Saturday, December 20, 2008

Identifying opportunities in video - a model

I've always been curious on how to model video opportunities from a core strategy perspective.

Here is my take. 

We should use the strategic positioning model to 
  • identify opportunities by specifying various positioning areas,
  •  identify problems faced in each area, 
  • define target market for these problems, 
  • and set of benefits to solve these problems. 
This enables us to have a crisp definition of the product - which is nothing but a set of benefits for a target customer or a market segment. 

Strategic positioning in the video market can be divided into:
  1. Variety based positioning - the video workflow
  2. Customer segment based positioning - customer segments
  3. Access based positioning - on the modes of accessing videos. 
Specifically, 
We can use  "variety based positioning" to identify opportunities by understanding the video workflow:
  1. Ingest of video
  2. Encode/transcoding video
  3. Creation of a video asset (metadata + content). The video asset can be categorized as UGC, semi-pro, professional.
  4. Organizing videos and playlists via CMS
  5. Inserting ads. There are different ad formats - in-stream, overlays and ad-rules - ad frequency, post/pre rolls, etc.
  6. Content streaming
  7. Player - player creation, skinning
  8. Content syndication
  9. Content aggregation.
For  "customer segment based positioning", we should know:
  1. Consumer - end-user consuming content on a publishing site
  2. Content providers - consumers, semi-pro, professional 
  3. Publishers - video destination sites, aggregation sites, video in context sites.
  4. Advertisers - small biz, medium sized businesses, and large.
  5. Developers - they create publishing sites
And finally, "access based positioning":
  1. Form factor for accessing video - mobile
  2. Bandwidth constraints - on mobile or slower connection.
By keeping these three positioning models in mind, we can identify unique market opportunities and define a product offering.

I'd use the following table to articulate the problems that each area faces, example: 

Strategic Positioning Areas Problems Faced
Ads - inserting, rulesMeasuring ad effectiveness
.........

Once key strategic areas and its problems are well identified, we can then articulate market sizing for each area and its value proposition. The product definition must focus on a set of benefits for a target segment. The feature set is a technical articulation of the benefits.

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