Zina Kaye reports on the Sydney Netfest Content Conference 2000,
and current strategies for commercial streaming models

Introduction

Whilst we know what's going on in our own domains, the speakers at this conference give us some indication of the results of what streaming-media would look like in a commercial 'big-picture.' The Sydney Netfest Content Conference took place on 30-31 May 2000. May seems like a while ago, but nothing much has changed since then, except that a few months after starting-up and appearing at this conference.... K-Grind folded.

The first speaker of interest was Mike Summers representing the Austereo Network, who operate some of Australia's largest commercial radio stations. Both commercial and community radio broadcast networks in Australia have adopted a public "wait and see" approach to streaming media, but it seems that commercials such as Austereo have used this time to form an opinion and do some research. Austereo's two main products are:

• 2Day FM Radio represents females - 18-39 year olds
• 3MMM Radio represents males - 18-39 year olds.

Austereo base their entire programme and scheduling system on radio ratings and season times; and as such their websites are entirely complementary. In commercial radio, the average listening time is 11-14 minutes. The managers believe that if they increase the listener base - using net radio - by another 5 minutes, they will earn 1.0% - 1.5% more advertising revenue or about AU$1,000,000 more revenue per year. Thus, the stated aims of Austereo net radio:

• To get the most listeners
• To keep them stuck on the FM content for longer than 11-14 minutes
• To provide entertainment and information on current programming

Problems Austereo see with net radio in its current form:

• The quality is bad
• Dead air between tracks is unacceptable to listeners
• Inappropriate content, or content is old, and is beyond its two to three months
• shelf life
• No announcers or announcers that fill the talk break with ums and ahs

They see early experiments e.g., Destiny radio/Shoutcast as:

• Young blokes being a DJ and creating affiliates with banners
• Sites often get broken and stay that way, because there are no resources to
• support the structure
• Quality is inconsistent because DJ loses interest

Austereo's Commercial Model has three main points:

• Deploy staff which research more of what "the audience profile" wants
• Research, marketing giveaways - all coming from the speakers
• Look and feel of the information is not about "new" songs, but "the voice of the song"

Austereo believe that other stations have a different commercial model where the managers believe:

• That netradio is like AM radio where average listening is 30-50 minutes
• In an old stereotype of an audience of students with no cash, mainly male, whom they believe they can target with a marketing strategy of street press/weekly budget of AU$300

Austereo is taking a calculated risk by broadening its appeal based on the location of new net-based audience profiles and transmission methods:

• Silversurfers - 50+ age group
• Fast surfers that have modems which are more like transmitters ie. 200Kbps
• FM will move over in the face of digital radio, or FM will become attached to phones
• Quality content will be reinforced by, or bought from, affiliations
• Revenue - structure will not be based on banners or subscriptions "packaged sections" of content will reflect the live-to-air content
• Use of regional models

Online regional branding of 2Day and 3MMM shows:

• In Sydney, there is a young audience so the website is very hip, whereas In Adelaide, there is an older audience, so the page has the look of country music lots of wood, no flashiness. Ideally one should have a front page which reflects a particular regional audience.
• Only 5% listeners will interact with broadcaster
• Austereo's Disco Channel has its own Windows Media Player, displaying both a music mix and video mix. The format was based on concrete research into the identity of listeners, and uses "good talent" taken from FM radio
• Top-of-the-hour song is used as a branding tool, and is chosen for the nostalgia it generates
• Copy is written carefully to match audience expectations. The voices, inc. audience voices are chosen in them same way
• Advertising is kept predominantly inline
• Sales department is the most important tool

Bumper stickers:

"Don't take the site too seriously!, it's a complementary tool"
"Work on the local market that you know, because a global market won't attract enough revenue."

Alta: The Application Service Provider

ALTA is part of the growing pool of tailored service providers that put together
project management and telecommunications products to cook up a streaming media business. Whilst these kinds of services are reasonably useful in big markets such as Europe and the States; Australia is a bit thin on clients at this point in time. Australian talc services are also a bit thin on the ground - and permanent broadband connectivity can only be found at very few centers - notably cultural - including Sydney Opera House, MCA, Customs House and Artspace. Commercial clients are getting an appetite for redundancy. A good Internet Service Provider will respond with a scaleable bandwidth package. Here you purchase a basic allocation, and insurance that you can get a bit more if needed. An example of services currently being put together is BTELL "powered by Live Reality.com Inc." It provides interactive conferencing for delegates, chat and information delivery. ALTA believes that businesses have decided it is too expensive to be global on the Internet and are leveraging local markets against products and sales. Therefore, as a company, ALTA try to narrow down their clients' strategies in line with this agenda.

Bumper sticker: ALTA started by reminding us of the relationship between the Kilobyte - kilobit which is 1KB 8kb. Consider that 1Mbps is CD-ROM quality

3D Steaming

Brilliant Digital Entertainment is the parent of BDE3D.com - a new streaming 3D product,
using a TV model to colonize the web. The virus is the use of episodic content, called a "webisode". Its features include:

• lasting 5-10 minutes
• you can either buy or rent the espisode
• the content is syndicated
• it uses a proprietory plugin to play realtime 3D which is moving rapidly

Sequential content is a very good idea, because once you've been roped into downloading the player, the webisodes themselves are relatively quick and can be quite addictive. Based on the success of forerunners such as storytales, comics, spumco.com etc, webisodes are really going to succeed in the fan-boy market.

BDE sees promise in a global arena, with partners in netv, and to that end:

• BDE use Akamai as a service partner for content replication around the world, e.g. Sightsound.com (who purchase content based on bandwidth)
• BDE is selling episodic games e.g. webcorpgames.com
• Entertaindom.com use Brilliant as a delivery structure for weekly episodes of Superman/KISS

BDE3D.com make and broadcast content and syndicate it to a number of sites. This is a copyright technique as much as anything else. Whilst trying to develop their plug-in fanbase, BDE use a "permission marketing system", where users sign up for a subscription (free/paid). The subscriptions follow the user, and send regular e-mails, signed both from the partner site and the BDE3D site. BDE is a content partner with Yahoo, who are feeling the strain of Real and others using their "channel model". The Yahoo customized player now controls Player/plug-in/logo-skin/branding/installation issues, and controls commercialisation through preventing its competition from having buttons in its player and/or using the permission marketing model.

Software for streaming 3D --Current tools:

• 3D models for e-commerce , e.g. Reebok
• Metastream is a 3D studio max plug-in
• Pulse 3D Toolset - nifty plug-in for streaming media, e.g. entertaindom.com
• Nemo - for programmers, with extensive physics modeling, and collision detection. Unfortunately, it requires a large player which is a significant issue.
• B3D Studio Toolset utilizing:
• -screen player, with timeline like Adobe Premier
• -option to place 3D studio max clips into project
• -one million projectors already downloaded, with a sizeable chunk of
• content already made
• -being marketed as a great tool for making interactive porno.


The Future of Streaming 3D is bright, but only time will tell whether:

• In six to twelve months, 3D models will be indistinguishable from real video
• Different levels of interactivity will be possible depending on bandwidth
• Use of 3D in web commercials and interactive business
• 3D cards, notices and flyers accompanying email
• Stereo cams will stream from shopping malls and fashion sites
• Virtual celeb interviews
• Tomagotchi toys
• Real-time games

Advertising and Ad Agencies.... Old or New Ideas?

A motley crew from DoubleClick and EuroSCG came to show their wares. It's a bit rough for ad agencies wishing to use streaming media. These include such gems as dealing with portal companies that don't accept audio ads, clients that don't want to be streaming media leaders, and the high piss-off factor of huge ads that confuse people. Somehow, somebody has to pay for the internet, and the declining response rate to banner ads.

The panel cited the results of an annual trend survey. Of companies willing to deploy an online strategy:

• 75% went for websites as a tool;
• 17% chose banner ads; and
• 9% chose media-rich ads.

Media-rich ads were found to have a high click-through rate. However, the spokesperson for Netfest gave an unsurprising argument for low-tech: "if the same ad is presented in flash and GIF, only 2% chose the flash ad, and 41% chose the GIF version". This is important to the AU$100,000,000 online advertising industry. In fact, ad agencies freely admit that they haven't figured out how to make money out of the net. It's still seen as loss leader. Meanwhile, on the other side.., DoubleClick won't accept you as a client unless you have at least 100,000 page impressions and a clear stats story. Independent standards are sorely needed.

Telstra WAP

Finally, in case you were sleeping, Telstra is rolling out the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) for people who love bitmaps, ascii text and "rocking" up/down interfaces. Heavy text entry is not viable, but you can get all the trappings of "here and now", e.g., your equitable stock portfolio, flight details, local information and an evolution to banking via the evolution of third party encryption services. Opportunities for the consumer segments lie perhaps in endless "free" advertising and the SME application.

MyWAP-Telnet anyone?

Telstra are targeting youth initially using the success of the DoCoMo strategy in Japan to bolster their faith. Second in line for WAP are professionals who love the status and convenience; and third in line are the corporates who will use it for services, high-tech and utilities, dispatch and delivery. The rest of us will no doubt stick to the discreet charm of plain, old SMS!