This is a video presentation I put together for my Net Economics course, as well as to inspire my co-workers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and everyone else for that matter, to “get in there and play” when it comes to building the information commons through social media.

Alright, all kidding aside, this is actually actor Kevin Bacon in the 1978 film Animal House. And, if you are familiar with the scene being depicted, I should note that I am not asserting that Himma is a flustered ROTC student trying in vain to maintain order during a riot on the city streets after a fraternity prank causes mass chaos, uselessly shouting to the crowd “All is well!”. No, instead I should explain that this image is something that came to my mind when I realized that arguments Himma puts forth in a 2005 accepted and forthcoming APA Newsletters on Philosophy and Computers essay against the popular notion “information should be free” (ISBF) are likely to forever fall on deaf ears.

Now, I’m not necessarily claiming that Himma is standing in the middle of the chaos and proclaiming that “information should not be free”! In fact, Himma points out that he’s merely deconstructing the ISBF idea from the standpoint of mainstream moral views, maintaining that arguments in defense of ISBF are ungrounded and that legitimate intellectual property (IP) rights should be protected – that if IP law is illegitimate it’s not because of ISBF, but it would rather have to be because of something else. Well, that’s all well and good, but, like Bacon in the middle of the chaos, Himma is wasting his efforts.

I agree with Himma that there is no negative right to information, nor that the populace has a morally protected claim to any “true propositional content”, as Himma labels it. I agree that IP and IP holders deserve protection to the fullest extent of the law. I even agree that information should not be free solely based upon its nature, the marginal costs of its reproduction, or even general human interest in it. Truly, Himma is altogether accurate in his arguments. However, what Himma fails to adequately address is that the ISBF concept is only perfunctorily used as psychological rationale by some who wish to share information within the commons. In other words, I think some people in the ISBF crowd are only trying to defend what has become an unstoppable force within the networked information sphere, a “fact-of-life” that is pointless to defend: popular practices are inevitably making information BECOME free! Right or wrong, the crowd WANTS information to be free, and it’s going to get it.

Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks (2006) does not need to defend the reasons why information should, or “wants”, to be free. Its pages detail at length the many political, societal, cultural, and personal benefits to the ‘information commons’ ideal, and more importantly, that it actually exists and precisely how it functions to such ends. It’s a beast of a thing. And, if the losers are the institutions and persons who produce IP, their losses seem inconsequential to the beast. Even if it’s in the interest of fairness to compensate those who generate IP, once it reaches the commons, compensation becomes irrelevant because information just becomes free. Infringement happens – deal with it. Besides, laws are generally useless if they cannot be effectively enforced. Now, let me spell out that I’m not advocating that any laws be broken. Rather, I’m following in the footsteps of the Chris Andersons, Clay Shirkys, and Lawrence Lessigs of the world, all of whom have echoed or touched upon similar observations in their own work.

What this is really about is fear – fears that old economic models are dead, that fair practices will be eschewed, that voices will be lost, and that money will not be made. I guess that’s just too bad. Cut to Benkler:

…an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis … has been shown to have emerged on the Web. It does not depend on single points of control. It avoids the generation of a din through which no voice can be heard, as the fears of fragmentation predicted. And, while money may be useful in achieving visibility, the structure of the Web means that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to grab attention – because the networked information economy, unlike its industrial predecessor, does not offer simple points of dissemination and control… (Benkler, 2005, p. 254)

In a space where money isn’t necessary to reach an audience and where money cannot buy control, it’s no wonder money isn’t coming back to those who rightfully (or not) deserve it. Arguments like Himma’s, no matter how semantically or philosophically grounded they may be, are wasted on a crowd addicted to the information commons and which does not care to be told they’re doing anything wrong. Like I said, infringement happens – deal with it, because the crowd wants information to be free.

References

Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Himma, K. (2005). Information and intellectual property protection: Evaluating the claim that information should be free. American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Forthcoming. Retrieved 2 November 2009, from http://ssrn.com/abstract=727446.

Anderson’s “Free” starts out by giving us a quick economics briefing, using that as backdrop to defend the notion of ‘free’.  He explains that, for instance, traditional, or old media has used a third-party advertising model to earn revenue while still providing a “free” product.  I may not pay for 30 Rock, but when I buy products advertised during commercial breaks on TV or in interstitials on Hulu, I am still giving my money to NBC.  It’s pretty basic and has worked for Google, a benevolent empire that has largely amassed their wealth through selling advertising and diversifying revenue streams.  Of course, the model isn’t absolutely identical – the web magnifies things by presenting opportunities to apply wisdom gleaned from specific metrics and target users with relevant advertising, as well as ways of satisfying niches with long tail services – but the principle is the same: subsidize one product (free content) with money made from another (paid ad space).  Multiply and diversify.

With the notion of one product funding the other in mind, I further illustrate the point by explaining how I helped inadvertently save ABC, Monday Night Football, and the Disney company in 2004.  Maybe.  Or not.  But keep reading!  I think you’ll enjoy the reasoning anyways!

The popularity of Monday Night Football, or MNF, a free over-the-air product until 2006, has apparently soured since moving from ABC to cable’s ESPN in 2006.  In fact, this year MNF has seen a decline in viewers week over week.  Meanwhile, competitor NBC’s Sunday Night Football, or SNF, has quickly become the NFL’s showcase; during that same transition period in ‘06 SNF bested the last year of ABC’s MNF by comparison.  In general, it would appear that on average more fans are watching SNF than MNF (and SNF is on the rise – although, it should be noted that MNF has set cable viewing records, though still not as high as when it was over-the-air).  MNF just isn’t the same juggernaut it used to be, and that’s also in part because, for the viewer, cable TV generally comes at some price as compared to free over-the-air broadcasting).  Truthfully, ESPN doesn’t reach as many households as ABC did or NBC currently does, but, in using a cross-subsidies model – some Andersonian and basic economic thinking – I have found an interesting way of explaining how Disney, who owns ABC and ESPN, is going to come out winner.  In this situation, ABC will be our free product and the eventual beneficiary of the move.

In 2006, when MNF jumped from ABC to ESPN, NBC saw an opportunity to shift NFL eyeballs from Monday to Sunday.  On the other hand, Disney was looking at the move as an opportunity to bolster its ESPN brand as well as develop their free product – ABC’s Monday night – with other shows targeting other demographics.  However, this internal counter-programming was still probably not going to make up for all the prestige Disney would be losing in bumping MNF to a cable network.  Nevertheless, as their plans to switch MNF’s channel were taking shape, Disney still had Al Michaels in it’s deck, the lead play-by-play announcer and respected voice of MNF telecasts up to that point.  Certainly ESPN’s iteration of MNF would benefit from having Michaels, but Michaels would wind up with NBC’s SNF during the transition instead.  But this was no accident or failure on Disney’s part, for, ever the synergists, they must have spotted a different way to cross-subsidize and recoup expected losses with Michaels not around for ESPN MNF.  Michaels became expendable.  Let’s quickly investigate why.

First, back up to fall 2004, when ABC saw MNF get its lowest rating for a game ever.  Yes, their free ad-supported product was losing money.  Big deal?  Well, back up a few more months.  During the summer of 2004, Disney’s video game unit, Buena Vista Games, started a Think Tank of college interns to devise concepts for new video games.  I was one of those interns, a senior at USC.  One of the concepts we pitched, Epic Mickey, a recently announced game by Warren Spector and Junction Point that’s expected to reinvigorate the character Mickey Mouse and hopefully make him relevant to a whole new generation, was just coming together under the direction of game developer Chris Takami and others.  During our think-tanking we came across the character of Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit as we were looking for potential supporting characters to fit the story we concocted for the game. When we brought our ideas for Oswald to Chris Takami, he had some folks do some research and discover that Disney no longer held the rights to the character.  Oswald was Walt Disney’s first cartoon creation, but due to a financial dispute he wound up out of Disney’s hands and  in to the hands of Universal Pictures.  Of course, eventually Walt would craft Mickey Mouse and the rest is history, but this story doesn’t stop there.

Snap back to 2006, and The Walt Disney Company wants Oswald back from Universal in order to make Epic Mickey.  Why?  Disney CEO Bob Iger, perhaps betting that Epic Mickey will reap bounteous profits and reinvigorate a media franchise, subsequently subsidizing any long-term losses ABC and Disney might experience from MNF’s switch to ESPN, decides to trade Al Michaels to NBC Universal for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  Oswald was back home, and with the trade Disney has kickstarted a potentially lucrative video game venture, a mega franchise in the making (could there eventually be movies, books, and more based on Epic Mickey and Oswald? – as a progeny of George Lucas I sugggested as much for Epic Mickey when we pitched it, and Warren Spector has the same vision).  So, Disney cross-subsidizes ABC and synergistically creates new revenue with this trade, and in so doing they establish three revenue streams (new and free ABC Monday night primetime offerings, the Epic Mickey franchise, and the new ESPN MNF) where there was once only one, (free ABC MNF).  And it all starts with a bunch of interns, of which I was one.

If you think about it, as Anderson points out in ‘Free’, this is what Google does so well – they give away one free product (search) and sell another product (AdWords) to subsidize the free one while still earning a profit from other revenue streams, too (such as the freemium-based Google Apps).  ABC is free, but Disney collects revenue and then some to keep it going from other streams (selling on-air commercial time, selling games like Epic Mickey, charging cable systems to carry ESPN, and so forth).  Sure, it’s not the same as offering many high-quality free products at the same time the way Google does with free Gmail, free Google Search, and free Google Maps, all robust standalone products, but it does prove that if you diversify you can offer several very popular products for free or nearly free and still recoup and profit through other means.  Don’t believe me?  Just wait and watch how much attention they pour into promoting Epic Mickey, a game that will make oodles a pop (at whatever the typical Wii game going price will be when it’s released next year).  So, there you have it: Disney, like Google, diversifying and synergizing through new models.  You should do the same, because you must realize, as my friend Brook Elllingwood put it, that all companies are now media companies.  Step in to the 21st century and play by the same rules as the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world.

As an epilogue, I don’t actually know what went on in the room when Iger traded for Oswald (as a long-gone former intern by that point), and I’m sure there are eight gazillion other ways Disney prepared to handle the MNF move and ABC Monday losses – plus I’m not dense enough to not recognize that Disney makes plenty of money in other ways (theme parks, toys, etc).  But, they could have just bought Oswald back or found some other way of acquiring him.  Why Al Michaels?  Because Epic Mickey is going to be huge and fund rest of Disney’s free products, as well as help keep MNF on cable TV.

I interned with the first iteration of the BVG Think Tank in the summer of 2004, a video game concept development group comprised of paid undergraduate associates at The Walt Disney Company’s Buena Vista Games shingle (now called Disney Interactive Studios).  Working here as a writer alongside a team of seven other interns, the Think Tank helped develop proposals to guide key decision makers and help Disney extend their reach with gamer culture. “Epic Mickey“, one of those proposals and an idea that we in the first Think Tank originally developed and pitched to Disney executives under the direction of BVG in-house developer and Think Tank creator Chris Takami, is currently being produced by Disney Interactive’s Junction Point Studios by award-winning game designer Warren Spector.

There you have it.  I’m not going to say anything more about it because I’ve never been sued and I’d like to keep it that way. UPDATE: After some careful analysis of Game Informer’s interview with Warren Spector, there really isn’t much I could divulge – what we came up with is still basically intact.  Chalk it up to paranoia.  Now, the “how’s” and “why’s” would be a different story, I guess.  Or not.  Whatever.

Sigh.  Now maybe some of my close friends will understand my obsession with the word ‘epic’.  Incidentally, I latched on to the idea of what constitutes ‘epic’ by watching epic manuevers on YTMND.com.  Can’t wait to play the game next year and hopefully perform some epic manuevers with Mickey on the Wii.  Ahhhh, yeah.

Follow Up

Here’s a bit from Warren Spector’s Game Informer interview where he mentions how the game came about in 2004:

And so at that point they called in Luigi Priore, who was running the think tank at Disney, which I guess a bunch of interns would come in and work up concepts and everything. And he gave me a pitch on a Mickey project that they had been working on, and I sat there and I watched this Powerpoint presentation that he did – and it’s like, “Holy cow, that is the heart of an amazing game.”

So, yeah, I was one of those interns.  The eight of us came up with the original idea and first pitch for Epic Mickey.  What I think is great about this story is that TWDC, Takami, Priore, and Graham Hopper (GM of BVG at the time) – and I’m sure countless other individuals in Disney’s rank and file – were so incredibly wise to run a Think Tank of college kids to begin with.  Take a bunch of college kids, who are also people from the core demographic for the types of games BVG wanted to really get in to, and then just let us loose to create and develop, trusting that we knew what we wanted to see in a game.  It would be so much fun for me, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed, to discuss exactly how we came up with the concept, the reasonings and logic involved. I mean, this wasn’t simply about making a Mickey Mouse game, but about how to make Mickey Mouse culturally relevant again.  I say this because what I think is the very best thing about the way this Mickey game idea was realized, and how the Think Tank operated in general, was what each of us brought, in my opinion, what really special abilities each of my fellow interns brought to the table from an educational standpoint.  I think this is a testament to the educations we were receiving from our respective colleges at the time we were in the Think Tank, be it USC (where I was finishing up, and I can tell you exactly how things I was learning from the Interactive Media Program and film school factor in to Epic Mickey), CalArts, the University of San Diego, and so forth.  THAT’S what I think is most awesome about this, and why I’m making such a big deal out of connecting myself and the Think Tank to the project.  I think some serious credit should be given to our educational experiences in addition to any personal, artistic, gaming, and cultural interests, in terms of how Epic Mickey came to be.  I don’t know, and wouldn’t begin to imagine, that all of our ideas will be reflected in the final product, but I can see, and according to Spector’s interview this is true, that the heart of what we came up with is intact.  That, to me, is really, really, really cool.

Taken as a whole, I feel like Epic Mickey is the product of a bunch of different generations listening to one another and saying, hey, I get it!  That’s the most satisfying thing about this – I feel like someone finally listened to me.  That’s epic in my book.

“Free,” the latest book by Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, illustrates how the 21st century’s digital economy of ones and zeros is increasingly moving towards a pricing model where everything is (or should be), essentially, free (Anderson, 2009).  Another way of putting it is thus: whereas the marginal cost of reproducing intangible digital goods made of bits instead of atoms is practically zero, whereas Moore’s law and other concepts dictate that the cost of processors, bandwidth, and storage are marching towards nil, and whereas less typical motives for doing business like gaining reputation and raising social capital are on the rise, the very notion that one should pay for digital goods and services is pretty much dead at the door.  Anecdotally, for a US economy that is for all intents and purposes steeped in never-ending debt, built on the foundations of imaginary money no less, the irony is not lost upon myself that we really ought not to be paying for anything anyways!  Nonetheless, money is scarce, but the resource of intellectual property is endless.  “Free” addresses what to do about this, and how real money can be made by giving everything away.

But wait…

In the interest of confessing that I whole-heartedly believe in this gospel of Free, I will offer the counterpoint before moving on.  Indeed, not everyone agrees with Anderson.  Like who?  Malcolm Gladwell for one, who interestingly enough in a February 2004 TED talk illustrated an idea that fits perfectly with Anderson’s previous long tail concept (the skinny end of the distribution graph where companies like Amazon make a collective killing selling small amounts of less popular items; see The Long Tail at Wikipedia for more (The Long Tail, 2009)), discussing in this TED talk how businesses have learned that providing choice, variability, and specialization invariably will lead to greater profit, succeeding in a novel concept: giving consumers what they really want (Gladwell, 2004).  Why would Gladwell disagree with Anderson when it comes to “Free”, then?  In his review of the book in The New Yorker, Gladwell concedes that Anderson offers a lot of reassuring answers to intellectual content producers who are seeing the digital age destroy their profits through things like piracy and shifting mediums, but contends that Anderson’s solutions hold little weight.  These solutions, the gist of which I will get in to later, Gladwell asserts, seem unnecessary or redundant.  For example, why pay for the special service of finding someone to write when you can simply pay someone to write (Gladwell, 2009)?

There’s more!

Gladwell may be wise to question Anderson’s solutions, but time will ultimately have to determine who is right.  Businesses need new economic models now.  It is fascinating that the fears surrounding economic change seen in the digital age appear to echo fears being trumpeted in other areas, such as those witnessed in debates currently raging in politics and the social world.  For instance, the right tends to question the need for change, such as they have in watching the potential implementation of a new health care system unfold, and so they are doing everything they can to fight it.  Likewise, incumbent industries, or “old media”, like the recording industry or newspaper industry, have done or are doing the same – putting up a fight against changes in the way their content is consumed by the masses.  Even a software publishing giant like Microsoft, as Anderson points out in “Free”, has attempted to fight change in the midst of disruptive innovations like open source software (Anderson, 2009).  Change is inevitable, but adaptation is unavoidable.

Supplies are limited!

Perhaps some insight for fearful incumbents can be gained from Anderson’s discussion of the way society tends to ignore abundance and focus on scarcity as changes occur over time.  In a brief economic history laid out early in the book, Anderson spells out how people tend to fear the loss of certain resources and expect that as they become scarce prices and demand for these commodities will increase.  However, what Anderson illustrates is that once a resource becomes limited, people shift their focus towards alternative resources and the prices and demand for the depleted resources actually drop (Anderson, 2004).  Consider how oil prices have dropped in recent years as people have begun shifting towards alternative energy sources.  Mapping this framework on to the commodities of intellectual industries, incumbents need to understand that the demand has shifted to where the abundance of their resource can be acquired, which is through marginal reproduction of assets in the digital space.  Incumbents are ignoring the reservoir of abundance and are not looking for ways to make money in this new landscape, focusing on the depleted interest in older resources, a classic societal trend, or so it would appear.

*Shipping and handling not included.

What are these new models, the ones Gladwell might not like very well?  In general, Anderson looks to Gladwell’s specialization and variability concept and his own long tail for answers.  The, as Anderson calls it, “superabundance” of easily reproduced resources has created a wealth of information.  And, like Anderson points out, described already by Herbert Simon, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention (Anderson, 2009).  One size does not fit all, as Anderson says, which further complicates the matter – choice is seemingly endless.  Anderson also states that as people get older they tend to have less time and more money.  What this all spells out, according to Anderson, is that people will continue to expect free content because it costs nothing to reproduce, but people will, in the interest of convenience, pay for specialized service and ancillary product which will make consumption almost as easy a choice as taking a free product, too.  Freemium models, where a minority of users pay for specialized product and everyone else still gets the normal good while profit from the minority covers them all, are most indicative of this.  So, yes, there is a catch, but it is not a very bad one because freemium customers fund the masses while receiving added value for so doing.  Everyone wins.

Call now!

Free is inevitable.  I embrace it already and look forward to more of it.  However, even I know it is not truly free in that the abundance of some provides for the advancement of many.  This is a model already seen in representative democracies which function on taxation to operate, as Anderson notes in his book.  Like those right-wing politicos that are fearful of losing resources to social change, if they understood that they only need to shift their attention to new resources they would have nothing to fear.  Anderson’s “Free” succinctly illustrates how incumbent players moving (or being thrust) in to the digital space can learn from successful companies like Google and Yahoo!, both of which have made their millions by giving away their products while using alternative methods of cashing in on the value created by so doing (e.g., targeted advertising, to name Google’s primary model as one such method).  Those industries that are succumbing to network effects need to look for new ways of doing business right now, starting with giving away their primary products for free.  If they don’t, someone else will.

References

Anderson, C. (2009). Free, the future of a radical price. New York: Hyperion.

Gladwell, M. (2009, July 6). Priced to sell: Is free the future?. The New Yorker. 80.

Gladwell, M. (2004, February). Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce [Video File]. On TED: Talks. Video posted September 2006. Retrieved 25 October 2009, from http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

The Long Tail. (2009, October 24). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 25 October 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

This isn’t at all to say I know absolutely nothing about technology and business, if not specifically economics.  I know plenty about innovation, incumbents, disruptors, and so forth.  But, now I need to learn about the Information Economy. And, gladly, our instructor has been going over the basics of economics already, so I feel I won’t be utterly lost in this course.

So, my key goals for this quarter are to learn the following:

1. How does supply and demand apply to information?
2. How do you place a dollar sign on something that is not a scarce resource?
3. How on Earth, other than supplying knowledge to enact change, do you develop an Information Economy in places still fixated on scarcity, like the developing world?  I mean, isn’t a cell-phone or OLPC (”One Laptop Per Child“) pointless if you’ve got nothing to eat?

Kathy Gill, a brilliant woman who I’ve had the pleasure of taking a course from before, is our instructor.  I think I will learn a lot because my indifference to the subject of economics will probably mean I’ve got a massive untouched portion of my brain to awaken to these pretty new ideas (to me, that is).  I look forward to it!

Here’s my white paper, in all it’s PDF glory.

What do you think?  Will watching YouTube and Hulu in the comfort of your living room be all that and a bag of chips?

Where da money at?

Answer: Place-shifting, time-shifting, and format-shifting.

Any kind of shifting.  CONVENIENCE is what people want and will pay for.  Content providers are so concerned about out-dated license structures.  They’re scared of the margin, that the 1337 kiddies will pwn them the way the music industry got pwnt by file-sharing (which was their own fault, not Napster).  Providers are perpetually in bed with technology manufacturers making sure innovation is curtailed and that new technology is defective by design.  Stop plugging the analog holes of the world, stop making devices counter-intuitive, and stop making the masses do the innovating for you by looking for the next workaround.  Ditch your DRM and proprietary formats, unlock your devices, your iPhones and cable boxes and XBOXes and every kind of box, so that they’ll never need jail-broken and do what they are REALLY capable of doing.  Empower people.  And stop trying to control your content.  Just like the web always smacks brands in the face every time they try to control their messages, the web will slap content providers in the face when they try to control their content, too.  If it’s easy, it’s fast, and it just works, people will pay for it.  iTunes is infinitely more convenient than the surviving, illegal methods.  And when the file I download works on a litany of devices, I’m happy.  You’ve given the customer what they want.  Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?

I look forward to the day I can turn on my TV and in a few button-pushes have the movie, TV show, or inane trampoline video I want, downloaded DRM-free to my set-top superbox, a file that I now can do whatever I want with and copy to any format I choose, accessible at any time or in any place (yo, mobile, hook me up!) that I’d like.  I can stick it on my iPod, my laptop, a DVD, a thumb drive, a smartphone…  CONTENT PROVIDERS: Set your content free and people will pay for it, because they will pay for the highest quality iteration of it at the most convenient distribution point (my TV would be nice), especially if it happens FAST and isn’t complicated (see iTunes).  Content providers need to make better deals with the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world so that this simple world of distribution can finally happen.

And that, my friends, is where the money is at.  Makes sense to me.

No.*

Ok, let me elaborate a little.  Drew Keller put to us students in the MCDM’s Summer Web Storytelling class the same question, after being inspired by an article about the subject from Tod Sacerdoti at the Online Video Insider.  In his post, Sacerdoti explored the question: what is the most-watched show on the Internet?  What even defines a “show” online?  Drew also pointed us to an article in the New York Times discussing the growing popularity of longer-form videos on the web.  The TV business has after decades established standard terms for categorizing and classifying its content – serials, series, dramas, sitcoms, sports, primetime, latenight, and so on and so forth.  This serves many purposes, the most notable of which is to help measure viewership by timeslots and types of programs and sell advertising accordingly.  This doesn’t really work on the web, with a major exception (see asterisk below).

Content prepared specifically for the web is inherently different than TV content.  And I don’t care whether your videos are two minutes or two hours.  We don’t have a lot of official terms floating around for web video, and we don’t really need them – people tend to refer to a web video as just a “video” (or “clip”, maybe) unless informed by the content provider otherwise.  Sometimes you’ll hear that aging term “vodcast”, referring to one particularity in the web world.  But, generally, people use the term “video” when referring to a web video, unless they’ve been told it’s an “episode” of something, in which case they’ll say “episode”.  Or if the provider calls their series of videos a “video diary”, for instance, they’ll say “video diary” or “diary entry”, or “post”, or something along those lines.  You call your video series a “webcast”, people will call it a “webcast”.  Basically, viewers will call videos by whatever terms the videos call themselves.  If you make an “online show”, fans will probably call your “online show” an “online show”.  “Did you see that web show?”, for example.

But really, 90% of what’s out there are just plain-old videos, and that’s all they need to be termed: videos.  People are watching Adobe Flash files (or something very similar) downloaded or streamed relatively quickly to their browsers via YouTube or Vimeo or CNN or Myspace or wherever else.  The lengths of videos out there cover the spectrum, too.  Nothing is totally standardized, so you can’t apply TV terminology very easily here.  These are simply video files.  We don’t call them “broadcasts” or “airings” or “programs” or “feeds” (unless they’re actually live web feeds or live web streams of a network/station/channel feed, of course) because they’re not – they’re typically on-demand, user-initiated standalone files.  And, we behave differently with them than we might any old-fashioned TV “program”.  If we like the video, we share it on Facebook or embed it on a blog or bookmark it for later viewing when our co-worker gets back from lunch.  We have much more control.  You don’t do that with your cable box (yet, anyway).

And since we don’t need official terms or standard lengths, and we can call our video content whatever we want to, and the whole idea of categorizing by format (ex.: hour-long drama, half-hour local newscast, sitcom, etc.) is generally pointless, then what should we do?  Well, what becomes important is categorizing and tagging for search engines.  The web is a “search and share” medium.  If my video series is about my kids’ little league soccer season, I would categorize this content as “sports” and tag it as “soccer”, depending on the metadata capabilities of the venue I eventually exhibit my content in (YouTube, Blip, self-hosted Quicktime clips embedded in my blog, etc.).  Metadata is where the real classification really takes place.  This is where advertisers will look: in addition to whatever metrics they can get on number of views, metadata helps target their advertising.  Things online are too messy to relegate to any TV-style categorizations.  Timeslots are moot when a video goes viral at 2pm in the afternoon.  The term “show” altogether is moot here (unless you call your video a “show” – but that’s a matter of preference).

There will never be the same kind of categorizing, labelling, and classifying on the web for video content like we see on TV.  The web is a people-powered medium and the people will decide how to label their content.  Sacerdoti wants to call a web video a “show” if it’s any kind of periodically produced content.  Well, when the Emmys start handing out the “Best Sobbing Emo Kid in an Online Video Diary Series” award, I’ll subscribe to that idea.  Until then, whatever you call your content is what it is.  A video posted online is just that – a video, until proven otherwise.

*TV shows from the actual broadcast world, when viewed online, still keep their categorizations and classifications from their initial medium – that’s how they’re organized to begin with.  One episode of ‘House M.D.’ on Hulu is still an episode of an “hour-long drama series”, just like when it’s on TV, so I wouldn’t call it something else when I watch it online.  While I control when I view it, it doesn’t suddenly become something different when it’s viewed on my computer screen.

VirtualDub – (PC only) This is great for you Flip users out there dealing with that pesky 3ivx codec in your camera’s AVI files.  Assuming 3ivx is installed on your machine, you should be able to open your files in VirtualDub and save them as regular AVIs without the 3ivx encoding.  However, you’ll likely wind up with massive files afterwards, so proceed with caution.

MP4Cam2Avi – (PC only, I think…) So you’ve got some Quicktime .mov or .mp4 files from your Point-and-Shoot that don’t behave in your editing program.  Try using this to convert them to AVI.

AVIDemux – (PC, Mac, Linux) A very popular program for doing simple conversions from various formats to various formats.  Also let’s you do simple edits.  An essential for any video editor.

Handbrake – (PC, Mac) Did you shoot with a camera that, for whatever wild reason, records directly to DVDs that you can immediately stick in your home entertainment center’s DVD player and watch?  Handbrake gets your stuff off of regular video DVDs and in to formats you can use.

VLC Media Player – (PC, Mac, Linux) Not only a nifty replacement for Windows Media Player or Quicktime Player, it now does conversions from various formats to various formats!  Hooray!

Mencoder (Part of Mplayer) – (Linux) Assuming I’m not the only Linux geek in class, this beaut does everything… albeit, command line only (no REALLY good GUIs have been made for it yet).

Any Video Converter – (PC Only) Freeware that does loads of different types of conversions… however, I think there is a length restriction until you buy the full version.

FLV Crunch – (Mac Only) Don’t let the “FLV” part fool you in to thinking this is restricted to dealing with .FLV files.  Nifty, though not robust.

MPEG Streamclip – (Mac and PC) This thing is wonderful, and so far it’s my favorite.  Seems to do almost anything, including very clean conversions of Quicktime files to Windows Media Video.  A must!

Now, as an aside, it might be helpful, depending on your program or the converter, to install certain codecs that you might be lacking to your machine.  However, with Windows, I highly recommend a registry backup because installing certain codecs that were not officially installed by your editing program or Windows itself COULD screw up your OS – proceed with caution.  The K-Lite Codec Pack seems to have every codec on Earth.  For Mac, Perian seems to be the codec package of choice.

There are plenty more converters and codec packages out there.  Post your recommendations below, and good luck!  It’s a trial-and-error game, trust me!