For the past few months, I have been assembling IPTV business plans for a number of my clients, some of whom are new to both digital video and the internet.
For many of these clients, everyone they meet in our industry seems to live in a world that’s filled with dense, almost impenetrable jargon. Take this example:
“We propose to monetize your IPTV DC by using a SAS approach with a hybrid-P2P CDN that supports DRM and your existing CMS infrastructure, while enhancing your CRM systems and DAM tools, built with a combination of PHP, SQL, Python and a LINUX backbone.”
No wonder people are confused.
Most of my clients, unlike most of us, have an easily described business proposition. They want to make money by creating and delivering video content to their audience. That’s not too hard to understand.
Unfortunately, it is sometimes exceptionally hard to even describe what these internet video and software companies are trying to sell to us.
What, for example, is Hulu? Or Drupel? XOOPS? Serendipity? Rhapsody? Blinkx? Ning? Akimbo? Pawky? Pooxi? Kwego? Flixya? Aggrega?
Who are these people? What are they making? Are they content providers? Software developers? Ad agencies? Networks?
Sometimes I am damned if I know.
Here’s another example ? this time from a real press release (without names):
“XXXXXX, the only provider of multiformat, multiplatform DRM and the recognized “Switzerland of DRM,” today announced an integration with XXXX, a global video applications service provider that applies the rigors of broadcast to the management, syndication and reporting for all forms of digital content from any source to any destination.”
This unintelligible garbage does not bode well for our industry.
I call the companies that rely on this kind of language “Media Derivatives.”
Most of them do not develop any real content themselves. They are one, two, even three steps away from the visionaries who actually create what we watch.
In some ways, it’s a lot like the current mess in the housing and mortgage industry. For years, “knowledge professionals” in the banking industry invented and sold convoluted “derivatives” of home mortgages. Then they cloaked these products in jargon and terminology that only the most dedicated analyst could understand.
Confusion doesn’t benefit the digital industry
Many of these derivative companies have now gone bust ? some for the simple reason that there was no underlying business benefit ? to ANYONE.
Even worse, there was almost no way to find this out in advance, simply because the technical language that they used to describe their business was designed to confuse ? not clarify.
The emperor really did have no clothes.
I fear that this is happening in the IPTV and digital video business today. It used to be that new companies announced a useful solution to an existing problem. If it was a good solution, they prospered ? if not, they failed.
But nobody tried to confuse the marketplace by creating an oddly named company that solved a problem that nobody knew they had.
So be careful out there.
I know that offering a complex solution is not necessarily evil. In fact, most media businesses are a web of complexity. But the job of any good business must be to clear away the smoke and mirrors and lay out their business proposition so it can be compared to others. Then, informed purchasing decisions can be made.
What’s desperately needed is a single clear source of information about all this stuff. I just wish I could find it.
If you have good examples of IPTV marketing doublespeak, send them as BackTalk to this article or directly to me at mfayette@aol.com.
