Archive for December, 2006
When a single video can pull in actual equivalents to ratings points, you know people will take notice. Such is the case with Richard Engel’s Saturday “Today Show” piece on the Saddam execution. According to a MSNBC source, it was streamed a remarkable 2.9 million times on MSNBC.com. That’s for one video, on a Saturday, during a holiday weekend. Wrote our source: “That’s more than an average day’s TOTAL streams and adds about 3 TV rating points (worth) of viewers.” The overall Saddam numbers on MSNBC.com: 9 million streams on Saturday. Friday saw three million streams, with all of the site’s top five videos covering the execution. Pageviews on Saturday were about double a normal Saturday.
December 31st, 2006
It was only a matter of time. There is now video on YouTube, Revver and other sites, purportedly of Saddam’s execution in full. It is believable. The person who shot it on a cellphone is standing below the gallows, so you clearly see Saddam dropping and then hanging. Arab television stations are showing this in full. The American stations I have seen (as well as the BBC) showing it stop it just before the hanging. I am linking to it, because I believe it is important people have the choice of deciding for themselves. I’m not embedding it here. You may disagree with this choice, and I respect that. But the truth is that, once the video is out there, everyone will find it. And that’s the point of the internet in 2007: people shoot the news with their own tools, find their own information, and our jobs are changed now to facilitate the conversation of news.
December 31st, 2006
Forgive the bragging here, but as I go through the links from 2006, I am awestruck by how many sites from different countries have linked to Lost Remote. I write this not so much out of bragging (OK, a little) as out of pride that people around the world share our vision of better journalism through the web. Thanks to technorati, we see we have been linked from Japan, Australia, Italy, Israel, Sweden, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, England, Ireland, Canada and Norway, in Polish, and in Chinese. 17 countries, 12 languages. So, in any language, thank you and Happy New Year.
December 30th, 2006
Video of Saddam Hussein’s body, shot on a cellphone, is apparently the first to show him after his death. CNN has posted the video that is from Shiite Iraqi channel Biladi TV. While not verified by CNN or other sources, the video does indeed appear to be legitimate. (Screengrab below.)
December 30th, 2006
RTNDA VP of Communications, Marketing and Membership Noreen Welle has died. Noreen had cancer - multiple myeloma - and had been fighting it this past year. Sadly, she succumbed to the illness on Friday. We have had the pleasure of working with Noreen on many occasions. She was wonderful. Noreen edited the first piece I wrote for the RTNDA’s “Communicator,” and worked with Lost Remote on the presentations we give at RTNDA conferences. She was a strong believer in the best that journalism could be, and was a cheerleader for new media ideas. Whenever I lost my membership number or password to the RTNDA site (which was often), Noreen graciously looked it up without so much as a scolding. As you can tell by her title, Noreen had an impossibly big job and was part of the RTNDA’s very DNA. We have lost a kind mentor and dear friend. Kindly read the RTNDA’s announcement following the jump.
Read the full post December 30th, 2006
The American networks’ mere whisper of the execution of Saddam Hussein is exactly the reason why we need better access to international news channels. Even our news channels, giving this story the time it deserves, are stuck quoting Arab news sources. We, as news consumers, should demand the ability to get news as it is reported from around the world. I would much rather be watching al-Jazeera right now than skipping through channels to see who is quoting it.
Screengrab of stream from al-Jazeera English, only available online with subscription.
December 29th, 2006
CNN was first to report the execution of Saddam Hussein, with reporter Aneesh Raman breaking the news from Baghdad at 10:07 p.m. EST. Raman quoted Arab news services, which had the story first. Fox News and MSNBC also relied on the reports from the Arab channels. While I was flipping around channels, TV Newser Brian Stelter caught the quick NBC News special report at 10:14, making NBC the first net to break in. CBS News followed at 10:19, with a report hosted by Katie Couric. While ABC News was third among the nets, it had the longest coverage, with Elizabeth Vargas changing gears while hosting 20/20 to devote the rest of the hour (which had been about celebrity culture). Over at TV Newser, Stelter quotes an ABC News source as defending the decision to hold off on the announcement (ABC was last, breaking in at 10:25 pm): “While ABC was last to get on the air with a report on Saddam’s execution, we were FIRST to air official independent confirmation” from the U.S., an ABC insider says. “Seconds before the special report took to the air, Jonathan Karl had just gotten off the phone with a senior U.S. official who confirmed what all the others were hanging on unconfirmed Arab media reports. This was a deliberate decision made by wise managers in New York.” There is a legitimate point here - and I’m interested in what the LR Faithful think about the choice. The media gets criticized when it reports stories too quickly, without attribution. The nets reported this story well after the cable channels. So, were the nets practicing better journalism?
December 29th, 2006
“Is there something ghoulish about this?” Larry King asked CNN’s Aneesh Rahman who is standing in Baghdad waiting for the execution of Saddam Hussein. Yes, of course. But this isn’t just prurient interest - it’s a major international story, obviously. The cable news nets are in “fill” mode, waiting for the execution which is reportedly going to happen any minute now.
December 29th, 2006
There are some interesting ones in Wired’s annual list of predictions for ‘07:
DVRs get BitTorrent baked in, bringing internet video to the living room.
20 percent of all new laptops sold will be MacBooks.
A major newspaper gives up printing on paper to publish exclusively online.
HD-DVD is the clear winner over Blu-ray in the DVD format wars.
Digg holds out for a big payday but ends up like Friendster.
The New York Times opens its archives from behind the paid firewall.
December 29th, 2006
Waaaaay back in August, we asked everyone for ideas for a Lost Remote T-shirt. Now I’m finally getting around to opening it up for a vote. Click here to vote for your favorite titles (you can vote for more than one), and the winning title will make it on a Lost Remote T-shirt. If you happened to have suggested the title back in August, you get a free shirt. Also, you can suggest another title in the survey, if you like, for the next T-shirt vote.
December 29th, 2006
MSNBC is patting itself on the back with a new campaign that’s dominating ad positions on media sites like TVWeek and TVNewser. It shows quotes like, “MSNBC’s ratings are on a roll” (from the SF Chronicle) and ends with the exclamation, “Everybody’s talking about MSNBC.” Good for morale and generating some advertiser interest, I imagine.
December 29th, 2006
A fascinating point from Rex over at Fimoculous:
We tend to think of websites on a scale similar to that of tv networks — large, permanent, liquid. But what if a better comparison were sitcoms — small, ephemeral, risky. Due to media hype, MySpace is perceived on a scale next to Fox (as AOL was to Timer-Warner), but maybe it should be considered more like Lost (which turns Yahoo into The Simpson’s). And before this freaks you out, think about how we might use this to our advantage.
December 29th, 2006
With the distinct possibility of Saddam Hussein’s execution appearing on Iraq TV, the broadcast and cable news networks are figuring out what they’ll do with the video. “We’re very aware that we’re coming into people’s living rooms and that there could be children watching,” CBS News senior VP Linda Mason said. While the nets will likely not show the actual execution, what should news sites do? Post a slide show of screen grabs with a warning? The video? Or is that best left to Drudge? Adds Rob in comments, “I served in two wars where he was leading the other team and believe me I want him dead but, however evil he is, to televise his death up close and personal, would make us appear to be gloating over his downfall and demise and make us no better than he is.”
December 29th, 2006
That’s right, Saddam Hussein’s Hangman with the tagline, “A traditional game of hangman with a sick twist: you actually want to hang the man.” Says Game Show Network’s John Roberts, “If we are the network for games, we should be the website for games.”
December 29th, 2006
Last week two of three of Revver’s co-founders stepped down, and now Guba CEO Thomas McInerney is moving on. “The billion-dollar opportunity has kind of passed,” McInerney said, referring to YouTube. “Guba is at a crossroads, and we’re deciding whether to look for funding or to sell. I think we’re inclined to sell.” Guba has been around way before YouTube, since 1997, and McInerney said it has turned a profit.
December 29th, 2006
If it’s not blatantly obvious already, Mark Cuban is not a YouTube fan. But in this case, I think he has a point. Cuban breaks down the list of the top 20 videos in December and discovers that most clips are commercials and fake porn. What’s fake porn, you ask? It’s a headline and thumbnail that promises nude video of, say, Britney Spears but turns out to be a cat with the message, “Excuse me, WTF R U doin?” Between the commercials (which he defines broadly, like clips from SNL and Letterman) and the fake porn, Cuban found just 3 user-generated clips out of the top 20. “Could it be that Gootube will fade?” he asks. Unlikely, but he raises some interesting questions. If YouTube begins to delete the fake porn, are they going astray of Safe Harbor laws? What really qualifies as a video view if people are bailing out of a clip a second after it plays? Will fake porn discourage major content providers from partnering with YouTube? All worthy questions, although I’ll remind folks that the vast majority of YouTube’s traffic is not from the few “most popular” hits but the long tail of video that people are uploading and sharing with their friends. Plus, the home page is still hand-selected and largely user-created. Cuban adds in comments below, in part: “What I tried to do is look at it from a business perspective. YouTube can’t subsidize bandwidth forever. If it’s merely a hosting service for the LongTail, then they are going to have a huge bandwidth bill. How are they going to pay for it?”
December 28th, 2006
VentureWire reports Digg has raised another $8.5 million in funding from previous investors, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, which is run by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. “A lot of where this is going is increasing our development team and focusing on the features our users are telling us to add,” said Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson in an interview. “Our board and investors did not want us to focus, at any time, on monetization at this stage. Our focus has been on user growth.” Greylock investor David Sze says it’s unlikely Digg will be sold anytime soon as they’re looking at partnering with sites interested in integrating Digg’s functionality. (Via PaidContent)
December 28th, 2006
Earlier this year, Google rolled out click-to-play video ad units as part of its AdWords network (demo here). Now Google is testing in-stream video ads, a sort of video AdSense for content publishers. Here’s how it would work: Publishers upload video to Google Video, embed the players on their own sites and the Google-powered ads are embedded in the streams (currently as post-rolls). The revenue is then split. Google has been testing the in-stream ads on Beet.TV (although I didn’t see them when I checked today) and also working with MTV. Add YouTube to this equation and you have a massive network of video blogs that are shooting, posting and embedding video content, a market ripe for video advertising.
December 28th, 2006
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