I came across Brightcove.com yesterday. This site is gearing up resources for producers of video content to broadcast online. Their products and services are still under wraps, and the website's navigation does not function in the Firefox browser, but what they're talking about sounds exciting.

Brightcove is founded by Jeremy Allaire, formerly of web software company Allaire Corporation, creators of the ColdFusion programming language and development environment. (Allaire was sold to Macromedia, but this is the first I'd heard that - I've must have been asleep :)

While reading Brightcove's main pages, I wondered if there were any plans to incorporate video publishing via RSS. While there is an RSS feed for their Brightcove blog, there is no mention of using the technology as a delivery vehicle. It got me to thinking that it wouldn't be all that hard to set up an Internet TV channel via RSS podcasting and a programmable interface, where you could select the shows you wanted, and the order of delivery.

And of course there's a monetizing angle for such a service. Recent research shows that ads in web feeds have a higher clickthrough rate if they exist as their own item. Thus, video ads could be automatically inserted into the feed, and the video feed reader interface designed so that viewers cannot skip over the ads. Ads would be displayed between programs. And while the viewer could be paused and fast-forwarded, ads could only be paused.

If viewers do not want to watch ads, they could subscribe to an alternate fee using micropayments per program requested. A custom USB hardware key (today's equivalent of the dongle) could be snail-mailed to each premium subscriber to prevent unauthorized copying. That is, the key is required for viewing, and would allow subscribers to view their subscribed content on other computers.

Extending this idea, for those on the go, content could be downloaded to a special vodcast device similar to a video ipod, for later viewing. Once again, the USB key would monitor and control the content transfer process, as well as the viewing on the vodpod.

I think that such hardware-based uses of RSS/ Atom would be extremely exciting.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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