Adobe Gets It

I just watched a short presentation at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit from Mark Randall of Adobe Systems Dynamic Media Devision.  He articulated clearly something I have been thinking about for a while which is the technology and business process that need to come to being in order for content owners and aggregators to monetize their content in an online environment.

Eventually I believe that the metadata and monetization systems will connect content owners with distributors in a way that allows the content to be free in terms of where it can go and yet still be tracked and monetized.  Take this example:  You produce a video like a TV show and in the metadata indicate where the ad avails are.  Also in the metadata is which avails the aggregator can change.  In the end the consumer views a video with a few ads and both the content owner and the aggregator can monetize their respective avails.

The standardization of meta data, the handling of that data and the revenue flow between different members of the creation to consumption chain have a long way to go before this becomes reality, but I think that’s where online entertainment is headed.