Forrester Report on Video

It's nice to get external validation from research. Forrester Research applies a proven methodogy to "early adopter" research, contained in a report (sponsored by Akamai), The Real Potential of Internet Video. View the webcast.

Their findings, after interviewing executives at a dozen leading sites:

Web video is now where Web graphics were in 1996 — sites without it are going to look awfully vanilla. Google and Yahoo! are indexing Web video, making it increasingly likely that most Web media experiences will include video. As a result:

· Advertisers must combine video and interactive thinking. Advertisers have learned interactive competencies — from the Web to email — to complement the mass-market video-branding expertise they developed with TV. Now it’s time to combine the skills. The video Web will combine the awareness characteristics of commercials with the engagement of click-throughs. Smart advertisers will create cross-functional teams that combine advertising, interactive, and direct marketing skills to connect with consumers throughout the sales and support process.

· TV networks will become video distributors, not channels in a lineup. For five decades now, a TV network has been defined by its ability to program half-hour-long and hourlong programs, especially in prime time. That era is ending. Networks can now reach consumers with short and long clips through broadcast, cable VOD, Internet streaming, and even mobile phones. Networks will now define themselves by their audience, and by re-engineering their creative capabilities to spin off video for multiple distribution channels.

· Devices will seek differentiation by accessing the video Web. As tens of millions of video clips spread across the Web, why should PCs be the only devices that can see them? TiVo, already capable of hooking up to home networks, will differentiate against cable DVRs by linking to on-demand clips from CNN, E!, ESPN, IFILM, and anyone else that will provide them. TV manufacturers facing commoditization will build smart TVs that link to their own portals featuring movie trailers and weather forecast videos. Satellite operators will use broadband connections to provide the on-demand programming that only cable can now offer. And cable will be faced with a choice: open up set-top boxes to Internet content or suffer against the telcos’ built-for-online-content IPTV offerings.

· The text Web will lose out in the competition with the video Web. People used to complain that nobody reads anymore, but the Web changed that — everybody reads online. But as the Web fills with video, text will look flat again. Already, podcasts have made audio searchable and easily enjoyed. Those with online videos will soon learn that attaching the closed-captioned transcript makes their videos easier for search engines to locate. Result: Google and Yahoo! video searches will begin to rival text searches as consumers seek answers online.