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Guvera and the Martha Stewart Dilemma
Many of today’s TV and video dilemmas are at least a decade old. Take interactive television. Stop in at any iTV event today, and you could easily mistake it for an industry confab in the 1990’s. The same is true for talk of monetizing older content beyond a straight syndication model. It doesn’t go back quite as far as the iTV days, but you might remember hearing the example of Martha’s Stewart’s turkey-carving demonstration earlier this decade. The idea was that there ought to be a way to make money from people wanting to access Martha’s turkey demo after its original air date. Sounds reasonable, right? And yet the Martha Stewart dilemma still hasn’t been adequately solved.
Guvera is a company out of Australia and a Limelight Networks customer. The company is currently running a beta service in the land down under that matches targeted advertising with music libraries from Universal Music Group, EMI, and IODA. The music is completely free to consumers, but brings in revenue to the music studios through branded channels. Once a consumer logs in, he or she can search for a song, artist, or genre, and then click through to a branded page with free downloading and streaming available. Download files are all DRM-free.
Often there’s a chicken-and-egg problem of trying to line up content agreements while also getting advertisers on the hook. However, Guvera has top-notch music studios signed on in Australia, and an impressive list of advertisers including Johnson & Johnson, Dominos Pizza, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nestle, among others.
Guvera’s ability to target brand sponsorships is what potentially gives it the ability to revolutionize content monetization. However, they couldn’t make the content delivery work without a little help, and that’s where Limelight Networks comes in. Much of the free-content landscape today is based on slow or best-effort content delivery, meaning the user experience can range from adequate to unbearable. The Guvera team knows that to make their business work, they have to start with a higher quality experience or risk losing users and advertisers alike. Limelight Networks is Guvera’s exclusive platform for delivering that experience with music streaming and downloads in Australia. And come March, we’ll also be their exclusive partner when Guvera launches in the US. More details to come, but Guvera has plans to launch video and television content by the middle of the year as well.
In the meantime, Guvera held a pre-launch party in New York last week. Several pubs have posted celebrity-laden photos from the event. We’ve got more screenshots from the service below.
