NBC News says it is tweaking its Campaign Embed program from the 2004 election cycle (where a budding one-man-band reporter was assigned to each presidential candidate full time). This time, NBC will team with the National Journal to put together a staff of print journalists, who will file in print, video and audio form - and blog as well. The other key difference is that not all candidates will have a full time reporter assigned to them (which make some sense since there are about twice as many candidates this go around).
…And while we’re on the subject of presidential campaigns: Little Lost Robot blogger JL Watkins wrote up Barack Obama’s visit to South Carolina last week. He says that at one point he (a TV news photographer) was outnumbered by people shooting video for websites. Check out the photographic evidence (scroll down the page a bit).
Ever wanted to sit back and watch a classic episode of Who’s the Boss?, but you just don’t have the 30 minutes it requires to catch it on TV Land? Sony has solved your dilemma: the “Minisode Network.” The new service brings together more than a dozen shows in very compressed form. Honda has signed on as a sponsor, with only eight seconds of ads per clip. For now the network is only on MySpace, but could expand to other platforms after the exclusive deal ends in August. I sampled Boss episode “Samantha Grows Up” - and despite some jarring edits, the plot made sense, there’s some laughs, and you even get a few seconds of the classic theme song.
A market research company grabbed an Apple TV, picked up a screwdriver, voided the warranty and cracked open the hot little video streaming device. Inside, iSuppli Corp. found a heap of technology worth about $237 - according to its estimate. The device retails for $299. When you pile marketing, packaging and shipping costs on top - Apple is likely taking home a very modest profit, if any. Last month Steve Jobs said Apple TV is a “hobby,” not a core business.
WISC news anchor Katy Sai and photographer Jay Olsen were tired of fighting for time to produce longer, relevant stories, so they quit and launched Storybridge.tv. It’s a showcase for in-depth pieces, but more than that, their goal is to create communities around great stories. “We found that communities of people were thirsty for information,” Olsen said. “When you do extended coverage, it allows people to gather around this story thread.”
They’ve also created a nonprofit arm to Storybridge.tv called StoryFund. “My hope is that we may be able to get grants or charitable donations to support series that are socially valuable but don’t have a natural commercial appeal for companies,” Sai said. While it may not make them rich, I think it’s a terrific idea. (Thanks for the tip, Allen!)
The Times has launched City Room, a local blog with “with in-depth reports from the five
boroughs.” What I find interesting is it has a blogroll with links to dozens of other local blogs. The blog has video, too. “City Room is the most audacious online venture the Metro desk has so far conceived and committed to,” said Joe Sexton, metropolitan editor. Release after the grab…
It’s not too often we talk about a radio station website doing something cool. That’s probably because they don’t usually involve video or cross into an area that might overlap TV efforts. This is cool though. 670thescore.com launched a new chatroom today that shows the webcams of those chatting, including the DJ booth that’s on the air. They’re only doing it with their morning and afternoon shows right now. How about a TV station do this and put the chatters on-air?
CNBC’s David Farber speculates that “Yahoo could soon face an activist group which attempts to force the company to explore strategic alternatives.” Among the possible scenarios: News Corp sells MySpace to Yahoo for as much as a 25 percent stake in the company. AT&T, AOL, Microsoft and Comcast are also potential participants in some kind of acquisition or strategic partnership.
Big news out of Yahoo this afternoon. The company has replaced CEO Terry Semel with co-founder Jerry Yang. “This is the time for new executive leadership, with different skills and strengths, to step in and drive the company to realize its full potential,” Semel said. “It is the right thing to do, and the right time is now.” Despite the fact Yahoo has been struggling over the last 18 months, Semel received $71.7 million in compensation last year. He’ll remain on as chairman. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Susan Decker has been promoted up to president.
“The past year has obviously not been an easy one for us,” writes Yang on his Yahoo blog. “But we’ve taken important steps to address the challenges we face, and we’re starting to realize some of the benefits – especially with the successful launch of Panama…. The Internet is still young, the opportunities ahead are tremendous, and I’m ready to rally our nearly 12,000 Yahoos around the world to help seize them.”
Mediapost’s Video Insider Blog today poses the question, “What Would Jakob Nielsen Think?” While we may not have phrased it thusly, many of us are asking ourselves questions about the best way to integrate video into our information architecture and user interfaces. Quoth the blogger, Alan Schulman, “These are interesting times. The Web canvas is becoming more open and dynamic, while the way we scan and process static information hasn’t changed much since the advent of the printing press.” The LR bloggers are champions of clean, open design. When I look at many local broadcast sites, I find pages that are packed tight, overcrowded with aggressive palates, and played hard with remade versions of onscreen graphics and anchor mugs (and the occasional weather dog). Then I see the peaceful serenity and easy focus in the simple sequential deployment of embedded video players by vloggers and wonder, why can’t local tv sites look more like Jetset or zefrank’s the show? Now, blogware tends to sacrifice design in trade for publishing ease, but we all have to dance with some kind of CMS. Why is it this way? What got us here and where are we going? Your thoughts?
Blogger and technologist Chris Pirillo hosts a live internet talk show here in Seattle. So imagine Chris’ delight when a Seattle Times telemarketer unknowingly called the show trying to sell a subscription to the dead tree version of the newspaper (which happens to come bundled with an “e-edition”). As the kids say these days, hilarity ensued…
Since launching its full episode player back in October, NBC.com said it has served “a third of a billion” (well, that’s over 300 million) video streams. Press release below…
Prophets of doom have a good business, there is always something awful lurking around the corner and as our populations and cultures expand, things like greenhouse gasses, weather, and Web traffic get more complicated. Today’s sandwich board from the BBC has warnings of ‘internet overload’ scrawled on it. Many of us in the business are watching Net Neutrality, with more than passing interest. And if you have been in the business of managing servers, connectivity and telephony for more than a few years, you will know precisely what all this is about. E-mail is an easy example to grasp: The basic mail protocols were designed around shipping small text messages many years ago, and when we started moving rich format mail into more robust clients without building up the base platforms, mailservers started getting really grumpy a few years ago. Well, with today’s rich media content, we’re moving a lot more packets across the Internet today than we were back when Pine and Eudora ruled the pipes and the web was browsed in text with Lynx. “In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. The ‘Net’s spine was rebuilt mostly in the heady boom-and-bust days back in the 90s and hasn’t gotten an infrastructure boost in a long time. So, as they say, the end is near, but as this article notes… it was near last year, and the year before that, and so on. So when should users and publishers get seriously concerned?
The national Edward R. Murrow awards were just released this morning, and the top web awards go to CNN.com (network), KING5.com (large market), WAFF.com (small market), KCBS.com (radio) and WashingtonPost.com (non-affiliated). NBC Nightly News, KYW-TV in Philadelphia and KVUE-TV in Austin won the TV awards for overall excellence.
As most of you know, I work at KING5.com, and we’re honored to win the national Murrow. We’ve made it our mission to cover the news aggressively online by combining the editorial strength of KING-TV’s newsroom with our own 24/7 interactive reporting. My thanks to our talented team: Dale Steinke, Jan Minagawa, John Goff, Karin Czulik, Susan Wyatt, Liza Javier, Travis Pittman and Katherine Sather. And my thanks to news director Pat Costello, who understands the web is vastly different than TV — a realization that’s all too rare in local TV newsrooms today.
On day 1 of NXTcomm, Microsoft introduced an update to their IPTV product saying, “With this latest release, Microsoft is renaming its IPTV platform Microsoft Mediaroom to better reflect the broader set of new connected entertainment experiences made possible today and the types of experiences anticipated in the future.” The new product adds the ability to play music and photos from your computer on your TV and provides multiple picture-in-picture channels. The biggest news is the availability for third-party developers to build their own commercial applications to run on the platform. The website isn’t up yet, but it will be at microsoftmediaroom.com
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