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According to the New York Times, the rumours about YouTube adding full-length movies are about to come true — sort of. The paper says that MGM will announce a deal with the video site on Monday to run some full TV shows and also some movies, with ads appearing alongside them. But the content isn’t really much to write home about:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios will kick off the partnership by posting episodes of its decade-old “American Gladiators” program to YouTube, along with full-length action films like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven” and clips from popular movies like “Legally Blonde.”

Wow — the chance to watch old episodes of American Gladiators and Bulletproof Monk. Hold me back.

Continue reading “YouTube to get MGM’s also-rans”

Greg Sandoval at CNET had a story today saying that he heard from a couple of sources close to YouTube that the company will soon be launching full-length movies. This led to a raft of posts echoing the story, most of which mentioned that this seemed like a plausible rumour — since YouTube now offers full-length TV shows from a couple of networks, and also has a “theater” setting that offers a wider viewer and slightly better quality. But only a couple of blogs that mentioned the story raised what I think is the most important issue: Can YouTube’s infrastructure even handle the real-time streaming of full-length movies?

Robert McLaws, for example, mentioned what I think is a pretty routine occurrence for most people when watching YouTube videos, and that’s the “buffering” message (I get that a fair bit even though I have an 8-megabit connection). John Brandon at Computerworld mentioned the crappy quality of most YouTube videos, and Nick Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider noted that YouTube videos aren’t actually streamed, but are downloaded to the user’s computer — meaning they can easily be copied.

Continue reading “Can YouTube even handle movies?”

I came across the news earlier today that United Feature Syndicate, which distributes about 150 comic strips to newspapers and other publications, has opened its doors and set its content free on the Web. As described by the comic blog Drawn.ca, the site run by United Feature — which has the great domain name comics.com — used to restrict access to the strips it syndicates, and even RSS feeds only included links to the panels. Now, users can sign up for a feed of their favourites and get the entire strip. The site has set free its entire archive of comics as well, which means (among other things) all 50 years of Peanuts comic strips, which Drawn says is more than 20,000 comics. Even better, they have embed codes for their strips so you can plop them into your blog or webpage. Very smart. On a related note, if you enjoy comics at all, Drawn.ca is worth bookmarking — it was created by Canadian cartoonist John Martz, creator of the excellent Robot Johnny strip, and some other leading cartoonists, including Adam “Ape Lad” Koford.

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV may have started getting into video and Twitter and other social media to push wine, but he has become a leading proponent of using social-media tools to build your personal brand and sell whatever it is you want to sell (including yourself). In the video clip embedded here, he takes on Howard Stern — who should probably change his name from the King of All Media to the King of Old Media — who launched into a tirade about the uselessness of blogs and Facebook on a recent episode of his satellite radio show. I think Gary is probably onto something when he says that Howard (to whom he gives a lot of props for succeeding wildly at the conventional radio game) sees social media and the Web as a threat to his empire in some sense. Howard’s original rant is here.

Update:

Fraser Kelton says that Gary V is wrong, and makes a fairly persuasive case in a post from a couple of years ago that Howard is actually using social media and community a lot better than some people think — although in his own way. Not being a Stern listener, I’m going to take his word for it, and the fact that Loren Feldman, Howard Lindzon and Chartreuse all posted comments agreeing with Fraser makes it even more likely that he is right. Drama 2.0, who started this whole thing, has a not-safe-for-kids response here.

At some point during a long night of Twitter responses to the U.S. election, Ze Frank posted a simple message saying that he was looking for people to post where and what they were doing when Obama was elected president. “Gimme snippets of your night,” he said. And about 130 people did just that, some of them just a few sentences, some of them long messages of 800 words or more. Here’s a few samples:

— “I was the girl who ran up and hugged you under the gigantic American flag. One of the most surreal moments of my life. Thank you.”

Continue reading “Ze Frank knows about community”

Kal Raustiala is a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, and talked in a recent video interview about piracy, intellectual property and the “fashion paradox” for the website Big Think. The term “fashion paradox” was coined to describe how the fashion industry has very little protection for intellectual property — new designs are copied almost the instant they hit the runway — and yet there is no shortage of creativity, or money, in that business (supporters of strong IP protection laws usually argue that without them, many artists would no longer create).

Raustiala also talks about how industries often assume that technology such as the VCR will decimate their business, only to find out that they can actually make far more money with such technologies than they did before. The video is definitely worth a watch if you have some time. The site that it comes from, Big Think, is a kind of intellectual version of YouTube, featuring one-on-one interviews with leading thinkers and authors. Co-founder Victoria Brown — a Canadian — started the site earlier with support from Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, and Facebook backer Peter Thiel.

(hat tip to Hypebot for the link)

It’s not exactly a huge surprise, given the anti-trust brouhaha that the proposal caused in Washington, but Google formally announced that its search deal with Yahoo is over, kaput, deceased, pushing up the daisies — it is an ex-agreement. It wasn’t just the anti-trust concerns either; some advertisers were apparently worried about a lack of choice as a result of the tie-up, and not without reason. So how badly is Yahoo screwed right now? On a scale of one to 10, I would say Yahoo is now at 11.

As John Paczkowski notes at All Things D, this deal was supposed to generate as much as half a billion dollars worth of additional cash flow in its first year, money Yahoo could definitely use. But more than that, this deal was a way of trying to stand on its own two feet (albeit while leaning on Google for support), and that is now gone. Microsoft, which had its takeover bid for Yahoo derailed by the Google arrangement — among other things — is no doubt doing the math on another bid.

The only problem for Yahoo is that instead of a $45-billion deal at $31 a share, Microsoft is more likely to bid about half that, and that’s if it even makes another bid for Yahoo at all. Nice job, Jerry. How many failed Hail Mary passes can one CEO throw?

Update:

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall is reporting that an internal Yahoo memo says to expect “a major historical announcement” later today, and the rumour is that Jerry Yang will step down as CEO. Kara Swisher at All Things D says that is dead wrong, and so does the New York Times DealBook blog. VentureBeat has now updated its post and quotes a Yahoo source as saying there is no truth to the rumours.

Apart from the historic nature of the U.S. election (which I will let others discuss), the coverage on CNN set new records as far as the coolness factor goes. Not only did the channel have the Magic Wall — which until recently was the height of geek-dom, with its multi-touch input and other features — but then the network whipped out a couple of holograms just to up the stakes a little. Like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, even though part of me realized they could have done exactly the same thing with a remote camera, a much larger part of me was thinking: “Those holograms are cool.” Plenty of other people seemed to disagree, however, calling the hologram “creepy.” I was less enamored of the virtual Capitol building, which looked kind of cheesy, but the Will.I.Am interview (which is embedded here) was just extremely cool. Yes, I agree that the Jessica Yellin interview had more than a touch of Princess Leia about it, but it was still damn cool. That is all.

Update:

According to a professor of theoretical physics and an expert in holography, what CNN used were not really holograms, since they didn’t project a 3-dimensional image into the studio — they projected it into the camera feed, which is what viewers saw, while the actual hosts were talking to empty space. Okay, not quite as cool. More here.

As many people who have been reading this blog for awhile probably know, I work for the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper based in Toronto, where I’ve been working since 1994 or so. I’ve written about the stock market, the rise of the Internet, moved out West to write about oil and gas, and then came back in 2000 to be the Globe’s first online columnist and its first blogger (before anyone — including me — really knew what that meant). For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been the newspaper’s “new media” reporter, writing about all the ways in which the Web and social media are changing the business of online content for newspapers, magazines, authors, musicians, actors, artists and just about everyone in between.

A little while ago, I was offered an opportunity at the Globe that I got pretty excited about: a position that we’re calling “Communities Editor.” What does that mean exactly? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.

Continue reading “Personal note: A job change for yours truly”

There’s much sturm und drang about online advertising, and whether it’s in a big hole or a *really* big hole. Judging by the graphic of a giant smoking crater he used for his post, Peter Kafka at All Things D apparently falls into the latter camp, and he also quotes Nick “The Dark Lord” Denton as saying that anyone who doesn’t expect ad rates to fall 40 per cent is an idiot (although, to his credit, Peter does note that Denton is always saying things like that). But one of the reports that everyone is using for fodder, which comes from the Rubicon Project, isn’t that bleak at all.

If anything, in fact, the Rubicon report indicates that online advertising is still growing relatively strongly despite the turmoil in credit markets and the slump in stock prices, and could even benefit as advertisers look for more quantifiable results for their spending, which online ads provide. The report also says that while overall ad rates tracked by the network dropped 11 per cent in the quarter:

Continue reading “Online ads: It’s called a flight to quality”

I would take this one with a large grain — perhaps even a boulder — of salt, but according to a report in The Register, wireless-handset maker Motorola is planning to get buyers of its new, ultra-expensive Aura handset to sign something saying they won’t sell the device on eBay. The report (from the usual unnamed source) says that buyers would be required to sell the handsets back to Motorola if they didn’t want them any more. This has drawn scoffs from a number of commenters at Gizmodo and elsewhere, and rightly so, since such a policy would almost certainly be a breach of the so-called “first-sale doctrine” (in the United States, at least).

In a nutshell, the first-sale doctrine — which was originally created to cover patented items, but has since been extended to cover copyrighted material as well, such as records and CDs — prevents a patent-holder or manufacturer from extending their control over an object or piece of content beyond the first sale of that object or content. In other words, “the first unrestricted sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee’s control over that particular item.” This is to allow buyers of CDs and other products to sell them through second-hand stores, or to loan them to friends.

Continue reading “Motorola: First-sale doctrine — what’s that?”

It’s one thing to turn a blind eye — as some networks do — to the uploading of pirated content that occurs daily on YouTube, MySpace and other social networks and services. To use one potential metaphor, it’s like the approach that some countries take to prostitution or marijuana: They know it’s out there, but as long as it doesn’t cause any trouble then they’re okay with it. It’s quite another thing, however, to do what MTV is proposing to do, which is to actually place ads alongside the content that is being infringed. That’s like legalizing prostitution or marijuana use and taxing it.

According to an announcement today, MTV has teamed up with MySpace and a company called Auditude to do exactly that (I mean sell ads next to copyright-infringing videos, not legalize prostitution and marijuana use). Theoretically, that means the network — and MySpace — could benefit any time someone uploads a clip from The Colbert Report or South Park or a music video, based on the advertising that Auditude inserts into the clip. As the LA Times story notes, YouTube rolled out similar technology earlier this year, giving copyright holders the option of monetizing their content rather than removing it. And some are taking that offer.

As more than one person has noted, the approach that MTV Networks is taking seems a little ironic, given that its parent company Viacom is still suing Google for $1-billion in a long-running copyright infringement case. Will that kind of lawsuit go away, as more content providers try to monetize their content wherever it appears, rather than suing to have it taken down? I hope so. What if Auditude or YouTube offered its identification technology as an open API, so that video clips posted by people like me could include ads? I think that would be a great solution. Bring it on.

So what happened when Oprah, the Queen of All Media, mentioned on her show that the Kindle is her “new favourite gadget?” According to Ad Age, the amount of traffic to the Amazon website was about six per cent higher than usual on that day. That’s not a huge amount — but the article also mentions that the number of searches for the keyword “Kindle” rose by close to 500 per cent, which is a pretty big number. Traffic from Oprah’s site to Amazon’s, meanwhile, went up by more than 15,000 per cent.

As Greg Sandoval of CNET points out, Oprah is hugely influential with a certain demographic, one that is much larger than the initial geek/early adopter crowd that gravitates to things like the Kindle. The biggest issue for the device, in my view — apart from the fact that we can’t get them in Canada, of course — is that the Kindle is, well… butt ugly. Seriously, the thing looks like it was designed back in the 1970s, by someone who had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey too many times.

Continue reading “Can Oprah overcome the Kindle’s looks?”

Aaron Fotheringham is 16 years old and has been in a wheelchair since he was eight years old, as a result of spina bifida. But he didn’t let that stop him from attempting, and successfully completing, many of the stunts that his older brother and friends performed on their BMX bikes and skateboard at the local skate park. That includes what appears to be the first example of a wheelchair backflip — something that has landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Aaron, who turns 17 in a few days, has also performed a number of other stunts, including a 180-degree aerial, and you can see some of them here and here. He refers to what he does as “hardcore sitting.”

Click through to watch a video…

There are a few comic strips that stand out in my mind over the years. The first is Doonesbury, for obvious reasons — brilliant social commentary and wit — followed closely by Calvin & Hobbes, and then Berke Breathed‘s Bloom County. I still have a bunch of the collected Bloom County strips, and can recall many a Christmas morning spent enjoying them after getting one under the tree. The strip ended in 1998, followed by a related comic called Outland (which I didn’t like as much) and then a Sunday-only strip featuring Opus the penguin all by himself. Now Breathed has ended that one too, with a single panel showing his anti-hero snuggled in bed in the children’s book Goodnight Moon. It’s a fitting end for a true innocent like Opus, one of the great comic characters of our time. Salon has an interview with the artist, who says that he decided to end it because his anger at the political situation in the U.S. was bleeding through into the strip.