LB's Rambles

Where Do You Get Your News?

The Pew Research Center asks that question fairly regularly. According to MediaPost, the latest indication is that TV still leads the list of news sources for most people - but the Internet is coming up fast, and apparently at the expense of newspapers.

The total number of respondents who said they had looked at a newspaper the day before slipped from 40% to 34% from 2006-2008, according to Pew. Meanwhile, the number of people who say the visit an Internet news sites at least three times a week increased from 18% in 2006 to 25% in 2008.

I think the most significant point, though, is that there is a subset of users who rely entirely on the Internet for news - and their median age is 35, making it the lowest-aged set found in the study.

There's a lot more - check out the article.

Surprising Video Trend

eMarketer has a report today on what I would call a fairly surprising trend in online video. It has long been a truism that viewers of online video prefer short clips - the kind you generally find on sites like YouTube. While some people do view longer clips, the advice usually given to people trying to get advertising or PR messages out online, for example, has been: keep it short, preferably under 4 minutes.

Maybe not so much. According to eMarketer, a couple of recent surveys indicate that viewers are anxious to watch longer videos - particularly TV shows - online, if/when they are available. Nearly half of all users told Harris Interactive that they felt the same way about movies.

eMarketer says that's good news for producers, fearful that their audiences might dwindle overall if more online viewing starts cutting into TV and movie watching. That doesn't seem to have happened.

eMarketer also says that a surprisingly large percentage of viewers realize "the money for longer programming has to come from somewhere." They seem willing to watch ads for long form videos - more so than they are for the short videos that make up such a large percentage of today's viewing. That's a new trend, to me - and I think an interesting one showing good possibilities as online video continues to mature.

Pirates in the Clouds

If I were a major content provider trying to assert my rights over my material - as, for instance the recording and movie industries do - I'd find this warning from Shelly Palmer very disturbing. Writing at JackMyers.com, the Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC, notes some possibly unintended consequences from cloud storage computing.

He's talking about the companies that now specialize in providing large-file off-site storage space for companies and individuals. Most of us use these for backups, to free up local disk space. But Palmer notes that a casual friend of his, in the course of an email exchange, was able to offer him a link to a very large HD movie video on the friend's storage cloud. As Palmer says..."Yikes!"

Now think about it for a moment. Most of us, generally wouldn't dream of downloading a pirated movie for a variety of reasons - from a concern about piracy (and, as a writer, I am opposed to freeloaders) to a practical concern that we may be downloading a virus or other malware along with that pirated music or movie.

But if a friend sends a link to a private storage site where he's put a movie he uploaded from his own computer - well, where's the downside? Except, of course, that it's piracy. But that's a hotly debated point, isn't it - is it that much different from handing my HD movie disk to friends for them to take home and view?

And unfortunately, as Palmer points out, it probably won't take the pirates long to move in on this "legitimate" form of storage:

At the end of the day, P2P networks and strange or alien files are not going to cause any more economic hardship for the content industry than they are causing right now. However, good natured, good citizens using private storage clouds are going to be hugely hurtful. And, if good citizens can cause irreparable harm by paving the road to hell, imagine what bad natured, bad citizens will be able to accomplish with the same technology. Trust me, the computer network does not know the nature of its users.

It has to be a frightening prospect for anyone owning the rights to movies and music.

Olympic Measures

Think a lot of people will be watching the Olympics? NBC clearly does. And not just on television. So the NBC measurement folks have come up with a very good idea: experiment with ways to measure that on-line, off-air exposure. According to Bulldog Reporter's Daily Dog, quoting from the AP, NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel is calling it the "billion-dollar lab."

Measurement has always been a problem for the online world. TV has ratings systems, and - whether or not you accept their accuracy - those systems have been accepted for years as reliable indicators of audience size. Web video doesn't have that same kind of system. Check out the story linked above for details on the NBC plans. A lot of us who are interested in better ways to measure video will be watching to see what NBC comes up with.

Time Warp

A followup on my last post about 3D technology.

There are times I think I have been living in a time warp. Last week, I wrote about a reunion of ABC Radio News personnel, some of whom I have known for more than four decades. After that reunion, I received a video that was put together back in 1969, to promote what were then the brand new ABC Radio Networks. In 1968, ABC became the first US radio network to program four distinct newscasts each hour, each one aimed at a particular group of radio stations. This allowed ABC to have up to four affiliates in each market - very clever indeed.

At any rate, watching that video, I found myself amazed at how far we have come. For example, there are shots of audio tape being edited with a razor blade and a grease pencil. That's how we did it, folks. Even video tapes started out that way. The editors, newscasters and writers all used typewriters. MANUAL typewriters; I was pounding away on an Olivetti until the early 1980s. Video? TV relied on film, which had to be shot, shipped, developed and edited; the entire process took at least hours and often, for overseas stories, days.

The narrator notes, with pride, that all of the ABC news bureaus were linked by private teletype. I remember that one; I was quite proud of being able to type at the machine's maximum speed of 60 words per minute. We also had "facsimile" machines that could transmit documents over phone lines; it generally took six minutes per page. And the newsroom was filled with the clattering noise made by the AP, UPI and Reuters machines, disgorging reams of paper, usually running multiple carbon paper rolls.

Time warp. This morning, I sat and watched people demonstrating console editing of 3D digital video. Punch a few buttons, move a mouse, and a miracle happens. I don't think the people doing the presentation had ever worked with a film doublechainer; certainly not as their primary source. I doubt they were born when that promotional video was made.

Yes, I AM older than dirt.

Time warp.

Enhancing the Consumer Video Experience

3D technology has been used in movies for more than half a century – with considerable success, in some cases. The Disney Corporation has incorporated some of it into top-of-the-line attractions at Disney World and Disneyland. As the world moves to HDTV, what are the chances for improving this technology to expand the use of 3D in both movies and television?

At Bill Sobel’s monthly breakfast for the New York Media Information Exchange Group, we had a demonstration of the work being done in this field, and a chance to see how it is working right now.

David Dever, VP Broadcast and Network Sales of Quantel, presented a 3D video on their HDTV system. It’s pretty impressive. It does require wearing a set of special glasses to make the imagery work, but – once you get past that hurdle – the images themselves are quite impressive; the illusion of 3D is very good on a large HDTV screen.

According to Danny Peters, Director of Creative Services, Quantel, what’s different now is that we are able to do stereoscopic processing in post production. That has always been the primary problem in doing 3D productions. Traditionally, left and right images had to be edited separately. Quantel has come up with a way to make it work in post production. Peters provided a hands-on demonstration of how the editing can be carried out. Other techniques are possible as well – ways to provide color correction, depth perception and convergence, etc. Peters calls this one of the most significant developments in post production creation.

The demo was followed by a broader panel discussion of the 3D process and its possibilities, along with a review of some of the many considerations that need to be considered when shooting, editing and displaying 3D video.

The post-production technology on display could be used for virtually any display technology – from HDTV to Imax to the old Viewmaster “stereoscopic” viewer slides.

One key question: when will this get into the home and reach a much wider audience? Chris Chinnock says there are already a lot of 3D capable HDTVs in people’s homes – and nobody knows it. They do still require glasses. Some of the manufacturers are starting to do demo programs – it’s just starting to happen

Chinnock says there IS an audience for this. More theaters are coming on line virtually every day with the capability to display 3D entertainment releases, including fine arts and Metropolitan Opera productions. He also discussed a 3D in home consortium that is working on getting the technology into homes.

But there was also discussion of the need to change focus – to use the technology not as a novelty, but as a storytelling mechanism. There was general agreement on the panel that it is important to move past novelty and exploit the creative possibilities of the medium and the technology.

Chris Chinnock also says there are displays being made today that do not require glasses. This seems to me to be the direction that the industry will have to go. As long as you require an extra piece of hardware – the glasses – you’re going to be limiting your impact. Not a universally held sentiment among this group – but these are the pioneers in extending the technology.

More Than 10 Billion Sold...er...Viewed

This is starting to sound like those BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SOLD signs outside McDonald's: MultiChannel News quotes a new comScore report showing U. S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos in February. That's 10 billion. In one month. In the U. S. alone. Up 66% from the previous year. 34% went to YouTube.

With numbers like that, sooner or later, somebody's gonna figure out how to make serious money at it...

Hat tip: IAB SmartBrief.

No Life for 'Quarterlife'?

Tim Bourquin, creator (among other things) of the influential annual New Media Expo, has some useful thoughts about the dismal showing of the program Quarterlife, which started out as an Internet video series and has tried to move over to NBC television, including:

(a) 4 million viewers (on TV) is a dismal failure, while it would be great on the web?

(b) maybe there's a difference between what folks watch on TV and what they watch on the Internet?

And his key point (italics in the original):

Bottom line: the Internet doesn't HAVE to be a farm league for television.

He's right. Convergence doesn't necessarily mean the same programming on TV and on the web. Some programs are better suited to the formats - and the audiences - on one or the other.

Broadband Video: What Is the Future?

Monetization.

That was the key word at this morning’s meeting of the New York Media Information Exchange Group. When it comes to broadband video, the words “future” and “monetization” appear to be synonymous, at least in the minds of the audience and the panel gathered to discuss the future of video. The real question, though – to which there were no really complete answers – is how to really make that happen.

The moderator was Fred Seibert, co-founder of NextNewNetworks. Also on the panel were Kevin Shively, the EVP of TV Worldwide and Mike Hudack, CEO of blip.tv. The three companies have different approaches towards the overall problem of making money out of broadband video. NextNewNetworks is primarily a content producer, TV Worldwide is concerned with building and reaching specific audiences with shared interests and blip.tv concentrates on providing infrastructure, including ad sales, to content producers.

The loosely-structured discussion answered several questions from the audience, including suggestions for ways that an independent producer can be trying to raise money for a production. Fortunately, as Hudack pointed out, online production costs are significantly lower than they would be for television or cable.

Advertising continues to play a major role, of course. And the question becomes, what kind of video will attract the kind of audiences that advertisers want and need. As Kevin Shively pointed out, it’s not just a question of the quality of the video, but also of the quality of the audience.

No real conclusions were reached, but the lively debate over the future of broadband video continues. The panelists pretty well agreed that there are limits to being able to monetize User Generated Content – how many cat-flushing-the-toilet videos can you watch? – and that the key, as Seibert said, is, “There’s room for cats looking cute and David Letterman in the same video world.”

Remembering John McWethy

Former ABC News National Security correspondent John McWethy died a few days ago in a skiing accident. Jack McWethy was a colleague over many years at ABC News. He was one of the finest reporters I have known. ABC News put together a beautiful and moving (and lengthy) tribute to Jack. I invite you to enjoy it - it's long, but very much worth your time. He will be missed.