances in technology drive a rapid drop in production costs. New content is produced on an inverse curve.

• Later, advances in computer technology enable desktop publishing and an accelerated drop in production costs for other media

• The proliferation of mailed newsletters created by “interest groups” expands the availability of media, followed in the last 20 years by the expansion of talk radio, granting a “voice” to the ‘common man.’

DEMIGODS

"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news-and what was not. They acted as

sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened. Today editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog and cover and comment on the

news yourself."

Rupert Murdoch News Corp, MySpace.com, The Wall Street Journal

INFLECTION POINT

Technology is "allowing the little guy to do what once required a huge corporation…

Matt Drudge has succeeded in challenging all the leading media companies of our day -- including mine. And he has done it with

minimal start-up costs: a computer, a modem and some space on a server."

Rupert Murdoch News Corp, MySpace.com, The Wall Street Journal

PULL

Content continues to be published by small groups with large production budgets but is now also

being produced by a much larger array of small, independent publishers leveraging cheap

technology to produce content of more vertical interest. Consumers are able to pick and choose from a rich array of static or interactive content, as

well as choose how, when, and where it will be consumed.

AGE OF NEW MEDIA

• The newsletter/talk radio movement transitions to the Internet. Matt Drudge, blogs, podcasts

• Corporations attempt to use PUSH agenda to drive their message but find consumers will PULL what they want

• Music & Movie industry similarly attempt to continue PUSH distribution model and are slow to adapt to consumer demand to PULL – resulting in consumers Pulling the content anyway and creating an adversarial crisis with RIAA “prosecuting consumers”

P2P IS A SYMPTOM

• These are aggressively attacked by large media concerns as facilitators of theft

• Consumers want content so much they’ll create their own infrastructure to compensate for how poorly large media concerns have adapted to the opportunities of New Media

• Consumers are criminalized• Meanwhile, content is being distributed without cost to the

content publisher• Content publishers must learn to take advantage of these

changes and intrinsically embed their advertising and sponsorships in content so that it does not matter how content is distributed.

Consider Napster, BitTorrent, and other P2P music and movie file sharing networks:

Interactive (Pull) -vs- Push

Source: Ibisworld.com 2008 Reports

• 2007 Video Game Industry Revenue: $35.5b

• 2007 Movie & Video Industry Revenue: $36.8b

US Video Game Market -vs- Movie & Video

YIN / YANG

There will always be a demand for PUSH content. Large live sporting events, mega movie titles, coverage of major global news events, disasters, elections, and overall transcendent content – and the natural human tendency to want to “veg out” and be a couch potato.

OTOH, the above have rapidly growing audiences for blogs, podcasts and independent coverage in general. Combined with interactive content and the explosion of business, entertainment, news, opinion, political, and other content, there is a level of balance between PUSH and PULL.

DELIVERY TO EVERYWHERE

BroadbandWiFi

3G wireless & competing networksin parksconcerts

shopping mallsoffice buildings

airplaneskiosksstoreshome

Anywhere & Everywhere

Content is being consumed everywhere

IMPLICATIONS OF PULL

• Interactive and ‘Pull” content have obvious long term implications for – Latency – The bidirectional nature of delivery networks– Next-gen IP networks must evolve more

efficient integrations IP data, service, voice, and video applications over broadband infrastructure

IMPLICATIONS OF PULL

• Internet neutrality – Some proposals to address Internet neutrality

concerns involve tiered throughput and allowing networks to self-regulate

– Just as the PULL market dynamic bypassed legacy music distribution models, leading to P2P file sharing, tiered networks may well lead to new, unanticipated adaptations to connect consumers with the content they want, forcing demand to find another path, like a river shifting banks

CONTENT STRUCTURE

Content restructuring strategies:

• “Googalize” content. Enabling tangential interactivity – eg: the image of a Dell or Mac computer as part of the content is clickable and can lead to multiple targeted tangential results, like you would experience in search engine results. Also called “Telescoping”

• Some popular content may return to a 1950’s/1960’s style of sponsorship with a single sponsor or sponsor group intrinsically embedded in the programming. Once done, the sponsor message is preserved regardless of how the content is distributed.

TIVO EFFECT

Content structure example:

Business and other content publishers tend to follow the examples of popular content. In Television & Radio, content is formatted for delivery within fixed time slots. Consider commercially sponsored content, such as nightly TV shows. An “hour-long” show is actually closer to 40 minutes of content and 20 minutes of advertising. It’s no wonder Tivo and DVR users are fast-forwarding through content.

It is clear the model needs to evolve to get ahead of consumer expectations. It remains to be seen how this will impact IP infrastructure.

PIRATE DOWNLOADS

Every day, copies of popular content are downloaded P2P on BitTorrent:

Example: New episodes of the popular TV show HEROES are downloaded/shared over a million times. The current top downloads:

# 1: Heroes# 2: Prison Break# 3. Dexter# 4. House# 5. Desperate Housewives

FREE DISTRIBUTIONEvery day, copies of popular content are shared online:Example: New episodes of the popular TV show HEROES are downloaded/shared over a million times. The current top downloads:

# 1: Heroes# 2: Prison Break# 3. Dexter# 4. House# 5. Desperate Housewives

So, if a million copies are being shared, that means that the publisher did not have to pay to get it in front of a a million pair of eyeballs.

PIRATE DOWNLOADS

FINAL THOUGHT(Adapt or die)

• To quote Rupert Murdoch one more time:

“Stop whining about the challenge of new technology and get out in

front of it".

PATRICK SEAMANPATRICK SEAMAN

VP Streaming Media Solutions

AudioVideoWeb.com

patrick@audiovideoweb.com

patrick@patrickseaman.com

http://www.audiovideoweb.com

http://www.patrickseaman.com

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