Say What?

They say YouTube isn’t making any money.  Its bread and butter is user-generated content, although it has managed to draw partnerships with some major Hollywood content providers, such as Fox and Warner Bros.  Nevertheless, the money is supposed to be sparse.  Then you have Hulu, which got started with content from some of the major players, like NBC Universal and Fox, right off the bat.  Hulu is, according to the word on the street, doing very well.  And so what we’re looking at is two models, UGC and content from mass media.  In other words, a site catering to social media vs. a site catering to mass media (or, instead of simply saying “mass media”, we mean the lumbering, late arrival of mass media content providers to the social media space).

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Posted by Brian Steel

Last night, I experienced my first introduction to Silverlight. I finally had the opportunity to catch up on some of the Olympic games that I had missed. So, I figured what the heck, why not check out the games online? After a simple Google search, I found NBCOlympics.com. I clicked through the site in order to watch some Olympic events only to discover that I must download the Silverlight plug-in software before proceeding. Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device plug-in software solution for embedded streaming media player technologies, which happens to be .NET compatible. Although I anticipated my experience to be much worse, I was pleasantly surprised. One click and a minute later the .DMG file was on my desktop. I do not know why Microsoft software runs so much smoother on Macintosh?

Anyway, upon completion of the software install, I was back on NBCOlympics.com watching Olympic programming such as Women’s Archery, Softball and Kayaking. You know all the extremely important ‘mainstream’ Olympic events. It was great! The Silverlight player was easy to use and the streams were like watching the real event on a really small screen with the option to enlarge. However I do not recommend the enlarge feature it is not so great, the playback becomes ‘blocky,’ ‘distorted’ and difficult to watch.

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Love this New York Times article about NBC’s futile attempts to maintain its US broadcast monopoly on the Olympics opening ceremonies.

NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.

In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.

Also love good-friend-of-the-MCDM Tracy Record’s (from the West Seattle Blog) most excellent comment in said article:

“The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive.”

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Posted by Hanson Hosein:

We’ve often discussed how we’re witnessing the death of industrialized, mass media. For those who might recall, this top-down form of communication, involved massive technical resources, high barriers to entry, and a captive market of millions of eyeballs. Network TV, in particular, reached its peak in the 1970′s with ratings grabbers like “Roots,” “60 Minutes” and “M*A*S*H.”

Now this interesting article, “Broadcast Networks Under Siege” notes that the disastrous May “sweeps” [begins] “to look like a signal moment in the slow, painful meltdown of the broadcast-TV industry.”

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