Abhishek Tiwari

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It goes without saying that Wall Street Journal has been one of the most successful newspaper of its time. Especially within the financial community. You ask anyone over 35 and you will realize the amount of respect WSJ has. However, if you ask a teenager the same question and you may receive altogether a different answer.

This is because WSJ has been truly late to the Internet party and hasn’t really capitalized it as a major distribution channel. The whole online experience is restricted to paying customers only. There is very minimal information which is available for free. Sure they have 900k users paying for this. However that is peanuts when you compare this to any other news sites or portals. There is much more to be had with ad based revenue.

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Comscore recently published metrics validating Google’s lead position (21.5%) in the online video market. Well, no surprises there, especially with them acquiring the YouTube property.

The release also stated that 3 out of 4 internet users streamed video in May. That stat clearly reflects the success of video as a medium and the penetration rate within subscriber community. Online video primarily has been used for entertainment. You know people ghostriding or watching lonelygurl15.

The question is, “now what?”. Monetizing video and actual usage of video as mode of general content consumption are still not ubiquitous. Let’s talk about monetization for now. I will cover the content consumption problem in a later post.

One would have expected to see embedded ads in the video we consume. LonelyGurl15 would have been a millionaire if a clean, seamless ad model existed. As Nick Gonzalez says (on TechCrunch), there are many start-ups tackling this problem, but no one has nailed it. The problems are:

• There is no a perfect model yet (pre, post, embedded etc)
• User content is unpredictable and in some cases unfiltered. Advertisers are not sure about associating their brand with such content

In my opinion a perfect video ad model should include following elements: Read more »

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Over past few months I have been checking out some of these nuvo online movie download services. Frankly I haven’t been much impressed with the ones which let you download movies on your PC.

I am much more of the “lean back on the couch and let my remote do the work” types. So you can understand why I was unimpressed by MovieLink, Vongo and the rest.

I have always wanted a set-top box based service, which could allow me to rent/buy movies right from my couch. Recently there were two key service launches.

Both these services allow you to access movies from your TV. Vudu even stores first few minutes of all the movies in its library right on the set-top box. This provides instant gratification. In principal, if you can download faster than you play, then such a service could deliver a great experience.

Now I haven’t personally played with this service yet but I do have high hopes for it. What I am interested in is the usability of the whole browse movie catalog and rent/buy experience. I was hoping Apple TV would address it but I guess not in the current version. You still have to use iTunes to download the movie/shows, which kinda sucks.

So finally I have real high hopes for these new services, specially when things are heating up in IPTV and Content OnDemand space. I will have additional updates once I get a chance to play around with any of these services.

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