Month: October 2007

The international component of the BBC, BBC World News has established a presence to non-UK web audience on that internet video service you may well have heard about — YouTube. According to their website: “BBC World is the BBC’s commercially funded, international 24-hour news and information channel, broadcast in English in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe.” With this mission in mind, they are likely more willing to take some risks in other areas.

The site it clearly branded, and features news stories produced for their television outlets reformatted for YouTube. Some of these news bits are the harder hitting sort, including their most-viewed clip, an interview with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to the lighter material about living ‘green.’

Views of the clips vary a great deal, with the videos with high-profile figures leading the pack. The Zenawi clip, for example, has garnered 26,673 views as of this writing. All but one of the top 15 clips have 1,000+ views, with the rest settling into the predictable long-tail curve.

26,000 isn’t stellar by many measures — my decidedly un-newsworthy video of an old Sony CD player has over 55,000 views.

Perhaps a great number of views is not what they are after. As with any established broadcast entities in this space, any experimentation should be viewed as a positive move. If it does not work, BBC World News will face neither great fiscal losses nor catastrophic image degradation.

[ Since the BBC has embedding disabled, I shall leave you with the clip of my Sony CD Player: ]

In the above image you will see a screenshot of the new Amazon MP3 Downloader application, superimposed with my single-word evaluation.

Being an incurable music buyer for several years, I have had a great deal of experience with all of the major music download-for-$ places. This is by far the easiest and smoothest deal by far.

The first place I got started was with eMusic.com. I still like eMusic, even though I am no longer a member. The business model has changed there over the years; at one unsustainable point, users paid a modest $10/month fee that entitled them to unlimited downloads from the site. That is not a typo — unlimited. My computer system had neither the hard drive space nor a CD burner, so I was unable to take advantage of this. I knew of some people that downloaded hundreds upon hundreds of albums during that time.

They switched to limited numbers of downloads which have since settled at 30 per month for $10. They have other options, but the bottom rung was always my price. It is an odd behavior, counting the tracks on albums to see if you have enough to get it all this month. For this persnickety collector, it proved to be too much. I kept focusing upon downloading longer tracks to get more for my $. I discovered that there are quite a few full-length albums with just 2 or 3 cuts!

I downloaded a single Bjork song from the MSN service, which proved to be too much to deal with.

The standard service most folks think of for downloads-for-$ is iTunes. I have dropped a few bucks there as well, but only a few. The DRM they slap on most cuts makes my teeth itch.

But, this new deal from Amazon really looks nice. I found an album that is a single track [Henry Flynt’s ‘Purified by the Fire’] for the likely incorrect price of $0.89. [It is now $8.99, FYI.] I was asked to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader. A couple of clicks later and a short wait for the cut to make its way onto my hard drive and I was set.

The coolest thing is that one of the options is ‘Place Song Into iTunes.’ Once it is downloaded, there it goes, into your iTunes library, artwork and all. That is the missing link in a lot of these non-iTunes services, and one that I think that will make a big difference. It is a small convenience, but it sets them apart. Awesome.

For more on this as it relates to pricing, see this MoBuzz.tv clip:

Comedy Central has taken another crack at a redesign of their online content interface [website]. Their high-profile past issues with video content was much discussed on teh Internets. 

They took what was then the unpopular approach of taking their content back from the user-posted world. Comedy Central, it seemed, wanted to control the quality, context, and subsequent potential ad revenue. The site design that followed made the content subservient to all concerns: keeping their content on the Comedy Central site, massive & cumbersome ad placement, and prohibiting embedding on other sites. Only direct links to the interface were provided. To the world of user-posted-clip consumers this was clearly a step backwards.

Comedy Central’s last revision took place last week, and they have put these very features back in. The interface is much cleaner, the videos are larger & higher resolution, and embeddable. A comments section now lets people chatter on about their favorite clips. Adverts are post-roll and much shorter & less painful.

This is a smart move, methinks, as it accomplishes two things: it gets adverts in front of people, and the content can be easily and freely dispersed throughout the tubes of teh Internets.

NBC could learn a lesson here. I tried to view a hysterical clip from last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. I turned to YouTube, found a link, and was greeted with a notification that NBC Universal had removed the clip.

I surfed over the the NBC site to give the source a try. No such luck there. No indications of where I could get it, either. The only thing they provided was a linear rundown of the show. Useless. Perhaps they are hawking the clips on iTunes?

Kind of. I was greeted there with a special section offering 16 – 25 minute ‘best-of’ compilations from each week’s show. Neat, but the week I sought was not available. Even if it were, they might not place the sketch clip on that compilation. Here is the store:

NBC, you waste my time and failed to take advantage of the opportunity to serve me at least 3 or four adverts. You are not letting people consume content in the way they choose. And I am not spending $2.00 in iTunes for it, either. I am not the only one, I am certain.

Google has been rumored for some time to be pursuing a mobile phone strategy of sorts. Word this week on the CNET News Blog is that a Taiwanese manufacturer is getting started on the production of an alleged unit that uses a Google operating system.

Many other handsets/operating systems utilize some Google apps [like the iPhone and Google Maps] but none have a complete OS from the search giant.

How this will play into the announcement earlier this week of Steve Jobs opening the iPhone up for developers remains to be seen.

All of this is infinitely complicated by the nature of mobile devices. When people design software for computers, there are three primary platforms to which they cater: Windows, Mac, or Linux. The same goes for designers of websites; they encounter MS Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. If you take the number of mobile devices and multiply that by the number of mobile service providers, and you can begin to see why companies like Apple and Google have waited this long to jump into the game.

The content is getting better, and the computing power of the devices are on the increase, but the fact still remains that there are about 1,500 different handsets in use worldwide. [!]
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This delightful image from Paul J. Thompson on Flickr shows a bubble bursting in a mudpot at Yellowstone National Park. Here, gases flow up from the ground and percolate through the mud. Like many bubbles, they are intermittent, unpredictable, and quick to burst. The ones at Yellowstone are often caused by hydrogen sulfide; when the bubbles burst, they stink!

I have been to Yellowstone to see these stinking bubbles burst, and I was a part of another bubble burst that stank — the Great Internet Bubble Burst of 2000. My employer, once flush with venture capital, was forced to downsize and I was left without a gig. After that, things leveled out for teh Internets, and I found gainful employment once again.

Ever since folks have been chattering about Web 2.0, there have been murmurs of “here are the makings for yet another burst-bubble situation.” This sentiment has been echoed in a recent article from the NY Times. It explicitly calls out the signs of an impending burst — tons of venture capital, funny company names, and questionable or non-existent business plans. From the article:

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, an Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability,” he said.

Speculation is no new concept, and no one is asking it to cease. The thing that might set this apart from other business analysis situations is the concept of the ghost user. Best described as the registered yet non-participating member of a site/service/community, these users are often curious [as a result of reading an article in the NY Times or WSJ]. A username is selected, password entered, and ghost user is now officially considered another hash mark on the all-important tally of “total registered users.” Of the seven Second Life users I know, I am aware of at least six of them are ghost users, not including myself. I did configure that avatar, after all…