Category Archives: entertainment

Viacom to Google – YouTube aren’t the boss of me now!

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Viacom’s ditching YouTube, and says they are glad they did.   This  FT story suggests that we may seeing the beginning of what could become a monumental shift in content distribution online.   Viacom has forced YouTube to delete Comedy Central and other popular clips, and says these deletions have resulted in people heading over to the Comedy Central website to find the content rather than YouTube.  This was exactly what Viacom wanted.

Key questions are shaking out about online video:
*How much  of the video traffic is to the “professional” content like that produced by  Viacom vs amateur content?

* How important are search engines / major video sites to finding clips?    The Viacom statement suggests that people will seek the clips they want away from YouTube.   However if they are using Google search to find the alternative locations of the clips Google may have successfully covered both these bases with the YouTube aquisition.

* The most important question is about $money$ and it is simply this – can video be monetized well?   Nobody knows yet.   I predict the answer is going to be somewhat complex, but basically no, you can’t monetize it nearly as well as pay per click advertising, where the information experience can be integrated well with the buying experience.    With Video this match is going to be more difficult and usually impossible.   Somebody watching a “Daily Show” clip is primarily interested in a quick laugh, and seems unlikely to wind up clicking off on an advertisement and almost totally unlikely to buy something as part of the Comedy Central clip watching experience.

Sure there will be some room to market clip specific advertising like Comedy Central hats, but that type of thing is not much of a market for the burgeoning video content industry.    Even junky clips take a lot more time to produce and and bandwidth to distribute than text content, so the revenue equation is simply not as favorable and probably will always be a challenge.

I think a major challenge with Video is that many think the online video experience and advertising will be similar to Television content and monetizing.   It won’t.   Decentralized control and the fact almost anybody can and will produce content are changing things rapidly and globally.

The video fun, junky content, and advertising experiments have only just begun.

New York Salaries

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New York Magazine has a great piece showing the salaries of hundreds of people in many professions, all of whom are based in NYC.    There’s even a description of salary trends and amounts in sectors like publishing and TV News, both of which are well represented in New York.

Blogging x 10 years

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Dan Farber has a nice commentary on the state of blogging after 10 years based on his informal confab with Dave Winer, who arguably is the inventor of blogging.

10 years of blogging is misleading in the sense that the true tipping point is about … now …. as blogs are now a key shaping force in so many aspects of society.

Dan notes the common criticism of blogging as a bunch of amateurs spouting junk and mediocrity.   Of course blogging is all that, but mediocrity is hardly something that distinguishes blogging from conventional media.   Mainstream media, especially TV, has *always* been a few shiny gems buried deep in an ocean of irrelevance and celebrity gossip.    I’d rather find the gems within billions of pages of amateur but expert-in- their field-ramblings than thousands of pages of jaded professional “journalism” that must often focus on maintaining profitability or readership as much as uphold the so called standards of excellence that IMHO have not characterized commercial journalism since …  hey….quality standards have never been they key driving force of journalism!

Oscar predictions using search engine results? Not very accurate!?

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WordTracker, which measures search queries, was used to predict tonights Oscar winners. Here’s the story from PRWEB. It looks like this approach could go down in flames based on Alan Arkin’s Best Supporting Actor win given that he had a fraction of the online queries of others, but still won.

Best supporting Actress in a supporting role: Jennifer Hudson! Hey, it worked for her.

Here are the numbers:

Wordtracker predictions:
Actor in a leading roll
Will Smith 8751
Leonardo DiCaprio 4485
Ryan Gosling 1507
Forest Whitaker 425
Peter O’Toole 100

Actor in a support role
Eddie Murphy 2670
Mark Wahlberg 2659
Jackie Earle Haley 656
Alan Arkin 236
Djimon Hounsou 167

Actress in a leading role
Penelope Cruz 10359
Kate Winslet 9077
Helen Mirren 5470
Meryl Streep 1155
Judi Dench 573

Actress in a support role
Jennifer Hudson 6439
Cate Blanchett 1716
Rinko Kikuchi 973
Abigail Breslin 416
Adriana Barraza 65

Best picture
Little Miss Sunshine 3121
Babel 2587
The Departed 2052
Letters from Iwo Jima 1317
The Queen 1112

Well, the results are in (bolded above) and only Supporting Actress was predicted by this approach.    Interenet people … must be stupid?

Ringtone Scams are about 99% of that business … so beware!

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I  *hate* the ringtones business because it represents so much of what is wrong with the internet and wrong with people.   Here’s one post about some of the millions of problems that plague the Ringtones Scam industry – a very sad excuse for a business enterprise.

However, with Apple jumping in to the Ringtones biz I’m hoping Apple may bring some standards because they don’t seem like a company that would do the Ringtones “business as usual” scam which is to offer what looks like a free ringtone and then hook unsuspecting or stupid teens into  a “contract” that dings their parents cell phone bill indefinitely.

I’m ranting about this after running into a banner I clicked on out of curiousity which led to a “Zoltar Ringtones” scam with the fine print below the fold that, to the extent I could figure out what the heck it was saying, was going to bill me 5.99 per *week* plus other charges.

This is a dispicable industry, and it’s amazing to me that it has not yet been regulated appropriately.    The solution is simple – nobody can enter into these contracts without a *written* signature from the credit card holder.

Blinkx

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Blinkx is a brilliant video search program that allows people to search *within* videos for specific content.  This has become one of the holy grails of search because the internet is now awash in video content. Tastes vary but almost everyone would agree that most of the clips out there are garbage. With routines like Blinkx users can rapidly search the tidal wave of video that pours online every day for things that interest them.

Check out the Blinkx home page with it’s “wall” of tiny video clips reflecting content they have recently indexed.   It’ll keep the attention of even the most stubborn A.D.D. sufferer.   Some cringe at the sensory overload of dozens of videos, but massive input reflects the new ethos of the internet, and I predict we’ll see desktops and applications become increasingly overwhelmed with content.    As a superb tool that will manage the most rapidly growing and complex part of the digital maelstrom – video clips – Blinkx has a rosy future indeed.

The New York Times reports on this today.

Bald Britney Spears busts out of Britney Spears rehab

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Some time ago I was testing how terms are getting ranked by search engines here at the blog and I noted that blog traffic spiked from a simple post about Cicarelli, a famous model.   Time to test Britney Spears which is often at the top of all the world’s internet searches.

This is testing what happens when I mention Britney Spears in a blog post.   I apologize – sort of – to those of you who actually carefully follow Britney Spears news on a regular basis.  I’m not immune to the prurient interest in Britney that has captivated *billions* worldwide, but it really is a sad commentary on the state of our cultural well-being that Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan garner far more news time than, say, Global Health …

….. gee whiz Britney Spears, you’ve done it again!

Britney Spears Shaves Head, scream the headlines, and then in the small print if at all… millions die from lack of oral rehydration therapy.

We should be ashamed of Britney Spears, and ashamed of ourselves.

Mark Cuban, the sage of internet video?

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I think Mark Cuban  has more valid points than Cory does on the controversies swirling around copyright and takedown notices delivered by Viacom.     Cory is right that it’s annoying and obnoxious to send takedowns to people who obviously are not infringing, but that’ll shake out soon enough.  What isn’t shaking out soon enough is what I’ve discussed at length before – YouTube and Myspace and other big players are making hundreds of millions by purposing user generated content to their commercial needs.   I’d even concede that commercialism is not the bottom line on these big player/user interactions, and also concede that users like me are agreeing to provide content that in turn gets searched at Google and generates money for them and *sometimes* for me.

However as Mark correctly notes it’s significant to ask within the copyright, content, and user community issue this question:  Who gets the lion’s share of the revenues created by copyright holders or community participants?    I’d like to see more of that cash flow to the community and less to the big players.   But maybe that’s just because I’m a community guy?

Go Mavs!

Google + Kiosks = Coolness!

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Wow, I sure hope the rumors about a Google Kiosk project are true. I like Google and I like Kiosks. Here in Oregon I was involved in computer kiosks for over ten years. Back in 1990 I managed one of the USA’s earliest multimedia projects using IBM Infowindow Touch monitors, computers, and laserdisc players. That was a US Forest Service partnership with my former employer the Southern Oregon Visitors Association, and we had 30 units in tourism places all over Southern Oregon.

This project led to a new project I designed and deployed as part of a SOVA, State, and National Scenic Byways partnership that put internet connected units in about 15 places. The internet solved many of the problems with the early kiosk project such as real time information availability, though it brought a host of new problems with rural connectivity issues and eventually a lack of enthusiasm for a complicated, grant driven project.

Could Google bring the necessary ingredients to make Kiosks commercially viable? I think they could by deploying broadly and with enough of an advertising footprint to interest national players who would appreciate being both in the programs and on the sides of the cabinets.

Good luck Google, I’ll always root for touch computer kiosks!

Related link – HUGE touchscreen with mapping demo – fantastic!