The Big Content Squeeze

There was a time when media companies and news agencies edited film for their programmes and, either discarded the unused footage on the cutting room floor, or ‘filed’ it in an archive for a rainy day.
However, in today’s cut throat market, the pressure is on them for them to squeeze as much value out all their resources – including any previously discarded outtakes. Fortunately, this new competitive environment has been accompanied by an explosion of new digital distribution systems that have provided additional commercial channels for this ‘surplus’ content.

Mark Boardman is the head of media and entertainment industry sales for Digital Island in the United Kingdom. Unsurprisingly, he sees the Internet as a great place for broadcasters to generate additional revenues by showing the hours of still usable archive footage, which he believes, has value for those people who have the time and money to view them.

"There are lots of advantages of driving extra traffic to a website and offering extra services such as pay-per-view. Companies can use the huge stores of footage which they have already, by repurposing it and re-editing it for an Internet audience in addition to the TV,” says Boardman.

"These days, companies are much more focused on cost control and making the most money they can out of their websites. If a company has an hour's worth of film, it can edit it and show a five minute clip for five euros, or show the whole film for 20 euros, a process that can be repeated in multiple languages,“ he says. “By working more smartly with its content, a company can derive far more money from it than has been done in the past.”

top

Differentiation

However, Reuters' vice president of video and broadband services, Ralph Nicholson, argues that repurposing is about more than simply increasing revenue. He believes it is about taking the content the company already has and doing something new and interesting with it that improves customer service.

Besides this, he says, it also fulfils a more practical role. Companies like Reuters would traditionally develop a product once and sell it a hundred times but that no longer acceptable explains Nicholson. "People are demanding customisation and nobody is prepared to pay for content that looks like their competitors'," he says.

Reuters has developed a number of services specifically for the broadband Internet market, which have grown out of the company's mainstream business. These include online financial video services for the US, UK, Japanese and Asian markets, as well as an online news, entertainment and health service.

"The beauty of repurposing is that we can aim for a niche market in a way that we have not been able to do before. And, although these products are specifically designed for the Internet, we made sure that they began life as full broadcast quality packages so that we are able to attack both markets at the same time,” says Nicholson.

For Reuters, the task of repurposing their news packages is straightforward. They have always been an agency providing international news in ‘natural sound’ – sound without commentary. In this way, its TV station customers can re-voice and re-package the news to suit the different cultures and interests.

Reuters uses Digital Island technology to compress, format and stream the data for its Internet services right to the desktop of its users – where they are able to view it via Windows Media Player, QuickTime and RealPlayer formats at 28.8, 56 or 128 Kbps. The Digital Island network can support more than 700,000 simultaneous video streams.

top

Content Optimisation

NewsTakes is another company specialising in providing content repurposing services. Unlike Digital Island, however, which provides network services, NewsTakes' systems are designed to sit on customers' own web servers or application servers. From a single copy of the content, NewsTakes is able to deliver it to any wired or wireless Internet access device.

"We are able to recognise the amount of bandwidth that is available, and dynamically adapt the content to make it a continuous user experience," says Rodger Armstrong, vice president of business development and general manager of NewsTakes Europe. "We analyse the video feeds with a series of algorithms, which prioritise the frames based on factors such as a scene change, key words, crowd noise or graphics coming in. We don’t try to deliver it live with full motion, when the bandwidth will not permit it; instead, we deliver an intelligent collection of analysed and prioritised frames,” he says.

"We are about offering the broadest possible reach to the broadest possible content, which is of value either to a portal, an operator taking content from a variety of originators, or to an enterprise that wants its employees or customers to have universal access to its Intranet," explains Armstrong.
"It's about making content intelligent about the device and the network, rather than waiting for the device and the network to become intelligent about the content."

Charging for content is not the only way to make money, however. UK brewer, Scottish Courage has paid 820,000 euros for the right to advertise its flagship Foster’s lager brand on Granada Interactive’s ITV-F1.com Formula One site.
Granada have a community of Formula One fans who are hungry for whatever information they can get and – in the opinion of Scottish Courage – a thirst for lager.

ITV has the terrestrial rights to the races, which enables them to repurpose the content for a wider Internet audience. The site has 420,000 unique users and registered 5 million page impressions before the season even started.

top

Mobile content

A particularly striking example of a company generating additional revenue by repurposing existing content is illustrated by the UK’s Financial Times newspaper. Together with the Carphone Warehouse, the company has established a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), FT Mobile, using the BT Cellnet network that gives its users immediate access to the newspaper’s latest news.

For a monthly charge, subscribers to one of its two services are sent automatically the latest news flashes – in their chosen markets – as soon as they are published. Furthermore, should they want to hear the full transcript, he or she can dial in to hear the full story, which is recorded by FT broadcasters as the story breaks.
However, it is not as simple as that – the entire system depends on the complex interplay of technology and personnel who have had to adapt their working practises to suit the new system.

The FT journalists writing the headlines publish them via a content management system to a screen where a team of dedicated broadcasters sift through them for importance.
If the story is deemed to be in the breaking news category, it is pushed out through an automated mechanism to the relevant subscribers.

The SMS message hits the mobile telephone between one and four minutes after the story has reached the FT’s website and within five minutes the story will have been recorded for the mobile user to listen to. A second service, FT Mobile Gold, is a premium WAP service that gives quick access to business information from FT.com and FT Market Watch.com.

The FT's content management system allows the organisation to distribute content through any device. An essential factor of this – besides the obvious technical complexities – has involved the FT working closely with its editorial staff to make sure they write stories is in a way that suits any device.

"The idea is to bring the FT to people at anytime anywhere," says Lara Salameh, product manager with the FT. "And people can choose how they wish to do this. FT Mobile is complementary to the paper and the website. The feed is supplying the FT Mobile phone as well as FT.com. All the content is fed in by the journalists sitting at Southwark Bridge in one integrated newsroom."

Repurposing content is about squeezing more value out of existing assets and with the trend towards having access to ‘anything anywhere’, it looks set to dramatically increase. Furthermore, the imminent release of new technologies such as GPRS-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants – will further stimulate the supply of repurposed content.

Yet, for all the alleged advantages repurposing content has for the providers of information, there remains a considerable amount of scepticism surrounding this new practise.
Will people really be prepared to pay a premium for ‘surplus’ content when the price they paid for the rump of it will already have reflected the cost of this additional content. In short, will they pay twice for the same thing? Secondly, will there be enough demand to make repurposing commercially feasible – after all, the world is not exactly short of information sources, is it?

top