Here is something you probably don’t know about Marcellus: we’ve tried our hand at content publishing.

Yesssirreee! The Marcellus team was exactly where you, the content publisher, is today: looking for venues/channels/mediums to distribute/monetize/publicize our content.

And honestly, we were not mighty successful at it… so with the deepest respect for you, and a first-person understanding of your needs, we decided to stick to what we do best: design the tools to help you dig the gold.

What are the 10 things we learned about online video:

1. Online video is online first and video second.

2. Online video is driven by consumption, not adoption.

3. Online video is essentially a niche business.

4. You can compromise on the meaning, but you cannot compromise on quality.

5. Context is king; content is the king-maker.

6. Unless you are in the porn-business, people are willing to pay$0 for video.

7. Youtube is, and will increasingly become, the TV Guide channel.

8. Finding your audience is easy, keeping it is hard.

9. The name of the game is: accessibility.

10. It helps to have an online video platform that places its bets on your success.

Okay, the last one was a plug for Marcellus… so I will give you another one:

10. You only define the price, the users decide the value of your content.

Happy Streaming.

Recently, the artist formerly known as Macromedia – Adobe plugged the most obvious hole in its Flash platform by announcing DRM in the form of Flash Access 2.0.

What can we take away?

• Premium content comes at a premium and needs to be treated differently.
• Adobe has effectively killed the Adobe Media player – browser-based streaming is the future.
• The competition for adoption by premium-content owners is going to heat up… and for now it looks like it going to be Microsoft versus Adobe.

The bigger question: DRM serves a tactical purpose, but is it sound strategy?

The money question: How many publishers out there are interested in DRM?

What is Marcellus’s stand? Well we couldn’t say it any better than Mr. Jobs:

“Convincing them (publishers) to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.”

I’d like to end our Obama-centric, and politically biased diatribes on the Marcellus blog, with this video.

Perhaps all of you have watched this already.

Nonetheless, it’s still very moving, so let’s end this election chatter and move on with a renewed sense of vigor and with the re-instated belief: Yes, We Can!

Cheers, from all of us here at Marcellus.

[youtube=http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY]

After announcing a few months ago that they were shutting down Brightcove.TV, Brightcove has now announced that they will be discontinuing their ad-supported free version.

The upwards jump is scary..from $0/year, you’re now faced with $6000/year.

I remember a recent interview when Jeremy Allaire said: “We’ve made multiple bets, and the platform side won.”

• Obviously, some publishers lost. Especially given the current economic context.
• We shudder to think of the money that went into funding Brightcove.TV and all those free ad-supported accounts.
• Finally, Brightcove seems to think that several hundred dollars a month is a “low-cost” service. Pull up SaaS offerings today, and find me something that has a basic service running into several hundred dollars a month.

Hmph!

We’re trying to figure out what we can do to help. Obviously, this is a big opportunity for us, but we also want to see how we can help, beyond just offering an alternative.

Initial thoughts include:

• making it simple for Brightcove Basic customers to transition into the Marcellus platform
  • importing videos
  • importing metadata
  • anything else……?
• making it very cost-efficient to make the transition
  • we’re planning on waiving the SaaS fee for Brightcove customers
  • we’re planning on creating a special pricing model attuned to this new reality.

Two weeks is all we ask. Please stay tuned, and I promise to respond with a solution.

When Time Magazine nominated You as the person of the year in 2006, the notion that resonated was that YouTube had methodically deconstructed every notion we had about content production, consumption and distribution.

We now had the tools to create and express ourselves freely(Blogger/YouTube), the ubiquity that made content accessible(broadband internet/RSS feeds/device independence), and the ability to distribute content at a very micro-level, enabling levels of individualization that has never before been possible.

Lev Grossman aptly said: “It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

In December 1996, exactly a decade before Time came up with this brilliant feature, Alan Greenspan made a comment in reference to the stock market boom of the 1990s. He said: “…But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

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Fast forward to 2008, skipping through the revolution that YouTube has brought about. Try to ignore the fact that Greenspan was proved right during the dot-com bust, and focus on the fact that he is about to proved right, once again.

In 2001, we didn’t really have broadband, there was a player war where even Real Player could hold their ground, and content delivery was expensive. Companies like Vingage could charge you $50,000 for content management, encoding and delivery……AND still call themselves inexpensive. They’re dead now, because folks like us can now offer the same at $49 + $10/month.

You see, today, we have broadband, we have Flash, and we have cloud infrastructure.

Effectively, we have the all the basics in place, and in theory, online media business models should be thriving at this point. We should be seeing a truck-load of very imaginative models taking full advantage of this unique position we are in.

In 2007, YouTube alone consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2001. There’s your demand.

By the time I’m done writing this post, there will be an additional 50 hours of video content, if not more, up on YouTube. There’s your supply.

It’s obvious that media content production and consumption on the Internet has grown phenomenally, and Lev Grossman was spot on: YOU are responsible for this phenomenon.

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But something’s obviously gone wrong. Online media business models today are a joke…….merely glorified(and fine-tuned for style) versions of old media business models.

Of course, advertisers are seeing declining returns(if I can get a lower-rez, ads-free version of SNL on YouTube, then I’m going to YouTube. Period.) and we’re having to choose between charging people money for premium content, or improvising on the placement of ads.
Hulu has effectively put to rest the first option…people are now going to think four times before trying to charge their viewers for premium content.
And sure…toying with ad formats and placement might help, but that’d only delay the misery.

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So what’s the problem? The problem is that we’ve ignored distribution.

We’ve understood that there’s a lot of production, so we need platforms.

We’ve understood that there’s a lot of consumption, so we need infrastructure.

But we’ve forgotten all about distribution. There are no real answers (or even questions, for that matter) about what next-gen distribution is going to mean.

The way we see it, even the best folks out there building online video platforms(from Jeremy Allaire to Chad Hurley) understand the Internet and they understand video.

But in their quest to get video on the Internet, they have forgotten about the importance of the same people who made LonelyGirl15 an online phenomenon. Yes, they have forgotten about YOU.

• You form a critical piece in the new media value chain, and your importance has been mis-interpreted….under-rated.

• Yes, you are the producers, and the consumers, but you are also the new distributors. You are the new medium, not the 480 x 360 Flash player.

• You drive traffic. Heck, you ARE the traffic.

• Your interactions and involvement determines how much money an advertiser will pay for an ad spot.

• You represent the soul of the media democracy- the democracy that never was, because you have been looked upon as audiences, not participants.

Please don’t get all worked up. I’m sure Allaire and Hurley meant well. In fact, I know they meant well. Brightcove and YouTube are products of love, and their success speaks to their intent.

But, if we can set aside our (irrational) exuberance for a second, and look at the business of online video objectively, it’s clear that no business can succeed without an effective distribution strategy, no matter how wonderful the surrounding economics are.

My pitch on TechCrunch talked about a $1.75 in infrastructure costs bringing in $4.00 in ad revenues, but I also said that I’m not going to B.S. you..that you’d still have to go out there and distribute your content(…”market your site”) for the economics to make any sense.

So here’s the challenge we want to tackle: go out there and construct a viable model for new media distribution that places due importance on the distributor…YOU.

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Thanks for reading. I’ll look forward to your thoughts.

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Update: This may or may not be relevant, but Marshall Kirkpatrick just cost Barack Obama(DEMOCRATIC nominee) the elections.

Hey everyone.

Riff here… let’s deviate from the “what’s happening?” and “what will happen?” to something more relevant for you – the publisher: what does all this mean for you?

As I sit and think about how to introduce the team (friends to me) and the service (passion for me) to the rest of you, I am reminded of the long, arduous and fun journey… we really set out to create a service that will change what you can do with online video.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to fulfilling our goals, but I do believe we’re bang in pursuit.

Marcellus is a service that is, in every sense of the word, designed for you, me and everybody we know.

• You have 20 videos that you shot over the summer and want to create a portfolio for someone looking for an ad designer – this service is for you;

• You are a sales manager and have a sales demo that you want to share with twenty members spread all across the world – this service is for you;

• You are a car company and want to launch a viral campaign centralized around a web site with a look and feel that you will not get on Youtube – this service is for you.

We’ve made it very simple, very accessible, and most importantly, very affordable.

If you read on our post on pricing a few days ago, you’d have noticed that we’ve basically gone and commoditized online video.

Our business model is not centered around grabbing thousands of dollars from you every year. It’s based on the fact that if we help you realize a significant ROI as you scale up, then there will be a cash bonus for us in there somewhere.

It’s one of those “we-help-you-help-us-help-you-help-us-….” models.
Welcome to Marcellus.