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!
