NBC says that Fear Factor now has a vlog, though there’s no video on it, so it’s a blog and it appears under a blogs.nbc.com address. But, hey, why be picky?
Posts about tv
Mt. Rushmore
Before going on Howie’s show today, I went to makeup and saw something new: Rather than using little sponges and pads to make me look human, they used a airbrush to gently blow me-colored powder all over my face. She explained that they’re doing this to get ready for HDTV. Or maybe she was just being nice and she thought I needed sandblasting.
CBS behind the curtains
Kudos to CBS’ Public Eye for taking a camera and mike into the CBS Evening News editorial meeting. Having sat through all too many editorial meetings in my day, I can warn you that you will not necessarily see a great show. But, of course, that’s not the point. You now get to see the show behind the show. You see sausage being made. And that is great. That is what more news organizations should do. It’s not as if everyone is going to watch this. But the point is that now you can and now they are willing to let you in. That’s progress.
Hey CBS News: Free the Stern tape
Here’s a suggestion to my friends at CBSNews.com and 60 Minutes (you know who you are, Dick and Larry):
Take the outtakes from the very good 60 Minutes story on Howard Stern and put them online. Good on you for putting up the segment itself. But Howard’s huge audience wants more.
Howard talked this morning about asking 60 Minutes for the video to put it on his pay-per-view channel. Thanks to damned Cablevision, I don’t have that yet.
But if you took all that material — more of the Howard interview, his trip to Roosevelt, interviews with the staff, scenes from the studio and office — and put it all up in separate chunks with permalinks to each, you’d get incredible traffic. Howard said this morning that 60 Minutes on Sunday got 17.5 million viewers, up from 10ish million usually (please comment and correct those figures if they’re off). And you can bet that the age demographic took a pleasant dive that day.
So you can attract that large and young audience to CBSNews.com if you’ll offer more of Howard. You’d also find yourself getting tons of links; you’d be in the conversation.
Now if you really wanted to be revolutionary and modern, you could take all those segments and put them up in downloadable form so people could remix their own segments on Howard. But I don’t want to push it too far. We’ll get there.
: MORE: Paul in the comments reminds us that for a higher cause and purpose, Jay Rosen also tried to push CBS to publish full interviews here.
Cheesy Broadcasting Corporation
We have three PBS stations in New York. Tonight, in pledge time, one of them has a diet show and two have cheesy violinist Andre Rieu. That is PBS’s dirty secret: They aren’t supported by high-class culture but by low-class cheese. Hey, whatever pays the bills. But why not just start the all-cheese-all-the-time channel to raise money for the real channel? Or why not just take ads? Are they really worse than Andre Rieu?
So bright
Brightcove, Jeremy Allaire’s new video-serving company, had lots of big news today: investments from AOL, Barry Diller’s IAC, Hearst, and Allen & Co. They also made a deal with AOL to distribute its video there. (Full disclosure: I think I’m on Brightcove’s board of advisors and I’ve introduced them to some companies.)
What I like about Brightcove — besides Allaire — is that they enable many models: ad-supported video, pay-per-view video, subscription video, and free video (that is, paid for by the producer). They make publishing and playing the video easy thanks to copious Flash (remember that Allaire sold his company to Macromedia and was there for sometime).
What will be interesting is seeing how this works with all the other means of video distribution that are popular: Bittorrent, of course; plus iTunes; plus TiVo to iPods and PCs…. There is no question that there is pentup demand for video among consumers and even more among advertisers, who’ve wanted to turn the internet into TV from day one. They want the motion and excitement of video. They also want the ease of buying TV upfront, but those days are over. Over.
Says Iconoculture‘s newsletter today:
Last month ABC and Apple started offering next-day downloads of major primetime programs. It started with Desperate Housewives and Lost for $1.99 per episode, and sparked a reaction (long in the works) from NBC/DirecTV and CBS/Comcast to offer similar content on demand for only $.99. Then, just this week, AOL/Time Warner decided to up the ante by opening up their back catalog of television content on AOL’s online network for free.How did this on-demand flash happen? Wasn’t this level of à la carte TV consumer control and access supposed to be years off? No; not really. Consumers have already been building their own level of mix-and-match programming and TV personalization with services like BitTorrent and a flood of new independent and user-created content via the web. Learning from the music industry’s late 90′s struggles with Napster and its brethren, broadcasters and studios are offering their content before consumers get too far ahead of them.
From a TV ad and affiliate sales point of view, these developments are like reversing the rotation of the Earth, flipping the script in terms of traditional appointment viewing assumptions. What that means for the next several years is a continued shift toward far more targeted marketing campaigns and a dependence on consumers to invite ads rather than merely accept the ones pushed to them. To get those invitations, advocacy, trust, and customization are the price of entry.
My emphasis.
: Frank Barnako writes about this today and is nice enough to link to my exploding-tv posts. The newer ones are here; the older ones (from the old blog platform), starting in June last year, are here.
: Now Viacom is in talks with Google about video search and VOD. [via Thomas Hawk]
Vlog-it lives
Long-promised, Vlog-it — the lite version of Visual Communicator — is out and it costs only $49.95. Visual Communicator gives you a teleprompter on your PC and lets you drag-and-drop inserts of audio, video, graphics, and such onto your script so, as you record it, they are recorded, too, eliminating the need for post-production and editing. Unfortunately, it works only on Windows.
Web 2.0: Bright Cove
Jeremy Allaire just revealed his new video company, Bright Cove, also featured in today’s NY Times. I met Jeremy and saw the company many months ago and loved it then, for it enables the explosion of TV: People can use his Flash-based player and system to serve video under various business models: ad-supported, pay-to-view, pay-to-serve. He’ s making it easy and big. (Disclosure: I liked what I saw so much that I’m likely to join his advisory board.)
