WimTV: new ways to monetise events

Centuries of history have taught many ways to monetise events off line. And there are also many ways to monetise large events online.
However, on line monetisation of medium-to-small events is often a challenge: an in-house service has high set up and maintenance costs, administrative costs of managing payment collection may eat significantly into the revenues and, more than anything else, it is hard to create trusts between parties concurring to the event organisation and distribution.

These concerns are now a thing of the past.
WimLive, a service of the WimTV platform, lets operators decide whom they do business with while the service provides video streaming services to their customers and, more importantly, manages payment collection and revenue sharing.

Therefore WimTV offers the different components of the audio-visual world an environment where operators can interact and lets them create and deploy new business models in an immediate and profitable fashion. It is a web-based platform with B2B marketplace and B2C distribution functionality connecting  video professionals (creators, producers and service providers), advertisers and distributors.

WimTV promotes association of operators to provide the best choice to end users.

To achieve its goals WimLive introduces two professional figures that have a natural correspondence with comparable figures of the real world: Event Organiser, the figure that organises the event and Event Reseller the figure that promotes and distributes the event.

WimLive obviously supports the case of free streaming, but also the case of an Event Organiser playing also the role of Event Reseller and the case when the two entities are separat. This lets the Event Organiser to carry out the functions that are proper to the role while letting other operators play roles that are congenial to them.

WimTV administration pages let an Event Reseller (e.g. a local broadcaster) manage its event programming. For each event an Event Reseller can set various parameters (date, duration etc.) an particularly those agreed with the Event Organiser (this can be a band or a football team), namely ticket price and revenue sharing percentage. If more entities claim a slice of the pie WimLive is open to do that.

Leonardo Chiariglione, CEO of WimLabs, has stated “WimLive is a companion service to WimTV’s Video on Demand that already supports video streaming with a variety of business models such as free, pay-per-view and subscription. Any payment received by a user of WimTV services is immediately split among rights holders as driven by licensing information associated to each video. WimLive – adds Chiariglione – allows an Event Reseller, who has reached an agreement with an Event Organiser, to obtain from the WimTV platform a sharing of each individual payment.”

For each single payment received from an end user consuming an event, WimLabs withholds an agreed amount for its service and automatically accredits the agreed shares on the Event Reseller and Event Organisers’ PayPal accounts.

WimLive opens new opportunities to monetise events for which it was so far impossible to get an economic return that would not be offset by administrative costs. Indeed the entire event administration, including payment splitting, is managed by WimTV, a feature of vital importance to retain profitability of medium to small events.

WimLive – live streaming that makes economic sense

With WimLive the WimTV platform makes available another service to WimTV users: the ability to offer live streaming services with a simple way to get paid for the service, possibly in combination with other parties.

Off line monetization of events has never been a problem. Also on line monetization of large scale events is not a problem. However, on line monetization of medium-to-small scale live events is an uphill battle because:
1. Setting up and maintain a live streaming service may entail significant costs
2. The cost of collecting payments may easily offset the revenues
3. If more parties are involved it may be difficult to establish trusts between parties.

WimLive has solved these problems. Let’s follow a simple yet quite realistic walkthrough by looking at the picture below.

As you can see, everyone can stream own live events independently, deciding whether to transmit to his audience for free or in pay-per-view mode. In addiction, the system also offers the possibility of make live streaming in cooperation with other entities, dividing the proceeds among all participants. In particular:


1. An Event Organiser holding rights to an event makes an agreement with an Event Reseller to promote and distribute events to end users and agree on revenue sharing (this step is not needed if there is no Event Reseller)
2. The event takes places and a cameraman shoots the scene and sends the digital stream to WimTV
3. An end user clicks on the event, pays and watches the event
4. The payment is split between WimTV and Event Organiser
5. Payments are split also with the Event Reseller in case promotion and distribution is done by a third party.

WimLive is a Unified solution for on demand and live video where
- An arbitrary number of parties may claim rights to event
- Revenues are accredited to each party as soon as payments are effected
- WimTV plays the role of trusted third party
- WimLive entails very low administrative costs
- Can be easily integrated with other application platforms (Moodle…)

Who are the typical WimLive users?
1. Hotel chains
2. Organisers of cultural, musical and sport events
3. Companies offering training courses
4. Small to medium size film makers
5. Local TVs
6. And many more...

To run a WimLive event you need to 
1. Register on WimTV as a WebTV
2. Sending an email to sales@wimlabs.com to get a URL
3. Input a few data (date, time, duration, price to watch the event etc.)
4. And go!

New transport protocols for a better user experience

In the 1980s the telecom industry decided they needed a “broadband standards” and started defining some protocols under the project name “Asynchronous Transfer Mode”. Today people know ATM for something completely different because the project, which actually led to significant deployment in the telecom gears of various countries, came to a stop because of a competing technology called Internet Protocol.
A decade later IP, that did not require an access speed of 155 Mbit/s like ATM, started being deployed with a bitrate that on average did not even reach 3 orders of magnitude less the ATM’s. IP seemed to provide the level of speed that could make customers happy keeping the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) in place while ATM required reaching millions of subscribers homes with optical fibers.

No one can blame telcos for trying to save trillions of dollars of optical fibers for the less costly Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL). The reality, though, is that our society is more and more video dependent but the fixed telecommunication infrastructure cannot provide the bandwidth that its users require. A lot of talk is being made these days around the “Next Generation Network” (NGN) acronym and, in due time, something is bound to come out, but very little prospects exist for the mobile network which is squeezed between a terrestrial broadcasting industry that sticks to its Ultra High Frequency (UHF) legacy while the need to carry video on mobile networks multiplies by the day.

Video is a strange beast. From time to time I regularly receive the question: How many bit/s are required to transmit video? My regular answer is: as many as you want, even no bits at all. I agree that some may see this answer as non-collaborative, but it contains a profound truth, namely that video is a really flexible beast because you can decide how many bit/s you use to transmit video. No matter how few bits you use, your correspondent will always see “something”.

Operators have exploited this feature to cope with the wide dynamics of networks characteristics. If transmitter is informed that receiver is unable to receive all the bits that it needs to decode a video, it can switch to a version of the video encoded at a lower bitrate. The user at the receiving side will see a less crisp picture and he may complain about the shortsightedness of telcos that did not invest in ATM (if they had done it, what would the phone bill be today?), but that is still better than a picture that keeps on freezing.

The problem is that operators has independently decided to use their own transmitter-receiver protocols. This was acceptable at a time when video was a past time of few, but it is no longer a solution today when video is so pervasive.

MPEG has spotted this problem and is close to releasing a new standard called DASH. The acronyms stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and is almost self-explanatory. The pervasive HyperText Transport Protocol is used to stream video but the bitrate used is dynamically adapted to network conditions using a standard protocol that any implementer can use to build interoperable solutions.

See a technical explanation at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/technologies/mpeg-b/mpb-dash/index.htm

Leonardo Chiariglione

How does your pc plays wim.tv videos?

So, when you first come on the wim.tv page was asked you to download a browser plugin, then you're able to watch videos. But what really happens in this process?  What you downoad is a gstreamer-based rtsp player, that receives multimedia contents from the network and allows the browser rendering them within a web page.

Real time streaming protocol and wim.tv

RTSP (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2326) coupled with Real Time Protocol (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3550) is the network protocol used by wim.tv to delivery videos to the end user. RTSP is a real live protocol, that means that the media supplier could create the video at the very same time it streams it. This is implemented by sending a single frame of the video at the time, so in every moment the server could decide what is the next frame to be sent. In the others web-based video streaming platforms each video is an indivisible file, that must be streamed as-is.

Then RTSP allows to insert advertisements within the video in a totally smooth way, without overlaying, switching through different streams or other tricks. In fact, when an adverticement starts, the player just keep on receiving and frames, without ever notice if those frames are part of the video or the adverdicement. Besides improving playback performances, this ensures the advertisers that end users cannot skip the adverticements.

Another thing wim.tv player is able to do is to decrypt encrypted videos. Pay per view premium videos are streamed in an encrypted form, and can be played only by authorized users. If a malevolent user tries to save video data from the network the only thing he could retrieve is video of solid gray frames. But if you're allowed to play the same video, wim.tv browser plugin will decrypt it for you. In that case, each frame of the video is received, decrypted and played. The entire operation is enough fast that you'll never notice that is happening when you watch a video.

Alessio Lagonigro

A roadmap to converging video services

Despite the rosy pictures we are often shown of encroachment of new media in the TV turf and the support of statistical evidence suggesting that more people spend more time with non-TV video, TV is as healthy as ever. In a recent Nielsen report Americans are said to have watched more TV in 2010 than ever before: total viewing of broadcast networks and basic cable channels is up ~1 percent, i.e. ~34 hours per person per week.

“Conservative” extensions of TV to the web like Hulu, Netflix or Apple TV are reported to fare rather well. On the other hand “innovative” attempts at integrating the television and “web video” experiences, like Google TV, receive mixed reports and see their deployment delayed.

The issue is further complicated by the underground battle around the enabling technologies to be adopted for streaming video to the end user via the internet. In the “analogue TV” age Consumer Electronics (CE) has thrived by adhering to established standards. In the now consolidated “digital TV” age CE has kept on thriving based on established standards. Should the “TV on the web” age be dominated by a handful of behemoths brandishing their technologies as a weapon to preserve and extend their walled gardens?

Judging from the number of initiatives addressing the need for standards in this space, one would say that the relevant industries do think that proprietary technologies should not be the only game in town. Unfortunately most initiatives have issued or are in the process of issuing specifications that appear to be driven by the desire of industries to protect their existing businesses by adding new features while keeping out potential new competitors. Whether this is what consumers are interested in is another story that may very well not be in their priority list.

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/ WG 11 (MPEG) has been working for the last few years – and keeps on doing so – to develop the key technologies that will enable, as done for digital TV, the creation of a level play field on which the third generation of CE can flourish. Some of these technologies target:

• New video and audio compression for more rewarding user experiences while keeping down the bitrate
• Media composition and presentation
• More attractive ways for the user to interact with services
• More effective ways to deliver content to end users when network is unreliable
• Multichannel distribution of content
• New ways to do business with content

This collection of basic technologies is very important for a smooth transition from “digital TV” to “TV on the web” based on standards. To make this happen, however, industry needs comprehensive specifications that integrate the technologies so that they can be seamlessly integrated in products and deployed to provide interoperable services.

In 2008 the Digital Media Project (DMP), an industry association based in Geneva, is in the process of launching a new project on “Digital media platform for the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century” (P21-2). The goal of this project is to integrate all technologies that are required to provide a solution that is attractive for consumers, profitable for content creators, secure for service providers and rewarding for device manufacturers.

A precursor of P21-2 is wim.tv, a service on the web that lets different types of entrepreneurs do business with video and advertisement content. wim.tv is enabled by CEDEO’s Platform for Digital Asset Trading (PDAT), designed to offer users all services required to do business with video content on the web effectively and profitably, e.g.

• Describe content
• Negotiate terms
• Request/generate/process events
• Issue licences
• Associate content/ads
• Stream video securely
• Interact with content
• Pay/cash

PDAT is an early implementation of the emerging MPEG-M standard (ISO/IEC 23006 Multimedia Service Platform Technologies). Its modular architecture allows for the easy replacement and introduction of existing and new modules to extend the range of services offered to its users.

Currently PDAT supports the following browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, running on Android, Linux, Mac OS (10.5 onward) and Windows (XP onward). The wim.tv player is a PDAT plugin.
Wim.tv is an ideal platform for the convergence of television services. It is based on international standards, has a growing community and its player is easily portable in such environments as Web, IP and mobile TV.

Initiatives such as wim.tv can provide the video ecosystem the means to move to the next level because of the existence of standard API to access services.

Leonardo Chiariglione