Queensbound Seven

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2007-05-23T09:21:00.000-04:00

Lots of news, my quick takes

2007-03-14T11:45:00.000-04:00

A lot of important web video news has broken in the past few days, and I thought it was high time I weighed in...

Mark Cuban's subpoenaing YouTube.

He wants the identities of people who are pirating his content. He's already made it clear that he doesn't intend to sue anyone with the information.

I don't care that the conventional wisdom on the web has turned against this guy - I love him. He's relentless, passionate and most of the time he's reasonable. He has no clue what leadership is on a basketball team, and that's one of the reasons the Mavs are perpetual chokers, but still - he's a smart dude.

Everyone's looking at this as Cuban attacking Goo-Tube, but that's not it at all. What he's really doing is testing the DCMA and making clear that the safe harbor provisions that protect YouTube and other "hosting companies" are designed to erode our privacy as users. If YouTube doesn't take responsibility for the copyright infringement, they are passing it on to you the user. And in order to maintain safe harbor, they're required to pass along all kinds of information that can be used against us. This is one of many really dangerous flaws in the DCMA, a piece of legislation that was hand crafted by special interests to be GOOD for the telecoms and the big content owners and BAD for users. Cuban's written extensively on this in the past, and if he can shine a light on these problems with his subpoenas, good for him.

For the record, though, I disagree completely with Cuban's analysis of what makes a hosting company and what doesn't. If they function as advertised, YouTube is indeed a hosting company. But if they're censoring and preventatively editing copyrighted material, they lose that safe harbor IMHO.

Michael Eisner's joining my industry! His new web studio Vuguru (I bet the focus group that came up with the name "Vuguru" cost more than our annual budget for Wallstrip) is launching with a soap opera targeted at teenaged girls. 80 episodes, 90 seconds each.

I like that they're launching their show with open distribution. You can watch it on Youtube, Veoh (which Eisner owns a piece of), as well as on their own destination site. I also like that they are partnering with Elle magazine and distributed the show on Elle's site. Ultimately, brand owners are going to become content providers on the web, not just advertising. That Vuguru's already building their distribution strategy in this direction is a very good sign. But ultimately, the question is will the content draw audience. When that happens, it's time to take notice.

More interesting to me was NBC's announcement that NBC Sports will be creating original web video for Sports Illustrated. Original content distributed where you're audience already is spending time on the web - that's moving in the right direction for NBC. A content company acting like a content company instead of a distribution company. Like it.

And, of course, Viacom slapped a one billion dollar lawsuit on YouTube. I'm not even going to link to it because the story's so ubiquitous that it was on the cover of the free AM magazine this morning in NYC. Just read about it where you get your news.

No big suprises here. If you read this blog, you already know that YouTube has a shut-off valve. The big question here is whether Viacom's doing this to kill YouTube or as a negotiating tactic to get a better deal. The "kill YouTube" option was a whole lot more attractive pre-Google than it is today, so my guess is that this is a negotiating tactic.

Either way, it will be interesting. And that's why we're all watching...

Hot off the presses

2007-03-12T10:27:00.000-04:00

Well, actually... not even on them yet.

Here's the joint press release we just issues with TheStreet.com. We're really excited to be distributed on a site that is the source of so much great content.

Wallstrip Joins TheStreet.com TV Network
Monday March 12, 9:00 am ET

TheStreet.com and Wallstrip Form Partnership to Distribute Video Content

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TheStreet.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSCM - News), a leading provider of financial commentary, analysis, research, news and ratings, and Wallstrip, a new Web site that produces daily video combining stock news and pop culture, today announced that they have entered into a video distribution partnership.
Under the agreement, Wallstrip, a daily three-minute show examining top-performing stocks, will be distributed on TheStreet.com TV, TheStreet.com's fast-growing video network.

"Wallstrip's innovative approach to stock coverage combined with humor is a terrific complement to our current video offerings," said Sandy Brown, Executive Producer & Managing Editor, TheStreet.com TV. "We're confident TheStreet.com TV's audience will appreciate the addition of Wallstrip to our video lineup."

Wallstrip has recently been featured in articles in Business Week ("A Sassy New Investment Webshow for Generation YouTube"), and The New York Times ("It's 'Squawk Box' Meets' 'Saturday Night Live'"), and on ABC News. An increasingly popular destination for non-traditional reporting on top stock picks, Wallstrip receives approximately 10,000 viewers per day.

Adam Elend, a Wallstrip producer and director said, "We are excited about the partnership because TheStreet.com has great audience reach and is a force for innovation in the online financial market."

TheStreet.com TV currently offers 12 channels of financial news and lifestyle content, including the Personal Finance and Executive Interviews channels, and Wall Street Confidential, a daily show featuring company founder James Cramer. In February, TheStreet.com reported production of 811 videos across its network in the fourth quarter of 2006 and an 80% increase in its video viewership from the previous quarter.

Wallstrip is currently available at www.thestreet.com on the Video and Audio section of the site.

About TheStreet.com, Inc.

TheStreet.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSCM - News) is a leading multimedia provider of business, investment and ratings content, available through its proprietary properties, which include Web sites, email subscription services, print, radio, syndication and audio and video programming. Founded in 1996, TheStreet.com, Inc. pioneered the electronic publishing of financial information on the Internet. Today, the Company offers proprietary information on stocks, mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs) and financial institutions, including various insurers; HMOs; Blue Cross Blue Shield plans; banks and savings and loans. The Company's breadth of top-grade services empowers a wide audience of retail and professional investors, by delivering information they can rely upon to make sound, informed financial decisions.

About Wallstrip

Wallstrip is where stock culture meets pop culture. Each episode looks at a stock that is at or near an all time high, and assesses the reason why the company is performing so well -- not in the stock world, but in the real world. Monday through Thursday, there is a new three minute Wallstrip episode, presenting viewers with a unique "ear to the street" approach to the market. On Friday Wallstrip runs a "Wallstrip Chat" series, a short fun interview with an influencer in the financial world.

Hello? Is Anyone There?

2007-03-10T16:20:00.000-05:00

If you want to reach me, you give me a call, right? Or you email me, maybe you IM me or text me or site message me, right, but the point is you send a message from where you are to where I am.

You don't put a note on a bulliten board and hope I see it. Not even if that bulletin board is in a high traffic area.

You certainly don't stick a note on the front door of your business, and hope that I stop by. And you don't post a message on your website in hopes that I'll happen to cruise your URL this morning.

And yet, that's exactly how almost all content owners communicate with their audience on the web.

My entire relationship with NBC is through iTunes. I watch The Office and Heroes, two pretty solid shows.

But instead of catching them in Primetime, I have paid for a season of downloads. Each time there's a new episode, I get an email from APPLE, not NBC telling me to download it. I download it on my Apple Computer, from the iTunes music store, and watch it on my computer or Apple iPod in the iTunes viewing environment.

If I were NBC, I'd be less worried about getting a bigger piece of that $1.99/ download, and a lot more worried about developing a relationship with people who are consuming my media in remote environments. That email I get every week should be NBC branded. It should upsell me other NBC products I might like in the iTunes environment. It should offer me other opportunities to consume NBC's brand, both in my "comfort zone" (where I'm already spending time on the web) or on nbc.com.

Same goes for YouTube - CBS sticks their clips on the site, but they don't have a presence. In fact, they block the social functions that YouTube community members communicate with. To me, that's just ridiculous.

CBS Primetime, David Letterman, 60 minutes - these are brands that must have an interactive presence on YouTube. An intern who's a character on Dave's show must site message all day long with other YouTubers. That intern, if well cast, could potentially build up an audience of millions of people who aren't watching Dave's show now.

But that's not how most big content owners view their online experience. Instead, they put all their effort into scrawling messages at nbc.com and CBS innertube, just hoping that I'll find them there.

Media companies are fond of saying, "we're well aware that the only person making any money off of iTunes is Steve Jobs." And that may be the case. But it's not just because he controls the market and the infrastructure. It's because he's talking to us every day. We're coming to him to buy your product, and while he's chatting us up, you're back at your brick and mortar, filling your bulletin board with notes to us.

Dealing with talent can be the toughest part of a producer's job

2007-02-22T15:20:00.000-05:00

I was getting ready to write the second part of my "Why WV content is different" post - got all my ducks in a row, wrote out a few notes, ready to go.

Then LC directed me to this video, and it blew my concentration. Hope it blows yours too:

Adding the splashcast player

2007-02-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

Splashcast has created a product that's pretty cool, and very much in line with the kind of RSS innovation I talk about on this blog.

They grabbed the rss feed from our Wallstrip Youtube channel and created an embeddable Splashcast player. Anyone can do this, grabbing their own videos from sharing sites, or other videos they admire. Then they can add photos (a flickr feed), music, etc. - creating their own rss powered multimedia distribution platform that's easy to embed, email and share.

A lot of smart people say that editors are going to be the real winners in the web entertainment space - people who can weed through all the noise, and aggregate compelling content for their viewers/readers/listeners. Splashcast is out there providing an elegant way to do that.

I've added the Splashcast Wallstrip player to my sidebar so I can play with it and see how it performs. It's serving the same purpose as our Revver widget, and I'm curious how the daily experience will compare.

Stay tuned!

T-Minus Two Days

2007-02-12T07:39:00.001-05:00

Happy Monday everyone.

We're picking fights we can't win at Wallstrip:

Howard's picking fights no one would want to win on his blog

And boys and girls everywhere - from the 7 day middle school affair to the silver anniversary - is scrambling around to buy something for national Hallmark day.

They say that the average man will spend $120 this year, down from $140 last year. I will be spending zero dollars, because I don't believe in saints.

Even if my favorite actor is pimping America's "when you don't feel like expressing yourself, let us" company this year.

When I was in grade school, it was cool to make your own valentines for your class. Six years later, when my sister was in grade school, it was all about who had the coolest store-bought barbie and ken valentines.

So this Valentine's Day, I'd like to encourage you to celebrate my way: either teach kids it's okay to show affection to others... or stay out of the stores and have some sex... it's free (most of the time).

Yahoo! Pipes

2007-02-11T09:16:00.000-05:00

Yahoo just launched it's very cool, very ajaxy new service Yahoo! Pipes last week. I've had some time now to play around with the service and create a few pipes.

If you read the hype on the web, pipes is supposed to bring programming to the masses and turn the entire web into a programming platform. If you read the hype on the pipes site, "pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment."

OK, so I get the feed mashup aspect - it's very easy to string feeds together, filter them very basically, and spit out a result. I did that here with the different feeds I use to monitor buzz about Wallstrip.

This alone is pretty cool for people like me, who regularly use feeds in their web work-flow. I would love the data integration aspects of this service to be more spelled out - maybe I'm just an idiot (maybe?) and definitely I'm not a programmer- not even an amateur one, but I thought this was supposed to bring programming to the masses.

On the other hand, I thought I might be getting with Pipes was a way to build easy web applications that use .xml as a background technology. In this case, I would understand why the data integration, etc was beyond me, but I would be REALLY excited because people who are smarter than me, but are not programmers could create all kinds of new applications that made life easier and made the web more personal, without the end user ever thinking about the fact that they're using RSS.

That's the future and potential of RSS. I've talked about it a lot on this blog.

But as far as I can tell, that's not what Pipes is about either - at least not right now. The output is simply a feed. There's no way to build an application around it, and user interface design is not integrated into the service.

So count me in the "see the potential, but a little disappointed in the beta" camp.

A little pub on ABC News

2007-02-08T23:44:00.000-05:00

Had a fun time on ABC News with Lindsay talking about Wallstrip. Biana was a great host, and Lindz kept me from making too much of a fool out of myself. I'm the one in the brown jacket, in case you have a difficult time telling us a part.

Since the NYT article, I've spent a lot of time on the phone talking to people who are interested in working with us or helping us. It's been great, but I want to get back out there and shoot! Today we're filming two shows, including a Man on the Street and a rather ambitious green screen project. Should be a really fun way to spend a Friday.

How WV content is different, part 1

2007-02-06T07:51:00.000-05:00

Based on my post yesterday, I got a few emails yesterday asking me to explain how I thought WV (web video) content should be different than TV content.

It's a big question, and the most honest answer is, "I don't know." None of us do. I do, however, have plenty of ideas, some of which we're implementing on Wallstrip. Today, I want to talk specifically about intimacy and authenticity.

Start with the premise that you watch your TV from 10 feet away and you watch WV from 3 feet away. In the "real world", if I watch a scene play out in a bar tonight from 10 feet away, I am a spectator. The players in that scene aren't aware of me and I have no impact on its result.

If I watch the same scene from 3 feet away, I am a participant. I may not be involed in the plot, but the players know I'm there (even if they ignore me). And if I'm watching a scene play out three feet away, it's going to dominate my field of view. I'll be immersed in it and not able to watch other things going on at the same time. Finally, I'm more likely to watch it subjectively. If I'm 10 feet away, I'm a more impartial observer. When I'm 3 feet away, I'm hearing every word, looking into the eyes of th players, and making my own judgements about the situation.

So how does all that translate into narrative and structural differences? Here are a few rules I stick to in WV. Of course, the idea with any visual storytelling is to figure out the rules and then find creative ways to break them.

1) The viewer will see the story more intimately, so tell it more intimately. Not just tighter shots and close ups, but stories that focus on one character. (I'm talking fiction or non-fiction storytelling here). That's one reason why Wallstrip is centered around one personality - our host, Lindsay.

2) Authenticity is the gate keeper. From two or three feet away, I can see all your flaws. I can judge for myself if you're lying to me. The realism bar for me to buy into the story is a whole lot higher. In terms of non-fiction, that means being self-reflexive, acknowledging when something you're doing is silly or risky. It might mean breaking the "fourth wall" and talking directly to the audience. In Wallstrip, we are relentlessly self-referential. We do shows about our lack of popularity, we talk about our audience and specific characters we've built out of audience members. We sometimes talk conversationally with the audience ("I know what you're thinking," etc.)

3) Be intimate with your audience. People think about "interactive storytelling" in literal terms - strict structures where audience members have an opportunity to influence the direction of the story (voting on American Idol, for example). But the best kind if interactivity is completely organic and unplanned. It's about carrying on a conversation. Every morning, I wake up and read all the comments on Wallstrip. I also read every blog post or web article that mentions us. I don't take action based on these comments, but they influence my understanding of who we're talking to when we're writing and directing. They give me a more complete understanding of the world I'm making narrative choices in. As Fred Wilson described, our Jack-in-the-Box show evolved from these conversations with our audience.

I've got lots more I'd like to say about how the web environment and user experience effects narrative and formal components of WV, and I'll do so in the next few days. The bottom line, though, is that WV is different. Jeff and I started our company BrightRED Pictures because we believe strongly that this is a new art form, with it's own conventions.

And, in the spirit of interactivity, we got our first real panner of a review yesterday in New York Magazine. While the tone seems decidedly, "we like to dog on anything the New York Times likes," I must admit - it feels damned good to be dogged a little bit. Get's the juices flowing.

While I didn't mind them dogging us, I was a little miffed that they took a shot at our investors. I can think of a lot lamer things to do with $500k than invest it in a few people who are trying to create something entertaining and take a chance in a new environment.

Besides... "Dumb, but Edgy" - that seems like the slugline for my life. If that's as bad as it gets, I'm a happy man.

Brrrrrrr... see for yourself

2007-02-05T07:37:00.000-05:00

It's COLD here in NY.

It's one thing to know it's going to be below 10 degrees when you wake up, and it's quite another to hobble over to the gym at 5:45 AM trying to figure out if your eyeballs have frozen.

There is no replacement for experience. That's what we're banking on at BrightRED Pictures, committing fully to the web video space so early in the process.

Web video is fundamentally different than television, and right now there are no rules. We're all making them up as we're going and learning from... experience.

My wife is a graphic designer... just like I am a producer. But that doesn't tell the whole story for either of us.

Ciara is a print designer. She does book covers, logos, posters, brochures... that's a world away from a web designer. The work Ciara does is looked at. Information is derived from it passively. Designing for the web is more like product design or packaging design. It's about function as much as form. You have to handle a web site, work it to get what you want out of it - you have to USE it. And that limits the choices and changes the priorities for a graphic designer.

Same thing for a producer like me. Television is a wholey passive medium. In fact, that's why I like it. I can sit in front of the tube and be talked at for a while. Good web video is designed to be used, just like other web content. Whether it's being passed around, fed to you, viewed contextually with other content, referenced while working, viewed on a mobile phone, searched for, mashed up, etc, etc.

It's not as if web video doesn't share characteristics with television, just like print and web design share certain characteristics. But WV has fundamentally different priorities than TV, and that should mean fundamentally different content.

The next step in Pro-Sumer video

2007-02-04T09:31:00.000-05:00

I wrote a post not long ago about the rise of pro-sumer video over the last 15 years, and the impact it's making right now on the web video revolution.

Well, this CNET article fortells the coming of a second wave of pro-sumerism... and I think they totally miss the point.

They're talking about evolution of internet video editing tools like eyespot and jumpcut, and asserting that these will open up the exclusive world of video editing to "the rest of us"...

I'm very suspect of this assertion - Editing is about choices. That takes experience and training. The tools you use to edit are pretty much irrelevant.

You can make shooting video very automatic. Camera work is as much about what you get as how you get it. If you point the camera at something compelling, the camera can handle the exposure, and the footage will be compelling. A great shooter is active, creating the shots. You can be a good shooter, though, and be reactive.

In the non-fiction space, editing is where you craft the story and build the experience for your viewer. Lowering the barriers to entry by creating cheaper and easier to use tools and then expecting the whole youtube world to edit is kind of like saying that, by moving from typewriters to word processors, we've created a whole generation of great authors.

Web based editing does have the potential to revolutionize both the editing field and the world of user generated content, though, just in different ways.

Non-destructive editing (which is what we do on NLE's like Final Cut Pro and Avid) is revolutionary because the work itself is very easy on the computer. Basically, you "digitize" your video onto the computer, creating large media files for each clip. These files are never touched by the editing process, they're just referenced by your editing program. The editing project file itself is a series of instructions about what order to play the referenced media files in, what parts of them to play, how loud to play them, etc.

The editing file for my documentary contains over a hundred hours of video. There are probably over a hundred different editing "sequences" (a sequence is the linear result of your editing work - a timeline that has all your footage cut up and placed in the right order). The project references over 150 gigs of raw video. Yet that project file is less than a 100 MB.

Web based editing is a natural evolution of this process - instead of referencing clips stored on local hard drives, we can store the video online - accessing and editing the files from anywhere, on multiple computers at once. This will take remote editing, on location editing, and collaborative editing to a whole new level. And by integrating the ajax based interfaces that are becoming the norm in new web tools, you can create a fully functional editing workflow that's completely virtual. The online video's not fast enough, but it will be soon. The bandwidth's not there yet, but it will be soon. And this will have an enormous, positive impact on my industry.

On the user generated side of things, web based editing won't create a generation of home trained Walter Murch's, but it will allow users to interact with video online in a much deeper way. Video commenting, remixing, video messaging, video quoting - these are the places where the tools can improve the user experience. If I post a video and make the clips I use available online, then other people can build on what I did, play with it, switch it around, add their own work to it.

Simple editing tools won't make great editors, but it will allow people to use video more like they use text online. They will make it easier to search and communicate with video. Right now I can link to and/or embed your video in my blog post or on my website, or an email. Soon I'll be able to quote your video in any of those forums too (in fact, on vSocial I can do that right now). Web based editing will allow me to quote your video just as easily in my videos as I can in my blog posts. Imagine youtube as a giant library of raw footage for me to create whatever I want out of - the possibilities for creativity, better video communication and video social networking are endless.

There's also a great opportunity to build web based editing into the user experience when you create entertainment and information on the web. I blogged about this before - talking about intuitive, interactive web documentaries.

All of that is the true potential of web based editing. And I, for one, can't wait until that potential is realized.

All the news that's fit to print

2007-02-03T09:19:00.000-05:00

I admit, I have a long history of criticizing the New York Times.

After all, my dog's name is Chomsky.

In my political life, they were the establishment press - cheering us on to war in Iraq, adding credibility to the administration's fantasies of weapons of mass destruction...

Then in my web 2.0 life, they became "old media" - putting their best content behind a walled garden, two steps behind their online readers.

Well, yesterday I finally realized that I was all wrong about this NY institution. They really are the paper of record. They deserve our respect. For example, take a look at this fine piece of reporting.

Wallstrip does SNL

2007-01-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Where is the low hanging fruit?

2007-01-07T22:38:00.000-05:00

I've been hearing a lot lately about advertisers chomping at the bit to buy ads against video content. The "low hanging fruit" of internet advertising as we move into 2007.

Granted, the overall market for video ads increased 82% this year to over 400 million dollars. But I fail to see how this is low hanging fruit for content producers.

Sure, right now it's pretty easy to sell ads against video content at around a $40 CPM. That's what the video sites like Revver or BlipTV are getting from their advertisers, and that's what you're getting from the large ad networks. Unless you're going to seek custom advertisers on your own (which is expensive) then you're pretty much stuck at that level.

Is there a lot of demand for that advertising space? Probably so. Because that CPM is incredibly low for video. Video is wayyy more expensive to produce than text content, yet the CPM isn't much different.

And it's not just us independents stuck in this position. I can't seem to find a link anywhere to back me up, but I remember clearly when ABC announced that they would be streaming their primetime shows, they also announced that the advertisers were forking over 500k for a fiscal quarter of advertising. That's a lot of advertising - a half a TV season. And if you've watched ABC's streams, the ads are incredibly prominent. That may sound like a lot of dough, but compared to television advertising, it's peanuts. We're talking about shows that cost 2 million an episode to make.

To build a large audience for web video is exponentially harder than driving traffic to a site, and for the advertiser the brand exposure in video is pretty rich - even richer with brand integration/sponsorship models.

So what we have now is basically low hanging fruit for the advertiser and unsustainable returns for the content creator or video network. To make that equation more favorable to the content producer, we need to get better with metrics and we need more ROI success stories.

Primetime Podcast

2007-01-05T23:59:00.000-05:00

You know that podcasting has hit the mainstream when they become a critical plot device in a warmed over primetime drama plot.

Ciara and I were clicking through the channels on the old media magic video box yesterday and came across a new episode of the hit CBS show Numbers. Turns out that the evil child rapist polygamist terrorist communicated with his mindless flock through - you guessed it: podcasts.

"What's that"

"He records the audio on his computer and uploads it to a podcast website with a unique identifyer - the name."

"So terrorists everywhere are podcasting?"

"Yes, terrorists and Dane Cook."

The show was so boring I made that last part up. Then we shut off Numbers and watched the new episode of The Office, which had downloaded automatically to my iTunes.

We watched it full screen on my 17 inch MacBook Pro, and I have to say - really hard to tell a difference between the iTunes file and the boob tube image quality wise. They didn't mention podcasting on The Office, but that's OK, because they didn't have any child rapists on this episode.

We're to the point now where we do about half our television watching on the computer. The shows we like to watch oon CBS and ABC are free, and so far we've been williing to pay for the few shows we really, really like on iTunes. I think this trend is likely to catch on soon - probably before the L.A. FBI office catches the evil podcaster.

Wait until they hear about RSS feeds.

The rise of the internet video networks

2007-01-04T17:31:00.000-05:00

It started with atomfilms.

Then it was the the Digg team's Revision 3. And in the past couple of weeks we've heard about two new web video networks: Abby Corps, which boasts the videoblog star power of Andrew Baron, and Next New Networks, with a lot of old media executive firepower.

All these networks are looking to produce content for the web. They're all well funded. And, despite what some say, that's a very good thing for the web video business.

Production costs money. There's no secret to that. Unlike a story, a blog, or even an audio podcast, web video doesn't leave much to the viewer's imagination. It's up to the content creator to build the world that we want to watch. And that costs money.

It makes sense to pool resources like space, personnel and equipment, so the costs are shared across different shows. It makes sense to build some brand consistency across your shows too - in terms of user experience, monetization method, distribution etc. And it makes sense to agreggate different niche audiences together and build cross over appeal.

But the biggest reason why independent video networks are a good thing is marketing, marketing, marketing. You can't build a big audience without marketing the hell out of your product. There's a reason why CNBC plasters Jim Cramer's face on every website they possibly can - it drives audience. A single show, bare bones outfit can't do that, but a funded network can.

A single show shop means that the same people are writing and producing shows, making long term strategic decisions, building the brand, doing distribution deals, doing monetization deals, marketing the show, publicizing the show, and sometimes acting. That leads to some brilliant and amazing work, but it's not a realistic business model for anyone.

Independent networks are the best way to create innovative outside the box programming that's sustainable in the long term. The reality is that the big players in this market will be the television and movie studios. And what they offer will not be as cool or as good as what independents are offering. But it will gain more viewership because it will have star power and money to market.

The golden age of american cinema was from Bonnie & Clyde to Raging Bull. Those were the years when the movie studios were smaller - in most cases the people who owned the studios ran the studios. The movies were edgy and risky and actually SAID something. But they were also studios who had the firepower to get their films in front of audiences.

In the web world, it's not about getting your work in front of viewers - that's easy. You need the firepower to stand out from the crowd and get noticed.

I think that independent web networks (studios is probably a more accurate term) have the potential to bring on that kind of creative renaissance for video on the web. And that's why I think it's a good thing.

Here's to '06

2006-12-31T12:10:00.000-05:00

2006 was billed as the breakout year for web video and was it ever.

2006 was the year when Google launched Google Video, relaunched it, reached 2nd place in video traffic, and then bought 1st place for 1.6 Billion dollars.

2006 was the year that CBS and ABC started streaming their primetime shows online and in watchable quality.

2006 was the year that web video revived the stone dead Saturday Night Live and kept The Office on the air.

2006 was the year when two guys making videos on their couch raised more than a million bucks to start a web video studio.

We talk about the "You Tube era"... that era is comprised of not even the entirety of 2006.

Will web video be like e-commerce and change the way we use the web? Will it be like flash intros and just fade away? We'll find out in '07... stay tuned.

Happy New Year.

A new start in the new year

2006-12-29T23:29:00.000-05:00

It's been nearly a month since I've updated my blog, and that means it's not serving it's purpose.

Queensbound Seven is supposed to be a forum in which I think out loud about the emerging web video industry, join the ongoing conversation about new media, and interact with others about my ideas.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been pouring a great deal of my energy in the last few months into Wallstrip. It's a daily show, and writing, directing and producing has left me little time to blog.

My first job out of college was as operations manager for a large graduation photography company. Our busy season was (obviously) April-June. Every year, when we got to the season, all the upkeep of my personal life would fade away: my credit card bills went unopened, my apartment uncleaned, daily workouts abandoned. To my friends and family, I just disappeared. There was just the work.

That's my instinct. I'm the kind of person who likes to dive head first into a project, slap the blinders on and live my work.

Over the years, I've gotten much better. My priorities have shifted - I'm married, I have a lot more responsibility, and shutting off my life affects other people. Besides, it's just not healthy. You lose all your perspective and the job suffers along with the rest of your life.

Getting better means fighting my instincts. It's easy for something like this blog to get lost in the shuffle when I get really busy. But busy times are when this blog is most useful.

Wallstrip isn't simply a show I produce, it's a show that's distributed based on the BrightRED strategies I develop and fine tune on this blog. Right now I am putting many of the ideas I talk about here to work in the real world, and that's the time when the thought becomes a hypothesis and the hypothesis becomes a theory.

BrightRED has evolved to the point where every single project we pitch contains at least one element that stretches beyond the boundaries of conventional video and integrates net native characteristics into content and form. We may not be solving all the problems in web video, but we're actually trying things every day.

For our clients, what matters is the result of each campaign - the growth of each show. But for us, it's about the evolution of the form, and our position as leaders in that evolution. To get there takes some hard thinking about what can be and what might be - along with some experience in what actually is. My work isn't done when Wallstrip gains audience share, or when we acheive the goals set for one of our commercial campaigns. It's just as critical that I use this blog to analyze what we're doing, compare it to what others are doing, and think about what no one is doing.

In the past few months, I've come to believe that search is the single most important form of distribution for web video, and while that idea has shaped my thinking about every new project I take on, I've never even mentioned it on Queensbound Seven! So what am I going to do about it?

In the coming weeks, your going to see a few changes here. First off, I'm going to be converting the blog to a wordpress platform. I want the added functionality, and I'm a little sick of clogspot. So you'll see a new look and a new user experience.

Secondly, I'll be adding a store to the blog. I'm very interested in affiliate marketing, and I want to create an affiliate store for Queensbound Seven to, well, try it out for myself. I want to build a store based on products that I like and use, and sell them using the medium that I'm comfortable with: video

And finally, I'm going to be posting at least one "thinking out loud" post each week. I may post every day, I may only post once, but I'm going to add at least 52 valuable posts to this archive by the end of 2007. I don't make declarations like that very often, mostly because I feel terribly humiliated if I can't live up to them. But that's exactly why I'm putting this in print, because it's important to me that I do it. And I want to feel disappointed and embarrassed if I don't.

So there you have it. My end of the year manifesto. I usually try to keep the personal stuff to a minimun here, but it is a personal blog, so you have to indulge me every once in a while.

Stay tuned for my New Years challenge to the web video community - Seven problems we've got to solve in '07.

Somebody's Watching Me

2006-12-01T21:37:00.000-05:00

I just grabbed theattention trust recorder, something I've been meaning to do since we interviewed Seth.

A nice easy firefox extension install later, I am now perpetually creating an .xml file of my clickstream, both on my hardrive and at the Root Vaults, where I can play with my data and learn more about my online identity.

Extremely important with a tool like this, turning it OFF is really easy. On click and the green diamond on my toolbar becomes a red box, and my stream goes unrecorded.

Engaging in this exercise made me realize how many different ways you can use rss to look at me online:

Anyone who wants to can set their RSS reader to:

watch my daily show

read this blog

see what sites I'm bookmarking, and who's tagging with my name

see what people are saying about this blog

see what people are saying about wallstrip

Who's going to monitor all those things? Probably just me and the FBI. My wife? Please. And anyone else, well that would just be creepy.

In The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, the title case study is about a man who lost his ability to interpret what he saw. He had no trouble seeing, and described abstract shapes perfectly. But when it came to interepreting and contextualizing that data, he was at a loss. An autistic brain can only analyze what is concrete. Conversely, his brain could only think in the abstract, and so he couldn't discern by site the difference between his wife's head and his bowler.

Right now, attention tracking is sort of like that man's brain. Once we develop tools to contextualize and interpret that data, an observation like, "Adam seems blue today" will be something that can be concluded not only by seeing me and interacting with me in person, but also from my web presence. That's pretty cool.

Embedding your name on my face

2006-11-28T11:24:00.000-05:00

I was directed to this post from the MIT Ad Lab via Publishing 2.0. The Ad Lab suggests a different way to look at advertising on YouTube, namely this:

Embedded ads. My response is... duh. Anyone who's in the television business knows that embedded advertising works without seriously eroding the user experience. Why do you think the CBS bug (that's the term for the little graphic in the corner) sits there through all 46 minutes of CSI?

And for those of us who see the path to success for video on the web as light, portable content that you can embed, share, and discover at sites you already visit, the only viable monetization solution is embedded advertising. Your advertising has to be as light and portable as your media.

I can't figure out why no big video site has tried this monetization model yet - to me it is the single most obvious solution - it's easy, it doesn't take any of my time as a user, and it has a track record of actually WORKING - embedded advertising, integrated marketing, product placement and sponsorship. Those are the only ad strategies that will work in the evolving web video space.

Perhaps the only place where that's NOT the case, however, is Youtube. Like mySpace (ok, mySpace is another exception to my video advertising rule) Youtube is a destination. It's a social networking site that seamlessly integrates video and has an audience. You can sell ads around content and banner ads, etc in this context. Youtube's got an entirely different monetization problem, which I blogged about here (and provided my idea for a solution).

But back to the embedded ads - think about where that takes you... so I've got this portable media... and I've got portable ads that go in my portable media. That means I can distribute my media like ads are already being distributed online - because I make money anytime anyone watches it. I can start distributing my videos through adsense, or doubleclick.

To me, this model just makes sense. It allows the content producer to monetize their product in a way that's good for the user (good content with no ads that they don't have to hunt for - in context with what they're doing already online) and good for the websites that have traffic (valuable and entertaining content for their audience).

The beauty of the web to me is synergy.

When the Internet works, things just make sense and fit together. Everyone's life gets easier and everyone makes money. That's the kind of monetization model we should be working towards, and embedded ads are a key part of that.

Who's side are you on, anyway?

2006-11-27T20:36:00.000-05:00

A little video hosting performance art from Chris Pirillo. Nice!

Zune Nation

2006-11-27T16:14:00.000-05:00

I don't have one (yet) but I have played with it. Well, at least I played with it for a little while... then the battery died.

After that, I read this article - which falls pretty much in line with my experience.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

I wish it had a clickwheel. But Apple has the copyright. For now, at least.

It has a wider screen than the iPod, which is way cool. But it's the same resolution, just spread over more space, which is way uncool. It's mighty impressive to make a screen improvement that gives you a net loss in image quality.

It has wi-fi, but it doesn't really. It just lets you share a song for a few plays, and then replaces it with an advertisment. It's like the "beam" feature on my Treo, but lamer... and my Treo has real wifi too. Did I mention that this doesn't?

The DRM sucks. Hard. And so does Apple's. No reason to complain when the competition sucks too.

But the Zune has NO podcasts.

How disappointing. Really, I mean it. I'm not just kvetching. To me, this shows a startling lack of "getting it."

Even though the vassst majority of the media consumed on iTunes is music bought from big record companies, the podcast integration makes the Music Store an interactive user experience.

Think about it - anyone can link to their RSS feed right now and have an instant presence on the music store. I produce a few podcasts up there, and when someone clicks on my show, the interface looks just like NPR, or ABC or CNN. I'm placed on equal footing. That's important. It's a little of the mySpace magic sprinkled on Apple's music interface.

It's part of what makes iTunes successful - it's about me, the user. It's also about Apple (that's the reason for the sucky DRM). But, to a great extent, it's about Apple and me tolerating the record companies together (that's the reason for no wifi), and rolling our eyes privately.

The Zune is about Microsoft and the record companies selling me something. That's old news, and not very interesting.

If you want to come after the iPod, I would think you'd want to hit hard in the first round.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they've got a "rope-a-dope" strategy... or at least some kind of strategy. I'm sure the Zune will get better.

Really, I'm not sure why I'm bitching. I can't use the damned thing on my Mac anyway.

Why is no one watching video on their iPod

2006-11-25T21:15:00.000-05:00

In case you missed it, Neilson reported that less than 3% of video iPod owners watch video on their iPods last week. This was based on a survey of 400 iPod users (only a portion of which own a video iPod).

I question whether you can reach meaningful conclusions based on such a small sample. And their are other problems with the study, some of which are outlined in this article.

But even if the results are accurate, I don't think they say too much about the demand for video.

Don't forget - Apple never released a video iPod. Instead, they added video to the iPod without changing the price point. That means for the past year, anyone who wanted to buy an iPod had to buy a video iPod.

This was sheer brilliance on the part of Apple. With that one move, they created an industry around video on the iPod, from The Office to Ze Frank. But it also means that most people who have a video iPod didn't make the decision to buy a video iPod. And that's why it's not surprising to me that the percentage isn't higher.

What Apple is counting on, and what the rest of us in the industry are counting on, is that the people who didn't have any interest in video when they bought their iPod might try it out. Maybe they'll like it. Or maybe they'll miss an episode of their favorite show, and decide to download it on their iPod.

Regular users? Maybe. But more importantly, they'll get familiar with consuming video that way. The biggest hurdle to overcome in making the leap from early adopter to mainstream is lack of familiarity.

Your grandma doesn't use firefox, and if she does, she doesn't download toolbars to customize it. Your quicktime movie doesn't play on her computer.

But maybe she has iTunes, and if she knows how to get a song, she can get a video. And if she has an iPod, and she listens to her music on it, the video she downloads will just show up on the iPod too. And maybe she'll watch it.

And then next year, when some thing she really wants to see is available only online, the chances increase that she'll watch it.

That's not the way you build big numbers in a year, but it's an interesting long term strategy. And, I think, a good one.

Turkey for you, Turkey for me...

2006-11-23T13:58:00.000-05:00

Well, actually, chicken.

I'm enjoying a Thanksgiving feast with close friends here in Sunnyside, and due to oven size issues, we're eating the wrong bird.

How wonderfully rebellious of us, don't you think?

Glad to be among friends in the first city that's really felt like home for Ciara and I. It may be cold and raining, but the Bucs are on at 4, and it's warm inside, so I'm happy - and thankful.

I usually resist cliche's like lists of what I'm thankful for - but I think it's gotten more cliche to resist such cliche's than to give in to them. Plus, it's a good exercise, so here goes:

I'm sooo thankful for my amazing wife who has changed the way I see the world. And for my obstinate dog for keeping me in my place.

I'm thankful that I have a family that's tolerant and supportive and warm and tight-knit. Everyone should have that and most people don't.

I'm thankful that I have a business partner who I want to work with everyday, even after ten years.

And I'm thankful we're working at things that are hard, and that might fail. And that I have the support I need to take that risk.

I'm thankful that people like Howard and the folks at Kontent Real trust me to create work from their vision.

and I'm thankful that it's my job to meet amazing and inspirational people every day, and listen to them.

I'm thankful that I was born in a place where I do not lack nourishment or shelter or opportunity like most of the people in the world do.

and I'm thankful that I'm not the guy huddled under my subway stop right now, trying to keep his legs warm. I know there's probably not much difference between us, other than luck.

Happy Thanksgiving - and thanks for reading.

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