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Live from Massachusetts, it’s showtime on the Internet. But rather than being the main act on the stage, Bay State companies are more like the producers and directors behind it.
Companies inside Route 128 are redefining basic tasks for the fast-growing online video medium — tasks such as searching, publishing content and tracking users. These innovators are breaking ground on a scale that will span the entire web, shifting an online paradigm initially built to serve text and images alone.
Some believe this region is poised to create the main technological enablers for video on the web by building on the Boston area’s long-standing expertise in enterprise applications and the Internet’s inner workings.
The growing cluster presents a compelling opportunity for the region’s high-tech industry. By year end, video is expected to account for nearly a third of all consumer Internet traffic — and by 2010, video will drive the lion’s share of traffic, becoming the first application to surpass peer-to-peer sharing, according to a Cisco Systems Inc. report issued earlier this year.
By the time that happens, someone will need to find a better way to search all that video, said Tom Wilde, CEO of Cambridge’s EveryZing Inc.
“If the web is powered by text, then search is the Gulf Stream,” Wilde said. Using know-how from its parent company, Internet pioneer BBN Technologies, EveryZing’s products convert video to text, flagged with time signatures, that allows for pinpoint searches within a video’s content.
Without such a process, video is at a disadvantage, he said. “It would be as though I said to you, I built a web search engine, but I don’t index the actual documents because that’s kind of a pain. Well, that’s sort of stupid — but it’s exactly the problem with video.”
And there’s no shortage of video content to search: In 2008, YouTube alone already carries more petabytes of data per month than the entire U.S. Internet backbone did in 2000, according to the Cisco report.
Online video’s roadies?
The regional online video back-end cluster includes a host of other companies: Cambridge-based Brightcove Inc., Boston-based Visible Measures Corp., Newton-based ExtendMedia Corp., Waltham’s PermissionTV Inc. and Boston-based ScanScout Inc., to name just a few.
“What seems to be sprouting up here is this wave of companies that will monetize, deliver and provide infrastructure for online video,” said Neil Sequeira of General Catalyst Partners. Sequeira is on the boards of five video-related companies, including Brightcove, ScanScout and Visible Measures. “We’re going to have a community here … on the pure enabling side, (that is) significantly stronger than the West Coast,” he said.
One of the first New England companies in the online video delivery space was Maven Networks. Founded in Cambridge in 2001, the company sold in February to Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) for $160 million. Maven’s co-founder, Hilmi Ozguc, said he believes new opportunities abound.
“I think we’re in the baby-steps phase of video on the Internet,” said Ozguc, who recently left Maven Networks. He wouldn’t say what he’s working on now, but speaking generally, he said, web video needs to provide more premium content, it needs to be better targeted and more interactive, and it needs to start attracting viewers for hours at a time.
“Show me an ad about something I care about, and then I’ll watch it,” he said.
From its Boston offices, Visible Measures has sought to enable advertisers and content publishers to do that by setting a new global standard for measuring video consumption. To the legacy advertising metrics of reach and engagement, Visible Measures adds a third measurement: advocacy.
“It’s the sentiment of the community,” said CEO Brian Shin. “How much work are they doing to promote your brand” — by tagging your video, sharing it, commenting on it, or embedding it in a blog. Those kinds of measurements will help advertisers pay the high cost-per-thousand impressions that online video will require to survive, Shin said.
Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire said video solutions that scale out to the entire Internet are a natural for Massachusetts companies. With Brightcove 3, the company’s latest platform version, “we’ve finally kind of cracked the nut, if you will, on coming up with a platform that now we think can get adopted widely,” he said.
This week, Brightcove said it would end its free, ad-supported hosting service and its Brightcove.tv distribution business in December. According to Adam Berrey, senior vice president of marketing and strategy at the company, the network attracted 44,000 users, but only a small fraction was able to generate significant revenue. Brightcove Network revenue never amounted to more than 1 percent of total revenue, Berrey told Mass High Tech.
Brightcove 3 automates tasks like publishing and managing content, creating interactive experiences’ empowering viewers to easily share content, controlling where content goes and tracking how content is used, Allaire said.
Now, Brightcove hopes to benefit from some of the ideas and solutions that are sprouting up along with it, he said. “What we have been doing is essentially opening up our platform to third parties and trying to build an ecosystem around what we do.”
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