Fairfax Digital launches online video push

With the NBN on its way, its logical for News/Media organisations to diversity their delivery channels. It will be interesting to see whether this strategy will compete or complement with GoogleTv … which is not far away.

Why would anyone go to SMH to watch an episode of Gruen Transfer or Summer Heights High?

This is all backwards and not even focussed on the end consumer. I bet there’s a sh*t hot media kit that the sales team are pinging out to clients tho.

I personally despise the stupid auto play videos on SMH as it is. Very frustrating, I click do not play EVERY time. Even MySpace turned off autoplay FFS.

Paragraph 4 “There genre of videos…”

Oh come on…

flash-based video player. Don’t expect to watch this on your ipad.

That’s a great achievement. We knew Fairfax Digi has been working on it for a while, but were quite sure when this would come out. Now I guess the next step is, excepting a proper launch and traffic generation, to make it available on several platforms. As a user, I can’t wait to hear Fairfax Digital announcing it will be soon available on PS3. As a digital dude, I can’t wait for an enhancement of behavioural targeting and re-targeting, delivering pre-rolls based on users’ browsing history.
Anyway, good job Fairfax Digital!

Good way for the ABC to make ad revenue – would imagine this is a rev share with the ABC and allows them to have ads run before their content, see revenue from it, and not breach any govt rules.

Not sure news sites are where people want to watch TV shows but wait and see I guess.

I would assume you would go there as Summer Heights High is no longer available on iview. I would prefer that the ABC had a secondary site with ads for older programs if they wanted to make revenue from them online. There’s no reason why they can’t sell ads online. Until this sort of thing is accessible on people’s tv I don’t see it as a big deal. The Iview plug in for Plex is great. Means I can watch iview with a remote.

looks like plus7! watching some stuff now

FABULOUS! More stuff to keep me occupied and procrastinate at work with!

These sites have been out for a month or so…? Not sure why you/they are saying it launched today.

@ChinTan

This would be complemented by Google TV, not compete with it from my understanding. As in, if smh.tv was to be made compatible with the Google TV browser, you’d be able to set up a smh.tv channel on your TV.

I think that’s how it works, anyway.

Why are organisations like Fairfax putting up inferior quality video in the year 2010?

The video quality is very poor, particularly considering Fairfax is a ‘media’ company and particularly that broadcast video has been online now for more than 5 years!

And why is Fairfax (and others) using Flash to present video and not HTML5? HTML5 is device agnostic so you can watch it on any device; PC, MAC, iPhone, iPad etc. Try YouTube’s HTML5 interface on your mobile or Vimeo’s or even Facebook’s.

The User Interface and design is circa 2005. Many companies have learnt many lessons on how best to present video online and much of this knowledge is in the public domain. The user interface should be something at least like http://www.hulu.com or even YouTube or Vimeo. There aren’t even any ‘share’ functions in the media player design which has been a UI standard for at least 4 years.

C’mon Fairfax (and News.com.au) get with the times!

Sheer audacity for Ms Leary to say its a way to engage more content…piffel… its repurposing and adding head end advertising, nothing more. +1 to “DEC”, I always click DONT PLAY on FFX websites, especially the ones that have channel TEN news clips. What a crock of a cop out !
Both papers are clueless about the digital video strategy so they take the easy way out; buy cheap content and rebrand it. News.cum do it with skynews extract clips. They must think we are idiots and we won’t notice.

So why dd FFX recently spend $1M on new studios at Darling Island ? Has anyone actually seen a video news item produced by FFX ? Why do they employ uni grads to do their video “journalism”- because its cheap !!

Since I stopped buying newspapers 10 years ago, I now dont go to their websites for real news. As for the the technicals, the decision to go to flash is an epic fail. Shame Mr McMillan shame. It took them 10 years to work out the difference between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios now they go and choose the LEAST useable player solution.

Side note: my PS3 now recognises the 7 extra service and it is a wonderful promotion tool for them. Not that ill want to use my data to watch promos and Sunrise “extra” content. but I do like the technical strategy they have implemented. Streets ahead of the other commercial FTA stations. Did anyone else notice this ?

So my personal ratings board for digital video strategy would be:
1- ABC online/iview/PS3
2- Seven/ yahoo7/ PS3
3- IINET/ Fetch TV (though limited release)
4- Television Sydney website/live scaleable streaming in quicktime
5- youtube/google channels with customization
6- unallocated
7- nine/MSN
8- SBS- barely existant
9- TEN- feeble
10 FFX /News Ltd- fail !

@Dec “I personally despise the stupid auto play videos on SMH as it is. Very frustrating, I click do not play EVERY time. Even MySpace turned off autoplay FFS.”

I hear your pain. It’s a deceptive and shitty policy designed to inflate their view rate. Here’s a Chrome Plug-in called Fairfax Video Blocker:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/akdhnalfijbhlifpobhanbopfbdlbjfd?hl=en-au

There should be a Firefox add-on too, but you’ll have to search for it.

For Mac, try Click2Flash, it’s a free Safari plug-in that prevents all Flash autoplaying on all websites (including ads) – however you can whitelist sites like YouTube if you want to: http://clicktoflash.com/

@Martin – HTML5 video doesn’t work with Internet Explorer. iPad is only about 2% of the market and not really worth developing for.

@Tom – thanks mate I am aware of the limitations of certain technologies. Opera, Safari, Firefox and Chrome are capable of HTML5 video and IE9 is built on the standard. (And yes I’m aware of browser market shares.)

My main point was the very poor quality of Flash based video used by Fairfax and the very poor user experience and poor overall design. It’s not that hard but look at the output and result from Fairfax.

As an aside, mobile video views have grown 660% in the past 12 months and smartphones like the iPhone happily play HTML5 video. YouTube mobile video views are already up over more than 100m per day.

I’m also acutely aware of iPad’s market share and I was simply arguing that if people are building content for mobile devices such as the iPad or smartphones then unless they are selling their content (aka iTunes or Zune) then they should avoid wasting money building native apps and instead build for HTML5.

The fact that most of the mainstream online and digital video networks already have HTML5 sites or are HTML5 compatible (YouTube, Vimeo, even xBox now!) let alone have had HD quality video for a couple of years, then Fairfax just now putting sub standard video content online pretty much speaks volumes about how much they don’t get it.

@ Martin

To begin with, I’m not sure why you’d both praise HTML5 and also dismiss the video quality of Flash – you realise both HTML5 and Flash use the same video codec (H.264) and therefore most likely both will look identical? The compromise for video quality is usually due to a decision on the lowest common denominator of network connection from the site’s users. Fairfax Digital know what they’re doing and I’m sure the quality they’ve provided is a logical one for their audience.

Also, while I agree that it would be fantastic for them to create an HTML5 solution to cater for the mobile audience – which I agree is growing rapidly (although realistically, still far behind the desktop audience, especially when it comes to streaming full-length TV shows) – to include it as a necessary requirement at launch would be seen as a waste of both time and money. To cater for such as small potential market when the core product has not had time to establish itself and prove itself as a success?

I’m sorry, but your arguments are entirely focused on what you yourself want, and not what the Australian digital market as a whole is capable of consuming – and it is this that both the Fairfax Digital team and the Fairfax shareholders are interested in appealing to.

@Tom we can have chat over a coffee about online video if you want cause I’ve been doing (live and on demand video) since 1998 across Australia, the USA and Europe and on some of the biggest sites – so I have a fair clue in this space.

We can talk codecs separately but people who use Flash (or anything else) choose to encode their videos using any one of a variety of codecs and H.264 is just one and it appears Fairfax aren’t using it.

The issue with Fairfax is their specific Flash implementation is poor and or the video encoding (and choice of codec) is poor and or their choice of CDN is poor. Just look at the quality of the video and the extensive pixelation. I am on a 30mbps cable download speed on a quad core PC with dual Nvidia video cards, 6gb RAM which is optimised for video production and encoding and the Fairfax quality is circa 2005. All I have tried to say repeatedly is that the Fairfax implementation is so far behind the times for a media organisation it is sad. But, it is not just the video quality and their particular implementation of Flash it is the whole UI without any social sharing capability and other UI basic must haves – all of which have been know about for many years.

Now, just compare the Flash implementation of Hulu and Major League Baseball to Fairfax and iView. There is almost no comparison in the quality of video because they’ve been doing it for years. But, you can also compare http://www.abcnews.com or http://www.cbsnews.com video to Fairfax and iView, again there is no comparison in quality because these sites are using people who know what they are doing and implementing basic best practices. You won’t see any pixelation of the videos on those sites and they are using Flash and the content is being served out of the USA (but they might also be using Akamai).

As I work in this space I can give you any stats and facts you want about video via the browser (live streaming and on demand) and on mobiles and your arguments are focused on your perceptions of the market which isn’t today’s consumer behaviour. Not once did I mentioned that my argument was based on what ‘I want’ so you’re jumping to conclusions.

I also highlighted the use of HTML5 on major sites as a demonstration of how far behind the curve Australian media is and that it is an answer right now for smartphones, iPads and users of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari which now make up more than 50% market share vs IE.

You will be surprised at how many Australians are watching higher definition video via their browser from non-Australian sites and via their mobiles. Australians are one of the highest consumers of online video in the world (44% of Aussies as at Feb 2010 with an additional 33% saying they’ll do more) and just because Australian media organisations haven’t offered it has not stopped or inhibited Australians from accessing it. iView alone is already getting more than 500k visitors per month and more than 1.7m visits but they also have a sub-par Flash implementation.

I’ll just finish again with the point I was trying to make. It is 2010 and there is no excuse for a sub-standard implementation of online video whether using Flash or Silverlight or raw embedded media players. The knowledge is in the public domain and easily accessible whether its about encoding, Flash implementation, usability, design best practices, CDN’s and on and on – and it doesn’t take large amounts of money. It is simply a real shame that a major Australian media organisation is today implementing a sub-standard video portal and talking it up when most other sites (media and non media) have had great experiences for a number of years and are already innovating / piloting HTML5 and offering high quality experiences.

In the digital space you innovate or die and there is no excuse for offering these sub-standard experiences in Australia particularly when a large majority of online Australian’s are already accessing higher definition and higher quality experiences and expect and deserve better (and so do advertisers).

@ Martin

Happy to meet another online video pundit, feel free to get in touch through my LinkedIn.

Try that again. 🙂