There was a lot of reaction to a story we posted last week about AOL and CBS dumping online high-definition plans. At the same time we learned about that, Akamai unveiled a new site dedicated to high-definition streaming called thehdweb.com. It’s a pretty awesome site, with video quality like I’ve never seen online. Now, you need a pretty impressive pipe to watch the video - at least 7.5 Mbps. I can usually access it via Comcast at home, but sometimes it does buffer. Some of the video on the site is from Gannett, including video from WZZM and KARE. Check it out and share your thoughts.
November 5th, 2007
As we’ve happily proclaimed, 2007 is Lost Remote’s Year of the Clean Site. Boston’s top-rated website relaunched today with a new look on the homepage. The site is another in a long line of site clean-ups that we’ve been tracking here at LostRemote. boston.com’s biggest improvement is probably the increased width, since their page was stuck in a narrow template for quite a while. Story pages include a very nice features sidebar that pulls users into other site content. boston.com has also begun using a Brightcove video player. The new look appears to only affect the homepage right now. You can contrast it with the old look that you can still see on the News page.
November 5th, 2007
MSNBC.com is offering users preview screen grabs of its upcoming redesign, set to debut later this month. Here’s the new home page.
Editors can choose from a ton of flexible layout options for the cover section.
Further down the page, users will be able to collapse, expand and move section modules to their liking. Also, notice the “topics” organization.
This is the “explore” box with tabs for personalized news, video, photos and “participate,” which includes content from FirstPerson, the message boards and iPredict. Also notice the bigger plug for FirstPerson content submissions.
“It’s been several years since we significantly shook up the look of our home page,” writes Jennifer Sizemore, MSNBC.com’s editor in chief, on AlphaChannel, a blog dedicated to the redesign. “We have tested and retested all kinds of solutions and what we’re preparing to roll out is dramatically different from where we began, thanks to your feedback.”
Your impressions so far?
Adds Don Day: The site will also work better for non IE-users. In fact, the new Safari/Mac friendly navigation is already live on MSNBC.com.
Adds MSNBC.com’s Jim Ray in comments: We’re all working hard over here to get this thing out the door. Be sure to clear your cache and refresh the homepage in a week (fingers crossed) to see all the new toys. We’re hoping to use the Alpha Channel blog not just for the redesign but to catalog other new features and projects that we roll out in the future, so be sure to keep an eye on that one, too.
Adds MSNBC.com’s Rex Sorgatz in comments: The thing I’d like to point out about this design is how it’s not at all what we’ve come to expect in recent redesigns. It’s not gray/blue on white, the look that has steamrolled itself through news sites ever since NYT started it. Obviously, there’s no reason to be critical of those designs, but hasn’t that look become a little… safe? I like that we’re taking a risk here. (Also, I can only say “we” for another week. I’m leaving msnbc.com soon, trying out some new stuff.)
November 5th, 2007
It’s that time of year again when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases circulation numbers for U.S. newspapers, and as expected, they’re still dropping. The average drop was 2.5 percent for weekdays and 3.5 percent for Sundays over April-September of this year. One of the biggest drops is in Denver: both the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News dropped over 10 percent. You can see the top 25 newpapers here.
But for the first time, you can also roll up internet reach with the newspapers’ physical circulation. The idea is for advertisers to look at combined reach instead of dwelling on the dying side of the business (they’re combining numbers from Nielsen/Netratings, Comscore, Omniture and Scaraborough). While it’s a great idea, the execution side of things is not easy. You need to go here and register to pull a report, and dissecting the numbers isn’t immediately obvious (can you really equate a unique user with a subscriber?) And as a result, I haven’t found any reporting so far that can say if the New York Times, for example, experienced a net gain or loss if you add their internet growth. But the extra data is a big step in the right direction.
November 5th, 2007
LAWeekly is reporting that Leno, Conan and Kimmel are all going into repeats beginning tonight because of the strike. Meanwhile, Portfolio.com says that Jon Stewart is paying Daily Show and Colbert Report writers out of his own pocket for two weeks. (Pictured: Writers picketing at 30 Rock in NYC.)
November 5th, 2007
