Jan 10th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
We appear to have two data points related to online video that are worth paying attention to. Number one: According to the BBC, Nielsen says that traffic to some online video sites has doubled since the Hollywood writers’ strike in October turned the TV into a wasteland of reruns and unfunny late-night talk shows (although it may be stretching things to call the Nielsen figure a data point, since I can’t find a report that has those numbers in it).
The second data point is a report from the Pew Internet Research project, a reliable and independent research group, indicates that almost 50 per cent of those surveyed had been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube (up from 38 per cent last year) and daily traffic to such sites has doubled in the past year. The number of people who said they had been to such a site within a day of being asked almost doubled to 15 per cent.
Ever since the strike began, there has been a debate about how much of a benefit online video might get as the fresh content on television became more and more scarce. Some have argued that most online video is crap, and therefore the boost would likely be minimal. Others argue that much of what is on TV is also crap, although the production values might be slightly higher, and that the strike might help to push some content creators to remake the industry in Silicon Valley’s image.
I don’t know where things will end up, but I do know one thing: I am hearing from more and more “average” people — i.e., not geeks — that they are watching more video online, and that they are finding things there they can’t on television. The writers’ strike may be one of the forces that are pushing people to do that, but it’s not the only one. Increasingly, the boundaries between TV and online are blurring.
Nov 27th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Kevin Nalts is a marketer who currently works for a Fortune 100 company as a consumer-product director, and moonlights as a YouTube comedian, one whose channel is in the top 10 in the comedy section, with more than 24,000 subscribers and over 1.2 million channel views. He also writes a blog called Will Video For Food.
Nalts wrote a column recently for Advertising Age in which he gave marketers some tips on using video and YouTube — a nice counterpoint to the recent piece by a “viral” marketer who wrote a post over at TechCrunch about how to manipulate your way to the front page of YouTube.
Nov 9th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Ego alert: I was on The Agenda with Steve Paikin — a current affairs show on TV Ontario — on Wednesday night, along with my friends Mark Evans and Om Malik, as well as Jesse Hirsh, a CBC commentator on media and technology, and Nancy Baym, a University of Kansas professor who writes the always excellent Online Fandom blog.
We were talking about Facebook (of course) and the Microsoft deal, but also about privacy and “social advertising,” and whether online social networking is a replacement for real face-to-face networking — stay tuned until the end to see Nancy lay into Om on that one 
The video clip is here, or you can click on the image of yours truly below.
Sep 26th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
I must admit, when I read that BudTV had gotten a reprieve and was going to have its lease extended to next year, my first response was: Why? The site, an attempt to create a Funny or Die-style comedy video destination, was so painfully lame — despite the estimated $20-million that went into setting it up and getting various artists to create content for it — that I thought it would be better to euthanize it, and put it out of its (and our) misery.
That was my first reaction. But Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has managed to convince me that BudTV should live on to fight another day. He makes a number of points, including the fact that Bud has spent a bunch of money on the site, and should give it a little longer to find its feet — and he also notes that people criticize large companies for not experimenting enough, taking risks, etc., and that we should cut BudTV some slack.
Good points, Chris. I’m going to give BudTV another chance. But at this point, they still mostly suck.
Sep 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 1 Comment
I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on it, because frankly it isn’t worth it, but I thought I should take note of the fact that BlogTV.ca — the video-streaming experiment from Alliance Atlantis that launched with much fanfare (or at least a big, fancy party) in March — is getting the chop. According to an internal memo from CanWest, its new part-owner:
“When the site first launched back in March, initial traffic surged, but then declined and over the past quarter we’ve seen a steady decline, indicating that high usage is not likely.
Moreover, the site has not produced the sales interest we expected, and as such we felt that winding the site down was the most fiscally responsible option.”
In other words, it tanked. I don’t want to be accused of saying “I told you so,” but well… I told you so. Before the site was even out of beta, it seemed clear to me that it wasn’t going to work — primarily because it was restricted to Canadians only (in part because of a licensing agreement with the Israeli company that developed the platform).
As much as spokespeople for BlogTV and Alliance tried to argue (as they did in the comments on my post) that the restrictions were a feature rather than a bug, and that Canadians wanted a kind of playpen/ghetto where they could share with other Canadians, that just never proved to be the case.
