Last week we pointed out Samsung’s Instinct video campaign, featuring hot-spotted video allowing users to navigate their way through the story line.

In sticking with today’s election theme, here’s another “choose your own adventure” video, a murder election mystery spoof, “Maverick Me Deadly.” Check it out before we know who really won the election.

9 months after we asked how Yahoo! Live would ever make money, they decided they can’t and will shut their doors December 3rd.

On a day where the Premier League lashed out at Justin.tv for their lax policies on taking down illegal content, it’s worth asking if Yahoo!, a company with real revenue and existing video delivery scale can’t afford to pay for bandwith, how much longer can some of the other players in live streaming space survive. How will they make money?

The answer is subscription sales, or ad sales, or both, but the former requires a rabid audience, the latter requires more targeted advertising, and both require scale and low content delivery costs to be successful.

Moderator: John Durham, CatalystSF
Panelists:
John Vincent, Eyewonder
Sean Finnegan, Starcom Mediavest
Randy Kilgore, Tremor Media
Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll
Mike Henry, Veoh

Kilgore: Pre-roll has gone full cycle. It got its bad rap, and now its come back and is very popular. It got a bad reputation because it was being placed in front of content that people weren’t sure had any value. Now that it is associated with better content, the value proposition is clear. A :15 second pre-roll in front of two minutes of content is something people are very comfortable with. Now we’re focusing on tying it all together on the back-end with advanced reporting.

John Vincent, Eyewonder: People thing about pre-roll as repurposed TV, but the perception should be about the placement. Its an increadibly powerful spot, especially ahead of premium content. Pre-roll is the most valuable location. Understand the opportunity and then execute against it. Don’t think about it as repurposed TV spots.

Mike Henry, Veoh: I don’t know that the location makes it more valuable. Part of our own research has shown that the more time people spend with a video, the more engaged they become. They are more likely to rate it, to send it to a friend.

Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll: We don’t see any ad unit as dominant as pre-roll. The two things we focus on a getting quality content at scale, and can we get pricing at rates that people are comfortable scaling their budgets. I’m bullish on pre-roll

Q: When can we get sustainable standards?

Sean: Standard metrics is still key. The ability to bridge the gap with the people who are buying TV is one of the ways to allow the ad dollars and inventory to flow. You also need to preserve the unique elements of online video, like the ability to track purchase intent and filtering down the funnel. But we need to align these universes and understand that it is the same user across multiple platforms. In the digital industry, we tend to stay down in the weeds a little too much.

John Vincent: Until recently, it has been technically impossible for publishers to have the same tracking and interaction metrics. So we’ve rolled out a universal metric that Adobe and Microsoft are adopting.

Kilgore: I don’t understand why we even need to have this conversation. Before digital, we were still aggregating audiences across platforms and figuring out how they work together. Maybe its because in 2001 we needed to show how different and special we were.

Sean: My point is that we just need to be able to find a way to do more of it. But there are some fundamental hurdles.

Tod: The reason I think measurement is so important is that ads have ways of finding themselves in places that advertisers don’t want them to be. Campaigns tend to be optimized for a number of different metrics, but we need to be able to give advertisers the trust that the placements are way they should be.

Mike: High CPMs are going to need to be justified, especially in the short run. But if you wan to compete with the scale of TV, you wont be able to charge those high CPMs that will finance and support the industry. I’d expect that the CPMs will go through the roof because we can narrowcast our message to the audience that is relevant and measure its impact.

John: You can measure what you get on TV, and then all the interactivity on top of it.

Is the money following the video? Why aren’t we getting $75-$100 CPMs for targeted campaigns?

Tod: We need to show the efficacy. And the interoperability isn’t there yet.

Mike: I’m skeptical that the CPMs will be higher than TV. You could argue that TV is overpriced right now. The dollars will flow when the pricing is more competitive. But there’s a tendency to hold on to those higher CPMs.

Kilgore: I think the issue is slightly different. The money comes from the marketer to the agency for planning. And then the portions get sent to digital or other places, but that hasn’t really changed. There’s a reason that the money goes to TV first. They see the broadcaster’s digital extension programs, but they haven’t been exposed to the real online video market. Where the pricing will fall will be up to us to show the value of our audiences, our targeting, and our benefits.

Audience Q: We’re hearing that DRM is part of the problem shifting TV ads over to online.

Randy: We hear that about 10-15% of the time. I’m surprised at this point that people aren’t securing those rights.

Audience Q: Are the networks doing a better job building an ecosystem around their video content than the agencies are on a campaign basis?

Sean: I think the networks are odin ga fantastic job. My agency is there in lock-step with them and continue to work with them on multiple levels to find more opportunities. We’re big fans of pre-roll and buy it a lot, but we’re also interested in further, deeper innovation.

Audience Q: A pet peeve of mine is seeing auto play video on a home page. Are those ‘real’ streams or not? Would you buy them?

Sean: No. If we knew that was happening, we wouldn’t by that.

Mike: If we could prove that those units were less effective, it would be easier to weed them out of the mix.

What are you doing in your organizations to help people move away from the UGC perception of video?

Mike: What we’re trying to understand is the relative engagement and effectiveness of the different types of content. What is different about web content – not UGC – that is different from Lost of Heros online.

John Vincent: Risk vs Reward. You have marketers who are looking for an advantage. You look at costs and you look at downside risk. If the risk is greater than the incremental upside benefit, you just eliminate that from the buy.

What frustrates you most about our industry?

John V: I wouldn’t say frustrated, but I’m fearful about 2009 and losing all the progress we made in 2008. How do we learn from what we did in 08 and do more in ’09. Marketers can either cut costs.

Randy Kilgore: We’ve come so far, and we’re talking about a lot of the same things, but when you balance that against all of the great things going on, its hard to get frustrated at all. I’m more concerned about the things going on with Congress that could derail our whole industry.

Sean: I’m a bit more positive. In this tough economic time, I think we’re going to grow up as a business and see how we can advance while the pressure is on.

Mike: I’m also more positive and excited about what will happen in the next year.

What is an interesting website that you go to?

John Durham: SlideShare
Mike: Veoh obviously
Tod: Search for “retargeting” and see how often they find you over the next week.
Sean: There’s a new site called Facebook
Randy: SeatGuru.com.
John Durham: Hopstop.com

Digital content firm DECA has launched Down To Business, a new business show hosted by Pat Croce former Philadelphia 76ers trainer turned owner and best-selling author. Already Croce has lined up some pretty high profile guests, and his personality and direct interview style make the show pretty entertaining.

The twice weekly series will be distributed exclusively by Portfolio which will control also ad sales. The Portfolio site uses a Brightcove player which unfortunately has disabled embedding which should limit some of the series viral potential, so you’ll have to head over there to check it out. But Portfolio is betting people will go to where the content is, and I for one, will.

The Metropolitan Opera, through PermissionTV, is now offering Met Player, a new online subscription streaming service that continues to expand the Met’s use of digital media.

The Met Player will offer subscribers access to 170 full-length performances—including 13 operas shot in high-definition video, 37 standard-definition videos, and 120 historic audio recordings. Selections from the Met’s video and audio archives will be available to opera-lovers everywhere and at any time. Perfect for the audiophile and videophile crowd that classical fans tend to be (see DVD-A and SACD demographics).

In addition to online viewing, users can extend their Met Player experience by connecting their computers to HD TV sets and home-stereo sound systems. PermissionTV and the Met are leveraging Move Network’s technology to power the player.

Much hyped, much maligned video portal Joost is set to relaunch tomorrow, this time, sans download. Oddly, the logins from my previous accounts don’t seem to work, so I’m guessing there will be plenty of signing up again. Unfortunately, in my attempts to sign back up, I keep getting a “Something went wrong, please try again later” message.

Keep your fingers crossed for these guys. They can’t afford to botch another launch.

Looks like mashup makers Eyespot are shutting their doors. In an email to account holders, and on a page when users log in, members received the following message:

To Our Users and Customers

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we’re no longer allowing you to upload new videos. We’ll soon be providing you with a simple means of retrieving your uploaded videos and video mixes from within your account.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing: Kaltura, and video publishing space: Fliqz immediately. We’ll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard. Look for “Download: Click to save.” under each media thumbnail in your galleries.

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we’re now moving on.

Thank you all for being part of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

Searching for good content online can be a pain in the ass. If your friend doesn’t send you a link, or you aren’t trolling YouTube for hours, you’re more likely to find a podcast that is already dead than discover the next cool show. With the volume of new webisodes being created, and only increasing, what we could use is a trustworthy source to do all that trolling for us, find the best of the best, and make it nice and easy for us to choose from.

Enter TheWebisodes.com, a new portal for webisodic content. Consider them the new TV Guide of web programming. Not just a guide, The Webisodes has its own show, The Weekly Webisode Watch (hmmm, kinda crimping on our name, but we’ll let it slide), that features co-founders Gil and Oran Margulis chatting about their favorite shows.

For those of you with your own programming, TheWebisodes is syndication friendly, hosting shows on their site or delivering users to your own site. Got content, make sure you tell the brothers at TheWebisodes.com. Finally, a portal page for the videophile crowd.

Yep, its that time of year again. AT&T’s Blue Room is streaming the Austin City Limits Music Festival.

All weekend long, The Blue Room will have live streams from the festival, now in its seventh year. First stream is at 12:45pm ET. The Blue Room also has an XM Satellite radio broadcast, a Twitter feed and ringtones available to download from the artists performing at the festival, so they’ve got a true cross platform effort going.

Kudos to AT&T overall for their continued strength in online video events.

Warning: This video may be the raciest thing we’ve posted, but since its branding, and technically there’s no nudity or anything “questionable,” I’ll save you the hassle of hunting for it.

In building anticipation for their XXX Party, being held in 17 cities around the world, jeans maker Diesel contracted The Viral Factory to create this “SFW XXX” video, which is sure to be a viral hit. In its first day, it has nearly 350,000 views on Break.com.

The Viral Factory, based in the UK, has a long history of creating viral hits, including one of my personal favorites, The Trojan Olympics series.

Someone will have to explain the videos on the Diesel home page to me. Other than an odd similarity to the whiteface worn by Bob Dylan in his Rolling Thunder Review, I flat out don’t get any of them.

Ok. You’ve been warned. Now enjoy.

Diesel SFW XXX - Watch more free videos