Global online streaming of live IPL cricket matches on YouTube

As I discussed earlier, users prefer to watch live sports on television. They go to alternate digital platforms (Web or mobile) if they don't have access to a television, or the telecast is not available in their region, or if they want to simultaneously complement their TV experience. Sports leagues/rights owners/broadcasters also prefer television for distribution because it drives almost all of the distribution economics.

Having said that, yesterday's announcement that YouTube is partnering with the Indian Premier League (IPL), the richest cricket tournament in the world, to provide live global Webcast of all IPL matches is significant.

The partnership will allow the young IPL, which starts its third annual season on March 12th, to market its increasingly popular and novel format to a global audience. In addition, it will be a boon for global cricket fans living in countries where cricket is a niche sport and hence not available on television.

Google, which owns YouTube, gets exclusive global online rights for two years. All 60 matches in the tournament will be available for online streaming, which apparently will be free for consumers. Google will monetize the content through advertising and sponsorships, and split the revenue with IPL. The U.S. market, which has a decent size international fan base even though cricket is a niche sport here, will have re-broadcast rights. DirecTV offered the 2009 IPL season package to consumers in the U.S. last year on a pay-per-view basis for $99.

This is a great win for Google, which is playing nice with premium content owners in international markets, having learned from its mistakes in the U.S. where it started on the wrong path with content owners, and until today is fighting to counter their skepticism in its efforts to secure distribution rights for premium content. IPL content is by far the biggest prize with the maximum online commercial potential in the cricket-crazy Indian sub-continent.

The Google/IPL deal follows a similar partnership struck last year between NBC Universal and Ten Sports, one of the most popular sports cable channel in the Indian sub-continent and Middle East. The partnership provided NBCU exclusive digital rights to monetize Ten Sports content on a revenue-share basis. Full disclosure: I led the formation of the Ten Sports venture and managed the business at NBCU.

As part of that partnership, we launched tensports.com as the first, free, premier sports video portal in the Indian sub-continent and Middle East. The portal was designed to stream live cricket matches in full with a highly social and interactive experience. The first major live event on the portal - the Compaq Cup Tri-Series cricket tournament between India, New Zealand and Sri Lanka - beat all expectations by arguably hosting the biggest live event ever held in that market. During the four days of cricket streamed from the week-long tournament, over one million users watched live cricket online, with an average session time of 63 minutes. More than 100,000 concurrent users were clocked on the portal during the event. U.S., a much larger Internet market in comparison, crossed the 100,000 concurrent users mark for a live online event as recently as in 2005 during the global Live Aid music concerts that were streamed by AOL when I worked there.

Our decision on the business model - ad-supported, free live streaming to consumers - also proved to be a success. The Compaq Cup was sold out with premium brand advertisers like Cisco, Samsung, Airtel (the largest mobile carrier in India), Maruti (India's largest auto maker), Xerox, and we witnessed record audience engagement (upto 10x of average CTR) .

I'm not sure how big a catalyst was the NBCU/Ten Sports success in paving the way for the IPL/Google deal, but we definitely proved the model for live online sport streaming in the Indian sub-continent - a nascent but high-potential market that is showing impressive growth.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra - A window to the future?

I've been following the coming together of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra since it was announced early December last year. Conceived by Timothy Lee, a product marketing manager at Google, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra was an attempt to "crowdsource" classical musicians from all over the world to perform Chinese composer Tan Dun's Internet Symphony No. 1, Eroica. Tan Dan is the Oscar-winning composer of the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.



The above video explains the process. YouTube posted sheet music for individual pieces along with instructions on the Internet. Individualized segment videos featuring Tan conducting each part were also made available. Auditions were accepted until January 28th. A panel of experts from various high-profile orchestras reviewed all entries and shortlisted them to a more manageable number, and the YouTube community voted their favorite semifinalists between February 14 and February 22. After over 3,000 auditions of musicians from 70 countries, winners were announced on March 2nd. Selected orchestra was flown to New York City in early April by Google for a three-day summit with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, after which they played at Carnegie Hall on April 15.

Below is the video mashup of the final performance:



Act One of the final performance is below:



This was a first-of-its-kind, global collaborative project that promotes classical music, unfortunately a dying art form.

Is this a window to the future of how creative content can be developed leveraging technology & Internet?

The biggest book deal ever has lessons for content owners in today's digital age

Content owners have struggled to balance copyright laws and new technology as digitally savvy users maintain constant pressure on them to keep up with users' evolving behaviors. Music labels missed the digital revolution and then sued the fans who resorted to illegal downloads of songs. Movie and television studios and book publishers doubled up their ranks of lawyers and lobbyists instead of pro-actively experimenting with new technology to stay ahead of or at least keep up with their users' demand of providing new-technology-enabled, more convenient, content consumption experiences.

Content owners may however be finally learning their lesson - that it is better to redefine legal concepts and create innovative business models in order to help their customers than trying to stop the march of technology.

YouTube, the world's largest online video site, which is still fighting Viacom's $1B+ lawsuit over copyrighted infringement, recently announced a slate of deals with premium content owners. MGM, the financially struggling veteran Hollywood studio, will stream full-length movies and television shows on YouTube (owned by Google). CBS and the independent studio Lionsgate also announced similar content streaming deals with YouTube, which is essentially acknowledging its past mistakes with its stance on copyrights, and is willing to explore how it can together make money with content owners.

But I believe the landmark moment on this issue came in November when Google made a $125M copyright settlement with book publishers and authors, in arguably the biggest book deal ever in the U.S. history.

Under the deal, settled after two years of negotiations, Google will pay $125M to settle claims from authors and publishers for its earlier digital scanning of their copyrighted works without their permission. Google will be able to allow users to buy online access to copyrighted, out-of-print works, and will provide free online views of them at public libraries. Book titles that are still in print will be available only if publishers and authors agree to include them in the Google Book Search program, that is aimed at copying and indexing books, including copyrighted works, and allowing users to search through them online.

The settlement will provide a potentially lucrative e-commerce revenue stream to Google, that derived 99% of its total 2008 revenue ($21.8Bn) from advertising. A framework has been laid out for a new system that will track total revenue generated by Google from books (book sales, advertising and other fees) and split it between Google (37%) and authors & publishers (63%).

Google' s corporate mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." And make money through contextual advertising alongside that information. Google's Book Search program is another initiative by the company towards this mission.

This settlement signifies a major shift for Google, which has basically conceded that information is not free. A precedent has been set for content owners to make a case that they are entitled to a large piece of the advertising revenue generated by their content used by Google and other Internet search engines. Search revenue, at 41%, was the largest component of the total U.S. online advertising revenue of $21Bn in 2007.

Legal experts would read between the lines of the Google settlement to re-interpret the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. Google, on the other hand, still maintains that the "fair use" clause allows it to continue its practice of indexing all Web content by its search engine and generating revenue without sharing it with content owners. “It is not a concession of our legal position,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

As the digital media industry matures, we'll see more interpretations and redefinitions of legal concepts such as fair use, many of which were defined in the age before Internet, as a medium to consume content, changed everything. There will also be revisions of business practices regarding who gets paid what and by whom.

I hope one of the most important lessons from the Google settlement is a reminder to owners of intellectual property that they can choose to lock it away, give it away, or, most sensibly, share it in exchange for reasonable compensation.

For now, I won't be surprised to see Viacom lawyers back in the news on the company's $1Bn lawsuit against Google.