After a day or so of tweaking, software downloading and restoring files from my JungleDisk network backup drive, Ariel has come to life in full. The fourth of a series of Dell Latitude laptop PCs that I have used (we'll forget that Compaq that I had for a corporate job), Ariel is the third unit I've owned named after archangels, a small but welcome comfort when I have need of a machine that can deliver some assurance to a hard-working road warrior. The processing power of this ES6400 model and its solid-state RAM drive certainly help Ariel to deliver those assurances. Having been out of the PC purchasing loop for several years, now, though, I must say that Ariel is representative of a new place in the content hierarchy for PCs than former units that I have owned, more a waystation than a destination in the stream of real-time content going and coming from a myriad of inputs and outputs.
The edges and guts of Ariel are bristling with interfaces to all kinds of content sources and outputs. An SD card slot on the front for camera and mobile media, a Firewire port and four USB ports for high-speed serial connections, one of which doubles as an eSATA port for high-volume storage units, high-definition video output port and a plain old LAN connector. Inside are wireless cards for WiFi, broadband, GPS and for Bluetooth-enabled devices. A CD-DVD drive is there for legacy media and storage, while the slot for the analog modem finally said goodbye. In other words, this machine is more like a switchboard for the galaxy of content sources and output devices surrounding it than a little walled garden unto itself. The fact that I have oodles of disk space is not as important as the peta-oodles of storage and processing available in the networks surrounding Ariel.
The notion of PCs as switchboards and waystations for content is underscored by the main reason that I finally decided to spring for a new unit. My old unit was fine for browsing the Web and office automation tasks, but it groaned at the memory and processing required to produce video content. A new webcam that I purchased, able to produce high-definition video, was just not up to the task, complicated by a USB interface that was underpowered for processing video. Ariel is more than up to these tasks, equipped with its own tiny webcam to boot and a screen that is proportioned perfectly for video presentations. In a world in which video and other multimedia are beginning to become the focus of more mobile content than ever before - wait for a new generation of powerful mobile phones next year that will accelerate this trend signifcantly - PCs are becoming more of a filtering and production platform for sophisticated content that is consumed on other platforms oftentimes.
The other key factor that Ariel's power underscores is the depth and breadth of real-time information sources that it's able to handle. Dozens of browser tabs are no sweat for Ariel to manage, with streams from Twitter, email, videos humming along while I chug along on word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and slide presentations. Its dual-core CPU processor is designed to maximize the efficiency of multi-process computing, a capability that's underused via the Windows XP operating system loaded on to Ariel but a help nevertheless. This is power that used to be available only in the trading rooms of investment banks consuming hundreds of real-time information resources to make split-second decisions on securities.
With affordable multiple screen displays and larger displays becoming more common in both office and home computing to consume all of this information, our desktop and laptop computing capabilities are starting to focus on the types of benefits that used to be the focus of only a handful of securities traders. Integration of multiple content sources to help people attain the benefits of real-time computing power is going to become only more important as machines like Ariel begin to dominate the PC end of content production and consumption. With video and multimedia sources an increasingly important part of this real-time stream, the winners in publishing will the those who are able to understand the integration and collaboration requirements for people consuming information in ever more immediate decision-making cycles.
The other factor that's highlighted by Ariel's strengths is the constancy of content consumption in today's online environment. I settled for batteries that could keep Ariel going for about ten or twelve hours without recharging, but I could have opted for an even larger add-on unit that could have extended its off-cord power to eighteen hours. High-power mobile smart phones and smartbooks are about to enter this realm soon also, with the ability to power video, Web browsing and other content-intense applications for days between recharging. This "always on" culture of content production and consumption is leaving fewer and fewer gaps for people to consider alternative forms of publishing.
As emerging technologies such as Google Wave make instant content sharing and collaboration more immediate and global than ever before, the world of real-time content is going to produce even more emphasis on instant awareness and consensus-building through publishing services. While the world has not become Wall Street, in some ways the content marketing concepts - and challenges - that shaped financial markets with new generations of technologies in previous decades are becoming the baseline of how most enterprise and consumer publishers will have to adjust to content markets in the years ahead.
Immediacy is not just important, but essential to the process of making good decisions. Sophisticated analytics are needed to help people make sense of a myriad of real-time inputs and related archives. Sophisticated networks are needed to help people collaborate rapidly on high-value opportunities and to execute on those opportunities cost-effectively. All of this requires sophisticated and affordable cloud infrastructure that will enable these services to scale cost-effectively and to minimize technology investments in markets that reward rapid adoption of new technology advantages. Look no further than to companies like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters to understand the full cycle of changes that will be required for your own markets if you plan to survive and to thrive in the years ahead as real-time information changes your own markets.
So here I go, off to a new era of slugging it out with my keyboard, mouse and webcam to produce and consume content in real-time more productively than ever before. I am glad to have Ariel as my new road warrior compadre. My travel bag will be a lot lighter thanks to all of its built-ins and my life will be more content-centric and real-time than ever. I hope that's a good thing.
With a webinar for MIT coming up at the end of September, I finally accepted that my aging laptop was overdue for an upgrade to keep up with the increasing need to be video-literate online. In the process of ordering up my new unit, I had an opportunity to order a nearly-free netbook along with my new Dell Latitude. Looked interesting for a moment, but I decided to pass and to wait it out a while longer for something with a little more power and battery life. That something is not just an idle dream: smartbooks are coming to town in a few months, and they promise to do for mobile computing what PCs did for desktop computing in the 1990s.
A smartbook is in essence a small laptop optimized to use a new generation of CPU chips such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Nvidia's Tegra that offer days of battery life and high-quality performance for video, Web browsing and online office applications. Combined with operating systems such as Windows CE and Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, smartbooks - and smart phones based on the same chips - are poised to eclipse inexpensive (and not very powerful) netbooks as do-everything mobile devices for people who are content to do most everything computer-oriented via the Web. Given the billions of people who have yet to use PCs on a regular basis and the increased demand for on-the-go lifestyles that rarely settle down to a desktop unit anymore, inexpensive smartbooks are likely to take off in a big way over the next few years.
That's not all bad news for some of the incumbent interests. Microsoft is well positioned with both its CE operating system and a wealth of improving online Web-based office productivity tools to take full advantage of the capabilities of smartbooks. While this means that some of its legacy desktop software may go by the wayside in the process, it's likely that the online versions of these favorites will be powerful enough to satisfy the lion's share of people who use them. This spells sorely needed growth for Microsoft, even as it comes to terms with the positioning of Google as a more direct competitor in this space via its Chrome OS operating system being launched next year. Smartbooks are also good news for most books publishers and video producers, as they are big enough and powerful enough to support their needs for better on-the-go display systems.
Will smartbooks be the spark that catches fire in many unwired parts of the world to open up the Web to billions of people who have yet to experience it? Many mobile phones equipped with these improved chips are more likely to be key in the Web's further expansion, but smartbooks are definitely a very important step forward in making Web access an instant-on service that will make browsing a more universal tool in more venues than ever before. Yes, mobile apps will still be important, but will face far stiffer competition from cloud-based content services that work perfectly fine in smartbooks and a new generation of smart phones that will service people more effectively overall. So I'll wait a few months before picking up a smartbook, but by then, with 4G networks starting to roll out, I am sure that it will be well worth the wait.
About a year ago I had the opportunity to look at Viralheat, a media monitoring service that at the time was focused on real-time analysis of trends in online video services such as Hulu. Viralheat was good stuff and ahead of its time in many ways, though positioned as a high-end service aimed at a fairly narrow audience. It was interesting, then, to see recently the evolution of Viralheat into a more broadly based real-time trend monitoring service that covers a wide array of social media outlets and regularly updated Web sites and that can be yours to use for as little as $10 a month.
Viralheat allows you to choose key words and phrases and to track key statistics on how frequently they are popping up as fresh mentions in today's real-time publishing environments. You can get summary stats for cross-site mentions or drill down into trends found in specific online services. Viralheat's graphs are highly reminiscent of those found in Google Analytics - a possible exit strategy in the making? - and the interface as a whole has matured into a very well-designed tool that groups information into very easy-to-digest summary of key metions of terms. I like especially the three-tab summaries that form the body of Viralheat's content, which aggregate mentions in separate tabs for messages, websites and videos. This really helps you to get a sense of these three very distinct types of influence and to be able to use Viralheat as a high-power aggregation service that can trump many other online aggregation tools for ease of monitoring.
While many of the summary statistics are basically just tallies and percentages, one key tool in Viralheat is a color-coded summary of positive, neutral and negative sentiment discovered for a chosen term. In a screen grab provided by Viralheat this statistic revealed that although the new Bing search engine from Microsoft had strong mentions in social media, videos and Web sites over a recent week, more than 86 percent of these mentions were rated with neutral sentiment - in other words, most people weren't waxing strongly about the new service but were instead just spreading the word about it. This type of take can help to separate perceived buzz from mere volume quite rapidly.
Taken in sum with the other statistics Viralheat is offering a strong basic workbench of media analytics that almost anyone can afford to use to understand how their products, services and brands are resonating moment-by-moment through the countless number of online media outlets that are the front lines to true market influence. It was only a year or so ago that such types of services were used mostly by major ad agencies, corporations and PR firms to track the performance of trends in online media services. Now, thanks to highly scalable cloud computing services, good and essential monitoring can be used by any size organization to understand trends over an even wider range of services than those used by traditional monitoring services.
Most importantly, by covering the waterfront of the most popular message-oriented online social media services, Viralheat can tap into trends in the highly distributed world of social media publishing in which many trends take form and influence opinions well before they are packaged in traditional media outlets. If you've been thinking that you need to be able to monitor social media more effectively for your organization but you don't know where to begin, you list of excuses has become much shorter.
The Special Libraries Association convened its annual conference in Washington, DC recently, an event which had reassuring energy and solid attendance. SLA President Janice LaChance observed that attendance was up at this year's event compared to last year's conference in Seattle, Washington, an indication that lean times may not get people to remote locations but convenient locations are worth at least a day or two of investment for this key enterprise content community. I put together a summary video for your enjoyment below and more comments below the video that expand on some of the items featured in the video.
While many of the changes in the enterprise content industry on display at the SLA conference were evolutionary in nature, the thing that struck me most about this year's event is how much enterprise content brands are being absorbed by the focus on workflow-oriented products and services. Yes, subscription database services such as Dialog, now a ProQuest property, are still popular in their own right with enterprise information professionals, but as a brand the Dialog name no longer represents the goals of many of its subscribers. Instead, enterprise content services providers are focused intently on discerning which market segments they can serve most effectively and profitably with highly tailored services.
In the instance of Wolters Kluwer, for example, this means providing a natural language interface for clinical practicioners in medicine such as nurses that will enable them to find answers to practical questions from Wolters Kluwer medical information resources.For Thomson Reuters, products such as Business Citator blend financial, legal and public information sources into a tool that can accelerate the productivity of professionals conducting due diligence efforts on business acquisitions and partnerships. For Dow Jones' Factiva unit, it's focusing on highly tailored software solutions for sales, market analytics and competitive intelligence.
These companies have been focusing on these more tailored market opportunities for quite some time, but it's clear from this year's SLA event that the lion's share of their revenues from traditional database services are diminishing in importance rapidly as these more tailored approaches to content solutions gain more favor on the end-user desktops of enterprises. As always, this leaves the role of enterprise information professionals in some flux, as reflected in a conference program that highlighted the application of infopro skills to competitive intelligence as well as more traditional information management topics.
The influx of more tailored solutions from enterprise content vendors also means that more general content access tools are gaining a broader foothold in the development of enterprise portals. Access Innovations, for example, was showing off their new alliance with Perfect Search, which enables them to combine their indexing and categorization technologies with a platform that can create tailored search solutions for both enterprises and content vendors that provide enhanced content navigation features as well as high-performance searching. So even as many enterprise content vendors are trying to integrate enterprise content into their own products, many enterprises are looking at the problem from the other side and looking at new ways to integrate external content into their own workflow services. Sometimes these types of vendors come out on top, sometimes the information vendors, and sometimes OEM partnerships allow both to win, but whoever wins in the end the competition for solving enterprise workflow issues continues to intensify.
The SLA is to be commended for shepherding an organization of highly talented professionals facing challenging times into supporting what continues to be a first-class event. While the ranks of traditional corporate infopros have thinned in recent years, the need for people with their skills is still strong, even as those skills get repurposed often for more specific functions in the enterprise. As infopros become more adept at interpreting the needs for specific applications that address people's information demands and technologies become more easily configured to respond to those insights I expect that we're at the beginning of a new era for information professionals that will see them becoming new types of "gurus" for on-demand information services. When the world is your library, it will certainly take someone special to do that.
UPDATE: I wrote this entry yesterday originally, focusing on the Hulu launch versus HDTV. Any coincidence that today TiVo launches a direct interface to YouTube accounts? Perhaps not. Post is updated to reflect this new announcement.
A significant wedding anniversary gave our family a reasonable excuse to replace our aging and failing television with an HDTV set which arrived yesterday. Having suffered through years of the old set's fuzzy screen and scratchy sound it was quite a shock to experience faces as big and clear as life and wonderfully crisp audio. But while the senses were definitely doing backflips thanks to this not-so-little toy the cable box still had the same number of channels to flip through, with the same stuff as before - just better looking and sounding. As amazing as the technology behind it may be, it's still just a glorified monitor.
At the same time the world is bracing for tomorrow's much-ballyhooed debut of Hulu.com, the online television portal that will provide DRMed video content from NBC/Universal, News Corp and a network of 50 other providers already pumping out video through its own portal and partner sites. Staci Kramer at paidContent.org notes that there are already more than 50,000 imbeds of the Hulu player at 6,000 Web sites, with content from more than 250 TV shows and 150 clips from major shows already in the archives. It's superficial social integration, but it's a start.
In other words, Hulu is a good step forward for mainstream media outlets to adopt the cable programming model to online markets through user-assisted contextualization of secure content players, enabling a wide proliferation of places in which one can encounter their video content, albeit without any ability to mash it or otherwise do much of anything with it. Archives will also be a little problematic, apparently, with current shows not necessarily being available online indefinitely - at least until they pass off into another economic lifecycle through syndication. In the meantime, Silicon Valley Insider notes that many old-time television shows have found enthusiastic new audiences on the Hulu service, including old chestnuts such as the 1950's series "Davy Crockett" and a less successful 1980s series "Airwolf."
The concept for Hulu has matured quite a bit and is likely to experience a fair amount of success, in spite of its proprietary player dampening the service's ability to integrate much with its partners' platforms. Just the ability to search through archives of traditional TV shows should enable people to gain more breadth in their television viewing far more easily than ever before. But as always old business models hold on to television production like boat anchors on the QE2. The introduction of materials on the service is likely to be slowed by producers concerned about how it will affect DVD and syndication revenues, in spite of the fact that audiences will be more able than ever to reach the content that they enjoy most when and where they want it. In the meantime more than 65,000 videos are posted on YouTube daily, gaining more and more of people's attention bandwidth and creating a competing "long tail" of monetizable content.
Hulu is certainly a step forward for TV producers in search of increasingly distributed audiences who seek out content in the contexts that matter most to them , maintaining a "walled garden" of sorts that replicates the closed loop of content typically distributed on cable TV networks. As it succeeds, though, the services that it's most likely to impact - cable and satellite distributors - may want to ask themselves a key question: why aren't we doing a better job of providing content when and where people want it? With TiVo having announced a direct interface to YouTube downloads and HDTVs having the ability to interface directly to PCs the envelope of on-demand content that's accessible to cable and satellite TV viewers is going to have to become a priority for these companies - as the Web side of their facilities consumes more and more bandwidth for video delivery.
This brings me back to that brand-new HDTV in our family room. It's great that we can see all of these channels more clearly and even get a smidgen of content via on-demand services, but why is there still virtually no integration between cable services and the Web? Why can't I find some video that moves me on the Web, click on an icon next to my "email to a friend" and "embedding code" links that will queue it up for viewing on my HDTV in a TiVo/DVR device? Years after the introduction of TV monitors capable of managing digital video content there's almost no interactivity with those devices and the Web, save for a handful of enthusiasts who hook up their PCs to their home theatre systems. I'll enjoy it for what it is, but it seems as if the most sure-fire way to make sure that cable and satellite TV systems remain relevant is to improve the integration of TV and Web services.
Hopefully Hulu gives cable and satellite companies enough competition that they'll start thinking more seriously how they're going to be able to leverage a Web that's far better able to locate and serve up interesting video content from millions of sources worldwide. As it is the digital interfaces to modern televisions offer home audiences a wide variety of options for people to bypass the monotony of cable viewing and find the content that's most relevant to them in brilliant displays that may or may not require old business models to pay for them.
Instead of focusing on a few hundred channels, most of which are of almost no interest to a particular person, cable and satellite providers should be focusing on being the most efficient download services possible to enable set-top units to be filled with lots of programming that's of high interest to a given audience - then tailor advertising and other services to the downloader, not the program channel. It's a day that's coming sooner rather than later, hopefully - that is, if cable and satellite providers can outdance the Hulu craze and recognize that if they don't out-TiVo TiVo the days of hundreds of subscription channels is definitely numbered.
The ABM Digital Velocity event had a typically insightful array of B2B trade publishing specialists talking about the block-and-tackle world of helping print publishing brands become electronic more effectively. There was also the usual frustrating mix of people who really "get it" seeded into a general industry outlook for B2B publishing which may be looking for better answers but which oftentimes has a hard time framing the right questions.
One good example of this problem can be seen in the realm of video production for B2B publications. The panel focusing on this topic acknowledged that video was important but to them the cost of getting telegenic people and high-level production standards expected for professionally produced videos was not worth the expense. Yet a corporate marketer on the same panel was pointing out how they had whipped up some nifty promotional footage on their industrial products that was getting some good play when they uploaded it to YouTube. It sure sounded to me like these were two ships passing in the night - one assuming that their job was to produce all of the content that a marketer needed and the marketer saying that what they really needed was context.
Yet when I suggested to the panel that perhaps B2B publishers could help marketers place their corporate video footage on their sites for a fee this was shrugged off quickly as a suggestion of "advertorials." I'm trying to be charitable here, since there is a good amount of use in B2B publishing of user-contributed videos, but have these people ever looked at their Google search results and seen that little column off to the right labeled "Sponsored Links?" Has it occurred to these people that audiences understand the difference between sponsored content and unsponsored content and now are open to having clearly labeled mixes of these available on a Web page?
It would seem that corporate video is an ideal way for publishers and marketers to solve a mutual problem. The publishers see the production of video footage as distracting them from their core editorial function (which is, as I understand it, telling a story the best way possible, but we'll leave that one alone for now). The corporate marketers spend lots of money producing such video and are learning how to make them both informative and appealing. Instead of spending money on old-fashioned "creative" for ads that sell brands the old-fashioned way why not let marketers allow their prospects to step inside their brands via topic-oriented videos embedded in B2B sites? Instead of trying to flag down people with an instant's worth of attention via advertising have them hang around with your brand inside the topical video in the same space in which you'd normally put an ad - and, of course, pay the B2B publisher for that right.
There are certainly services such as TheNewsMarket that are already flush with corporate video and which could with just a little imagination be combined with a contextual ad network service such as ContextWeb to make it easy for this footage to be monetized in spots where normally ads would run. Alternatively, of course, publishers' ad sales forces could offer better deals to marketers for premium placements and special creative to enhance its ability to provide sales leads.
B2B publishers are moving far more rapidly to put the right technology in place to be successful in online publishing but more than ever they are butting up against long-established job functions and business roles that need to be rethought dramatically. It's not just a matter of combining online and digital sales forces or going digital-first in your content production. It's also about understanding that the nature of your pie that your trying to slice online is fundamentally different and changing rapidly.
As B2B marketers succeed increasingly in creating their own valuable content and using "prosumer" channels such as search engines and YouTube to reach those audiences traditional B2B publishers have to accept that the essential nature of their editorial function has changed irrevocably. These publishers have to look to their marketing clients for contextual content as well as brand messaging if the more conversational nature of online publishing is to reap its full rewards under their umbrellas. Similarly they have to become more adept at enabling both their own content and content from marketing partners to be contextualized elsewhere on the Web.
I saw a number of very hopeful signs at the Digital Velocity event which tell me that B2B publishers are investing in digital publishing more aggressively but their fundamental issue remains rethinking what their industry is really about. Just plain missing the opportunity to make good use of corporate video seems to be one important example of this disconnect. These companies have the resources to invest in change but in a marketplace in which publishing brands are becoming far less focused on the "mystique" of established titles and more on how they help people get things done new opportunties seem to be arising that will allow new players to engage B2B publishing as a market sector more effectively. If established B2B publishers aren't willing to rethink their pie then others will certainly be very glad to reslice it for them.
The new video format wars came to an abrupt end recently as Toshiba gave up on the HD DVD format and accepted that they would have to move to the new Blu-ray format. The question may be asked, though, will consumers really care who won? I've been accumulating hardware to install an HDTV recently and going through potential support for storing content. One item that caught my eye: a one-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) file server than can park itself on a wireless home network or a direct network connection. This little puppy will set me back all of about USD 550 online. That's about the going price for a Blu-ray disc player for a device that can store hundreds of movies, though certainly the Blu-ray disc devices can be expected to fall in price.
Nevertheless, with home servers becoming more and more economical, why would the entertainment industry dicker around with discs when in-home servers, on-demand cable movies and other service channels can ensure far more rapid delivery of content to interested audiences? Yes, it will provide in-store sales and help to introduce technophobes to yet another new media format, but isn't that a little bit like telling a blacksmith to keep on selling those horseshoes because you never know when those automobile people might get a hankering for using their old horse-drawn carriage again?
It seems as if the movie industry, like many other sectors in the content industry, is a captive of its traditional metrics. Faced with a new technology - HDTV - the movie producers said "Hey, now we can make more money on in-store disc sales - this is great." This of course locks them into a form of sales that's chasing yesterday's audiences: in an on-demand world of content, it's better to develop an on-demand system that can enable more people to respond to systems such as search engines and profile-matchers that can feed people the movies that would most interest them in the moment. If you can get a movie easily on an on-demand basis and it is priced to make it competitive with theatres, store sales and rentals at different points in its "shelf life" why would you focus so much energy on a format that will inevitably be the focus of piracy? In an economy in which our ability to enjoy libraries of old content stacked on a shelf is dubious at best, the rationale for disc sales has grown appreciably thinner.
Producers of all traditional media need to get far better at making their content discoverable and accessible in the venues that users value most. If I am on my mobile phone, make it easly for me to click on an icon or link when a movie is mentioned and queue it up for my viewing for the next five days. If I am reading a book review at a Starbucks, make it easy for me to go download it into my iPhone or to order a print-on-demand copy that I can pick up at Kinko's. Print magazine publishers floundered for years with getting their online models to work because they were unwilling to embrace similar basic questions of how to service their audiences. When Hollywood gets around to recognizing more clearly that they're in the audience serving business and not the film and disc distribution business hopefully they'll follow the lead of publishers who have already started to learn how to service their audiences the way that they like to be served. In the meantime that terabyte server looks like a tasty option to reclaim my bookshelves for...books? I don't know, now...
Sometimes it seems as if Apple can't win when it comes to playing the media game. After having been roundly criticized by some for having too much control over pricing via its iPod-compatible DRM content packaging and moving towards a more open model for content access Apple let the NBC television network take a walk when it wanted both higher pricing and tighter DRM controls. Ars Technica reports that NBC has opted to go instead with Amazon's Unbox video ecommerce service to package its content for online, home entertainment and mobile distribution. This will allow NBC to sell entire season series of their television shows at hefty prices - about 30 percent off of a per-episode purchase - and in doing to retain some sense of traditional syndication revenues as they move to online distribtion of video content.
It's the syndication picture more than anything else that's at issue in this move, with NBC doubtless having concern that an easily pierced DRM scheme would enable audiences to download episodes that would enable them to bypass both cable networks and affiliates to build their own libraries of shows. The fact that Amazon Unbox also enables access to their video content via TiVos also underscores NBC's desire to solve syndication revenues once and for all.
But in opting for the Unbox approach NBC has doomed their ability to reach growing mobile audiences with the latest and most appealing devices available. Unbox is locked into Microsoft's largely orphaned "Plays for Sure" DRM technology, which supports a dwindling pool of mostly also-ran mobile devices. Given Unbox's ability to support only two licensable devices per purchaser the chaotic environment for delivery platforms is not likely to enable audiences to ensure a smooth transition for their libraries from one platform to another - or to be able to switch to whatever device the rest of the family is not using at the moment to catch their favorite reruns.
As with other types of premium content Amazon is very happy to work with content producers who have long-established business models that they don't want to let go of in the rush for online profits. Video is a good target for these types of services as the delivery mechanism enables on-demand fulfillment with few in-between hassles with one of the most popular and well-managed online ecommerce services. And although Plays for Sure wound up being a good idea that few content and technology producers decided to support at least Amazon has a somewhat open mind to making cross-platform content access a reality. As Microsoft moves to a new generation of its DRM capabilities it could be that this deal is as much about moving to Microsoft as it is about moving to Unbox.
But while Amazon benefits by appealing to established content marketers and becoming a potential cross-platform haven for content producers the timidity of publishers and producers to move to new models will likely hamper Amazon's efforts to become a leader in new premium business models in the long run. The status quo on syndication revenues seems to be just fine for most traditional video content producers just now as they try to adjust to a rapidly shifting revenue mix, but hiding out in the Unbox is likely to create about as many problems as if they had tried to move to the platforms that consumers desire most. Other video producers more willing to work with those platforms will be likely to open up broader audiences for content syndication over time and have more access to market demand on the platforms that consumers want most.
At the end of the day this deal is a battle of the brands, with traditional content syndicators having a hard time adapting their brands to platform providers eager to create their own locks over premium content distribution. What's missing from this mix is a willingness from content producers to make some compromises that will enable them to adapt truly platform-agnostic content packaging that will allow them to meet today's revenue goals as well as tomorrow's as consumers shift rapidly from one type of technology to another. If content producers don't manage this well the value of their content in syndication is bound to diminish rapidly. For now consider NBC's move a noisy vote for here-and-now revenues - with the future of syndication left to other executives after the current batch has parachuted elsewhere.
After yesterday's Neilsen/NetRatings decision to drop page views from their site rankings two studies remind us that online marketing is a very complex process in which search engines and social media play a key role. A take on Facebook's rise in the ratings, why WikiYou is probably another feature searching for a marketplace and Fair Use Day is celebrated at BoingBoing.
What the Nielsen/NetRatings change really means, Postini's impact on enterprise Google sales, new Google social media search and initial thoughts about the new Flock release.
Will Yahoo's replacement for its 360 social media product take off, StumpleUpon helps publishers in the long tail of content and Springer deals with an Open Access publisher who turns out to be quite vocal about their early efforts' shortcomings.
Will social media grow to be a $4.3 billion dollar industry on just ads alone? We examine the role of premium content in social media growth. Also, some thoughts on Open Access as a growing trend for scholarly research and bridging the gap between peer-reviewed publications and Nature's Precedings portal.
Is Twittergramming the future of citizen news gathering? Robert Scoble is bullish on it. Also, a take on Read/Write Web's view of the past and future of the Web.
Happy Independence Day! While most Americans are unplugged today tending to barbecues, baseball games or frolicking down at the beach we thought that we'd offer everyone our view of how social media played a pivotal role in the events that lead up to the historic signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here's an entertaining - and short - photoessay in tribute to those pioneers of publishing. Transcript follows the clip.
It’s Independence Day in the Unites States of America, a time when people of all walks of life get together to celebrate our nation. In most ways we celebrate America as it is today, a unified nation more than two hundred years old.
But it’s also a day when we remember how America used to be on the day of its birth. Who was America on that day? We were people of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia – people who lived along a thousand miles of coast , plains and mountains, each with their own idea of what America was and what it should become.
Where was that common idea that we call America formed?
Was it in the bitter snows of Valley Forge?
Was it on the battlefields of Guilford Courthouse, Cowpens or Bennington?
The War of Independence was necessary to create an independent nation, but there was one real factor above all that created a unified vision of what America would become:
Content.
Out of the printing presses of colonial America poured pamphlets expressing a new vision of politics and democracy that spread throughout the land. The pamphlets were read aloud and discussed in taverns across the colonies, creating a new common consciousness about this new nation in the making. The discussions lead to convictions, convictions lead to action – and action lead us to new discussions, new content – and a new nation.
In our great new era in which so many people are blessed with the freedom to express themselves through publishing, please take a moment today to remember the social media pioneers who dared to express bold thoughts to people – people who would join to become a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the freedom of expression that has ignited a global revolution in content.
CCC's new licensing deal for academics, a take on Nature's blog pushing for more innovation in scientific publishing and what really happened when the iPhone debuted.
We all know those catchy jingles that companies like Microsoft and HP come up with to get us thinking about them as innovative companies, but what's an up-an-coming content company to do if they want their own tune? Well, they could try "Whatdoyouwannaknow," an upbeat tune from NLX Music. NLX is one of a number of indie music acts promoted by online music channel Harris Radio, founded by Pete Harris, a financial content industry veteran with a bent for great local music acts in NYC. The following clip of the song gives you an idea of the kind of energy that the song can invoke, you can contact NLX to arrange for your own cut of visuals or other tweaks as desired. I think that it's the type of tune that can play across a number of generations, so listen to it with an open mind - you, too, could have the next hot marketing anthem...
Our take on a brewing counter-offer for Dow Jones, thoughts on how Wikipedia's Current Events editing challenges news organizations to take a more objective view and ECNext's Manta uses social media concepts to update business profiles online.
InfoUSA picks up high-margin research services from Guideline, Kevin Rose does Pownce file sharing on the sidelines using Adobe's AIR cross-platform runtime environment, and Endeca is touted at a conference as the next billion-dollar Boston tech company.
In today's installment I summarize some of our recent key postings as well as provide a quick take on Newsvine's new ElectionVine portlet. Instead of just providing the traditional "talking head" I have provided most of this with (**echo chamber, please**) picture-in-picture narrative. If you shoot up your player's resolution to max the screen grabs are pretty readable, so it should be kind of a fun experience. Windows-based video technologies leave something to be desired, but we're wrestling it to the ground step by step. Enjoy!
A preview of the SIFMA show, thoughts on Jerry Yang in it for the long haul against Google, Reuters Interactive and Science Magazine's content previews. Let us know what you'd like to see in our ShoreViews reports!
Brightcove is one of many video distribution platforms that wrestles for attention in the media world, an effort made easier by the announcement of a deal with Fox Entertainment Group to provide them with a platform for their IPTV plans. Brightcove's portal has featured primarily user-generated content and community, but its technology can accomodate long-format entertainment programming as well. Will Fox use Brightcove technology exclusively for its mainstream programming or will it use Brightcove's platform to build up user-generated content communities around its own assets? Time will tell, but my guess is that Fox Interactive Media's experience with MySpace argues for Fox having a good dose of its own user-gen content in the mix alongside mainstream Fox programming feeding synergies into the MySpace platform.
The key point in this deal is that an OEM strategy seems to have paid off for Brightcove based on the strengths of its own portal strategy that allowed them to refine its functionality with live audiences and to continue to act as a test bed for ideas that can feed into their partner networks. OEMing can be tricky if clients can't visualize the potential outcomes of using a product tailored to their needs, especially when you're a young company trying to get attention in a crowded marketplace. Having in effect bootstrapped their OEM strategy with their own Web site Brightcove made it that much easier for a prospect like Fox to say yes.
Coming next week - our first in a series of online video segments we're calling ShoreViews Video, providing our commentary, events coverage and industry executive interviews. Stay tuned!
USA Today reports on a test drive of Joost, the much-ballyhooed portal that promises to be the "future of television." That phrase in and of itself should be a clue as to both the strengths and limitations of a service that maintains much of what traditional video producers and advertisers cherish. Joost is amassing a library of entertainment from major U.S. television networks dating back to the 1950s, along with more recent cable television shows and news from Reuters and other sources. After a software download (natch) you get to use Joost's technology to view full-length TV shows with a minimum of in-line advertising from major corporations. Joost promises full-length movies in its mix, though one assumes that they will be either ad-supported or pay-per-view - and not usable outside of the Joost viewer, of course.
There are some key online add-ons that are supposed to jazz up the Joost offering - searchable archives, integrated chat and online community features - but for the most part Joost sounds like a fairly sealed container that allows the "television" phenomenon to be bled onto the Web in its fairly native form. With only up to three minutes of unskippable ads per offering, it's not clear that first-run, full-length television is likely to make its way into the Joost collection with any speed for producers needing a stronger revenue stream. Instead, Joost appears to be a tool for syndication rights owners to expose their libraries of older content more efficiently than via cable outlets. And with far fewer total channels than today's high-bandwidth cable offerings - which also include premium and cacheable on-demand programming - Joost is not necessarily giving younger online audiences a strong reason to shift from looking over the top of their laptop screens at television to have a closer look at Joost's offerings.
Most importantly, though, Joost is a no-op when it comes to video sharing or user-activated embedding or syndication. User community functions hang off the side of Joost's programming instead of allowing video to take its place in a myriad of user-defined contexts. Most online video viewers are not looking for this thing called "television" on their computers. The TV is the high-res appliance on the other side of the room that serves a parallel purpose to the in-your-hands experience of online content. If Joost is an attempt by TV traditionalists to have online audiences think of video on their laptops or desktop units the way that they want them to, then they are probably going to be very disappointed by the Joost experience.
There is a place for full-length programming that integrates with online audiences, but it's not likely to be in the format that experiments such as Joost have provided to date. Instead it's more likely that programming that has originated for television networks will take a parallel place to most online video for now until television producers are more willing to think more creatively about monetization models. In-line ads need to give way to parallel ads and contextual programming that can hang off the side of a TV program in much the same way that text ads, banners, scrapers, widgets and other contextual content hangs around core content on a Web page. There will still be a place for barrier ads for video, audio and text online but they will be a smaller portion of the revenue mix in most instances.
This concept is likely to feed back into television itself as display units become larger and more sophisticated. Digital TV shows are likely to be "framed" with complementary ads and content that can lure people into investigating viewing alternatives. We may also get to the point of having "this click is sponsored by..." advertising which may invite viewers to look at ads on their way from one channel to another. However it's done I believe that in-line advertising is being held onto as a security blanket right now by TV producers and ad specialists in large part because they have not invested in the skill sets that will take them beyond that model - in spite of online video's rapid growth.
Joost may enjoy some modest success at first but given the myriad of competing channels for video content - and an explosion of more interesting monetization models starting to be wrapped around online video - Joost programming may never rise to the level of pre-eminence that its backers would hope for in time to make a real impact in online video markets. It's far more important for video producers to embrace distribution models that allow content to flow into the contexts that audiences value most - those defined by themselves and their peers in whatever venue they desire.
While Nexis tinkers with the edges of its market footprint Dow Jones's Factiva unit is pushing forward with two key enhancements that are designed to change the scope of what business information users are likely to expect from their suppliers. Dow Jones' upgrades to its Synaptica taxonomy management services enable different taxonomies for different user groups - an essential tool for adapting business information into departmental functions - and enhanced semantic support for RDF, SKOS and OWL semantic standards that will enable Dow Jones clients to process and interpret a wider range of content types more effectively - including multimedia content. No small surprise, then, that the other announcement from Dow Jones is a deal with EveryZing (recently renamed from PodZinger) to integrate audio and video content from major suppliers such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, BBC Radio and other major suppliers. EveryZing's already heavily categorized video content includes news from around the world in several major languages, making it a natural for integration into the Factiva set of general news and research content, enhanced all the more by the increased semantic prowess of their semantic tools.
Video is certainly all the rage on the Web and gaining steam within the enterprise as network backbones and security infrastructures are tuned to deal with more pervasive video consumption. Dow Jones' aggressive positioning of its integration capabilities combined with timely multimedia content will position them well as a supplier of both content and integration tools as enterprises think more seriously about how to integrate business-ready video into their portals and collaborative tools. In a sense this gives Dow Jones additional leverage against the increasing penetration of services such as Google's enterprise search appliances that enable both enterprise content and content from the Web that will be backed by their "Universal Search" capability to make its way into corporate Webs.
But the "catch-up" nature of the EveryZing deal underscores the degree to which Google is developing business-ready content sets far broader than Dow Jones and other business information suppliers. Dow Jones, Nexis and others hope to continue to pull trumps on Google with more select licensed sources at their disposal tuned to very specific enterprise audiences. And with sales and support staffs that have been knee-deep in enterprise needs and solutions for years folks like Dow Jones have some important edges in being able to integrate content effectively into enterprise platforms. Yet one wonders how much longer search-oriented business information suppliers such as Dow Jones are going to be able to leverage their licensed content sets to stave off more direct competition from Web-oriented integration specialists such as Google. Is Dow Jones' Factiva unit a search and taxonomy company with licensed content or a subscription database service with some nifty integration tools? Neither answer may be sufficient as stronger competitors enter the stage with better generic answers to these questions and others with more sector-specific answers. But for now, kudos to Dow Jones for keeping Factiva fresh and relevant.
Download Squad highlights a new experiment on YouTube to embed advertising in its online video footage, using a small text box appearing under the live video box with a link to the advertising video. According to Download Squad a limited number of video clips are being exposed via this method in the YouTube site, with ads not appearing when clips are embedded into other sites. Download Squad sees this as a plus, as the embedder of a clip does not benefit from the ad revenues.
But on the other side of the coin, what if the site DID want to benefit from the ad revenue stream? Sites such as TheNewsRoom allow a viral distributor of their videos to take a piece of the revenues from their pre-roll ads, which they hope would entice users to choose their footage from major video outlets for embedding. But there seems to be some push-back from webloggers and other social media outlets on pre-rolls in embedded content. Embedding is a form of personal endorsement for the core content being inserted: the person choosing the content being embedded doesn't necessarily want to endorse a brand advertiser as well. Enabling the embedder to participate in the revenues seems to mitigate this somewhat, but the magic formula for embedding viral video for profit seems to be elusive.
The YouTube experiment seems to point in one key direction in finding a good balance in embedded video ads: sponsored links. As with Google search results in which AdWords sponsored links exist alongside non-sponsored search results the text bar appearing under the video clip enables a viewer to be exposed to the concept of looking at and ad while looking at the clip in question. The key concept of the ad gets exposed to the viewer without creating an interruption. Presumably Google's AdSense infrastructure could enter this picture and allow sites embedding YouTube content to turn on these sponsored links and to participate in their revenue stream.
This Google/YouTube experiment holds promise, but traditional video advertisers are going to want more out of the equation. And perhaps they can get that - for a price and in specific contexts. But in trying to define a new common-denominator formula for online video ads Google's enormously successful experiment with AdSense and AdWords may point to approaches that will be drawing video advertisers away from interruption-driven advertising and towards a level of engagement that may put their content in front of more highly engaged eyeballs.
CNET News and many majors go all apey over an announced distribution alliance between NBC Universal and News Corp. to provide full-length ad-supported and premium video content to media-friendly portals AOL, MSN and Yahoo. CNET and others hint at talks with Google about bringing this presumably rights-protected content into their YouTube video portal, but it sounds like speakerphone-ware at most for now. In general the whole effort sounds a little panicky and ill-formed, with partners confused about what's going to be free or not and no real details as to how this will all hang together. There are promises of user-generated content being in the mix but no sense as to how it would fit in with centrally produced video content.
At the end of the day it's probably going to be a step in the right direction for media companies to get more aggressive about building broader distribution of content with their own monetization built in to the packaging. But for all the talk about "ubiquitous" distribution it's a very limited initiative with scads of professionally-produced content well outside of the packaging schemes - including some of News Corp's and NBCU's flagship shows. It also increases the sites at which one can get content from these partners from two to a whopping...five. Wow. Bump it up to thirteen and we could fill up an old-timey television dial.
It's all a sadly inadequate response to user-generated distribution that doesn't begin to provide video the flexibility that will be required to respond to the user-generated media phenomenon. At most it's an acknowledgment that a significant portion of their audiences would be just as glad to receive programming over an Internet connection instead of a digital cable or broadcast service. This will be a plus as PCs become more integrated into home entertainment centers: why muck around with distribution deals with other partners when you can stream the programming that audiences want right to their PC/HDTV server. But a response to YouTube and other user-dominated distribution channels? Hardly.
Instead of circling the wagons of "friendlies" video producers need to face head-on the challenges of making user distribution of their content a plus rather than a frightening minus. The longer that they wait on this inevitable requirement the tighter their circle of wagons will be as the user "savages" develop increasingly flexible - and entertaining - alternatives to traditional video media. We'll see how this goes, but my bet is that in the short term it will be a fairly large ho-hum as users wait for the dust to settle around a less-than-spectacular service debut.
Pando is an increasingly popular destination for people wanting to share bulky files via email using a well-designed interface that makes it effortless to onpass content that used to be chancy to get through the typical email server's size restrictions. Pando's technology leverages infrastructure provided by BitTorrent, a popular file downloading service that makes it easy to get high-bandwidth content onto the your destktop. When Pando presented at January's SIIA Previews event I asked about whether they had thought about positioning the service for onpassing video and other forms of multimedia via a content serving model. The reps from Pando said "yes" in a rather strange and quizzical way, so I assumed that something was up.
Pando's recent announcement of media-serving capabilities seems to have confirmed my hunches - and opened up some interesting doors for those wanting to share podcasts, music and video with the world. The new Pando media tools enable media to be served up in client-side or server-side applications, kind of a NewsGator for multimedia approach to integration that will enable high-bandwidth content to integrate cleanly into any site or application design. While the underlying BitTorrent technology is nothing new, Pando's tools are making it easier than ever for publishers of any size to push out rich multimedia content without worrying about scaling issues. It's an interesting way to leverage the "that's easy" appeal of Pando's core functions into a much higher value-add relationship with content producers.
While folks like Viacom fret about the YouTubes of the world as threats there is a widening range of opportunities to work with vendors like Pando to develop publisher-friendly distribution channels for audo and video that can appeal to users who would like something better than the sometimes herky-jerky performance of the typical clip portals. What's the best way to deal with YouTube? Offer something that has more appeal and ease of use. Hmm, actually give audiences what they want in a convenient form. How novel. Pando's hardly the only game in town for good multimedia serving technology but they're lowering the bar quickly for publishers wanting to take a step into high-bandwidth services.
