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Quality time - April 15, 2008

Does quality matter online? Move Networks CEO John Edwards is convinced it does, and starting Wednesday, we may get a chance to find out whether it matters to content owners looking to monetize video online. Move is providing the streaming technology for PluggedIn.com, a new online video site that is launching with thousands of professionally produced music videos licensed from three of the four major music distributors streamed at near DVD quality, according to a report in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal.

The new service is backed by Overbrook Entertainment, the film and TV production outfit owned by actor Will Smith and filmmaker Jim Lassiter. The company is betting not only that slick, professionally produced content offered for free can steal eyeballs away from user-generated sites like YouTube, but also that high-quality video will offer a meaningful competitive advantage over the same or similar content delivered at lower resolutions and with balkier performance.

Move uses proprietary technology to deliver high quality video using minimal bandwidth to produce what Overbrook's Guy Primus describes in the Journal as a "stunning experience."

As it happens, music video turns out to be nearly the perfect genre of programming to test whether consumers will gravitate toward a higher quality video featuring similar content. According to a new ranking from online video tracker TubeMogul, the list of the top 100 most popular online videos of all time is dominated by music videos. If PluggedIn is able to take music video market share away from Flash-based services like YouTube, we'll have learned something about the impact of quality on consumer behavior.

In fact, we'll have an important counter-example to the currently available evidence. The MP3 format, for instance, is measurably inferior to the 30 year-old Red Book CD standard. And yet the portability and convenience of MP3 files have made mincemeat of the CD business.

Speaking Tuesday at the NAB Show, Sling Media's Jason Hirschorn offered evidence of the same triumph of convenience over fidelity at work in video as well.

"You'd be surprised what the audience will put up with in terms of quality in exchange for access," Hirschorn said. "When we started out, we didn't really focus on infrastructure issues or any of the other things that effect video on the Internet. We just built an app, and it was far from perfect. But there was an audience out there that was just rabid for it because it let them access their content where they wanted it."

It would be nice though, if it turned out that quality does matter.

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