VoloMedia blog

See us in NYC at Advertising 2.0

We will be exhibiting at the upcoming Digital Hollywood Advertising 2.0 event in New York City June 4th and 5th. If you're planning on attending, please stop by and check out our latest products and services. And if you'd like to schedule a meeting with me or Kevin Gianatiempo, our VP of Advertising Sales, please send a note to info@volomedia.com. We look forward to seeing you!

Jeff

Social Media Report

We just came across a report from Universal McCann diving into social media and its progression. It's a great global view of all the social media platforms and their respective penetration. Podcasts and RSS are highlighted as experiencing tremendous growth; in particular, podcast growth is seen as massive between Waves 2 and 3 (from 21% to 49% world-wide).

Podcasting News offers a good summary.

Jeff

Adobe Media Player

Just wanted to let everyone know about our support for the recently announced Adobe Media Player. We have been part of their developer and beta program since inception and are very excited about it's direction and vision. In meeting with Deeje and Scott at NAB and getting an in-depth demonstration, we came away impressed with the design and function of AMP.

Jeff

ADM releases new advertising standards and audience measurement guidelines

Standards for advertising in downloadable media will be proposed by the Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) today. With the release of these two proposals, “Downloadable Media Advertising Standards” and “Downloadable Media Audience Measurement Guidelines” one of the important goals behind the founding of the ADM will have been achieved.  The ADM standards are intended to help evolve a common language to enable advertisers buying downloadable and portable media. 

The downloading and mobile audiences are growing quickly. Arbitron-Edison Media research released this week shows rising Podcast consumption, now reaching 18% of the US population. Consumer habits are changing quickly, and the larger media landscape is being transformed rapidly.  This rate of change is only bound to accelerate, as consumers avail themselves of freedoms afforded by the newer technologies. For example, if you own an iPhone (or one of the newer iPods), you are able to load videos onto the iPhone via iTunes, or directly download videos from the Internet and save it on the iPhone for later viewing, or stream videos to the iPhone screen while connected online. These consumption behaviors complement watching video in iTunes, on a larger screen notebook computer. Consumers will use all of these modalities to get the content they want. These consumers are a highly engaged audience, not casual web surfers who happen to trip upon a random link. They are committed to the media they receive, having vested considerable energy, time, bandwidth and storage. For media publishers these are unprecedented times, a great opportunity to carve out a unique niche in the emerging media landscape.

As the downloadable medium grows, so does the challenge for publishers and advertisers. How do you reach these audiences? What ad formats best suit this medium?  How do you measure usage and engagement?  As traditional TV and radio models become increasingly defunct, it becomes imperative there is a rapid maturing of standards reflecting the emerging mediums. The ADM can help.

Murgesh Navar

Hear2.0 Interview and Online Video Advertising Presentation

We have an interview and a presentation to share with you!

Recently, Brian, our CEO, was interviewed by Mark Ramsey of Hear2.0.   During the course of the interview, Brian and Mark discuss how the radio industry can benefit from monetizing their content in the form of podcasts and how VoloMedia can help content publishers with this.  Brian also talks about  VoloMedia’s ad insertion and metrics reporting solutions as well as the company’s revenue model.  Here is the link to the interview: http://www.hear2.com/2008/04/make-money-from.html

Next, Jeff, our VP of Marketing and Products, presented at a webinar on Online Video Advertising: The Time is Right along with folks from Limelight and Tier 1 Research.  The presentation focused on trends in the streaming industry that affect online video advertising and the technology and infrastructure that are enabling all of this to happen.  In it, Jeff talks about the narrowing of the traditional distribution window for content, the proliferation of iPod/device ownership that is driving consumer demand for digital media that is portable and VoloMedia’s solutions.  Here’s the link to the webinar:  http://www.streamingmedia.com/webevents/details.asp?EventID=284

Please register and take a look at either or both. And if you have any questions about building the business of downloadable media, do not hesitate to contact us at info@volomedia.com.

Jenny

Meet us at the NAB!

VoloMedia will be in Las Vegas for this years NAB show, April 14-17. We have a suite at the Venetian for you to meet the team, learn about our products (including a few sneak peeks of our latest innovations) and see how customers are deploying our advertising, metrics and reporting solutions. If you're interested in setting up a meeting, please send a note to info@volomedia.com. We look forward to seeing you!

Jeff

Handing out free iPods - a very sensible corporate initiative

In the March 4 Wall Street Journal, Bobby White wrote a piece called “The New Workplace Rules: No Video-Watching.”  In it, he reported that Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day.  It seems to me that this issue helps underscore one of the benefits of downloadable, RSS-based media subscriptions: so that people don’t miss shows they love because they can’t watch them online while at work.

Although Mr. White’s article describes companies’ concerns over bandwidth utilization and cost from the consumption of online video in the workplace, this angle is not as compelling as the issue of employees wasting valuable company time.  Based upon this hypothesis, companies should be happy if people are time-shifting/place-shifting their non-work entertainment content away from the office…even if company-paid bandwidth is consumed to accomplish this objective.

The math isn’t hard to do:  A 3Mbps DSL line costs $60/month, i.e., only $3 per workday.  My oft-watched ABC News “Nightline Story of the Day” video podcasts average about six minutes and 36MB each, requiring less than 100 seconds to download.  (3 megabits per second = 0.375 megabytes per second; so 36MB/0.375MB per second = 96 seconds)

As the average U.S. employee costs an employer something like $240/day – based upon $50,000/year plus benefits (and probably double this in Silicon Valley) – and 70% of these workers are watching online videos for an hour a day at work, that’s $21/day of lost productivity for an average worker.  Actually, assuming that companies strive for at least a 2-3x return on employee cost, the real “opportunity cost” of this online consumption is closer to $50/day per employee.

One hour of video podcasting can be downloaded in about 20 minutes…in the background.  Therefore, one DSL line can handle the daily downloading needs of 34 employees (8 hours / 20 minutes = 24 one-hour downloads / 70% watching videos = 34 total employees).  As a DSL line costs only $3 for an entire day – less than a single, low-fat, no-foam latte at Starbucks – it costs a company less than $0.10 per day per employee to handle the actual downloading.  So, as I said, it’s not a bandwidth cost issue…but it’s definitely an opportunity cost issue.

To combat this very real drain on corporate resources, companies should encourage their employees to download non-work content and take it with them to consume outside the office.  Heck, to help ensure the success of this program it would probably even be a “no brainer” for most companies to hand out free iPod Nanos (starting at $149/each).  In CFO-speak, the “payback” on this investment would occur in less than two weeks (or less than one week if looking at the opportunity cost).  That’s the best investment a company will ever make.

Brian Steel

CEO

NOTE:  My bandwidth usage example in this blog post was intentionally kept simple – to help focus on the point that its about employee cost...not about bandwidth cost.  However, many readers will realize that much of the bandwidth consumption will occur at the same time, so that a single DSL line could easily get bogged down, implying much slower downloads than what I calculated and the need for more bandwidth at those times to handle “legitimate” work uses.  However, given the overwhelming magnitude of the basic ratio – of $50 of opportunity cost per employee/day to $0.10 of bandwidth cost per employee/day – even if the company had to increase its bandwidth by ten times, there’s still a 50:1 ratio, i.e., a persuasive argument in favor of focusing on reducing wasted employee time and not on bandwidth costs.  I should also note that since we're "in the business," VoloMedia's employees consume a lot of video - online and offline - and are encouraged to do so.

Welcome Buzz!

Buzz Dean has joined VoloMedia team as VP of Engineering. Most recently at Akimbo, Buzz brings more than 20 years of product engineering and operational excellence. His full bio can be viewed on our About page.

This recommendation offered by one of his peers sums up why we are so excited to have Buzz join our team:

“Buzz is an oustanding manager capable in a role as a leader, doer and influencer. His technical and analytic skills are top notch; his intuition a major asset. He's a tireless worker who acheives what he sets out to do. You can count on Buzz no matter what, and all that he's involved with is better for it. There's no one I'd rather have next to me in a foxhole or enjoying a sail on the Bay.”

Jeff

New Podcast Research Report

Late last week, eMarketer published a great report on Podcast Advertising. Check out the latest article for highlights if you don't want to purchase. VoloMedia and Murgesh were included with Murgesh being quoted:

“Podcasting started out being a long-tail behavior. What you’re beginning to see is that this medium is now being embraced by brand name publishers. It’s something marketers are extremely comfortable with.” - Murgesh Navar, founder and chief strategy officer of VoloMedia, as quoted by ClickZ, Aug. 24, 2007.

Here are a few highlights pulled from the article:

• eMarketer estimates that the total US podcast audience reached 18.5 million in 2007
• That audience will increase by 251% to 65 million in 2012. And of those listeners, 25 million will be “active” users who tune in at least once a week.
• Driven by this audience growth, US spending on podcast-related advertising (including sponsorships) will rise to $435 million in 2012, up from $165 million in 2007. 

Jeff

Product Upgrade Available!

For the past few months we’ve been toiling away, building an upgrade to our publisher and campaign management portal. I’m happy to announce that today all our hard work comes to fruition. We’ve packed lots of new features into the portal, allowing our publishers even greater control over their media and advertising campaigns. From our extra-detailed and super fast reports to geographic and demographic ad targeting to automatic ad – content profile matching, transcoding, and lossless insertion, we’re proud to say we offer everything you need to manage your downloadable media business.

If your curious and want to check it out, why not send us a note to info@volomedia.com? We’ll be happy to give you a demo.

George McMullen
Director of Products