Former Paramount, Technicolor and Disney executive Christopher T Carey considers many delivery and monetization mechanisms to be outdated and of declining interest to consumers. As he tells Mel Lambert, Carey is a strong advocate of a new concept that utilizes rich, contextually-relevant metadata to offer an enhanced level of end-user engagement.
For the past two decades Chris Carey has been deeply involved with the technical and operational dimensions of delivering digital media across a number of divergent but complementary landscapes. Most recently, prior to setting up as an independent consultant, he served as EVP of Worldwide Technical Operations at Paramount Pictures, with responsibility for the studio’s mastering and distribution supply chain, managing all technical facilities and operations and leading the Paramount Digital Studio project, an initiative to support file-based workflows from production/cinematography through distribution to partners and consumer-facing platforms.
Previously, Carey was Chief Marketing and Technology Officer at Technicolor, where he headed up a project to consolidate the operation’s production infrastructure and increase efficiency through the centralization of key areas. He also served as SVP of studio new technology with Walt Disney Studios, in which position he represented the studio in technology-standards efforts.
“The key to running a successful media-delivery operation is a streamlined infrastructure, efficient media-asset management and standardized data-exchange formats,” says Carey. “At Paramount I oversaw the servicing of our mastering and digital supply chains – getting assets out to DVD and Blu-ray authoring departments and then to digital-distribution retailers around the world – and our storage, film archive, content-protection and security policies.
“At Technicolor, I was charged with building a strategy to realize a digital version of the company. Technicolor grew up as a film laboratory and then, more recently, a VHS, DVD and Blu-ray replicator – bricks-and-mortar functions – but it also acquired other post-production facilities. I was tasked with developing a global private network for Technicolor with a digital asset-management and asset-servicing platform that would allow them to provide services in an all-digital world.”
There are major differences, Carey stresses, between strategies developed for consumer-targeted delivery mechanisms and establishing infrastructures for content-creation clients.
“The supply chain out to the retail space – either physical media or digital delivery to the consumer via iTunes, Amazon and similar outlets – is a highly unpredictable, on-demand model. Whereas B2B is much more predictable, in terms of supplying licensing deals that a content company has made with a reseller. Those thousand titles, for example, have an availability date of such and such; we can program our throughput for that workflow and schedule. However, in the consumer-facing digital-delivery arena, that’s where scalable, flexible content-delivery architectures come into play, including CDN caching strategies.”
Regarding the continuing transition from physical to digital media, “The landscape is changing dramatically,” Carey offers. “Beginning with the first meaningful digital-licensing business in 2007 and 2008 – Apple’s iTunes started selling video in 2008 – there has been a ramp up for the digital-supply chain. Now every on-line retailer that wants to license content from film and TV companies, and sell it to consumers, has developed their own point-to-point requirements, specifications, formats, codec types, bit rates and metadata. As a result, over the last three years we found that the technical servicing work became more complicated and an order of magnitude busier on the digital-file side.
“While the DVD/Blu-ray disc channel is relatively contained – the media is what it is – on the digital side there is a whole lot more diversity and complexity. Important work is being done to create a common industry format for digital media: the Interoperable Master Format, or IMF, developed initially by the Entertainment Technology Center and funded by the film and TV industry. A draft V1.0 specification has now been submitted into SMPTE and should be ratified during the coming months.”
IMF is a positive development that will ensure consistent descriptions across a wide range of digital assets. It includes standardized descriptors for file contents and content-delivery codecs, for example, that form the required metadata labels. Benefits include a single, interchangeable master file format, automated packaging/delivery, minimized storage and simplified post-production transcoding processes. “The idea is to create a standard container and a standard structure behind how you organize essences and related metadata,” Carey states. “Companies can take a packaged file and unpackage it in a structured and repeatable way.
“Since codecs will change, it is essential that we think more about the essence and the metadata – how it is structured, how it is contained and how you package it. Knowing that there will be a new plug-in with a better type of data-compression codec means that content creators can simply change them out whenever a new update comes along.
“We are also attempting, as an industry, to promote file-based delivery to our trading partners – be they broadcasters, telecommunications companies or internet retailers – in a structured way and with limited choices. Frankly, some retailers have a different codec and bit rate that is non-differentiating – it wasn’t making the product better or worse than another, it was just the way they had evolved.”
Conceding that revenue from physical media - DVD and Blu-ray - is down by 45-50% from its peak in 2007, “Digital-file sales are not fully making up for that difference,” Carey says. “With economic pressure on content-creation companies to find ways of securing more revenue more rapidly out of the digital space and not from physical media, there is a move for consumers towards buying from over-the-top and digital-media delivery.”
But Blu-ray players offer a unique opportunity for enhanced digital delivery, Carey considers. “In the early 2000s I was involved with the generation of early specifications for the Blu-ray format. One of the things we did – it was a seminal moment – was to insist that the BD format included an interactive application; we ended up with the Java BD-J set. We also said that Blu-ray players should be internet connected, with specifications that would allow consumers to stream video from the internet.”
While working as a consultant for Related Content Database (RCDb), a company that provides communication software solutions to content owners and service providers, Carey was involved in the development of “a software platform that will let media companies leverage the BD-J and BD-Live infrastructure. Using a next-generation Blu-ray disc, consumers will be able to view a number of on-line offerings, and hence bridge the digital-distribution world through a physical media supply chain that we already have. This, we consider, will get consumers excited about on-demand or downloadable video by way of the Blu-ray experience they already know and like".
And companion metadata can provide contextual relevance that is becoming increasingly important for an enhanced on-line experience. “Other companies that I’m working with,” Carey continues, “are getting very smart and forward-thinking about using metadata as a way to track behaviour and what people are doing when they are viewing video. I have just joined as an advisor to Ooyala, a new online video platform that offers technology for video publishing, video analytics and video monetization. Ooyala has a platform architecture that allows the company to track behaviour and optimize the video experience by securing analytics around pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls plus pay walls, and much more, together with any number of other monetization methods. It can also undertake multi-variant testing to see which [strategy] produced the highest CPMs.
“Again, at its core RCDb has developed a set of very rich metadata around Hollywood movies – eg, the actor’s name, the brand of shirt he is wearing, his sunglasses, the car he drives – that can also be used as a streaming feed into this on-line experience. For example, we could deliver a sports-car ad for the model that Tom Cruise just zoomed off in. Or the Ray-Ban sunglasses that he just put on. All of that is now fully realizable with the capabilities we have from BD-Live and also from the on-line video-playback platforms.”
Recent changes in monetization and transactional models also underscore the advantages for an immersive viewing experience. “The traditional ownership model seems to be changing, but a number of new digital offerings coming to light – the Netflix and streaming experience – suggest that a subscription model can be successful and offer a nice consumer experience. On the other hand, I like watching current new movies, and you cannot get those on Netflix. So what are my options?
“What we are seeing is a move towards ad-sponsorship and the concept of contextually-relevant metadata. At RCDb we have coined the phrase eVOD – Engagement Video on Demand – the notion being that we can take subscription VOD or advertising-sponsored VOD to the next level as an engagement experience. Because of all this rich metadata we can supply as you watch a movie or a TV program, we are going to be able to tell you who the actors are, deliver pop-up synopses of biographies, what brand of shirts they are wearing, direct you to a local retail store selling those brands, and keep it totally relevant to the program you’re watching.
“What that does is to create a much higher level of engagement on the part of the consumer – and that is at the core of all advertising revenues; you need a highly engaged consumer watching those ads. Consumers seeing the contextual information and limited ads about the products being put in front of them, we predict, will react favourably.
“The ability to stream such rich, contextually-relevant metadata in real time against the playback of a selected video will mean that consumers are far more engaged. We expect to see advertising revenues increasing to a point where there could be real promise in the future about ways to monetize a delivery mechanism that currently is seen as an otherwise bleak economic mode for subscription and ad-revenue strategies versus ownership, which was a much more margin-based business.”
