Sometimes I think God put video content guys on the planet to make the music guys look progressive and visionary.
Analyst Michael Gartenberg, commenting on NBC’s decision to take its stuff away from Apple because Steve Jobs wouldn’t agree to sell their video content at $4.99 a pop (compared to existing price of $1.99)
From IBM Press room – 2007-08-22…
A new IBM online survey of consumer digital media and entertainment habits shows audiences are more in control than ever and increasingly savvy about filtering marketing messages.
The global findings overwhelmingly suggest personal Internet time rivals TV time. Among consumer respondents, 19 percent stated spending six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage, versus nine percent of respondents who reported the same levels of TV viewing. 66 percent reported viewing between one to four hours of TV per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage.
Consumers are seeking consolidated, trustworthy content, recognition and community when it comes to mobile and Internet entertainment. Armed with PC, mobile and interactive content and tools, consumers are vying for control of attention, content and creativity. Despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers’ habits.
To effectively respond to this power shift, IBM sees advertising agencies going beyond traditional creative roles to become brokers of consumer insights; cable companies evolving to home media portals; and broadcasters and publishers racing toward new media formats. Marketers in turn are being forced to experiment and make advertising more compelling, or risk being ignored…
Lovely Guardian piece by Scott Rosenberg on the strange hostility evoked by blogging in conventional minds…
From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe – who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours”. To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn’t “strictly a blog” but claimed it “shares the genre’s characteristics”, and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy – which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it’s online, apparently, it’s all the same, and all worthless.
It’s hard to take Wolfe’s assessment of blogging seriously since he admits that, “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’,” he doesn’t read them himself. In any case, those who obsessively review their own Wikipedia entries for errors might pause before accusing others of narcissism…
Well, well. News Corp. is getting ready to roll out its putative YouTube killer. Here’s the breathless update from the site:
The first bit of news we’d like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.
Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.
Actually, it’s basically another way of spelling ‘turkey’.
Note also the cheerful, friendly Terms and Conditions which state, in part,
You are also strictly prohibited from creating works or materials that derive from or are based on the materials contained in this Site including, without limitation, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, on-line postcards and greeting cards, unlicensed merchandise and mash-ups, unless you have obtained the prior written consent of Hulu or unless it is expressly permitted by this Site in each instance. This prohibition applies regardless of whether the derivative materials are sold, bartered or given away.
David Weinberger has done something really interesting. He’s taken Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur and extracted from it the gist of the case that Keen is trying to make — and then discusses it critically but fairly. This is an interesting departure from the usual mode of public argument — in which people build straw men from wilful misrepresentations of other people’s arguments, and then proceed to destroy their creations.
There’s also a rather good debate between Andrew Keen and the Guardian‘s Emily Bell — which Keen graciously concedes that Emily won.
Handsome chap, isn’t he. I particularly like that aquiline nose.
Typically readable piece by Steven Levy about the origins and growth of Facebook.
Interesting profile of Matt Drudge by Philip Weiss. Sample:
The left hates Drudge for good reason; he has helped kill one Democratic presidential aspirant after another and has started in on John Edwards this season. But as Halperin and Harris note, Drudge only gained his power because liberals so dominated traditional media that they disdained the Internet. Now that he’s opened the territory, the left is doing pretty well itself. “There’s a pretty healthy group of left-wing sites online, which tends to balance things, no doubt,” says Donna Brazile. “But Matt is in a class by himself.”
At times Drudge does sound like a conservative. He hates big government, immigration, and abortion rights. When Jimmy Carter criticized George Bush in the foreign press, Drudge questioned his loyalty. But Drudge’s ideological heart is libertarian, and many of his anti-corporate riffs would stir a left-wing anarchist. Drudge has been highly critical of partnerships between Google and state governments, and he fears corporations. He believes that people in surgery have had chips implanted without their knowledge, that the day will come when the government will “dart” a chip into you without your permission, and that DNA will be collected from spit on the street, “and then they can impose any rule, even against smiling.”
Republicans can’t count on Drudge. He praises Rosie O’Donnell and Michael Moore for their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and McCain. “Breitbart is an intellectual, dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and educated. Matt is not a book reader. I think he probably struggles to make right-wing noises,” says one Republican…
Thanks to the incomparable Arts and Letters Daily for the link.
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
The Australian government spent almost $85 million on a filter to block children’s access to porn on the Net. Tom Wood, a 16-year-old from Melbourne, cracked it in 30 minutes, all the while heaping nationalist scorn on the imported product. “It’s a horrible waste of money,” he said. “They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one.” The government responded by adding an Australian designed filter. Tom cracked that one in 40 minutes. Communications Minister Helen Coonan said, “The vendor is investigating the matter as a priority.” Young Tom says there are more important concerns about children’s Net safety to deal with anyway. “Filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway,” he said. “Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix. They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them.” And maybe give them some security tips as well.
Good report by Bobbie Johnson of Vint Cerf’s Alternative McTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh.
The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player.
“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things – like news, sporting events and emergencies – but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”
Dr Cerf, who helped build the internet while working as a researcher at Stanford University in California, used the festival’s Alternative McTaggart Lecture to explain to television executives how the internet’s influence was radically altering their businesses and how it was imperative for them to view this as a golden opportunity to be exploited instead of a threat to their survival. The arrival of internet television has long been predicted, although it has succeeded in limited ways so far. But the popularity of websites such as YouTube – the video sharing service bought by Google in 2005 for $1.65bn (£800m) – has encouraged many in the TV industry to try and use the internet more profitably. Last month the BBC launched its free iPlayer download service, and digital video recorders such as Sky Plus and Freeview Playback allow viewers to instantly pause and record live television.
Dr Cerf predicted that these developments would continue, and that we would soon be watching the majority of our television through the internet – a revolution that could herald the death of the traditional broadcast TV channel in favour of new interactive services.
“In Japan you can already download an hour’s worth of video in 16 seconds,” he said. “And we’re starting to see ways of mixing information together … imagine if you could pause a TV programme and use your mouse to click on different items on the screen and find out more about them.”
Some critics, including a number of leading internet service providers, have warned that the increase in video on the web could eventually bring down the internet. They are concerned that millions of people downloading at the same time using services such as iPlayer could overwhelm the network.
Dr Cerf rejected these claims as “scare tactics”. “It’s an understandable worry when they see huge amounts of information being moved around online,” he said. But some pundits had predicted 20 years ago that the net would collapse when people started using it en masse, he added. “In the intervening 30 years it’s increased a million times over … We’re far from exhausting the capacity.”