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Reinventing media

12 comments on Reinventing media

Reinventing media
: At Unmediated, Yatta has a wonderful post re-imagining TV in the age of blogs. Every medium could stand to re-imagine itself in the age of citizens’ media.

1. Start publishing your program schedule as an openly subscribable RSS feed based on the XMLTV format. It will allow folks to publish feedrolls of their favorite TV shows on their blogs. If people like your programming, they’ll spread the word for you. You gain instant karma.

2. Fund Andrew Grumet’s (and other folks’) work to marry BitTorrent, RSS, and TiVos. Make sure it all works with your newly minted RSS feed.

3. Pay someone else to graft the TiVo interface onto a BitTorrent client….

4. Change your advertising model. People don’t like 30-second ads. Move all advertising to product placement…

5. Make it easy for folks to download your programming via BitTorrent. Don’t worry: you’ve embedded your advertising in your programming, remember?…

6. Encourage bloggers to create feedrolls of their favorite TV programs, irregardless of the TV network….

7. Create an Amazon Associates-style revenue sharing program for bloggers who’s readers click through to download an entire episode. Extra commission for those who click on interactive ad links….

How would you re-imagine radio… books… newspapers… TV news…?

12 responses to “Reinventing media”

  1. David Pinto Avatar
    David Pinto

    I’ve been talking about product placement with my wife for about a year now. Instead of getting a 22 minute show, we’d get a 1/2 hour show, and all we’d have to tolerate is the actors drinking a can of coke or a close up of the name of the car they are driving. And uderwear ads could be really interesting! :-)

  2. Ernest Miller Avatar
    Ernest Miller

    Why do shows have to be 30 minutes? Freed from the tyranny of programming schedules, why not shows that are as long as they need to be. 33 minutes one week, 18 the next.

  3. Farhad Avatar
    Farhad

    here we never attention to them to imagin, becaouse we dont trust them news at all.

  4. Angelos Tzelepis Avatar
    Angelos Tzelepis

    I like all but number 4.
    On a media ethics (oxymoron?) level, you just know advertisers will be able to dictate content. Now, if a “Friends” script calls for Joey and Chandler to be playing video games as part of a comic bit, and NBC starts a bidding war between Sony and Microsoft for the right to place their machine in the living room, fine. More power to them, get paid, cash money, dollar bills y’all.
    But if the advertisers won’t pay to have a certain character drink a beverage/drive a car/eat a burger because he’s a bad guy, writers may be forced by the suits (who by definition are morons) to change scripts.
    Think about it: 95% of prime time shows are garbage already. If the advertisers start “contributing” too, imagine how bad they’ll be. Of the 5 or 6 good shows that are left, shows whose writers are actually talented and the suits somehow stay out of the way, do we really want advertisers influencing script decisions?
    On a personal note, I like those two minutes of commmercials. I can take a pee-break, get a new beer or a snack, anything. I’ve also learned to ignore advertising in all formats, so that helps. Web banners, ads in newspaper in magazines, ads on TV, it’s as if they’re not even there. Advertisements that annoy me, like pop-ups and rich media, I conduct my own little boycott. I will never buy anythinng from Orbitz, for example, and I have greatly curtailed my ESPN.com visitation, because they’re always finding new ways to piss me off, even with pop-up blocking software. Same with Slate, with all the rich media – if you’re going to cover up the content I’m trying to read with an ad I can’t scroll around, you must not want me to actually read it. So I close the browser and move on.
    Fight back against increasingly invasive advertising and marketing. Read
    adrants.com for good commentary. This article in particular details what may be the start of a revolution. I’ll be there to help.
    As one activist says: “The industry’s implicit message is a total lack of respect for our time, our privacy, our attention, our peace of mind, and not least for our concerns about our kids. ‘Your attention is ours,’ the industry says, in effect. ‘We are entitled to it at every moment.’”
    Well, F them.

  5. Angelos Tzelepis Avatar
    Angelos Tzelepis

    As for the other media:

  6. JorgXMcKie Avatar
    JorgXMcKie

    On the other hand, in the middle of reading this, I got a quick email advertisement from a company I do a little business with. It was succinct, to the point, and said it had some new stuff. Took less than 30 seconds to check. It was, indeed, new. I wanted it, made my selection, paid for it, getting it shipped in 2-3 business days (they are also on time). Now, about 2 minutes later, here I am right back where I started. I like it.

  7. Andy Freeman Avatar
    Andy Freeman

    Ads aren’t the problem. The problem is irrelevant-to-me ads.

  8. Hunter McDaniel Avatar
    Hunter McDaniel

    After having Netflix for a year, my question is as follows – what do we need broadcast TV/Cable/DBS for other than live sports? It seems to me that there ought to be a business delivering “TV entertainment” that resembles what we have in magazines today. So maybe you can subscribe to Jerry Bruckheimer, Alan Sorkin, Steve Bochco, or whoever based on your tastes and get a regular DVD package. The RSS-TIVO idea sounds good, but now and for the forseeable future the Post Office has more bandwidth than Bit Torrent. And DVD technology makes unskippable commercials easier to implement that with TIVO.

  9. John Anderson Avatar
    John Anderson

    “Move all advertising to product placement…”
    Please, NO!
    Not only obtrusive, but think of –
    1. re-runs: does the sponsor have to cough up more dough? Can a different advertiser get in? How bad will cutting out a product be?
    2. archives: I’ve mentioned this with respect to the attempt to force video buyers and renters to watch the ads. I do not want to buy a Fifties TV show and get ads for Ipana toothpaste (though I’ll admit some might.)
    At the moment product placement is not very obtrusive, but the potential is certainly there. Back in the days when a sponsor bought a show rather than a slot of time under one minute, some shows wrote adverts into the program: it was awkward and distracting then, I believe it would be worse now.

  10. Angelos Tzelepis Avatar
    Angelos Tzelepis

    A great point by John A, which relates directly to fighting back.
    I don’t rent DVDs, because all I have around me are 2 small Mom&Pops, neither of which carries widescreen editions. But when I used to rent VHS movies, I understood the advertising, and I could easily hit FF.
    Not having a rental option, I buy what I’m confident I’ll like for a while.
    I first got hit with this last fall, when Animal House was finally re-released on DVD. I had to sit through 10 minutes of UN-SKIPPABLE ads. On a product I OWN.
    That went straight back to the store, which wouldn’t take it at first (opened), but it’s amazing what happens when you get loud at the service desk.
    A couple months ago, same thing with “Lost in Translation”. Same argument at the desk, but they took it back.
    F-em. What this has done is prevented me from buying ANY DVDs online, from Amazon or Buy.com. WAY too difficult to return. I go to my local electronics giant, and insist on finding out whether there are ads before a movie, and whether or not they are skippable.
    No proof, no money.
    It’s a real pain in the butt, but if I become one of the silent majority, one of the typical American sheep, I lose.
    Fight the advertising behemoth. The only way to survive with sanity intact.
    And speaking of sheep, fight this administration. They want you stupid.

  11. Hunter McDaniel Avatar
    Hunter McDaniel

    Angelos, advertising is not the devil. It’s ONE way of paying for content to be produced. You don’t get upset to find that the magazine you OWN has ads in it, do you? But if the DVD previews are too much to bear, I respect your decision to forgo buying them.

  12. Angelos Tzelepis Avatar
    Angelos Tzelepis

    Advertising IS the devil, but a necessary one, I understand.
    An ad in a magazine, I can easily ignore. I just flip vacantly until I find editorial. I don’t even know what I’ve “seen.” I can honestly say I have never flipped through a magazine and stopped at an ad for its content, unless it was the Coors twins in cheerleader outfits… But I don’t drink pisswater, so the ad is essentially useless.
    Banner ads, I don’t even notice. Never clicked on one. Pop-ups, I block.
    More invasive advertising must be stopped. Those 10 minutes belong to ME, not to the advertising company. I would have watched “Animal House” 2 or 3 times a year. I couldn’t possibly let them take 1/2 hour a year away from me. So none at all. Same with “Lost in Translation”.
    Rich media is the next invasion. It will become more and more prevalent, and they’re planning on making it harder to avoid and scroll around.
    My sincere hope is that will backfire. I may be a little more activist than most, but I hope people haven’t been lulled to sleep that much, that they’ll act with their wallets and outrage campaigns. That’s probably wishful thinking.