A Guide for Thinking about New TV

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When the Internet was first getting popular, and popularized, as a media platform we talked about how it would provide people with new ways to consume or get existing things – that is, newspapers, magazines, music, radio, television, movies. It was hard for us then to imagine how the Internet would, in fact, give us new ways to make and to consume new things – blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, casual and social games, photos on Flickr, and so on. It was hard for us to envision the real revolution that would take place.

And so it is now with so much of the analysis of the revolution that is about to happen with video, and the television (a subject of a post last week). Much – no, most – of that discussion focused on how these new devices and platforms (Apple TV, Google TV, the iPad and the Kindle) will give us access to the existing world of programming we understand and know. Once again, most people may be missing the bigger revolution that is about to occur.

For me, that revolution is about bringing the world of internet video to the television (or the devices that eventually replace the television). That is, the new programming. The forty-eight hours of video uploaded this minute to YouTube. The thousands of sites that offer new types and kinds of programming — stuff we watch and enjoy every day from TED, College Humor, The Onion, and Pitchfork, not to mention Vimeo and blip.tv and even new types of programming from traditional print giants like the New York Times or Time or the Guardian. And all the new programming that is to come, and that we can’t even envision yet.

And because of the fact there is so much of this new programming, we need new ways to discover it and to watch it. At Showyou, we think this coming world looks like this:

Most of the recent talk has been about the new ways to find traditional programming (the upper left quadrant). But we think the real excitement lays in that upper right quadrant –  new ways to find new programming. That’s where the revolution will happen.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Television

The Genius of Twitter

September 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It was fun to watch so many people rush to talk about Facebook this past week… on Twitter.

There was a delicious irony in that, of course, but it also provoked an underlying and important question: why do we take to Twitter to talk about Facebook and Google+ and everything else? Why not use those platforms for that discussion?

Twitter’s appeal is hard to pin down, and most often we resort to these answers: that it’s real-time, simple, asymmetrical (with following/follower relationships), or that it’s perfectly tailored to mobile usage.

I think there is an even more fundamental explanation, one that lies at the very core of the service  — Twitter is egalitarian (hat tip to my pal Om for providing that perfect word in discussing this point this morning). We stand on equal footing on Twitter; each tweet looks the same, is of similar length, occupies the same number of pixels. The literal design and UI of Twitter creates the appearance of  talking to each other and with one another as equals.

Compare that to Facebook and Google+, which compel us to use nested comments to have a discussion. If Om posts something on Facebook or Google+, I can comment on his post — but my thoughts are portrayed to the world as subordinate to Om’s. The layout echoes the more hierarchical relationship between a publisher and its readers ; my comment is not presented as an equal to Om’s original post, it’s presented as an homage.*

So we all take to Twitter to talk about Facebook because it’s the one place where we feel like our voice is equal to everyone else’s.

Twitter has been counted out by a lot of folks in the past month or so (with the launch of Google+ and the updates for Facebook). Many have complained that Twitter has failed to innovate. I don’t know how or why it has remained so fundamentally unchanged these past five years, but I like to think that obstinate insistence on keeping the service pure, simple — indeed, egalitarian — is the genius of Twitter.

* The nested comment format is, however, perfect for a response to a friend. Indeed, an homage is exactly what we intend in that instance.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Web/Tech

“Life is an intelligent thing”

July 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I read a lot, usually fiction. But (unusually for me) I’ve lately been reading a lot of the current, popular books about the technology world. In the Plex, by Steven Levy about Google. The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick.

And now “Inside Steve’s Brain.”

This passage – about Jobs’ doubts about returning to Apple in 1996 – has stayed with me the past few days:

He sometimes wondered if he was doing the right thing… He knew that returning to Apple would put pressure on Pixar, his family and his reputation. ‘I wouldn’t be honest if some days I didn’t question whether I made the right decision in getting involved. But I believe that life is an intelligent thing — that things aren’t random.’

Filed Under: Digital Media, Startups

A New Way to Watch

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today our startup launched a new app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch — Showyou. I’ve worked in digital media for almost 20 years now — shocking, that — and of the many products I’ve worked on, I can say without hesitation this is the one I’m the most excited to have helped create.

I love our new Showyou app most of all because it’s a joy to use. But I’m also excited about Showyou because it and other similar apps that are sure to follow have the potential to change how we watch TV — and what we watch.

We spend more time watching television than consuming any other form of media. Kids 8-18 years old watch television nearly 4 and a half hours a day — far more than they spend with any other kind of media.

And yet television has remained the most shackled platform, with the least range of choice.  With books, music, magazines and more recently the internet we’ve become accustomed to an abundance of choice. The television, on the other hand, has been locked down for most of the last 50 years, limited (for most people) to a set of channels chosen and delivered by their cable companies, and with programming on those channels determined by a small, select group. Maybe 1000 people, total, determine what most of us watch — or can watch. They’ve offered up some great stuff, to be sure — The Wire, Mad Men, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. But we’ve also gotten a lot of this.  And this. And this.

Despite the growing power of the Internet and social media, television has continued to reign supreme from 8-11PM in most homes. But cracks are starting to show. Data just released this week from the makers of the ReadItLater app shows that the heaviest usage of the iPad during the prime time hours. And we know that streaming from Netflix now accounts for a huge percentage of bandwidth consumed in the evenings.

And now, with Apple TV and  Airplay, your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch just turned into a new remote control for your TV. New apps like Showyou have the potential to change where we get programming for our televisions, and indeed what we watch.  Now available: tens of millions of hours of programming from the internet, chosen by our friends, or people we follow on social networks like Twitter or Vodpod who have tastes or interests similar to ours. Other platforms from other companies  — Android, Windows, and more — will surely give us more options and more choice still over time.

History shows us what happens when these kinds of disruptions occur. In 1985, when cable TV was still in its infancy, the viewers watched broadcast networks 45% of the time. By 2009, that had dropped to 25%, and basic cable has risen 10-fold, from  a 3.5% share to a 36% share.

Even though online video has had explosive growth the past five years, it accounts for just a small fraction of the time we spending watching television or video. Just like cable in 1984. There is a now an opportunity for entrepreneurs to change all that.

And so a pitched battle is going to be waged for how we get programming for our televisions — and that will be a good thing for consumers.

Filed Under: Apple, Digital Media, Internet, Television, Video

The Lost Magnificent Ambersons Footage: An Allegory

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”    – Steve Jobs, when asked if consumer research was done for the iPad (NYTimes)

The tale of The Magnificent Ambersons is well known among hard core movie fans. It was the first movie directed by Orson Welles after his ground-breaking Citizen Kane, and Welles and others thought it was an even better picture than Kane. But Welles went off to Brazil to make another movie just as Magnificent Ambersons was going into final edits, and left the film in the hands of the studio (RKO) and his associates. Who proceeded to test a version of the film in front of a group of teenagers in Pomona, California who had come to see a wartime musical, The Fleet’s In.

Predictably, the kids savaged the film, and in Welles’ absence RKO and some of Welles’ colleagues proceeded to butcher the picture, cutting it down from a run time of 132 minutes to 88 minutes.  No copies of the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons are known to have survived. (Imagine for a second 44 minutes being hacked from Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, or Schindler’s List). This whole saga is recounted in more depth, and wonderfully, here.

The tragedy of the Magnificent Ambersons illustrates perfectly what happens when you’re making something that is designed to engage one’s emotions and you leave the really important decisions to a focus group, or A/B testing, or some similar data-driven process.  For when you’re trying to make something that produces joy, or that is “fun,” or that is playful, some art and some craft and a point a view is required. Things that are built to engage one’s emotions — movies, music, art, even devices like the iPad — can’t be systematically produced, or manufactured, or tested.

I’ve felt this strongly as we’ve made Showyou (a new app we launch in about 12 hours) the past few months. We wanted to make something that was, first and foremost, fun to use. That made you smile with delight. That was beautiful to look at.  We had (and continue to have) a point of view about how we ought to do that. We tested it with about 50 people over the past month, got wonderful feedback from them, and iterated intensively to make the app more usable as a result.

But some feedback — while rational, defensible, perfectly justifiable — we ignored. Intentionally. Because acting on it would have involved taking out or substantially altering the very elements that, in our view, make Showyou fun to use.

It may be that tomorrow we’ll be proven wrong. And indeed, there’s definitely the risk of leaving too much in — or failing to recognize when you’ve just got a bad idea to start with (Ishtar?!).

But as I’ve gotten older, and worked on more products, I’ve come very much to the view that you have to have a point of view. And be willing to stick to it. You might be wrong. Or you might make something great. With Showyou, we are excited about what we’ve built, and eager to make it better still.

For in our world, unlike the movies, you’re never done and you always keep working towards perfection.

Filed Under: Apple, Digital Media, Startups

In Case You Didn’t Know It, Video is Huge

September 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This chart (and related stories) released by Comscore got a lot of attention last week.

Facebook is now the #1 site in the United States as measured in “time spent” with 41 billion usage minutes per month. Google is now in second place, with 39.8B minutes, and Yahoo in third place (37.7B minutes).

It got me wondering: how do YouTube and other video sites stack up in terms of time spent?

First interesting discovery: based on the chart below from Comscore, “video” (meaning, YouTube) accounts for 37.5B out of Google’s 39.8B minutes of usage (math is: 144M unique viewers X 261 minutes usage per viewer). That means almost 95% of the time people spend on Google is spent on YouTube. 95%! Unbelievable.

But it makes sense. The chart above shows Google’s percentage share of minutes spent increasing steadily and rapidly from Q3 2006 onwards — right when they bought YouTube.

Given Google’s mission to capture more display revenues (partcicularly branded video display revenues) the value YouTube has provided is incredible. It was a steal — a steal — at $1.6B.

Wrap your head around that for a moment.

Total time watching video online according to Comscore is 154 billion minutes per month (177M people X 870 minutes per viewer), or 2.6 billion hours per month. Or the equivalent of 4 Facebook’s worth of usage.

While Facebook scores reasonably high in terms of total viewers for video on its site (43M), total minutes spent watching videos pales in comparison to YouTube and Hulu; roughly 866M minutes of usage, compared to 37.5B on YouTube and 3.3B minutes on Hulu and 2.7B on Vevo. (As an aside, I’m curious whether the Facebook measurement includes minutes spent watching embedded videos on Facebook, or just Facebook-hosted videos).

The fact that YouTube accounts for such a massive and overwhelming percentage of time spent on Google services is the thing that boggles my mind. Have I somehow gotten my math wrong?

UPDATE: One additional observation: unlike Google, minutes spent watching videos is just a small fraction of the time people spend on Yahoo! While Yahoo! is #2 in terms of reach, it’s a laggard in terms of minutes spent; just 755M minutes of usage per month, or 2% of the overall time people spend with Yahoo! services. Clearly an area where they’ll need to make progress if they are to compete for brand dollars in video advertising.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Google, Video

People, the New Distribution Platform: Part 1 of 3

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the more interesting pieces of informational art to grace the web recently was this depiction of Gawker’s traffic growth driven by social networks:

via Allthingsd

There are a number of remarkable things about this graph: the heterogeneous array of social media sites, all driving relatively large amounts of traffic to Gawker; that Stumble Upon as a source of traffic is nearly as big as Facebook and growing; and that Facebook has become a much, much more important source since its introduction of a web-wide “Like” button last year.

But what the graph shows, above all, is that we’ve clearly reached the point where social media — or put in plain English, people sharing links and media and information with other people — matters.

People, it turns out, are the new distribution platform.

For most people who work on or write about the Internet and digital media, this is very old news. The evolution of social media platforms, from Delicious to Digg to  Twitter and Facebook, has been the focus of much commentary the past three to four years (including on this blog). But many people — including, I know for a fact, many media company executives — believe to this day that “social media” and “Web 2.0″ are just empty buzzwords without much relevance or real-world import to their bottom lines. The Gawker chart, emphatically, gives the lie to all that.

If you are an owner or maker of media, whether a blogger or broadcaster, you’re in the business of getting your content distributed. And in the coming years (perhaps decades) that will require you to enlist people to be your distributors — to share your content with their friends, or with people who have similar tastes and interests.

And so you’re faced with interesting new strategic questions. Do you rely on Twitter and Facebook to provide that distribution for you, on their terms and under their control? Or, do you invest building out social media distribution platforms over which you have more control?

Some media companies tried to address this question in 2006 & 2007, in the wake of the Myspace boom, by buying or building their own social networks. But almost all of these efforts conflated controlling a “social network” with “social media distribution.” They attempted to replicate Myspace and Facebook, offering their own proprietary “friending” platforms, instead of thinking more broadly about how to build different, more specialized social graphs around their content.

Newer companies like Quora and StackOverflow might suggest a better approach. Each are building very specialized social graphs around specific topics or categories (“content verticals” in the industry parlance). They utilize existing relationships and connections on Facebook and Twitter but then enhance them, building new connections between people based on interests, tastes, expertise. We are doing something very similar at Vodpod, by building a specialized graph around discovery of video online.

Over the next few years, I expect an explosion in services and companies looking to offer specialized social graphs. Media makers and owners need to decide if they want to own these capabilities, or outsource them.

In the next  two posts, I’ll address:

Part II: Why “Winner Take All” Doesn’t Apply to Social Graphs

Part III: The Facebook Effect: Why are people scared by FB, and should they be?

Filed Under: Digital Media

It’s What You Node

July 23, 2010 By 3 Comments

Chris Dixon has an excellent blog post up about social graphs — a must read if you’re in the social media or social apps space (Mathew Ingram wrote a nice follow up here on Gigaom).

Chris says:

In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship. <emphasis is mine>

And he goes on to suggest that we’ll see, in the coming months and years, new types of graphs around taste, endorsements, payments (“financial trust”), and local data. I think that’s right, but just partly.

The starting point for this discussion really ought to start with the node — that is, how and where we represent ourselves digitally.  Given  the gigantic success of Facebook, there is an implicit assumption that all our nodes are belong to Facebook — that it will be the primary place we express ourselves digitally —  and Facebook will thus own all the graphs that matter as a result (I think this is, essentially, the argument Mathew makes on Gigaom).

But for most of us, one node to rule all graphs just won’t do. Think about your interests, what you like doing, how you spend your free time, what your passions are, what music you like. Can you really express your full sense of self — all those things you both love and do — on and through Facebook, with your contacts on Facebook? Are your Facebook friends truly interested in all of the details of all the things you do and like?

For most, I suspect, the answer is no. In fact, one of the biggest complaints I hear from people about Facebook is how “noisy” it is — that we’re subjected to a flood of information from friends and acquaintances we really don’t care about. I care about my friends and their families and where they went on vacation. But I might not care as much about my friend’s obsession with, say, fly fishing. Or how much they just loved that Rush song. I suspect this is a large part of Facebook’s poor consumer satisfaction results compared to other services. Their rush to facilitate sharing of everything, instead of sharing by and between friends of things related to their friendships, has come at a cost.

We need different nodes to express all the things we like, all the things we do. Ironically, though we mock Google’s cluelessness  when it comes to social, the best research I’ve seen on this comes from a Google employee. Each of us has different interests and passions which we in turn want to share with different groups of people. It’s why many of us share some things on Facebook, others on Twitter, and more still on our blogs or other sites and services. We each need to express ourselves through many nodes, on many different graphs.

Indeed, we’ve already see plenty of examples of this: communities on Flickr for those into photography; or last.fm for people passionate about their music; or flixster for movies. Big opportunities still exist to create services that allow for distinct and specific expression of self combined with the right graph. And these opportunities don’t play to Facebook’s strengths, because so much of this is about expression and publishing — not just the graph mapping the nodes. Indeed, this may be where Google still has a few very strong cards to play with assets like Blogger and Buzz and YouTube.

We’re increasingly focused on building a very particular graph at Vodpod, based on our unique type of nodes — collections of videos, many of them very deep, many of them very focused.  For the first couple of years, we concentrated just on the utility of our service — making it dead simple to build a video collection, using your favorite videos from any site on the web, and to share it on your blog or elsewhere.

But now that we have attained significant scale (nearly 6M videos, nearly a million members with many thousands with very deep collections, 10M unique visitors each month, videos from over 17,000 sites) we have the opportunity to build one of these more specialized graphs. In our case, it’s about connecting you with the right collector so that you can get a video feed tailored to your interests and tastes. Whether you’re interested in soccer, politics, viral videos, technology, or electronica.

We’re now able to do this with increasing sophistication at Vodpod. For example, if you visit my collection and sign up from that page, we’ll recommend other, similar collectors for you to follow:

While we’ve enabled “following” on Vodpod for years, we’ve not focused on building out a graph between and around our video-centric nodes until now. The data represented in these nodes  – these video collections — enables us to do this in ways other cannot.

We started this effort in just the last week, and are beginning to see very profound results. Will we build a graph as big and as important as Facebook’s? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean the opportunity isn’t huge — we think we’re in a unique position to provide the best way for people to find and watch videos, via our members’ extraordinary collections and the graphs we’re building around those nodes. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and I suspect there are other, similar opportunities out there.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Facebook, Internet

Apple’s Big iPad Mistake

January 28, 2010 By 2 Comments

When Apple launched the initial iPod in 2001, they made two critical strategic decisions:

  • They focused on providing really great PC support on iTunes, and made the iPod a great device for PCs and Macs (remember, the Mac was not yet ascendant as a laptop); and
  • They supported MP3s

People bought (and loved) the iPod because it allowed them to take music they already had (through Napster, or that they’d ripped). The iPod became a dominant force in music by embracing and supporting an existing landscape (the PC, MP3), not by trying to circumvent that landscape (or trying to create an alternate reality right off-the-bat). People forget all this now, but the iTunes Store didn’t arrive until 18 months later; and only the huge wave of initial support for the iPod assured it would be a success. Apple changed the music industry paradigm only after they got tons of people to buy iPods, and they got people to buy iPods by making a great device that worked with MP3s they had on their PCs.

Turn to today’s launch. This was Steve Jobs’ lede today at the iPad unveiling:

You can browse the Web with it. It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.

Indeed, the Internet should be without doubt the killer app (initially) for the iPad.  What a joy to sit on a couch, or bed, or plane, or train with an iPad, using natural touch gestures to navigate and browse the web. I would buy this thing in a heartbeat if I could do that — everything else (iBooks, movies and video, games) would be gravy.

So what gives? Well, turns out you can’t truly browse the web with the iPad.

By ignoring Flash, Apple has basically made most of the web broken, as so clearly illustrated by the screenshot of their demo of the front page of the NY Times! It’s not just 10,000s sites which provide their videos in Flash (Hulu, yes, but also CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Comedy Central, BBC, and many, many more), but it’s the millions of flash widgets and other interactive elements on the page.  To get a sense, try this experiment — remove Flash from your computer, and start browsing around. If your web experience is unimpaired, maybe you’ll like the iPad. But I think most people will think: “Who broke the damn Internet?”

The iPad did, that’s who.

Now, I’ve seen some arguments today that this misses the point — that Apple isn’t just satisfied with replicating your standard web video experience, that they want to transform the entire video business.  Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee argues:

The iPad will cause ripples in multiple industries — including news, book publishing and gaming — but at the end of the day, I’m betting that what the iPad will be used for more than anything is watching video. Like the iPod, it’s only a matter of time before the iPad becomes the defining product with which to consume that type of media.

Could be. But they have to sell a ton of iPads first. And, by not embracing the existing landscape — the tens of thousands of video sites that provide hundreds of millions of videos encoded in Flash — they’ve cut off a natural, intial reason to buy and to use the device (and yes, I know all about HTML 5 video, and no the iPad is not going to cause a stampede to that overnight). If I have to choose between a lightweight, fully functional wireless enabled laptop that works well on every web site and that allows me to watch videos from Hulu and Netflix and a gazillion other places, and an iPad that doesn’t support Flash or any site that  uses Flash and only lets me watch videos from iTune and YouTube, which am I gonna use?

Simple. I’ll stick with my Macbook for now, thanks.

Filed Under: Apple, Digital Media, Internet, Video

Old Media, New Media

February 3, 2006 By

Some of the digital media cheerleaders out there are so eager to dethrone “old media” and the MSM, but sometimes I worry their plans will neither cure the disease or save the patient, just replace it with something different and maybe worse in some regards.

In short, despite the fact I’ve made a living in digital media for over a dozen years and consider it my calling, I hope many traditional forms of “old media” won’t go away anytime soon or be displaced by new media.

Books, for example. Love them. Not just the narrative form, the linear story, the artful prose, but the form factor of paper and pages and spines and the feel of them and the portability. They just work, have for hundreds of years, I’m not sure whether hyperlinks or digitization would add anything, and I know they might take away a lot. I can’t imagine, ever, lying in bed and reading a book on an ereader.

Newspapers, as another example. That business, which employed and employs my father for nearly five decades now, put food on our table when I was a kid and helped put me through college. So there is that bias, yes. But also the depth, the lack of interruption, the form factor again — whether spreading the paper over the table next to my coffee at breakfast, or reading a redtop, or the Independent, or the Guardian berliner format on the tube, or sitting in a cafe somewhere in the sun parsing through the International Herald Tribune (so snotty sounding, yes, but so pleasing). No distracting hyperlinks, or e-mail chimes, or other nonsense that results in twitching, not reading. I like the purity of the newspaper experience — reading, thinking, reading some more. 

An aside at this point: I go to Ritual in San Francisco to meet friends now and again, and it’s full of people with laptops open cranking on the free wifi. I joked to my friend the other day: “They should put some cubes in here.” Sure, I like my wifi in a coffee house now and again. But at Ritual, it’s always on: few folks, sometime none, have a newspaper or a book there. That makes me a bit sad, I think they’re all missing something really.

Films, on the screen, in a movie theater. Don’t care if it’s digital or analog, but the traditional experience of seeing a movie with a hundred other people, the community of our common laughter or suppressed gasps. That is nice, it feels human and connected and vibrant in a way that sitting in front of a tv doesn’t. I don’t ever want that to go away.

I go back and forth on theater. Yes, when great, which is really just in New York or LA or London best of all. But elsewhere?

Most television and music I’m happy to consume in more digital forms, be it DVDs or just bits on an iPod or over IP.

Cinemas, books,  newspapers — I like them analog, I hope they stay that way.

Filed Under: Digital Media, Film, Lit, Music, Television
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