On Saturday, TechCrunch posted an article written by our CEO, Jeremy Allaire, on "Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars." In the article, Jeremy shares his thoughts on where online video is headed in the next year, noting that "2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape."
Jeremy highlights five major trends that he thinks will play out in 2011 in significant ways for end-users and publishers -- the Connected TV platform wars, Over-the-Top (OTT) TV subscriptions, Facebook and Twitter growing as referral sources for video, video ubiquity, and online video delivery standards:
- 2010 saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing space, and Jeremy thinks 2011 will see those wars expand into new territory - the Connected TV platform market. He expects that by the end of 2011 there will be a frenzy of publisher and developer interest in creating TV apps and TV Web experiences as the volumes of products shipping by then will be in the tens of millions.
- Jeremy also predicts that the coveted idea of OTT distribution will further take hold in 2011, but will largely disappoint consumers. He thinks we will have to wait until 2012 when the scale of Connected TV adoption is much larger and more enticing for online TV subscription providers.
- As we've highlighted in our quarterly report with TubeMogul, the fastest growing sources of traffic to videos on publisher sites are Facebook and Twitter. Jeremy notes that this growth is accelerating and the role of these platforms as primary content discovery and viewing environments will reach a point by the end of 2011 where they will be as important as Google search.
- Video ubiquity continues to accelerate, and in 2011 all professional institutions, organizations or businesses of any size will have an online video strategy.
- With Google's recent acquisition of Widevine, Jeremy predicts the war over how video is consumed, secured and delivered both on PCs and increasingly on non-PC devices will continue to heat up.
To read the full article, visit
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/18/online-video-2011/.