April 27, 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:
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. Let them aggregate their own virtual TV stations, if they want to. 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 02:31 AM
Wow. Now THAT'S common sense. I just hope that somebody in NYC/Hollywood is paying attention and heeds some of this advice.
Thanks.
Somebody in Abu Dhabi, who has a satellite channel at his disposal, finds the subject of Yatta's post highly promising. I must admit, though, that the geek-speak confounds me since I am relatively new to blogging.
So, let's have this articulated in language that your moms and dads can understand.
Our channel is already 'participative' through the heavy integration of text messaging. So for me blogs (including moblogs and audioblogs) are the logical next step.
Looking forward to learning how this can be approached...
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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Wow. Now THAT'S common sense. I just hope that somebody in NYC/Hollywood is paying attention and heeds some of this advice.
Thanks.
Posted by: david at April 28, 2004 05:42 PM