Online In 2011: Connected s, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars

Editor’s note: Online is going through many changes as people begin to connect their s to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as srch. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online platform Brigove, gives his view of where online is going next yr. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile formats.
Web is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another yr of transformation in the online landscape. The stage is set for mainstrm connected s, Over-the-top adoption, and even more s watched directly strmed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike.

1. Connected Platform Wars
The past yr saw the definitive emerce of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This yr will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected platform market. Input 1 on the is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smart over the past several yrs, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. vs. the dominant brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for crting device-oriented appliions and Web experiences.
will ship an iOS-based display and will open up to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and , as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for Web 10-foot experiences.
Google, which has alrdy put forward its first rendition of the same, will expand on this and crte models that integrate Android apps across all devices.
In addition, the largest of the CE manufacturers (e.g. and ), will put their best foot forward with App SDKs, App Stores and Web standards based on HTML5, looking to leverage their massive volumes and strong position in the living room to fend off and Google from owning the consumer experience and app distribution relationships.
Expect by the end of the yr a frenzy of publisher and developer interest in crting Apps and Web experiences as the volumes of products shipping by the end of 2011 will be in the tens of millions and very attractive as a target platform.

2. Over-The-Top Subscriptions will emerge, but largely fail
The long coveted id of Over-The-Top (or OTT) distribution (through services such as Google , , or Boxee), which would ld in turn to tens of millions of consumers “cutting the cord” with their cable provider will further take hold in 2011, but will largely disappoint consumers.
While library on-demand subscriptions through services like Netflix, Xbox Live Marketplace, and Amazon VoD offer users grt and broad libraries of content, they don’t yet offer a compelling substitute to a cable subscription.
In 2011, we’ll see the first wave of attempts to crte more rich subscription bundles that are available over the Internet. Expect Netflix to start paying for more recent and popular shows, and for to potentially offer a low-priced ($25/month) subscription product with a collection of recent hit shows. But most major broadcasters and studios won’t bite or participate in a mningful way, lving consumers still feeling like these products don’t offer enough. The absence of a broad offering of live will be a major factor keeping cords from being cut.
At the same time, your existing cable subscription will start to offer a grter range of content over the Web, and likely top-tier cable companies such as Comcast / Xfinity will make their online products available through open devices and apps, blurring the lines even further.
We’ll have to wait until 2012 when the scale of Connected adoption is large enough that online subscription providers will be willing to write big enough checks to get the best available programming.

3. Facebook and Twitter will become larger sources of traffic than Google srch
In a recent jointly published study by Brighcove and TubeMogul, we reported that the fastest growing source of traffic to s on publisher websites were social platforms Facebook and Twitter. This growth is accelerating and the role of these platforms as primary content discovery and viewing environments will rch a point by the end of the yr that they will soon be as large and important as Google srch.
Incrsingly, online publishers will trt Facebook.com as a Web publishing platform that is as important as their own Web domains. Facebook will welcome and embrace using its site as a media distribution end-point, offering rich tools and a business model that doesn’t require that it share in advertising revenue erated from impressions on its site. This will be highly attractive to publishers and we’ll see more and more VOD type appliions launched concurrently on publisher sites and Facebook.com.

4. Ubiquity—Every Company is a Media Company
While a bit of a cliché, we’re seeing this happen at an accelerating pace. In 2011, if you are a professional institution, organization or business of any size, you will have an online strategy. is becoming such a central part of how one communies, markets, edues and informs online that every pro website will be publishing some form of online .
It will first feel a lot like the brochureware era of the first eration Internet, with a lot of poorly-conceived and poorly-executed content. But a new era of Web production businesses will emerge much as the Web development industry of the mid-90’s emerged, and organizations will start to iterate and experiment with how to best accomplish their online objectives using .

5. Battle Over Delivery Standards Hts Up
Google’s recent announcement that they are acquiring Widevine adds fuel to what is alrdy an important platform war over how is consumed, secured and delivered both on PCs and incrsingly on non-PC devices.
Several alternative stacks are emerging for encrypting / securing and then, in turn, delivering in a high-quality and reliable manner to all platforms and devices. offers HTTP Strming which both secures and provides for adaptive delivery to both HTML5 and iOS Apps, but is proprietary to ’s devices and software.
offers its own DRM services and HTTP strming standards, both of which are proprietary but are designed to work across client and device platforms that support the Flash runtime.
And now Google will get in the mix with Widevine’s technology, which also provides a method to encrypt and secure files and deliver them to nrly any device or operating system using adaptive bitrate HTTP strming. We should expect that, like with On2’s cs which were open-sourced as the WebM standard, Google will open source and freely distribute the Widevine technology, as well as bundle it as a standard part of the infrastructure in Chrome, Chrome OS and Android browsers and operating systems.
It all adds up to more Web s on more devices and points to a day when we won’t be able to tell the difference between the Web and .