Nothing irks me more than to see a Time Warner pitchman come on my TV to talk about all the money they’re “saving” me over satellite. Please. I’m currently spending more than $150 a month on my cable service, and that doesn’t count the $120 a month I pay for business class Internet service from Warner Cable.

The New York Times described my dilemma exactly when  it interviewed a 27-year-old actor who’s using a new service called Boxee that allows users to bypass the cable company and get the channels they want through a direct Internet connection to their TV. “Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give us that option,” he told the reporter.

Not just his age. Us 49-year-olds balk just as much.

Once you unchain TV shows from the cable gatekeeper, you’re opening Pandora’s box — just as you are when you allow studios to sell directly to cell phone users and bypass the carriers. Don’t be surprised if cable companies try to sue Boxee and others like them out of existence to maintain their lucrative oligopoly.

But in the long run, hopefully those efforts will fall short. Content, as they say, wants to be free. And as somebody who pays through the nose for a product controlled by those cable and satellite oligopolies, it can’t come a moment too soon.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Filmaka, the filmmaking site run by former Fox TV chief Sandy Grushow and "Bend it Like Beckham" producer Deepak Nayar, plans to announce its first contest winner on Monday, according to a spokeswoman. The winner will get financial backing to make a film and representation by the William Morris Agency. More in earlier blog .

See Also

• Filmaka: Vetting Hollywood Content on the Internet

Posted under Uncategorized

Dotcom high flier Josh Harris re-emerges with Operator11

This being Labor Day weekend I thought it fitting to open with a flashback to the workplace antics of pre-bubble lore. For instance, if you can remember being at one of Josh Harris’ New York office parties back in the day, you probably weren’t really there. The founder of pioneering Webcaster Pseudo was a poster child for dotcom excess. He hosted a three-day Quake multi-player launch fest. In a recent message exchange with Josh he recounted to me spending $1.5 million of his own money on a month-long Millennium Party at the turn of the centry. "Arguably the greatest party ever held in the history of New York," he says.

Hyperbole may be a hard habit for dotcommers to break, but Harris says he is a changed man since then. His new venture is a user-generated online TV hub. Operator11.com that calls itself a "Social Television Network." Harris has been interviewed lately about the venture. It is in an "alpha" state but seems to be striving for something between the randomness of YouTube’s uploaded clips and Joost and Veoh’s formal programming. This is personal broadcasting where anyone with a camera and some ambition can set up an online video show.

Of course, being an old Web fogey myself, I was just as interested in what Josh has been up to since the public crash and burn that was Pseudo. Josh had turned the camera on himself in the final days of his involvement and Webcast his life as it spun out of control. He tells me that it took several years literally working an apple farm to get his head back on straight and figure out what to do with a project like Operator11 with the little money he had left after the Pseudo debacle.

"All in, I wound up with enough to fund Operator11 to this point," Harris says. "If I make it, I am back in cash; if not I will be flipping burgers…for real."

And hosting killer parties in the Burger King walk-in freezers, I bet. 

Posted under Michael's Blog

The NBCu and News Corp. portal unveils a name and a URL

We imagine that the executives at NBCu and News Corp. decided to be a bit playful and "YouTube-sounding" when they came up with the name Hulu for their much-awaited video portal. But we can’t say we are much amused, although we are sure it went through more focus groups than a new brand of soap. The story broke from Mediapost this morning that Hulu.com would be the brand and the address of this home to NBC, Fox and others’ TV fare. The site is inviting users to put their name on the list for an invitation-only beta test in October, which means the site is well behind schedule and will not coincide with the rollout of new fall programming.

When I spoke with NBCu executive George Kliavkoff in the spring about this plan, hyper-distribution seemed to be the key. Hulu has partnered with YouTube, MySpace, MSN and others to boast an unprecendented Web reach of 93%. They believe that advertisers and users prefer quality, well-produced content. Advertisers need environments they can trust and users can only watch so many cats playing pianos and kids skateboarding into walls. The guys at News Corp. and NBC appear confident that dispersing their shows far and wide but keeping the ads bolted to them is the best way to ensure distribution and monetization. Interestingly, they ar elaso engaging in unprecedented coopetition, in that the search engine and categorization of the portal Kliavkoff described to me would let users mash up their networks and brands pretty freely. The biggest innovation in this portal may be the networks’ (well two of them) new willingness to dissolve the only brand walls. The plan that I heard months ago involved letting other media brands into the mix as well.  

Who knows how well this will fly. I can say that there is a great deal of interest and excitement among media buyers. Social media, user-generated media, etc. are tough for traditional buyers to figure out. Sure there is a lot of interest and experimentation going on here. Google just launched its first tests of in-video ads at YouTube. But on the whole, ad buyers need safe and well-lit places with lots of eyeballs in which to plant their massive budgets. Hulu may succeed with the advertisers more effectively and earlier than it succeeds with viewers. 

If it ever gets to Beta, that is.    

Posted under Michael's Blog

In which a tech site and a fashion site struggle to manage online video

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…for online video. Broadband has become ubiquitous and at long last the expectations of users is for a video experience to replace the text-bound Web. But with hours and hours of video clips floating about on all manner of sites, the real issue now is how to organize them in ways that approximate the indexing and cataloging we associate mainly with text?

This is a work in progress, to be sure, but it is interesting to watch two sites from radically different worlds and sensibilities come at the same problem in the same week. CNetTV.com unveiled its version 2.0 which tries to give users more on-demand choice among the growing library of videos than the first iteration of CNetTV. The site moves from an overwrought TV+remote control interface to a page that looks more like a standard CNet page, with the same green tabs and drop down menus that navigate directly to libraries of reviews, shows, tips., etc. There is a search box that brings up video results in a floating window, so you can stay on the current page while you look for other clips. We found that the library of videos is so vast that even when you do pare the results down to a manageable collection of clips, there is still a lot of scrolling and scanning headlines to find what you really wanted. The experience is not quite as efficient as text, in that there isn’t a navigation tree you climb down easily to find the relevant clip. On the plus side, however, the responsiveness is superb. You click on an entry and it just starts playing as if the video already resided on your hard drive. This makes video browsing a reality. The CNetTV challenge is considerable given the range of videos it is producing now. Just filtering reviews from tips is hurdle in a library this big.

On the other hand, CondeNet’s highly stylized ShopVogue.TV is all about a visually stunning presentation. It is trying to video-fy the lush pages of the fashion bible for its many advertisers. You can drill into the site via designer brand, by price or trend, but each option gives you auto-loading video. Mouse-overs animate even the static objects to give the site a feeling of aliveness and interactivity at every turn. Clearly made for browsing, er, shopping, ShopVogue.TV is a little less concerned with surfacing every bit of content than it is about giving you inviting entry points for swimming around in the videos.

And this tale of two sites embodies different approaches to online video. CNet’s second iteration is trying to make video index and behave more like text. It is very task-driven and designed to minimize user frustration with lost time. The ads are very brief and blessedly well paced so that the same ad doesn’t replay every time you start a new clip. It is meant to look and feel like a text site that moves. ShopVogue.TV is making the most of the animated experience. It is aimed more towards a user dwelling in this moving, talking environment. The brands are the content here. Yes it is possible to find a designer, but this site is not the straightest route to finding that cute bag you saw in the Macy’s window yesterday. This site is trying to make information more fun than efficient.

No doubt both approaches have a place online, but CNet does have more experience with online video presentation than CondeNet, and the tendency of Web development has been to go from stylish and fancy to more efficient and simple. It will be interesting to see how both evolve over time.     

Posted under Michael's Blog

The next wave of UGC video online will be verticalized and better dressed for mass consumption

My 15-year old seems to get a kick out of browsing the YouTube channel on our AppleTV. She doesn’t mind rifling through the many random thumbnails and clips in search of just the right one to entertain her, whether it is skateboarders falling off of a roof or cats stuck in toilet paper tubes. For the rest of us, however, user-generated video is entertaining but cluttered. Entertainment fast food eaters and drive-by digital snackers by definition do not want to hunt for their fix. YouTube is successful (traffic-wise) but still messy and uninviting. Advertisers, too, remain dubious about just how they fit into a mosh pit like this.

And so expect to see more verticalized iterations of the UGC video portal model at places like Future Publishing’s upcoming Gloob.tv. It launches officially on Monday but it is accessible this weekend.

Boasting 25 editors who pick and choose only the best video across news, celebrity, sports, and other content buckets, the site clearly is trying to make UGC safe for audiences and for advertisers. One of the persistent fears of marketers is that their ads on UGC sites will show up next to something unpredictable and rude. Publishers are looking for ways of making UGC seem more tame and controllable, more reliable for advertising. 

Another way to corral the mosh pit of random video online is to verticalize it. Sites like VideoJug are creating and aggregating expert advice interviews and how-to clips. The impressive thing about VideoJug is that it adds genuine value to the video experience. These are not just stray clips. They are segmented with a cool navigation system that lets you bounce among different questions, and many of the topics also have written and more detailed instructions. 

The point is that the next generation of online video goes beyond dumping and indexing, tagging and re-distriubuting. There is still an important role here for editorial descrimination and for value added content. YouTube was a starting point, not an end point, but online video needs to evolve.

See Also

• YouTube

Posted under Michael's Blog

Let’s see.  It’s been a hard day at work and I head home for dinner, a Bud and Bud.TV.

I don’t think so.  And apparently neither do the 100,000 other people who bailed out of Bud.TV’s struggling online network, one month after it launched with an underwhelming 253,000 visitors in February. Anheuser-Busch is said to have spent between $20 million and $30 million to launch the site, and hopes to have 2 to 3 million visitors a month by early next year.

AdAge.com opines that the 40% drop in traffic at Anheuser-Busch’s site is due to the online form on the launch page, which verifies your name, age, zip code and gives you a user name and a password.  That’s silly.  People fill out oodles more to sign up for free MySpace or Amazon accounts.  It took me five minutes to fill out Ad Age’s own online reg form — and they made me fill in my address, company, job title and check a box not to receive the magazine’s email propaganda.

There are two reasons why people aren’t going to Bud.TV.  One is tepid content.  A hackneyed show about fake celebrities, interviews with Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and a "Bud Light daredevil" who orders pizzas using only the words "large" and "yes," is not exactly compelling content.

But the more important reason why the site is bombing is that people just don’t want to watch a TV channel run by a beer company.  Especially when it features the same kind of beery spots you see in Bud Light commercials.

Imagine if NBC started selling beer in grocery stores.  You think that would sell?

Advertisers are advertisers for a reason.  It’s because they need to bounce off content consumers really want to see to get their attention.

Now, you could argue that a few advertisers really are in the content business, say BMW Films.  But they’re really not.  BMW’s critically acclaimed Internet short film series featured the work of famous directors like John Woo, Ridley Scott and John Frankenheimer.  BMW wrapped itself in their notoriety, the way any good advertiser does.  But it didn’t produce the films.

Had Bud done its site that way, leaving the programming to programmers, Bud.TV might have had a chance.  As it is, I predict it will end its life as a mere belch in the history of Internet programming.

See Also

• Traffic Plummets at Struggling Bud.TV
• Beer Site Hobbled by Barriers to Easy Access and Shareable Content

Posted under Uncategorized