Many news organizations, like Hearst, Gannett and Sports Illustrated, have refused to adhere to Major League Baseball’s new photo and video restrictions. “From our perspective, any arbitrary restrictions on how we use our intellectual property for news coverage is not acceptable,” said Phil Bronstein, editor at large for Hearst. The MLB has agreed to change one rule: the limit in photo slide shows has shifted from seven photos to a “reasonable” amount. Meawhile, sports teams are struggling with the definition of a sports “blogger,” and whether that person should be allowed into the locker room, for example.
NBC News has teamed with the New York Film Academy to promote a digital journalism and broadcasting program. Students will shoot, write and edit short and longer-form stories, as well as maintain a video blog. Beyond promotion, NBC provides some of the speakers as well, and the network gets a cut of the $35,366/student tuition. I love that NBC is getting proactive on the education side of the personnel pipeline, yet some criticize that the program’s promotion infers that students will end up getting hired at NBC. Watch the video here.
In January, MSNBC.com became the first major news network to offer embeddable video players. In March, MSNBC.com says it set a video record: 125.7 million streams on 7 million unique users, which it says beats CNN.com. While MSNBC.com doesn’t split out the embedded numbers, it’s clear that embedding has paid off in spades. And a couple days ago, Hulu said its video players have been embedded 105,000 times on 12,000 sites — and it’s only been launched for a month.
LostRemote has blogged before about how popular ‘Gossip Girl’ is online, buoying the audience of the show despite the low on-air ratings:
…it’s wildly popular online, even outpacing The Office on iTunes. Fans sites are everywhere. And when you add DVR ratings to the mix, it’s the most-watched show by teenagers.
So, the latest announcement from the CW will be a disappointment to the huge audience who watches the show on cwtv.com: wait. Yes, the CW is taking a step backwards and telling their audience that they will have to watch the show on TV.
“For these next five weeks the epicenter of the ‘Gossip Girl’ universe will be on The CW’s broadcast television airwaves,” CW president of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff told TVWeek.
This isn’t just inconvenient for the audience who risk being alienated, but a blow to the CW’s own website.
Adds Cory: So a show about a website is pulling itself off the web because it’s too popular online? Got it. While “Gossip Girl” is the first, I’m afraid it won’t be the last to panic and pull itself off the web when TV ratings erode. After all, it’s the TV commercials that still pay the bulk of the production costs, and (especially younger) audiences are growing more comfortable watching shows online faster than TV execs ever thought. But as Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar would say, this is a “defensive” move when media companies need to be on the offensive — it may give the show a ratings boost in the short term, but long term it puts the show at risk by making it more difficult to watch.
One of the big complaints of product placement is advertisers seem to be “jammed” into a storyline at the last minute. Well, the new NBC Universal Digital Studio in a partnership with Omnicom Media Group Digital will focus on creating branded content for digital platforms — a “co-developed process” for integrating advertiser brands from the beginning. “The idea here is to have brands in the storyline be the lead,” said OMG Digital CEO Matt Spiegel.
CBS Interactive is opening a Silicon Valley office and reshuffling its management. Bryon Rubin is moving from CBS corporate to EVP/CFO of CBS Interactive. CBSSports.com GM Jason Kint will also oversee CBSNews.com. Other GM’s will manage entertainment, mobile and Last.fm. “The quick answer simply is more CBS corporate firepower focused on interactive, yes,” Quincy Smith, President of CBS Interactive, told PaidContent. Meanwhile, the new Silicon Valley office will focus on tech partnerships and possible acquisitions.
Back in Seattle. Thanks to RTNDA and Lane Beauchamp for scheduling more digital/web sessions than ever. Good stuff. (Maybe next year RTNDA will add web critiques to their TV resume tape critiques, which will send a powerful message to students and young reporters.) I was a little demoralized to hear many of the same questions from news managers — questions that illustrate that the web still comes in a very distant second to TV despite all the talk about being “platform agnostic local media companies.” Baby steps, I guess, but I fear the time is short for broadcasters to gain real financial traction online.
On the NAB side, the announcements were light. The focus was on the DTV transition, which is clearly a critically important change for the industry. But I was surprised to hear NAB President David Rehr talk about making the internet part of a broadcaster’s DNA, which is a 180-degree turnaround from years past. NAB’s focus on content this year (”Where content comes to life”), while noble, resulted in a dearth of heavy-hitting technology speakers, and as a result, less news. Technology companies (minus the big TV vendors like Sony and Panasonic) are focusing more on CES than NAB, which is quickly becoming NAB’s substitute in the interactive world.
While many will say that “content is king,” I believe that content and technology are king. One without the other will not succeed in the new world, yet technology has a slight advantage (for now) due to its distribution channels and the ability to organize/aggregate outside content. And that’s why I believe CES has become more important than NAB. You could certainly argue that content will regain the lead, but only if it’s tailored to the unique properties of new platforms while keeping costs under control.
I stopped by the Microsoft booth to get a demo of MediaRoom, interactive TV software that’s being marketed to telcos with IPTV services. At its core, MediaRoom manages a user’s shows, photos and songs, similar to MediaCenter, but on a more powerful level. But it’s the applications that are fascinating to watch. They showed NASCAR, for example, that gives viewers the ability to select different cameras, microphones and read driver and track profiles (the data is pulled via an XML feed from NASCAR’s site.)
The also showed a CNN Election demo, where you dig down for more information, vote in polls and even play video clips straight from CNN.com in a smaller “picture in picture” Windows Media player. All of these applications make much more sense, as Microsoft pointed out, than earlier ITV products that let you “click and buy Jennifer Aniston’s shirt.” But the most interesting feature was MediaRoom’s social functionality. The idea is that it would be integrated with an existing online social network, like Facebook. You can view your friends, check their status updates, etc.
You can also see (if they desire) what TV shows your friends are currently watching, either live or on DVR. This becomes interesting, because you can rate shows and recommend shows to your friends.
All of this “builds a social profile around television,” said the Microsoft exhibitor, which opens up a whole new world of targeted advertising. Also, when combined with chat, is a powerful promotional mechanism, especially for younger viewers who are watching less TV these days. Of course, for many of us, a product like this will take some time before it’s a reality, depending on how quickly IPTV is getting rolled out in your neighborhood.
Essentially, weaker stories with little or no new information are getting stronger play in print by editors who don’t know what else to do. In an environment where news is always breaking and the pressure to break is increasing, the breaks are getting harder to find. Now everyone is trying to move copy like the AP. Wired’s Chris Anderson is quoted on how the relationship is changing:
“The role used to be that the way information was propagated was by the media, and it was the only way to get it out there. Now the role of the media is to add value to that kind of conversation and ask how much weight to give it. It’s not so much breaking news as much as legitimizing news.”
I’m not sure that new role is going to be a sustainable model for the future given the state of the art. The 2008 State of the Media report clearly finds that the public is past dissatisfied and is lashing back against the pack mentality in mainstream media by seeking new online alternatives. Old media types can’t just blame the new technology, the old content style is part of the problem. And it seems the reaction to the new mediascape has been floundering and doubling down on old bets. Copying your competition may have worked when media markets were geographic monopolies, but everyone has to work harder to distinguish themselves now and add value to the global conversation.
4-in-10 national journalists agree, the network nightly news has roughly a decade left before it signs off for good, according to a recent Pew survey. The respondents were less gloomy about newspapers, only 17% say the presses will stop a decade from now.
Safely back in the land of the potato - and away from the city of sin - I’ve had some time to think about NAB RTNDA 2008.
If you haven’t been — go. I learned an amazing amount and will try and make this an annual trip. I never really thought it would have much to offer me, but it did. The sessions were great, the show floor was great - and the chance to network can’t be beat. Plus… it’s in VEGAS. Plan to be there next year.
Our business is changing so fast that you an almost just feel it happening. The sessions talk about change, the technology parters focus on change - and even the show itself is evolving.
It’s way bigger than I ever would have thought. I’ve tried to describe the size to a few people today - and can’t. I could easily have spent another full day looking at vendors.
Wear comfy shoes. Not flip flops. Not dress shoes. Just roll out the sneakers… everyone will understand.
At yesterday’s Lost Remote meetup - I realized that our founder is “niche famous.” Dozens of people stopped by - and they each knew Cory - if not in person, then by his nine years of work here.
Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting outside the Ballroom at the Hilton at about 3:30pm killing some time by checking e-mail on my phone. A gentleman was sitting next to me with his laptop… reading Lost Remote. I didn’t identify myself to him - but that was a fun moment.
The much-maligned, not always accurate Alexa ranking system has been revamped according to TechCrunch - mixing in more data source than just the Alexa toolbar. Alexa isn’t saying what exactly that secret formula is - but some of the searched I run on the site seem to be slightly more in-line with reality. The bottom line is that there still isn’t an accurate way to compare sites and get a good read on traffic - not even the professional services like those offered by Nielsen.
Updated: I attended Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s keynote, and he announced that traffic has tripled over the last four weeks (since leaving beta) and revenue is already exceeding plan. To date, Hulu clips have been embedded 105,000 times on 12,000 sites (short embedded clips have overlay ads, longer clips have :15 pre-rolls). Some shows, like Hulu’s most popular, Arrested Development (an “unbelievable stat,” he says), are pulling in higher CPMs than network TV shows in primetime. Kilar said Hulu’s mission is a bold one: “Help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how they want it.” So clearly, Hulu has a long ways to go, but Kilar said many more content providers will soon be on board. One of Kilar’s key points was his team’s obsession with design simplicity. “It can’t look like Toyko at night” like many other content websites out there, he said, adding that his team obsessed over whitespace, nitpicked over the muted navigation and worked hard on video quality. (By the way, I love Hulu’s design.) When asked about local affiliates, he said Hulu’s not a competitor, and he encouraged local TV sites to become distributors of Hulu’s “entire content library.” One woman from the audience said she was contemplating canceling her cable, but Kilar brought up Hulu’s relationship with Comcast’s Fancast and said the service is additive, not a replacement of TV viewing. Have an “offensive attitude, not defensive,” he told the media attendees, bringing up that American Idol has 25 million TV viewers and a “non-audience” of 278 million who may want to watch it online. And when asked when Hulu will be wired into TV sets, he said he couldn’t discuss details of his product roadmap but it’s a “fantastic opportunity,” along with mobile applications, as well.
One other thing: did you know that when you search for a non-Hulu show on Hulu, like ABC’s Lost, that the search result will link you to the show on ABC.com? Smart thinking.
Watching the debate tonight I was wondering why there weren’t more teases for abcnews.com. It seemed Hillary “pimped” her site more than ABC News. Then I went to the site and saw the comments about the debate. Ouch. Did you see the debate? What did you think?
B&C has posted a story on our “Going Local” panel, where we urged TV stations to take a broader view of the local web. The story quotes me as saying that stations’ web growth will be “at-best-flat outlook for the near-term.” To add some context, I said that from a revenue perspective, increasing local competition will result in slowing and flattening growth (or worse) for many stations if they don’t launch new products outside their core compentencies. Those products are of the type that we demo’d at the session, such as local ad networks, content aggregators and hyperlocal communities (and I wish we had time to show some advertorial video directories, too.) From a traffic perspective, I believe local TV sites will continue to grow, but as Borrell predicted, “The decade-long era in which the banner ad ruled the web appears to be drawing to a close.” Which means local stations need to find new approaches to online revenue or see flattening or even declining revenue growth in increasingly competitive marketplaces.
NBC News has teamed with the New York Film Academy to promote a digital journalism and broadcasting program. Students will shoot, write and edit short and longer-form stories, as well as maintain a video blog. Beyond promotion, NBC provides some of the speakers as well, and the network gets a cut of the $35,366/student tuition. I love that NBC is getting proactive on the education side of the personnel pipeline, yet 
CBS Interactive 
Updated: I attended Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s keynote, and he announced that traffic has tripled over the last four weeks (since leaving beta) and revenue is already exceeding plan. To date, Hulu clips have been embedded 105,000 times on 12,000 sites (short embedded clips have overlay ads, longer clips have :15 pre-rolls). Some shows, like Hulu’s most popular, Arrested Development (an “unbelievable stat,” he says), are pulling in higher CPMs than network TV shows in primetime. Kilar said Hulu’s mission is a bold one: “Help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how they want it.” So clearly, Hulu has a long ways to go, but Kilar said many more content providers will soon be on board. One of Kilar’s key points was his team’s obsession with design simplicity. “It can’t look like Toyko at night” like many other content websites out there, he said, adding that his team obsessed over whitespace, nitpicked over the muted navigation and worked hard on video quality. (By the way, I love Hulu’s design.) When asked about local affiliates, he said Hulu’s not a competitor, and he encouraged local TV sites to become distributors of Hulu’s “entire content library.” One woman from the audience said she was contemplating canceling her cable, but Kilar brought up Hulu’s relationship with Comcast’s Fancast and said the service is additive, not a replacement of TV viewing. Have an “offensive attitude, not defensive,” he told the media attendees, bringing up that American Idol has 25 million TV viewers and a “non-audience” of 278 million who may want to watch it online. And when asked when Hulu will be wired into TV sets, he said he couldn’t discuss details of his product roadmap but it’s a “fantastic opportunity,” along with mobile applications, as well.
