Eddie Codel gets around town at lunchtime! From what friends tell me and everything I’ve read, San Francisco’s Revision3 is the new media company to watch.
[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/03/PID_010473/Podtech_LM30_Revision3.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2327/lunchmeet-revisiting-revision3&totalTime=1295000&breadcrumb=3F34K2L1]
Another gem of insight from Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser. This time, it’s the real reason behind YouTubes success. Well, one of the MAIN reasons at least. And this is something I would’ve never known until I say the great embedded media player by PodTech. Then it hit me hard — YouTube videos are embedded EVERYWHERE! I really got to experience the power when I began blogging. I can embed players and blog right from PodTech’s site without having to log into my blog. That’s the wave everyone ought ride! That makes it super easy and quick to post a media-rich blog entry.
Well, here’s more proof in “YouTube’s Success is its “Pass Along” Power, Declare MIT’s Henry Jenkins and Forrester’s Brian Haven”
The success of YouTube has come largely from the site’s utility to “pass along” video clips to blogs and social networking sites, according to two of our most astute observers of the Internet media scene, Henry Jenkins of MIT and online video analyst Brian Haven of Forrester Research.
Jenkins is a big fan of YouTube, which he calls the “modern vaudeville” — but he is not impressed with the social networking environment of the site.
YouTube has created a new kind of content distribution system. Video content creators from small fries like Beet.TV to big shots like the BBC are embracing the platform to expand audience and brand awareness.
View interview here http://www.beet.tv/2007/03/youtube_works.html
Thanks to Tom Foremski’s NewRulesCommunications, I found this exclusive scoop by Beet.TV “Microsoft and the Associated Press Teaming with Thousands of Newspapers and Broadcasters in New Online Video Network.” Here’s what Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser writes — link to view interview at bottom:
The Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, and Microsoft have developed an online video platform for thousands of U.S. newspapers, television and radio stations to upload, publish and monetize locally-created video.
The new system is in beta tests with some 30 newspaper publishers and broadcasters including The Miami Herald, the Houston Chronicle and the Rocky Mountain News. The program will go live in about 30 days.
I spoke with Jim Kathman, who heads global broadcast strategy, at world headquarters of the Associated Press in Manhattan.
He explained that publishers can monetize content through a revenue split between MSN Network and the AP. They also have the option to monetize ads locally against local content by using the Atlas adserving platform.
One year ago, Microsoft and the Associated press launched the Online Video Network, a distribution platform for the video clips created by the Associated Press television unit. Most of the clips come from abroad — and from major news. In the first year, some 1600 U.S. newspapers and broadcasters have used the video clips on their web sites.
Beet.TV has learned that the AP will stream about 7.5 million clips this month. CPM (cost per thousand views) is above $20. MSN has sold pre-roll ad inventory on the network to national brand advertisers including GMC, GE, Proctor & Gamble and Netflix. Clearly, the AP has established a successful online video distribution model.
The program currently in beta involves a much bigger pie: it’s the 7,000 newspapers, television and radio stations that are affiliated with the Associated Press and who will create their own content, locally. The clips will be staff and user-generated video.
The AP projects that as many as 50 percent of affiliates, or some 3,500 local news organizations, will eventually participate in the new video program.
For the nation’s 1000 television stations, many of which have news gathering operations, the opportunity to publish and monetize video is immediate. For 1500 newspapers and 4500 local radio stations, whose staffs produce very little video right now, the opportunity will be a little bit further off. It could be that the most immediate opportunity for newspapers and radio stations will be user-generated content. We’ll have to see.
The next phase of this program, scheduled for this summer, will be a syndication system which allows publishers and broadcasters to nationally distribute locally-created content and monetize content on a network-wide basis.
Although Microsoft is providing the uploading tools, infrastructure and monetization, clips are viewable in both Microsoft Media Player and Flash.
I finally got to spend some time on Beet.TV and wow! Found some fresh, insightful video interviews with influencers like Steve Rubel (, Om Molik (GigaOM), Peter Rojas, Shel Isreal and tons more.
Found this posted by Andy Plesser, who I had the pleasure of meeting over a year ago at a new media breakfast hosted by TheNewsMarket.com (broadcast quality video download services used by Intel’s GCG). In this interview you get a good sense for the importance of tagging and the benefits of allowing your readers to tag your posts/content. The most telling reaction here is that people who are paid to comment on blogs are currupting conversations. A strong opinion for which I feel is limiting. The sense I got from the ending of this interview: the real power resting in the potential of Internet, not particular tools people will create to make money off it.
Jeff Jarvis the vlogger! With his great video coverage of Davos under his belt, I asked him to handle some interviews for Beet.TV at the AlwaysOn conference in Manhattan this week.
Here Jeff has a talk with Harvard’s David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the ground-breaking Cluetrain Manifesto.
David is an author of an upcoming book about folksonomies and tags called “Everything is Miscellanous.”
Here’s the rising videoblogger Jeff Jarvis (l) in action, interviewing David Weinberger at the AlwaysOn conference.
P.S. Note — we are providing transcriptions of our interviews on Beet.TV — the lag is about 5 days since the the transcriptions are done by real human beings who understand and write real English! So, you should check back at this post to find the transcription in a few days. Here is our Beet.TV transcription blog.
This is something I first found in Tom Foremski’s NewRulesCommunications. Tom references BuzzMachine.com’s story New rule: Cover what you do best. Link to the rest about how local papers might do better by covering their community and taking wire/Internet stories to report on the world outside their community. This rule just might help us all in the age of links and aggregation. Embedded media players are proving that we’re moving beyond just using links.
Rohit Bhargava offers more sound advice based for working with bloggers http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2007/02/read_this_befor.html. His five principles for marketers interested in getting a product into the hands of bloggers to talk about:
And PodTech’s Marketing Voices — host Jennifer Jones is the Terry Gross of Social Media — has an interesting interview with David Hornik, general partner at August Capital. As early-stage investors in companies like Microsoft, August knows what makes great companies, and Hornik serves as its social media expert.
[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/02/PID_002021/Podtech_MV_Hornik.mp3&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/marketingvoices/technology/1253/august-capitals-david-hornik-on-social-media&totalTime=1147000&breadcrumb=3F34K2L1]
Long Tail author Chris Anderson blogs “Don’t Confuse Media With Media Institutions” http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/the_one_thing_e.html.
“First, let’s agree that “media” is anything that people want to read, watch or listen to, amateur or professional. The difference between the “old” media and the “new” is that old media packages content and new media atomizes it. Old media is all about building businesses around content. New media is about the content, period. Old media is about platforms. New media is about individual people. (Note: “old” does not mean bad and “new” good–I do, after all, run a very nicely growing magazine/old media business.)
The problem with most of the companies Skrenta lists is that they were/are trying to be a “news aggregators”. Just as one size of news doesn’t fit all, one size of news aggregator doesn’t either.
Every day I get most of my news from blogs. I don’t visit “news sites” or use a “news aggregator”. I use a generic feedreader (Bloglines) and a totally idiosyncratic RSS subscription list that includes everything from personal posts from friends to parts (but not all) of the WSJ. When it comes to the web, I have no interest in someone else trying to guess what I want to read or “help” me by defining what’s news and what isn’t. My news is not your news; indeed, you probably wouldn’t call most of it news at all. I will probably never visit any of the sites Skrenta mentions, and never did visit the ones that are now defunct.
In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomena is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomena.”
Movin' Ahead 