So you’ve likely heard by now that the Drudge Report outed Prince Harry’s 10-week tour in Afghanistan, which amazingly, the British press had agreed to keep secret all along. Now the NY Times published a story that reveals that Drudge wasn’t the first to break it. Way back on January 7th, an Australian magazine had the scoop. Then on February 27th, a German newspaper ran a small blurb. Oddly, nobody picked up on it until Drudge’s big flash. Also, while the U.S. newspapers didn’t know of the secret British deal to keep the story quiet, CNN, AP and Reuters all participated in the agreement.
So what do you think about all this? Check out the ongoing discussion in our new forum, The Circuit…
While several sites have started to offer live video streaming capabilities, that feature has been missing from the internet’s largest video site, YouTube. Well, according to video blogger and lifecaster Sarah Meyers from pop17.com, live video is coming to YouTube this year. YouTube says that Google’s resources are making it a reality. (Via TechCrunch)
Meyers offers a quick history of lifecasting, and then interviews YouTube’s Steve Chen for the scoop on live video. (Cool player, huh?)
If it wasn’t obvious before, NBC signaled that everything after 7:25am on the Today show is no-news zone. President Bush held a news conference in the 10 a.m. ET hour - which was carried on ABC, CBS and all the cable news nets. But not NBC - which is the only of the broadcast networks airing a “news” program at that time. “We’re trying to make MSNBC the place to go for NBC News, and the strategy is working,” NBC News VP in charge of Today and MSNBC told the AP. Even on the West Coast - where the speech aired during Today’s first hour, the speech and Q&A didn’t appear.
The Seattle Sonics have just debuted a new site, Supersonics.com, that they say is the “first Flash-driven site in major professional team sports.” The site took 2,000 hours and $100k to build, and it’s certainly a unique experience. “It is a much more immersive and high fidelity experience,” said Cypress Consulting founder Nate Thompson, the Seattle-based company that helped a Sonics developer build the site. The Sonics, meanwhile, say it’s “a whole new paradigm in how sports teams present their brands.”
What do you think of these Flashy designs for “brand experience” environments? Cool? Or lacking speed and utility?
While Hulu is still not out of beta, it’s a great site. I’ve watched many shows, and enjoy the experience. Well, that experience might get even better as more content is added. According to NewTeeVee, Warner Brothers will add their programs to Hulu. WB produces several shows on their co-owned CW, as well as shows on other networks. It’s unclear if movies would be included too.
Hearst-Argyle and Magid teamed up for a research study (of local news viewers 25-54) that drilled down on the effectiveness of ads in TV newscasts compared to other programming. “Respondents reported that ads on local TV news drive greater product/service awareness than those within any other program type,” reads a press release previewing the results. The same study also looked at the power of local TV websites. “After search engines, local TV news websites are the most frequently used for local news and weather.” And interestingly, the study found that “online video viewing of local TV news content is higher than that for any other genre,” 37% for local news compared to 31% each for cable news and primetime programming.
Update: Aaron points out in comments that the study was isolated to local news viewers, 25-54, which naturally would result in a local TV skew. This is one of the biggest dangers, in my opinion, of local TV research. By limiting the sample to TV viewers, we’re missing some of the more disturbing trends in our industry. For example, why is an increasing number of 20 and 30-somethings not watching local TV news? Is it just because of the internet, or it also because of a “live, local and latebreaking” style that these same consultants have spread across the country? What can local media operations — don’t call them local TV stations, anymore — do to get in front of this? I do, however, applaud the effort to trumpet the many positives of local TV news programming and local TV websites, two terrific platforms for local advertisers.
There are some interesting nuggets in this interview with Dave Lougee, the president of Gannett Broadcasting. First off, Lougee said the group’s TV sites are close to launching new designs with a new video player. (Let us know when you see one launch.) Plus, Gannett is getting ready to roll out Metromix entertainment sites in its markets as part of a joint venture with Tribune. And Lougee said they just rolled out ArizonaMoms.com, a site dedicated to new mothers. “We’re in the early stages of that,” he said. (Gannett already has IndyMoms.com and MichiganMoms.com.)
Lougee also talks about re-engineering its stations to focus on original content and sales. Some reporters are training to shoot video. “It’s not that everyone becomes a one-man band,” Lougee says. “Newsrooms have reacted to that. They feel it means a reduction in quality. But what’s the definition of quality? If a newsroom is only sending out eight reporters on a given day, what happens if they re-engineer the workflow and can send out 24 a day?”
Similar to the Gannett interview above, there’s some news in this TVNewsday interview with Lin TV’s online chief, Robb Richter. “It was just unbelievable the traffic we got and the interest we got on those sites.” Richter says about Lin’s network of 17 political microsites on Super Tuesday. As we’ve reported before, Lin has purchased political domain names across the country in the hope of teaming with other broadcasters. “We’ve talked to a few broadcasters about just basically giving them the back end. We’ll probably be rolling out a couple of other political.tv web sites with other smaller broadcasters in their markets this spring,” he says. Coming soon, Richter says he’s planning to launch entertainment microsites in a few of the group’s markets. And he’s working on a search product. “We believe that you can go to yellowpages.com and you can go to Google and you can go to Yahoo! and that’s fine, but they don’t have that hyperlocal content, they don’t have the relationships with the advertisers locally that we do,” he said. Also, Lin sites will be getting a new video player in the second quarter. (Free sub. req. for TVNewsday)
It’s always challenging get the conversation rolling in a new discussion forum, so please help us out on The Circuit, Lost Remote’s new forum for media/technology folks who want to vent, share ideas or ask questions to the group. There are three ongoing discussions:
- Journalists and their political Facebook groups
- Two-person local TV teams are ‘dead’
- Are you an angry web producer?
In that last thread, Rob made a terrific point about one of the biggest hurdles for innovation success in local TV today: “There’s a core issue right there in my experience: Revenue drives innovation. If the revenue isn’t there, you’re not getting that new widget, platform, hardware or tool. The expectation for the web in my general experience is that an immediate ROI is expected and if the up-front cost is too high to generate a nearly instantaneous ROI then you don’t move forward.” Absolutely right.
How bad were the ratings for the web original show Quarterlife when it premiered on NBC this week? It was “the network’s worst time-period performance in at least 17 years,” says Hollywood Reporter. Why? Let’s count the reasons, shall we? First, the show has already run on MySpace. Second, it premiered on MTV earlier on the same day. And third, the show is designed for a web audience of young people who are watching less and less TV.
Once it resolves, it has an embedded player and a link to find voting locations. (Full disclosure: Both those sites are owned by Belo, the same company that owns KING5.com, where I work.)
Update: Obama also bought the same ad on 24 other sites, including Ohio.com and Chron.com. They’ll run for a week.
Another nail in the coffin for print recruitment ads, this time from Classified Intelligence, which conducted a study on the effectiveness of job postings in newspapers. A survey of HR execs revealed that print is the most ineffective way to find good job candidates. So what’s the most effective? HotJobs. Explains Editor & Publisher, “Classified Intelligence editors point to Yahoo’s partnership with more than 600 newspapers as the probable reason for the uptick in utility. HotJobs traffic in the U.S. jumped 50% year-over-year compared to CareerBuilder, the report noted.”
Interesting. And by the way, if you haven’t posted a free job on Lost Remote, you should give it a try. We hear it’s very effective.
Do you watch The Wire on HBO? It’s a great show, a crime drama based in Baltimore, but recently it’s been chronicling the decline of the Baltimore Sun. Turns out, series creator David Simon used to be a reporter for the Sun. And go figure, not everyone is happy about the newspaper subplot on the show.
This shouldn’t surprise you. Major League Baseball is instituting new restrictions for web content. Websites will now be held to two minutes of video (or audio) a day gathered at MLB facilities — but formal press conferences are exempt to this rule. Similar to the NFL, there’s no live streaming. But in an unique twist, sites will be limited to 7 photos per game. And no photo galleries, either (it’s unclear what they mean by that.) All non-text content must be removed after 72 hours. If you don’t follow the new rules, your press passes could be revoked. The Sports Business Journal has the story here, but a subscription is required.
This was an interesting content strategy from the AOL blog Stylist. They had Joan and Melissa Rivers cover the Red Carpet in a video for the site. According to the site, it’s been viewed over 250,000 times. No matter your opinion on the duo, there is an audience for them, and a blog was their platform to do what they do. Smart move by Stylist.
The NFL Network, which would like each and every cable and satellite user in the country to indirectly pay for its niche service (end mini-rant) continues to wrestle with providers over carriage. An appeals court reversed a lower court ruling that backed up Comcast’s decision to sweep the channel to a sports tier. The NFL says it has an agreement with Comcast that requires it to put the channel in the basic package. Comast was pleased that the judge didn’t force it to put the channel back on basic cable — instead sending the whole battle back down to a lower court.
Last week, Dish Network bumped the NFL Network from America’s Top 100 to America’s Top 200 — costing the channel 4 million potential viewers - down to 31 million subs. (Disclosure: My cable service just went up four bucks a month, and I’m still annoyed)
It’s always challenging get the conversation rolling in a new discussion forum, so please help us out on 
This shouldn’t surprise you. Major League Baseball is instituting new restrictions for web content. Websites will now be held to two minutes of video (or audio) a day gathered at MLB facilities — but formal press conferences are exempt to this rule. Similar to the NFL, there’s no live streaming. But in an unique twist, sites will be limited to 7 photos per game. And no photo galleries, either (it’s unclear what they mean by that.) All non-text content must be removed after 72 hours. If you don’t follow the new rules, your press passes could be revoked. The Sports Business Journal has the story 
