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April 26, 2004
a proper marriage of tv and blogs.
a friend of mine who does technology development for a Big Media Network asked me a blue sky question over a couple of pints at NAB last week: if i could properly marry television and blogs, how would i do it?
I ended up giving two answers: a drunken rant that night (use RSS!), and a longer, more sober one which I recount here:
I just realized that this post belonged over at unmediated, so i closed comments here and reposted it there.
1. Start publishing your program schedule as an openly subscribable RSS feed based on the XMLTV format. It will allow folks to publish feedrolls of their favorite TV shows on their blogs. If people like your programming, they'll spread the word for you. You gain instant karma.
2. Fund Andrew Grumet's (and other folks') work to marry BitTorrent, RSS, and TiVos. Make sure it all works with your newly minted RSS feed.
3. Pay someone else to graft the TiVo interface onto a BitTorrent client. My mom can use a TiVo. My mom could care less for BitTorrent. The geek in me finds this funny since they're basically the same thing. They're both "downloaders" although one goes out in search of content while the other waits for the content to fly by in the stream. For my mother, the difference is in the UI. P2P apps make excellent software but horrible players, and ultimately, civilians don't need download managers. Throw all of the file management to the background and toss the whole thing in a set-top box.
4. Change your advertising model. People don't like 30-second ads. Move all advertising to product placement (Queer Eye is the best infomercial EVAR!), show sponsorship (Texaco Star Theater, anyone?) and less-obtrusive snipes. And if it isn't overdone, have your audience make your advertising for you. This should probably come first, but as I'm a geek, I want to emphasize steps 1-3 first.
5. Make it easy for folks to download your programming via BitTorrent. Don't worry: you've embedded your advertising in your programming, remember? To you, what matters are the eyeballs, not the interface. Set up a decent number of servers as file seeders on some fat bandwidth. The only major thing missing from the broadcatching concept is guaranteed sources. You have the bucks and the broadband to provide that.
6. Encourage bloggers to create feedrolls of their favorite TV programs, irregardless of the TV network. Sometimes you have to build culture to create audience. (Don't give up on me now. We're almost there.)
7. Create an Amazon Associates-style revenue sharing program for bloggers who's readers click through to download an entire episode. Extra commission for those who click on interactive ad links. Even more for those who's click throughs turn into actual transactions. If I had it my way, ABC.com would be a lot more like Amazon.com, complete with links for "People who watched Such-and-Such also watched So-And-So."
There are still a lot of holes, but it's a start.
Posted by yatta at 11:40 PM | TrackBack
April 13, 2004
Biz 2.0 interview with Mike Ramsay of TiVo
Fluffy but interesting interview with the TiVo CEO. Check this part out:
"...Say I'm looking for Martin Scorsese movies, and I search for Scorsese on TiVo. Back comes all this stuff that's on television, but there's also some website that's got an interview with Martin Scorsese that's never been shown on TV. Say we can index that and it will show up on our program guide, so if you choose it, it'll start to "record" -- download over broadband onto your TiVo.
We've got the ability to integrate broadcast and broadband in a way that doesn't change the user interface one bit. The paradigm is exactly the same....."
Posted by yatta at 1:28 PM | TrackBack
April 11, 2004
Hossein Derakhshan's 'Making A Blogosphere'
found this earlier today at buzzmachine. Hossein Derakhshan, a Canadian-based Iranian blogger, posted his guidelines for creating a community of bloggers. After Ryan posted it to unmediated, I commented on how Hossein's words were not unlike some of the more important community organizing texts i've read over the years:
Essentially it's about harnessing energy and getting it to move on its own. you show folks what's possible, you teach them how to do it, and then you help them create mechanisms for self-sustainability.
It translates to other media forms as well. Just replace the word 'blogosphere' with 'youth video center' or 'community radio station' and it all seems like the same darn thing.
Posted by yatta at 3:50 AM | TrackBack
April 6, 2004
unmediated is up.
for those of you who come here interested in non-major media stuff, go check out unmediated, a group blog that tracks the tools, resources, processes, and ideas related to decentralized media production. we've got a bunch of interesting folks blogging and reblogging over there. someone's bound to come up with something good. ;)
Posted by yatta at 11:23 PM | TrackBack
April 1, 2004
OMG! IM is VoIP!
All of a sudden Vonage is looking just a wee bit like Kerbango. ;) Om Malik posts from Spring VON that Microsoft has made public the discovery that VoIP is little more than IM on dedicated devices. Every month or so I'll complain about this or that cell network and ask Yury to remind me that voice just an app. QoS hell, here we come!