NEW YORK
This month, TitanCast, a platform designed to carry broadcast signals on the Internet based on DMAs, is announcing the first several hundred members of its fledgling network.
Developed by Titan TV Media, a provider of software-based technologies for digital broadcasting, TitanCast provides a turnkey video distribution platform for local, syndicated, and user-generated content. Viewers can also search across content without leaving the station’s branded player. They can even become part of the news team, submitting audience-generated content for stations to consider airing on the day’s news play-out.
‘JUST ANOTHER CABLE SYSTEM’
Because direct conversion of standard broadcast programming to Internet delivery exploits a long untapped place- and time-shifted PC and mobile device market, it is a competency coveted by more and more broadcasters.
“We need to have our broadcasting signals on the Internet,” said James F. Goodmon, president and CEO of Capitol Broadcasting at the launch of TitanCast at NAB2007 in April. “I would even suggest the law is in place to do that right now. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t like that. It’s just another platform. The Internet to me is just another cable system.”
By making it easy for affiliates to upload their video and have advertising supported through geographically targeted pre-roll ads and revenue sharing, the service is spawning a new kind of profit center.
(click thumbnail)This diagram shows the path broadcasters’ signals take through the Titancast architecture.TitanCast is built on a Flash video player that uses custom Action Script code integrating broadcast Web sites, content and video advertising. It provides media management tools for syndicating video to other members of the TitanCast Network, matching advertising to the user’s geographical location. Based largely on Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 (C#), running on Windows Server 2003, the TitanCast Player site customizes Web pages with Flash components and server functionality for authorization and metrics collection. Video and advertising are delivered by a Vital Stream Content Delivery Network (all video delivery is done via streaming in version 1.0). The back-end contains Web services for ad selection, metrics and authorization as well as secure streaming.
By joining the TitanCast network—a group of broadcasters, content owners and advertisers—viewers are now being connected in real-time over the Web via the TitanCast Player, enabling a new model of advertising revenue and content distribution.
TV, user-generated content, and other video-centric applications already comprise more than half of all Internet traffic, with that percentage expected to spike higher and higher in the next few years according to experts. All that traffic means the playing field is tilting in favor of providers who best diversify their content and platform to suit new personalized, interactive preferences of an emerging Web 2.0 and Television 2.0 audience.
“More and more stations are saying ‘how can I get into this whole MySpace, YouTube, user-generated space,” said Jack Perry, founder and CEO of TitanTV Media.
TitanCast spent about eight months embedding automated uploading, transcoding, hosting, and streaming into their new offering. Perry stresses simplicity.
“Stations or viewers upload content and they’re done,” he said. “We’ve totally automated it for WRAL so that at the end of the day the content just flows into the TC network. It’s no extra work. And that’s the way I think it will be for all stations down the road.”
According to Perry, customers will “re-capture viewers in a time slot they were never able to control: the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. slot.” Viewers “may spend 30 to 45 minutes within the KZEW or KCRG brand” as refreshed content makes their Web properties more sticky and “trains viewers to come online and stay online.” Perry expects the network to grow to 1,000 stations.
CHANGING TIMES
Must television become cross-platform to survive? One Midwestern station group, which has already signed on to TitanCast, says yes.
With television and radio increasingly in the information business, “if you don’t pay attention, you’re going to be sorry about it down the road,” said Elizabeth Murphy Burns, president of Duluth, Minn.-based Morgan Murphy Media, which owns and operates television and radio broadcast properties in Wisconsin and Washington. “Advertising is changing. Product placement, banners, trying different things on different platforms;” the end result, she believes, will be a combination of what everyone in the industry observes in what everyone else does about this, “state by state, region by region.”
Just as it has become easy for mom and pop video producers to air their video online, it’s becoming just as easy for advertisers to select or opt-in for advertising-based monetization, according to broadband advertising innovator Jayant Kadambi, CEO of YuMe, a Redwood City, Calif.-based company that has developed a dedicated broadband video advertising network.
“There are lots of people trying to figure out how to allow the little, medium, or regional undefined businesses to advertise easily in the video domain,” he said.
TitanCast pays off by “taking our programming and keeping it local—letting people take it on road with them, like SlingBox,” Burns said. “For instance, when you’re traveling in Las Vegas, you get local programming from home (which could be L.A. Dubuque, La Crosse, or Houston) with Vegas commercials. It opens up another advertising road! This additional national umbrella is very appealing.”
TitanCast offers stations a scalable solution not available anywhere else, says James F. Goodmon Jr., vice president and general manager of CBC New Media Group in Raleigh, N.C. Stations can receive revenues from ads sold around content that is displayed even on another broadcaster’s Website. Most importantly, they can now sell advertising on content viewed by people within their DMA, watching on a Website outside that DMA.
“Not only are we able to attract more people to the site,” says Goodmon Jr, “but given the new content and user interface, our visitors are looking at more content and spending more time online with us than ever before. We are now exceeding a million video views a month” doubling last year’s Web traffic.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
In the past, Titancast’s original Air-to-Web Broadcast Replication (AWBR) patent and others pointed the way to today’s innovations. But there’s more to the picture here than meets the eye—more than just content and technology.
What seemed at the time like a straightforward bridge from broadcast signal to online access has reached a twist in the road: intellectual property issues. To obviate this snag, Capitol Broadcasting is asking the U.S. Copyright Office to extend or recommend an amendment by Congress for compulsory copyright license to “in-market retransmission of TV signals.” Such a license would only be available to companies complying with cable systems rules and regulations that restrict Web retransmissions to TV stations’ over-the-air markets, according to Capitol. “Broadcasters need to have their signals available on all of the distribution platforms” Capitol CEO Goodmon said.
With the technical and commercial hurdles overcome, the competition is heating up for the best implementations of cross-platform news delivery. But, it poses another question: Can government keep pace with advances in this new generation of content distribution? Time will tell, but TitanCast has let the cat out of the bag.
