“Poor ad workflows” holding back VOD industry

Joseph O'Halloran ©RapidTVNews | 09-05-2012



Realising the potential of video on demand has always been seen as more or less a given but the second analysis of the market in the space of two days has revealed that VOD needs a bit of vigour to flourish.

In its report, logistics specialist IMD believes that it has revealed a number of shortcomings associated with VOD monetisation especially in terms of limitations associated with current advertising workflows

This follows hot on the heels of research from the European Commission Audiovisual Services Department which found that for 2011, even though VOD was growing in importance, it represented less than a single percentage of total TV revenues. Furthermore, of this figure, very little was being returned to content owners and in the case of broadcasters, spend on on-demand services typically amounted to less than 1% of their total programme budget.

The EC found that most growth was now coming from advertising rather than pay, with the majority of services delivered via open systems and not subscription based. This was reflected in IMD’s research in the UK, undertaken amongst major media owners, including Channel 5 and Sky, which found that as the number of connected platforms and the audience for VOD continued to increase, advertising across all online video is mirroring this growth, with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recording a £109 million UK spend in 2011.

Yet despite this, IMD insisted that the industry would benefit from a more streamlined and standardised ad delivery workflow, in order to improve output quality and remove some of the complexities and costs that are being incurred by publishers and brands. Key issues identified in the research included an absence of a consistent quality standard, poor quality video, no standard delivery path, multiplatform delivery and a lack of transparency.

“As online advertising grows in importance, advertisers and their media buyers are demanding more from their video campaigns, yet web publishers are struggling to deliver the same service to their customers that they would get for broadcast TV advertising,” commented Ross Priestley, Commercial Director. “Workflows need to become more organised and managed to guarantee audiences the highest quality viewing experience and we are working closely with publishers to help them overcome the workflow issues they face by creating a trusted pathway to reduce their cost in terms of time, money and reputation.”

“It’s increasingly about quality, especially as more and more TV-like devices enter the market,” added Kirsty Roos, Traffic and Analytics, Channel 5. “You have to balance the demands of getting it live with the need for quality of experience for the user. Every time you encode or edit an already compressed file you are losing quality. If an advertiser has spent £100,000 on an ad, you don’t want the last step in the chain to ruin it.”