Making good content easy to find is the best way of making money in the web-tv business.
I sat in the panel “Streaming across Europe” at the Streaming Media Europe Conference in London. Some of the sessions are available here: http://www.streamukdemo.com/
I would have been interested in discussing the cultural aspect of communicating cross culturally, as well as the specific production challenges that arise from live and on demand web-tv productions in multiple languages across borders. However the debate focused on technicalities of Content Delivery Networks, but also on expanding the streaming business to new markets.
It seems that the predominant mindset is that culture and entertainment will be the most important drivers for traffic in Europe, like they are in the US. Now I believe that availability, quality and revenue are the main drivers behind growth in web-tv viewership. So making good content easy to find is the best way of making money in this business. I’m not going to discuss business models here, but I thought that it was interesting to listen to a couple of my colleagues in the debate, and their take on collaboration. One of the most interesting parts of the debate was how the European Content Delivery Networks see their US competitors and the common ground found between the different European CDNs when talking about finding ways to collaborate in keeping the US CDNs at bay.
From my perspective it´s going to be interesting to see if the larger pan-european CDNs start collaborating on acquiring original content. Because if (when) we get a European Hulu, or perhaps when Spotify ventures into video, then European TV owners should start trembling.
