The emergence of Silverlight from the Windows Media Player is just a small part of the global players strategy for the TV market that includes an end-to-end advertising proposition. The technology is already in place at ITV.com and won a key deployment with NBC’s web-based coverage of the Olympics.
Microsoft has always been adept at changing its proposition to suit the market. Its initial attempts to offer a middleware to the cable TV sector were rebuffed, but this re-emerged as Microsoft TV, the operating system of choice for IPTV.
Microsoft’s Communication Sector has now turned its attention to the delivery of video content with or without DRM, taking on Adobe’s Flash, as part of a much wider proposition that comes close to integrating the production workflow with Microsoft Office.
Gabriele Di Piazza, MD, Media & Entertainment Communication Sector, Microsoft offers a familiar line that the company is not selling things to the communications sector, but partnering with them. “The focus is on the media and entertainment space where we are dealing with broadcast, advertising, cable and satellite, music and publishers,” says Di Piazza. He highlights the changes in consumption of content through the rise of peer-to-peer and user-generated content.
To this one can add TV companies that are through the internet becoming publishers and the traditional newspaper publishers that are increasingly moving towards video. “Media companies that have traditionally been in the B to B market, in selling adverting distributing content to movie theaters, even in sell to e-stores like iTunes are trying to change to become B to C companies as they need to understand consumers much more.”
Di Piazza says there the change goes right through the media industry, changing how content is distributed, going backwards towards the production and how it is managed, tagged, stored and archived; how advertising is sold and campaigns managed. “We can’t talk anymore about the change from analogue to digital, that’s happened, the change now is from digital to file-based.”
This, he says, places Microsoft as an IT player, and its competitors, at the centre of the TV companies’ business. “Every media company is evolving into a content factory, and this is true for newspapers and publishing companies. Broadcasters are not hurting so much, there’s a decline in advertising in the broadcast space, but printed newspaper advertising is going down dramatically, so all the publishers are trying to reinvent themselves to expose their online content. It’s really not about compressing video and shipping it how, but how the companies organise their workflow to move to the distribution components.”
In addition to the development of Silverlight, which rather than Flash has become the online content distribution technology for NBC, ITV and SBS in The Netherlands, Microsoft has also been making acquisitions. This has taken Microsoft into the digital advertising space through the $6 billion (€3.8 billion) acquisition of aQuantive.
The advertising network, which clearly has Google in its sights, uses both proprietary Microsoft technologies and those from third party competitors. The Aplus network, acquired alongside aQuantive, is going head to head with Google’s Doubleclick. “We’re building an integrated ad network that is able to place ads on multiple channels. Our proposition to the agency is that you will be able to place an ad from web to mobile to IPTV to TV to game consoles and so on. To the publisher we have data management solutions that enable you to maximise your revenues when you sell your ads.”
Silverlight has in part superseded Windows Media, allowing the introduction of ad overlays, and taking the video onto multiple platforms that in addition to Windows now puts the video onto the Mac and Linux operating systems. Silverlight has also been licensed to Nokia, which is including it as part of the Symbian platform, doubly significant given the Nokia’s acquisition of the remainder of Symbian will put it up against the Windows Media mobile platform. “We have our operating system, but if at the same time we’re working on a strategy to proliferate mobile media devices, we can be stuck just on our own operating system.”
Silverlight has also been powering Discovery Channel’s online content in the US, and the Home Shopping Network, and announced at NAB that the technology would be behind Abertis’ online aggregation of the Spanish DTT line-up. The use of Silverlight in NBC’s online Olympics coverage was the largest deployment to date as well as being a handy way to encourage new downloads.
“We worked with RAI for the whole coverage of the Euro 2008 football championships,” said Di Piazza. “We have a clear value proposition around the development tools. Silverlight is part of our .net strategy, so when you download Silverlight you’re actually downloading the core .net engine that allows broadcasters to leverage their .net development skills.”
Microsoft has also introduced Expression, a suite of editorial tools to create ‘Silverlight experiences’ where each component has its own mark-up language.
Di Piazza says that the industry is moving towards Microsoft’s thinking, arguing that the real competitor here is IBM. He is talking about the integration of production and workflows, underlined by a recent contract with Ascent Media. The interfaces of Microsoft’s new technology are deliberately Office-like to make developers and the less technically savvy journalists feel right at home.
