Portals and KM

The Rise of Data Journalism and Related Tools

Liliana Bounegru discussed the state of data journalism and its growing influence through an interview with Alex Howard on O’Reilly Radar (see: The bond between data and journalism grows stronger). This is a topic I have covered before for example, Progressive Mainstream Media Moving to News Aggregation.

Liliana explained that in the past reporters gathered and analyzed data as “a way of enhancing (usually investigative) reportage, whereas data journalism pays attention to the way that data sits within the whole journalistic workflow. In this sense, data journalism pays equal attention to finding stories and to the data itself.” Of course now there is so much data that this issue is sifting through the massive amounts to find what is relevant. She quoted Philip Meyer,  "When information was scarce, most of our efforts were devoted to hunting and gathering. Now that information is abundant, processing is more important." She also quotes Tim Berners-Lee, "data-driven journalism is the future".

Providing readers with access to data sources they can drill down and find information that is personally relevant, as well as to do their own fact checking, This type of data journalism provides a much needed service just like the links in this post allow you to go to the original source and likely through those sources to others. I noticed that for a long time the New York Times only linked to other stories within itself. Now they provide links to sources outside the Times. They are moving up the maturity model.

Liliana also mentions some useful tools for data cleaning, analysis and visualization Tow of these are ScraperWiki and Google Refine for data collection and analysis. At this point I also have to mention the Darwin Awareness Engine™ which creates content visualizations that allow you to quickly scan across the themes contained in the content within your topic of interest. To find what is meaningful to you. With the Scan Cloud, the top 100 themes within a set of content are displayed in a manner that allows for easy sorting and investigation. With Buzz tape, the topics of rising interest appear like a stock ticker and then you can make the ones of interest become the center of a Scan Cloud.

It has been applied to the new journalism as a way to shift through massive amounts of data on immigration in the US. (see our five part series on what PBS affiliate, KETC, did to create a great community through social media. Here is also some advice on how to proceed with this type of news aggregation (Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty). 

 

SXSW Notes: No Brochures: Digital Storytelling for Nonprofits

Here is another in my series on SXSW events. I am pleased to be attending SXSW for the first time. I am grateful for Adobe Acrobat for enabling me to attend. I will be attending a number of Adobe sponsored sessions. As I do with other events I will be posting my notes from most of the sessions I attend. This is the session on No Brochures: Digital Storytelling for Nonprofits led by Joe Lambert, Exec Dir Center for Digital Storytelling, Michael Borum, Web Mgr Oxfam America, and Roger Black,  Principal Treesaver Company Inc. Here is the session description.

“Storytelling is an inherently key aspect of non-profit business. Donors deserve to know how their gifts are having an impact; potential donors need to know how they can make a difference. But are non-profits truly "thinking digital" when it comes to getting their stories noticed? Are we stuck in brochure mode? The next generation of philanthropists—and beyond—is comprised of digital natives, far more accustomed to non-linear interactive storytelling and far more comfortable with a touchscreen than a staple-bound booklet. Donors are expecting to see complex, layered data presented in the form of colorful, entertaining, easily digestible media. This panel will discuss and explore alternate approaches to get your story noticed across a range of digital platforms.”

Michael said that Oxfam is still trying to figure how to best use digital channels. The goal of the session today is to listen to what the experts on the panel have to say. Roger has done a lot of work for Web sites for non-profits. Lately he works on at Treesaver, that is an open source publishing platform. Roger was taught as a print designer. You assemble pages to engage readers. Now in digital world you add space for people to add content. It is more of a two-way connection. One issue is how you find things within the Web site. If everything is nicely tagged you can find things easily. 

With a book, when you start reading a book you get lost in the content but the quality of the physical book itself is less of an issue. In the Web you want connection and quality of format matters. Many non-profits started with brochure like Web sites and added blogs. People want a social layer beyond the blog. Now multiple target audiences are added and multiple devices with different interfaces. Roger showed how a story can be adapted to the size of the screen. Treesaver.net is an HTML5 platform based on Java script. It is open source.

Joe went next. He is from a small town in Texas. He felt his Texas stories were not being told, only those on both coasts. In the 1930s there were union strikes about pecan workers. His parents were there and did a lot of work around social justice. He told about a group in the Rio Grande Valley community that sent children to top colleges who then came back to serve as teachers to the community. The community told an amazing story about how this program started and the reason for it that he showed us on video. It had much greater impact with its focus on individual lives than concepts or numbers. People give money because of the impact on individuals.

Storytellers should give control over creating stories to the groups who have the stories. Joe’s group has covered a variety of topics on a global basis. Digital stories are the key entry point. A big thing is to listen. You need to stop and take the time to listen. Look at www.storycenter.org.

Questions – for Treesaver. The asker does a lot of print, puts it in PDF and puts on the Web. How can digital be made to be more involved? The answer was that first print will not go away. It is not a replacement situation like cars over horses for transportation.  There will always be a place for print. They are looking at how to learn from print to make digital more effective. But also they are looking at how to do things that make best use of the unique capabilities for digital.

They look to telling fewer stories over a longer period of time through many channels. They hope to modify these stories to better fit each channel, such as Facebook Timeline.  It is best to have few good stories than many that are hard to follow.  

Can people do a good job of listening on Twitter? Joe likes the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows and I also agree (see Stepping Out of the Shallows: Moving from Push to Pull in Our Web Presence). Carr argues that we are losing our ability to concentrate because of the Web. Joe does not like Twitter for this reason but it can be a means to connect people. I actually like aspects of Twitter and do use it to connect with people. I have even shown my paintings and sold some through Twitter.

What about storytelling sites? Most work because there was already a community of practice sharing stories already. Many non-profits do not have a comment or donate button at the end of their stories and this is a huge missed opportunity. Many non-profits stay away from marketing as a bad thing but it is necessary.

Look at cowbird.com for a collection of stories with visuals. From Oxfam: Use few stories and make then count. You have to use different channels to make it stand out and encourage them to go deeper into the story. Try for deep than many. Do more with less. Quality counts more than quantity.  As a rule, if you are feeling overworked, do less work, just more quality work. This is a good idea. I find it I am doing too much work, I must be doing something wrong. 

SXSW Notes: The Curators and the Curated

Here is another in my series on SXSW events. I am pleased to be attending SXSW for the first time. I am grateful for Adobe Acrobat for enabling me to attend. I will be attending their all day Creative Camp Event on March 12, as well as some other Adobe sponsored sessions. As I do with other events I will be posting my notes from most of the sessions I attend. This is the session on The Curators and the Curated led by David Carr. Columnist/Reporter/Blogger, The New York Times, Maria Popova, Founder Brain Pickings, and Max Linsky, co-founder, longform.org. David Carr writes a column for the Monday Business section of the New York Times that focuses on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The New York Times covering all aspects of popular culture.Please excuse any typos and they notes are near real time. Here is the session description.

 "At the heart of our conversation: the relationship between publishers of original content and the web’s most influential curators. Seems simple, right? Content creators get eyeballs and curators get work to share. But with some curators dwarfing publications in size and influence, and with some publishers investing heavily in curation projects of their own, that relationship is getting a little complicated. We’ll get our hands dirty and break down just how important curators and publishers are to each other, how money plays into things and how attribution has become a lost art. Other fun stuff you’ll learn: what makes a curator influential, how content-creators can be curator friendly (and vice versa), and the evolving distinction between curation and aggregation.”

The first speaker said the theme for the session was about “David Carr giving us advice.”  We saw a video about finding great content and the connections between content fro ma wide number of people. It is not just selection but the way you pick it. The role of the curators is finding things that people will enjoy. The latest content is not necessarily the best. Ideas are the most valuable thing we have.

The term curation is getting over used and has many definitions. What is difference between curation and aggregation? The answers are from everyone as it was hard to separate them. Curation is by people who make choices. Aggregation is done by technology and algorithms and people are more interesting. Curation also has a moral lens and aggregation does not.  In terms of the Huffington Post it is about what maximizes traffic. There is not a moral lens here. Someone said it is different to have a moral lens and a moral lens you agree with.  David said that the moral lens does not work well as a concept (because it is relative?).

In the act of curation you making a decision about what is important. Curators provide a pattern of information that has a message about what is important in the world. Maria launched the curator’s code yesterday. She has been working on it for a year. The act of bringing content to people is act of art. She has some signs for it. One if you found the idea elsewhere and another that if you found the idea elsewhere but expanded on it. See curatorscode.org.

David Carr said we should not get to hung up on curation as new. Editors have been making decisions like this for a long time. The front page of the New York Times is a significant act of curation. What are the six most important stories in the world today?

David said when the consumer Web started we thought we are going to learn new things. But people click on what they want so things remain siloed. People use their Facebook and Twitter friends that think as they do. There is not as cross-fetization. I would agrue that of anything there is even more silos as there are mre niche sites that appeal to people with special viewpoints and they get all their news from there. There was a Pew study that found that people who watched Fox News on TV got more errors on current events that those that did not watch TV news at all. Of course, there are TV stations with a progressive bias, as well.

What is the relationship between curation and original content?  Brain Pickings has relationships with original publishers and helps link them to targeted advertisers. Many curators have started their blogs as a bookmark for themselves. Others have liked their taste and followed them. I use both Twitter and my blog for this same purpose.  Twitter bookmarks things and then some of them become the source for blog posts. My blog primarily serves as my personal knowledge system, like the notes for this session.

The circulation manager should not run the paper and this applies to Web curation also. Maria does her service as a non-profit for this reason.

David said there is an impulse to share is what good but it is also a way to try to gain status and can have the wrong motives. David said that one way Maria works well is that she can do serendipity very well. There is great value to this.

David finds Flipboard to be very useful in part because it is beautiful to look at.

At longform they post four stories every day. They tried eight and twelve and it made no difference so they settled on four. David that this is like the six stories on the front page of the New York Times. Aside from sex, new and old stories get clicked on the same number of times. In find the majority of the most popular posts on my blog for a year are not from that year.

David said it is easier for a curator to create great content absent ads. When they first thought about charging for online content at the New York Times, people said it would fail. They now have 280,000 people paying for their content. It is beginning to get to be more revenue from the consumer than from ads. The more the New York Times goes toward the consumer as revenue stream, the better the content gets.

Questions started:

A question was about having people pay for content after they read it. Some people are trying this but longform Is not doing it.

David said that when he worked for a Minneapolis paper that got selective on ads and the paper failed while the one that was non-selective survived. 

 

 

Washington Post Reinvents Itself on the Web

I have written about both the fall of traditional news media through social media (see Who Killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple) and the those enlightened media outlets that have embraced social media to their advantage (see for example, NPR is Expanding its Traditional Media Audience Through Social Media and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring. The New York Times recently wrote about the efforts of the Washington Post to ride the crest of the social media wave rather than become swept under it in their story, A Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered.

Through their efforts the Post has risen to the number two online news outlet only behind the New York Times. They note that the Post has the same problems as other daily newspapers, whose revenues have sunk as the Web and the tough economy has further cut back on advertising revenue. The news staff is 60% of what it used to be. To address this challenge, the Posts has undertaken, “one of the most sweeping and closely watched reorientations of any newsroom in the country. The editors now stress online metrics and freely borrow from the playbooks of more nimble online competitors like Politico and The Huffington Post.”

So what did they do to achieve this new success? They expanded their “Web presence by trying to meld what was great about the old Post with new traffic-baiting tricks of online start-ups — creating new, high-minded blogs…” They also integrated their digital and print operations that had been run separately. This is what all media outlets should do, just as any organization today should integrate is traditional business and its social business.

They filled the newsroom with also brought in large flat-screen monitors that provide real-time projections in real time on what the most popular online stories. The also installed a new internal publishing system that require reporters to identify Google-friendly key words and flag them before their stories are edited. There are now 35 different daily reports that track traffic to different parts of the Web site.

Editors receive a midday performance alert, on whether the site is on track to meet its daily traffic goals. More importantly the top editors embraced studying traffic patterns as a useful way to determine where to focus the paper’s resources. But they have gotten more sophisticated as traffic is all that editors look for when determining whether to kill or expand a blog. They also look at where online visitors and if their computers are registered with a government suffix — .gov, .mil, .senate or .house — editors know they are reaching the desired audience. They have also adopted the language of the new Web using terms like page views, unique visitors and social media referrals in their conversations and strategy.

I think this is a great case example for not only the news media but for any business that wants to survive and succeed in today’s market.  Here is another example of the creative use of social media (see our five part series on what PBS affiliate, KETC, did to create a great community through social media. Here is also some advice on how help with this transformation.  (Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty). 

 

Progressive Mainstream Media Moving to News Aggregation

Perhaps no industry has been hit harder by the growth of user generated content and news aggregators of all stripes than the mainstream print newspapers. I have discussed this bit (for example, see Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple). Many progressive newspapers and television outlets have decided to join social media rather than fight it (see for example, Enhancing TV Viewing with Social Media and Interactivity and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring,).

Going Beyond Content Creation to Becoming a News Aggregator

Matthew Ingram recently expanded on ways traditional media can survive and thrive in a Web 2.0 world in his Gigaom piece, Don’t think of it as a newspaper — it’s a data platform. One of his suggestions is it to open up a relationship with outside developers. For example, USA Today APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data. The latter is made up of public data that has been collected by USA Today and put into in a more usable format than the original government version.

Matthew writes that the UK paper, the Guardian, has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. As Matthew writes, “one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API?” Good idea.

Becoming a News Aggregator Through Citizen Journalism

Another way to crowdsource the news is through citizen journalism. We have seen this informally through the use of Twitter and Facebook in many of the recent revolutionary movements in the Middle East. A number of newspapers and television stations are doing this more formally by adding citizen journalism to their web sites to become news aggregators, as well as distributors of their content (see our five part series on what PBS affiliate, KETC, did to create a great community through social media. Here is also some advice on how to proceed with this type of news aggregation (Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty). 

 

Further Reflections on McLuhan, TV, and the Web

David Coupland wrote more on Marshall McLuhan in the Guardian on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of McLuhan’s birth: Why McLuhan's chilling vision still matters today. I tweeted it and got many retweets and this encouraged me to think about a blog post on the article. David starts with the interesting question: “which technological change felt more like a cathartic change to society: TV in the 1950s or the internet since 2000.” David said that a few years ago we would have said TV and now he picks the Web. As someone who was involved with both transitions I would say that it is a close contest. Television may have created more separation within families but it brought the world closer together and this window on the world was often shared within families.  Just as people say that Kennedy was the first TV president, Obama is seen as the first president who effectively used the Web.

McLuhan looked beyond the content, whether it was the world or politics. David writes that McLuhan told us, “Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.” To McLuhan this was a concern as he previewed Nicholas Carr on the Web (see: Is Google Making Us Stupid).

David quotes McLuhan in 1962: "The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind." He was the canary in the coal mind of media.

I had the pleasure of attending some of McLuhan’s seminars while I was doing my graduate school work at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. These were exciting experiences with rapid fire pronouncements from McLuhan.  He was full of ideas and quickly moved from one to another. Marshall did not like to take questions because, as he said, he was three or four ideas further down the road when a question was asked. David Carr noted a similar trait in his New York Times review of Douglas Coupland’s Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” when he writes, “He (McLuhan) loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis.” He might not have liked Twitter given the 140 character limit but I am sure he would something to say about it. 

I was at the University of Toronto indirectly because of McLuhan. I had developed an interest in the effects of media on cognition through looking at how young children did art. David Olson, a psychologist at U of T, was looking at this issue. He had initially been motivated to look at the concept by McLuhan’s work. So I choose to go to Toronto to study with David Olson. I have seen a lot of research that indicates that the communication channels we use help shape our messages and how we receive them. I did some myself. 

This was a new concept in cognitive psychology, as well as in the general dialogue.  Coupland quotes McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” and David Carr notes that was “describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed.”

This impact of the Web on our thoughts, relationships, and business continues to interest me. It is ironic that it grew from an interest in the 1970s in the cognitive thought processes that children use as they create art and was indirectly influenced by someone studying Renaissance art and literature mostly prior to the 20th century.  I looked at visual versus verbal thought but the same general concepts hold. Media does help shape cognition. I am pleased to see this new work. It both brings back memories and covers the still relevant work of a creative and complex thinker. 

Of course, TV and the Web are converging as many studies show. This convergence is a frequent activity for me. I even look up stuff on the Web about what I am watching on TV and I certainly look to the Web to see what is on TV.  I am watching a golf event on TV while i write this post. 

 

Complementary Roles of Tablets, Smart Phones, and Television

A recent article by Clayton Morris, Study Reveals Changing Role of iPads, Tablet PCs found that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smart phone owners use their devices while watching television. It also reported that 61 percent of eReader owners use their device in bed, while 57 percent of tablet owners and 51 percent of smart phone owners do the same. Now bed is one of the places I watch TV, the other is in my office next to my laptop.

Tablet owners spend more time on their tablets while watching TV than owners of eReaders and smart phones. This makes some sense as tablets will more likely have complementary activities to TV that reading a book and talking on the phone.  Many traditional news organizations and magazines are noticing this trend and providing iPad-optimized versions of their print offering. I think you are also are more likely to reads news and magazines while watching TV than books because of their short segments that can be covered during commercials. At least that is my view. I find I get very restless during ads and need an alternative such as Twitter to occupy me until the TV show, usually sports, returns. 

Clayton writes that TV is the new radio. “When there is no breaking news, people keep it on for background noise, information and entertainment. Gone are the days when a family sits around the tube, collectively focused like a laser on their screens.” Now here is what Don Tapscott calls stacking, “one screen plays something for the whole household, while another sits in the lap, surfing at the individual’s whim.”  He concludes that people are still watching TV, they are just watching it more individually. 

I think there is another point here since this complementary channel is digital and connected to the Web.  It is not simply another channel for individual use in the midst of collective consumption. It brings in interactivity. So we often have old and new media working together. I think that the old media organizations that recognize this will be winners and many already have such the PBS St. Louis affiliate, KETC, where my colleague Rob Paterson did some interesting work as they looked to integrate TV with social media.

Business should take advantage of this to use mobile communications for short messages to their employees providing alerts, reinforcing key strategic or tactical issues, and supplementing learning activities.  Because of the interactivity these digital devices bring organizations can also tap into employee viewpoints.  There is an emerging communication channel that can be creatively mobilized.

 

 

You Can’t Tape-Delay Social Media; Web TV Convergence is Here

As I wrote a few weeks back, TV Web Convergence is already occurring through multi-taskers. Now could the Grammy people not know that their show would attract a lot of social media people tweeting about the show, the winners, and the losers.  So why did they do a tape delay for the West Coast? As Cory Bergman wrote, “the taped (delayed) broadcast was getting underway, all of the top Twitter trends were related to the Grammys. This is just another confirmation of what I wrote last week.  You cannot separate TV from social media and The Web. The convergence has arrived.

The live blog on Grammys.com was even worse as organizers didn’t even try to cater to the West Coast audience. Just as West Coast users first logged into Grammys.com, they saw the biggest spoilers of the night from the end of the East Coast show. Cory adds that ‘two-screen experiences are now the norm for many TV households.” This is especially among key younger demograpghics that network television desires. Social engagement is at its highest for live events “where the outcome is uncertain,” said Twitter’s Robin Sloan after MTV’s VMA awards, which was broadcast live on both coasts. 

 

TV Industry Taps Social Media for Oscars and other Events

Continuing its coverage of social media and TV, Brian Stelter reported in the New York Times on how TV Industry Taps Social Media, in this case for the Oscars.  Recognizing that people multiple task with their computer while watching TV as I wrote about yesterday, ABC created a companion Web site with behind-the-scenes video streams. Oscar winners will be seen accepting an award on the TV set, then seen celebrating backstage on the Web.

The article quoted Ian Schafer, the chief executive of the digital agency Deep Focus, who said that Twitter and Facebook messages about shows may well be “the most efficient way to drive tune-in.”  I have found this for blogs and it makes sense for TV. To me Twitter is a great traffic driver, more than a direct message deliverer.  Far from competing than TV, the Twitter “water-cooler effect” makes big shows even bigger. The Grammy Awards had its highest rating in a decade this year with a lot of online support.  Again, the same holds for blogs and Twitter, in my view.

The article also quoted Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, that online conversations about TV shows turn the programs into events, “meaning people watch them as they happen,” blunting the impact of digital video recording. This makes sense, also the Times noted that digital recording remains strong.

The Times reported more data to support this trend. During the Super Bowl this year, Twitter users set a new record by sending 4,064 messages each second, the highest number of messages per second recorded during any sporting event.. In addition, a recent study by Deloitte of American consumers ages 14 to 75 found that 42 percent sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV. I do all the time, especially during onscreen commercials. The eye balls for ads may be drifting online. 

 

TV Web Convergence Already Occurring Through Multi-Tasking

I have written a bit about the convergence of television and the Web on this blog.  There are many plans for this to occur in single box, either through a television or a computer. However, people are not waiting to a Nielsen study that came out in 2010.  It found that “In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a month while also watching TV.”

Mac Slocum at O’Reilly notes the “disconnect between television's lean-back experience and the web's lean-forward positioning.” He believes “a big reason why web and TV haven't yet converged in a broadly adopted super device is because it's uncomfortable -- physically and mentally -- to rock between push and pull. It's a heck of a lot easier to prop a notebook on your lap while the TV plays in the background.”

This is spot on. TV and the Web actually complement each other. I confess to be one of these multi-taskers. This is especially true as I watched sports events. I tend to go to my computer for Twitter or other tasks during commercials. When I look at Twitter I see that others are doing the same thing. I do not watch videos on my computer while I do work on it. I watch them on my TV.  I would not want them on the same device unless it had multiple windows but even then I would prefer two devices.

Are you doing this multi-tasking with your computer and TV also?  Do you agree that putting them on a single device might be dysfunctional?

 

NBC Partners with DC Comics for New iPad App for The Cape

I continue to be interested in the integration of old and new media. Here is another really innovative integration of computers and TV. There is a promotion going on for NBC’s new series, The Cape. NBC has partnered with DC Comics to make the full pilot episode available through DC’s free comic book iPad application. This is a free way for fans to check out the pilot before it airs and is a very interesting way of making the show available for fans to see outside their traditional television set.

This is the first time DC Comics has offered long form video through their iPad application (which is also available for the iPhone). Web and TV conversion continues to be innovative and interesting. Here is a link to download the DC Comics iPad application.

However, as the New York Times recently noted that there is no standard way for the Web TV convergence and this may be a problem. They write, “But recent missteps by technology companies like Google with its Google TV service, as well as the often confusing mosaic of streaming and download providers, has left the market looking a little muddled.” I hope that standards will be implemented to further open up this great opportunity for creative applications.

Revisiting Marshall McLuhan

Here is another book about one of the more innovative thinkers in the last century, Marshall McLuhan.  David Carr reviews Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” by Douglas Coupland in the New York Times. Thanks to Chris Coleman, EVP of Marketing at Yakabod, for pointing out the review.

I had the pleasure of attending some of McLuhan’s seminars while I was doing my graduate school work at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. These were exciting experiences with rapid fire pronouncements from McLuhan.  He was full of ideas and quickly moved from one to another. Marshall did not like to take questions because, as he said, he was three or four ideas further down the road when a question was asked. Carr notes a similar trait when he writes, “He (McLuhan) loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis.” He might not have liked Twitter given the 140 character limit but I am sure he would something to say about it. 

David Carr writes that Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances, just like McLuhan. He notes that Coupland writes that it was “McLuhan’s ability to anticipate the homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media when the phenomenon was in its infancy that made him remarkable.”  McLuhan felt that the fact that the medium is the message was a bad thing. He did not like the triumph of context over content. He was not a fan of Mad Men. 

What was especially impressive was that McLuhan offered these conclusions before there was any genuine understanding of how human beings process mediated information. He was ahead of most of the cognitive psychologists of his day. As Carr quotes Coupland: “One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

I was at the University of Toronto indirectly because of McLuhan. I had developed an interest in the effects of media on cognition through looking at how young children did art. David Olson, a psychologist at U of T, was looking at this issue. He had initially been motivated to look at the concept by McLuhan’s work.  So I choose to go to Toronto to study with David Olson. I have seen a lot of research that indicates that the communication channels we use help shape our messages and how we receive them. I did some myself. 

This was a new concept in cognitive psychology, as well as in the general dialogue.  Coupland quotes McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” and Carr notes that was “describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed.”

This impact of the Web on our thoughts, relationships, and business continues to interest me. It is ironic that it grew from an interest in the 1970s in the cognitive thought processes that children use as they create art and was indirectly influenced by someone studying Renaissance art and literature mostly prior to the 20th century.  I looked at visual versus verbal thought but the same general concepts hold. Media does help shape cognition. I am pleased to see this new work. It both brings back memories and covers the still relevant work of a creative and complex thinker. 

 

New York Times Starts Wine and Film Clubs

Here is a topic for the holiday season. I have been covering the plight of traditional media for some time on this blog. As Editor and Publisher reports, merchandising has been an afterthought at newspapers. But now with shrinking revenues that are attempting to get creative.  Within the US you can get model airplanes, wine, hippie-era concert posters, antique maps, wood from the Titanic and even a broader range outside the US.

The post points out that, “the British national paper the Guardian, for instance, offers cottage rentals, duvets, CD players, plant seeds and dozens of other gift items. It has an entire "Guardian Fashion Store" offering shoes, suits and pajamas. The Telegraph in London makes about a quarter of its profit selling things, notes Jeff Jarvis, "They are the leading retailer of clothes hangers in the U.K.”

This even applies to traditional old guard papers as both The New York Times and The Wall Street  Journal have started wine businesses. Editor and Publisher quotes Alice Ting, executive director of brand development at the NYT. "Like a lot of newspapers, we were looking to expand into different verticals," she says. "If you think of the newspaper, we report on dining and food and home and health, so we've always looked at whether there was a way to extend the brand into those areas." She adds that research showed Times readers had a "very strong affinity toward wine consumption and spending on wine," The New York Times Wine Club, offers members a selection of wines at two price levels, $90 or $180 per six-bottle shipment. Here is the New York Times Wine Club site. 

I think this is a natural area to build a community to create greater engagement with the Times. The new Darwin Editions™ could help here as the breaking news on the topics that interest the community could be presented through a focused edition in the same way that The Engine Mine uses the Darwin Awareness Engine™ to create its energy sector news site. 

According to Reuters, the New York Times also recently introduced a film club.  This service was created for “an audience passionate about movies,” according to the press release and you have to pay $100 a year to join. Here is another good placement for a Darwin Edition looking at what is going on in the movie industry.

Currently the Times offerings are advertised only in its printed newspaper or on its affiliated Web sites. These targeted Darwin Editions could provide a means to reach a specific audience. 

 

 

Twitter Comes to Google TV

Google TV has announced some of its partners and Twitter is on the list. According to the Twitter blog, Twitter on Google TV has most of the features and functionality in regaular Twitter. You can look through Tweets, @mentions, and favorites. When you click on a Tweet, you can reply, retweet, favorite, or share it. You see additional options depending on the content of the Tweet. For example, you can visit a URL or click a hashtag to search for it on Twitter.

If a user is mentioned, you can visit that user’s profile to see their Tweets or follow them. If there is a link to a photo or video, you can see a thumbnail version. Clicking the link will take you to the site so you can see a larger version of the photo or watch the video.

The search box provides access to trending topics and recent searches, so you can see popular topics and revisit past searches. Twitter for Google TV is preinstalled lets you share videos, web pages, pictures, and other content on the Web Twitter. You do this through the “Share” option and select Twitter. I think this is an essential feature so I am glad they enabled this.

We are pleased to see this development. You can now look at the trends in Twitter content through both the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and through our business partner, Twortex, which provides a Twitter content discovery tool using our technology and a variation of our content visualization methods.

This is part of the growing convergence of the Web and television. Forrester expects there will be 43 million internet-connected television sets in United States homes by 2015. Google TV also announced that several television networks and media companies, including HBO, the NBA, and CNBC would be its partners in offering Web content and programming to allow for on-demand viewing and apps built for TV.

NBC Universal said it will deploy CNBC Real-Time, which allows for stock-tracking on the screen alongside the live broadcast of CNBC business channel. The National Basketball Association created N.B.A. Game Time for following basketball news. So far the major networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, are absent from Google’s partner list.

 

 

Content-based Checkin Emerges but Will It Spread to the Enterprise?

Foursquare has become huge as a location checkin service. There are others, as well in the field. I have not gotten the bug but it took me a while to warm up to Twitter. Now, as Mashable reports, a number of services have popped up that re-purpose the checkin concept, popularized by Foursquare, and connect it to media and entertainment, as opposed to location.

Now checkin to TV and movies is more virtual than physical but that is fine in a virtual world. In practice, this entertainment checkin behavior is more familiar than location checkin. It actually emulates the way we experience entertainment in our everyday lives. Mashable writes, “the desire to share is unchanging — it’s how we share that will continue to evolve with the help of social media and entertainment checkin services.” I agree.

Mashable mentions three entertainment based checkin services: GetGlue, Philo and Miso. They all have mobile and web applications designed to support and enhance this natural entertainment-driven social behavior. Here is what Mashable wrote:

GetGlue’s iPhone app extends beyond just television content and supports checkins for books, wines, topics, celebrities and video games. Rewards come in the form of stickers earned from app activity. GetGlue has been around for years attempting to master social recommendation via the browser. With the move to mobile, the company can marry checkins to the social intelligence previously harvested.

Philo is hyper-focused on live television. Viewers use the iPhone app or web to check-in to the live content they’re watching. Philo pulls TV listings directly from cable providers, so viewers can even see the content that’s trending locally and pinpoint where to watch it. App users earn show-specific awards based on their behaviors and work their way up a Hollywood-style ladder to earn “Director” and “Executive Producer” “credits” for shows.

Miso is also about creating a social television watching experience. The alpha service currently has iPhone, iPad and web apps that support TV show or movie checkins. It bills itself as “Foursquare for TV” and has its own game mechanics and badges that are designed to hook viewers with the promise of unlocking additional content.

It seems that checking-in to television shows or other entertainment modes, if done right, can create a connection between media consumers with similar interests. I wonder when this trend will move to the enterprise. In some ways many of the collaboration platforms provide a similar services as you can see who has read what and people can comment on it. The difference is that checkin takes it a step further with real-time reporting.  Even this capability can be found in some enterprise collaboration platforms. It is just not focused in the same way as these Web checkin tools.  I am sure that this and Foursquare for the enterprise will evolve but will it take off and sustain itself. I am still thinking about this one.

Interconnected Business Trends from Michael Fauscette

I have been following Michael Fauscette on Twitter for some time and enjoy his updates, many include links to helpful content. Last month he posted a comprehensive set of predicts, Evolution of Change: Signs for the Future of Business, that tie different trends together.  Michael draws on "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil and the concept that we often underestimate the rate of change but and tend to look at change in one area in isolation rather than as a part of a set of related changes. Michael links some current change factors to conclude there are some dramatic and fundamental changes ahead for business. I would agree and a part of this, but certainly not all, is related to the combined set of initiatives grouped under the term enterprise 2.0.

I will not review all of the trends and I encourage you to look at Michael’s complete post. A number of them relate to what we are doing at Darwin Ecosystem and these are the trends I will focus on here. They include: cloud computing, everything as a service, networked business (customers, employees, partners), the power of community, internet of things, big data, predictive analytics, multifaceted business models, and necessity driven innovation.

Like many other firms we chose to offer a cloud solution and a services approach for the flexibility we can offer and the simplicity that our clients face in terms of technical implementation. We can host the Darwin Awareness Engine™ for a client or clients can do this themselves. In both cases there is little effort to integrate with their current technical architecture and/or involve the IT guys, even when Darwin is targeted at internal enterprise content in sources like Sharepoint and Domino, or multiple subscription services as Forrester, Gartner, etc.

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ can aggregate content across the networks that a business sets up or you can look within individual components of these networks. Clients can see the emerging themes and conversations their employees and business partners are holding. Michael writes, “The Internet creates hyper-connectivity and opened up the flow of information around barriers. The social web changed interaction models and redefined community.” Now you can look within these communities to better understand emerging themes.

The “internet of things” extends to television and opens up new models for traditional news media. Now you can combine traditional media and social media. Darwin lets you understand the emerging themes and breaking news. One of our clients, KETC, the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, is using Darwin as part of a pilot program connecting social media and television. Through Darwin they look for breaking news and trends within their news targets and then plan to also make use of Darwin to better understand the impacts of their new efforts within the program.  

The proliferation of data and the need to look with this data for predictive analytics is the foundation on which the Darwin Awareness Engine™ was created.  In 2008 more digital content was created than in the history of content and then the same thing happen again in 2009. Rather than try to impose external frameworks or use semantic techniques to try to comprehend this exploding content, we use Chaos Theory to allow the content to self-organize. Then we use data visualization approaches to allow the human user to determine which themes are in important for further exploration.  In the process we avoid the potential for spam and the practice of SEO that other approaches bring.

Finally, we are exploring multifaceted business models, enabled, in part, by our cloud services approach. We offer can Darwin’s capabilities as a direct service, through other software firms to enhance their content discovery process, through content focused business partners that publish their own niche publications, and as niche solutions that set on top of the core technology. We began as a necessity driven innovation because of the difficulty imposed by current models of content discovery that often required complex semantic techniques and/or the need for taxonomies.  This led us to Chaos Theory and the use of a radically different approach.

Thanks again to Michael for bringing these trends together and helping us reflect on their interconnections. 

NPR is Expanding its Traditional Media Audience Through Social Media

Rob Paterson recently posted on: It's not the content but the connection that counts - NPR Rocks. He said that NPR is trying to attract an younger audience and has succeeded “not because of a content shift but because they made it easier for a younger audience to connect to content on their terms! The secret was in the flexibility of the new connection NOT the content.” They used social media and mobile apps to achieve this connection.

Rob points to Jolie O’Dell’s post on Mashable, How NPR Is Leveraging the Twitter Generation. She made this statement that I totally agree with.  “…the future of news media lies in successful integration of social media to get the attention (and click-throughs) of a younger generation — a generation whose news needs are vastly different than those of the generations that preceded it.” We recently cover how our client KETC, the PBS television station in St. Louis, is engaging in a successful integration of social media,

NPR is becoming a poster child for this social media effort. They found In a recent survey of more than 10,000 respondents, that its Twitter followers are younger, more connected to the social web, and more likely to access content through digital platforms such as NPR’s website, podcasts, mobile apps and Facebook. The survey found that, 59% of respondents said they use NPR.org, 39% listen to NPR’s podcasts, around half use an NPR mobile app and 28% access NPR via Facebook. The survey also found that, 77% of NPR’s Twitter followers said they get all or most of their news online. These Twitter followers are more likely to expect breaking news, likely because of Twitter’s real-time nature.

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ works in real time and can play a vital role in these social media integration efforts as it is doing at KETC.  In addition, the Darwin powered Twortex Twitter content discovery tool can help you find out what is happening on Twitter. 

Will Old-Media Firms Control Web Video?

That is the question that the Economist asks and comes up with a yes answer at the moment.  I have already written a bit about how Google, Apple and Microsoft are making plays in this market.  The Economist reports that in the first seven months of 2010 that 12% of all the flat-screen televisions sold in America in the first seven months of this year were Web connected and the number may increase dramatically. However, many of these consumers do not know how to use this connection and/or are not interested in it.

The three tech companies are challenging the cable and satellite vendors and looking for ways to run around them. However, there is another group that holds much of the cards in this game. There are only a few big film and television producers, and they have slowed down this game according to the Economist. Apple has been unable to set up a subscription service for television and films. Hulu, owned in part by the studios, has similarly failed to obtain many shows from cable TV or from CBS, America’s most popular broadcast network.

Traditional television is going as strong as ever. According to Nielsen people watch online video for three hours per month, compared with 158 hours for traditional television. The only winner so far is Netflix, which rents DVDs. It has been amassing subscribers with 15 million so far. Now it is gradually moving into online distribution, and is becoming popular on connected TVs if anyone uses them. Neltflex will be built into the new Apple TV. The Economist also reports that Netflix has lots of money to spend on rights, and its wants to acquire some content exclusively.

This continues to be an interesting game to watch. 

China Pilots Major Web TV Phone Convergence

China launched a major pilot project in 12 cities nationwide this July to help converge the telecommunications, Internet and broadcast networks. Cities chosen for the pilot project include Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan.

It was reported in the People’s Daily that the project aims to make the three sectors compatible within China to allow users to make telephone calls, surf the Net and watch television through wireless gateway or one cable. It will enable telecom carriers, Internet companies and broadcasters to enter each other's fields and provide services, and is expected to create billions in investment in the coming years.

In China, the move to bring the three sectors together has been considered for more than a decade. However, it made little progress until now because of factors such as technological challenges and contention among stakeholders. It will be interesting to see how this move shakes out.  Will other countries be watching?

Traditional Media’s Move Away from Community has Opened Doors for Social Media

Mike Frey through Social Media Today provided an insightful post on How Traditional Media Created Social Media. Mike opens with this observation. “Prior to conglomeration there was a time that radio, television and print were local community outlets.  At one time the big three were locally owned, and concentrated on local community.  Now most decisions that are made for communities regarding their major media are made from thousands of miles away.  What music to play, what programming to air, and all the cuts made at the print level most stories come off the wore than actually written by reporters.”

I also remember this local control in the three traditional media and have been disappointed in its passing.  Now many people use social media to make up for this loss of community as Mike notes.  I certainly get much of my news through my Twitter friends and share back what I learn through Twitter and blogs. Like Mike, I stopped my subscription to our Boston print paper as it got smaller and, more importantly wrote about stores I had already heard through social media. I found myself often failing to walk down the driveway to pick it up. Now I still read the New York Times online for national and global stories. Even the TV news is a bit old and I watch more to see how they spin stories than to get new news.

Some traditional media outlets understand this trend and are looking for ways to become more connected to their community through social media. I have written about many of these efforts on the Darwin blog (for example, Foursquare Forging More Partnerships with Traditional Media and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring).

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ can help traditional media with both news collection and impact monitoring. For example, it can look at social media to bring forward stories for traditional media (see Tracking Social Media Buzz with Darwin Awareness Engine™). Here is the first of a three part series on how Darwin can help make traditional media better connected with its community: Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty. 

Will 99¢ Change TV Like it Changed Music?

This is a question Stewart Mader asks in his blog Future Changes. He writes that Apple’s announcement of a new Apple TV device with 99¢ TV episode rentals could have the same impact on the cable TV industry as the impact that 99¢ songs had on the music industry. “When Apple introduced the iTunes store with songs priced at 99¢, it changed the “single” part of the music landscape, by allowing consumers to buy only the songs they wanted.” I do it all the time. This changed the buying paradigm.

Many people also want to get a single cable show or channel rather than the entire package they are forced to select by the cable industry.  With the right rental charges these offerings could be cheaper than the DVDs covering the series.  This becomes even more attractive if it spreads to the iPad and iPhone.  What do think will occur? What will you do?

The Battle for TV’s Operating System

You may ask what does an operating system have to do with TV? With the convergence of TV and the Web is has lot to do with it. One of the latest Retrevo stories by Andrew Eisner covers this contest with Apple, Google, and Microsoft doing the battle here. Andrew writes that Microsoft does not have much of a chance of winning this battle for the TV OS. Google TV going for control of the living room like it controls Web search. Apple is countering with an updated version of their Apple TV that will put Apple iPhone/iPad apps firmly in the living room TV.

 Andrew writes that at the moment a TV OS vacuum exists and unfortunately for consumers, TV manufacturers appear to be filling it with their own proprietary offerings. He argues for standards and we agree. He concludes that the TV industry needs to move away from closed environments and let their connected TVs work with all the apps and streaming content that consumers are finding so appealing. True Web TV convergence needs to occur.

 

Google TV Is Getting Snubbed

I earlier asked the question: Will Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short? Well it seems that Google is also having a rocky road, at least according to Rick Munarriz at the Motely Fool.  Rick noted that the Wall Street Journal reported on how Google is meeting some serious resistance from media giants in its plan to converge television with online video.

Apparently Google had no problem lining up A-list hardware partners. Intel is making the chips and Sony making high-def TVs with the Web-savvy software pre-installed. Logitech is even making set-top boxes for those who don't want to pay up for a new Sony television and Best Buy has agreed to stock the enhanced TVs and Logitech's boxes.

However, as Rick notes, these partnerships will not succeed unless Google can get the major networks to participate. Google TV aims to change thee way we consume TV content.  Instead of passively going along with e broadcast schedules, the platform can search the Web to find previous episodes, clips, and related content that is available to stream right away. It's easier than TiVo as this approach eliminates the need for any kind of prep work such as loading up a hard drive.

The networks have many reasons to not play along.  They make less money on streaming and Google TV will only take more traffic from the live shows with the ads. The Google approach gives to much power to the people and, of course, Google.  They are going to have to figure out a way to get the networks to play along if they are going to succeed where apple and Microsoft have not. 

Jimmy Fallon Continues to Link Twitter and TV and a new Potential for Innovation Management

I have been following the convergence traditional media and social media for a while and wrote about Jimmy Fallon in this context (see Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More). Jimmy has now started his own hashtag: #whydonttheymakethat and solicited fan submissions, some of which made it on the air! Here is a link to a Late Night with Jimmy Fallon episode as Jimmy has some fun with this hashtag. He actually reads some interesting product ideas. While this has started as a humor stunt, there could be some crowdsouring potential here.

At a minimum it is another creative link of social media and traditional broadcast TV. He got thousands of tweets from his audience showing the power of TV to integrate with social media. The late night hashtag has become a regular part of the show. Some of these ideas were great and most were funny. Move over Cisco i-Prize and GE. 

I recently wrote that the convergence of TV and the Web is not waiting for the single box solution. Many creative efforts, such as this one are already occurring. I can see many business applications of Jimmy's approach. I would not be surprised if they are not already occurring. Have you seen any? 

Convergence Between TV and Web Already Happening

 

Here is a topic I continue to be intrigued by (see category in the right column). While many firms are competing in the race for the single box solution to TV Web convergence, Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar reports that new data from Nielsen suggests they're all headed in the wrong direction. “In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a month while also watching TV.” 

I am doing this right now as I am watching TV while I write this post.  This is usually an easy multi-task. Mac notes the differences between television's lean-back experience and the web's lean-forward positioning. Competing manufacturers did to consider this difference with the Web’s pull potential and TV’s push.  

The Nielsen report also said that that Americans watch network programs online when they miss an episode or when a TV is not available. Online video is used essentially like DVR and not typically a replacement for watching TV. Mac adds consumers are supplementing their consumption with online video, not replacing it. This is where I liked the On Demand options to see TV shows when I want to. I used this extensively for the Treme series that came on too late. It also helped me watch each episode at least three times.

Now Mac takes this data to an interesting conclusion. He writes that it matters if content is consumed, not how it's consumed. Much effort has gone into bridging the web and TV worlds through brute force into a single box. However, the most successful cross-media efforts are the ones that let consumers interact through the tools they already use. This is why many enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform vendors enable their users to interact with their tools through email. What makes more sense: integrating Twitter into a television's hardware or helping users tweet during a show? I would choose the latter. 

Will TV Web Convergence Lean Toward TV or the Web?

I have been writing a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web (for example, see Will Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short?). One of the remaining questions remains: will the Web TV convergence lean to the TV side to the Web side?  According to New TeeVee, while Google is planning to have its integrated TV and web offering available on Sony TVs and Blu-ray players, as well as Logitech set-top boxes, in stores by the holidays. However, TiVo says you can already get similar functionality on its existing products and this has been able to do so for years. TIVO claims it revolutionized television by creating the DVR, and later, added search functionality to make it easier to find the content that users wanted to watch, long before others offered this capability.

TiVo VP of Marketing Tony Lee is quoted, “We haven’t just entered a new era of TV and Web convergence that era started years ago. We believe the defining theme of this era is about making all the content you want television-centric, in one single approach.”

However, TeeVee notes that TIVO’s current search model is not robust enough for the broader global web. It wonders what consumers choose: TiVo’s walled garden approach, where they have access to a few, pre-chosen content sources, or Google’s open web model. With Google TV available by the end of the year, the votes will be counted soon and this will help to answer our question, will the Web TV convergence lean to the TV side to the Web side?

 

 

Will Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short?

Leslie D'Monte recently covered Google's linking of TV and the Web. She notes that Google believes there is a huge market opportunity in this space with around 4 billion people across the world watching TV. But also notes the not-so-successful forays of Apple and Microsoft to bring the internet to TV with Apple TV and MSN TV.

The browser on Google TV is simply the Linux version of Google Chrome. The user interface will have to be modified for TV. The same Android software that powers Google's mobile devices is being used with Google TV. With the browser built in, Google TV is expected to help you access all of your favorite websites and easily move between TV and the web. The open platforms of Andriod and Chrome open up room for developers to add to the initial functionality.

Leslie notes that many other players have been in this market for a while. TiVO had many fo the features in 2003. Other TV hardware providers that are competitive to Google’s partner, SONY, have other means to access the Web. Moreover, one could view content from Amazon Video-On Demand, YouTube and Netflix even in 2007. Then there are competing set-top box products like Boxee, PopBox and Roku.

Sean Portnoy looks at a different set of competitors for Google TV and asks on ZDNet, Will Google TV Threaten Cable Providers?  He begins by also noting that despite the buzz surrounding its launch, Apple TV never gave cable companies much to worry about. Now it is Google’s turn.  Perhaps to no surprise he notes that Google’s approach is far more insidious with its more open approach.

First, Sean notes that by buying a Google TV box for a one-time fee or a new HDTV with Google TV built in, you are then not resigned to pay an extra monthly fee when pay TV providers decide to add new features like Web integration to their packages. 

And we all know that this Web convergence is coming. In fact this convergence tees up Sean’s second and potentially bigger issue. With Google TV more subscribers will no longer see the need to continue being cable customers, since much of their viewing needs could be met with online video they could watch through the Google TV platform.

However, the battle is far from over as there are still plenty of people who are perfectly satisfied continuing to order on-demand movies from their cable box instead of streaming them online from Netflix or Amazon. I am one of them so far and just paid to see two new movies through Comcast this afternoon.. Perhaps I am just lazy but ease of access is a big factor with entertainment and I am not a gadget person like many others.

Google TV may urge on more innovation or reform by the cable providers. I have seen a great increase in Comcast’s on-demand since options like Netflicks became more prominent. Hopefully this will result in a win for consumers regardless of the outcome. All this competition does seem to ensure one thing, the Web and TV are becoming more connected to the benefit of viewers regardless of which vendors win. 

How to Enhance TV Viewing with Social Media and Interactivity

PSFK recently posted on How To Enhance The Viewing Experience, Rather Than Interrupt It. The increasing availability of smart phones and tablets such as the increases the number of screens that consumer can view – or interact with – TV programming.   But will each medium take advantage of its characteristics to enhance the experience. Bob Greenberg, CEO at R/GA, recently provided some additional perspective in AdWeek in his post, The Future of TV. He notes that as TV use broadens the convergence of Web and broadcast TV will continue.  He also offers some predictions and suggestions.

Utility-driven marketing and interactive TV viewing: the experience of watching TV has shifted to a more active experience rather than the traditional passive couch potato image. Many consumers view TV while surfing the Web, texting or chatting. TV people need to recognize this and enhance this experience.

Social TV: Bob offers an example: last year’s partnership between Facebook Connect and CNN’s presidential inauguration; many players are creating a conduit for viewers to interact during programming. There are many others. Darwin is working on one through a PBS affiliate.

Social interactivity (via co-viewership, gaming): MTV turned TV watching into a gaming experience by inviting viewers during episodes of the The Hills to join chat rooms to write and rate comments. Comments with positive ratings accumulated points and respective winners. The one with the most points wins. There are many other examples.

TV commerce: The click of a mouse or the touch of a screen will eventually allow us to purchase products directly from video content. Operators will no longer need to be standing by.

The traditional media people who best integrate with new social media will be the winners.

 

More Americans Paying For Broadcast TV

Despite the growth of free, on-demand entertainment options it paying TV customers appear to be growing. As PSFK posts, a new report by SNL Kagan shows that even though people purport to be moving away from traditional media sources such as cable and satellite, they are actually sticking with the familiar more than expected.

The New York Times explains in More Americans Are Paying for Television:

“Regardless, more people are paying for TV: 99.9 million at the end of 2009, up from 97 million at the end of 2008. The gain can be explained in part by the nation’s gradual population growth, but also by the enduring popularity of television in a fragmented media marketplace.

According to SNL Kagan, cable (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, among the companies in the category) lost a total of 500,000 subscribers between 2008 and 2009; satellite (DirecTV, Dish Network) gained 1.4 million; and telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T) gained 2 million. Cable providers still dominate, however, with 62.1 million subscribers, while satellite competitors have 32.7 million and telecommunications companies have only 5.1 million.”

If you add the numbers watching the various forms of Web TV, there is only growth in this media. How to explain these results? The Times concludes that we may seeing a gap between how people feel and how they actually behave.  This is not new. Many psychology studies have found this gap in many areas. In fact, attitudes or perceptions and actions often do not align. The Times adds that there is already a history of this gap in the television industry: it has been well established that Americans underestimate the amount of daily TV they watch.

 

Google Joins with Intel and Sony to Go After TV

I have written on how Apple might impact the television business model. Google is also getting into the act. Amy Vernon writes how Google's Open-Source TV: Coming soon to a set near you.  She notes that it goes beyond a simple set top box and is truly being more of an OS.  If it goes the open-source route it's said to be headed in the impact will be huge.

With print, the Web has initially been a competitor that has brought many outlets down (see Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple). Now, print is slowly beginning to learn how to co-exist with the Web. However, with TV, it seems that the Web firms are trying to better integrate and the traditional TV content producers are mostly on board to make this work.

Google represents one of the latest Web firms to get into the TV action. Amy writes: “if anyone is down for the democratization of Internet-based TV viewing, it's Google. And with a built-in browser plus expected apps from YouTube, Hulu and Netflix just for starters, it's conceivable that the pace with which the average consumer has been moving from the broadcast/cable/satellite model (which are all pretty much the same, just different technology and channel capacity) could accelerate exponentially.”

Now Google is partnering with Intel and Sony for technology and content. This is a smart move.  Recently they brought in Logitech to offer a single remote for all this stuff, including your laptop.

The High Def Digest picks up the story and notes that, “Google has learned a lot from Apple, and it’s pretty evident that they’ve taken those lessons to heart. What was once a humble search engine based out of a garage is now the company behind the Nexus One phone, Android operating system, Chrome OS, Chrome internet browser and now open source TV software and, potentially, a set-top box or two. The guys at Google have also learned a bit about what not to do. With Google TV, they’re taking a full 180 from the incredibly restrictive Apple TV.”

They note that Google TV is not a standalone product but an operating system for set-tops.  It will have a built-in browser so you can go after unlimited content.  This will open up a lot of ad space for them. It will also up more opportunities for Web-based services to provide analytics on TV related content such as our vision for Darwin.

 

Clicker Gets You in Touch with Online TV

I have written a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web. Here is useful tool to monitor and take advantage of this trend. Clicker is a search service to find what is available in video on the Web. There motto is “What’s On Online.”  At the site you are greeted with a simple Google style search filed as well as links to what’s new, what’s hot, recommended and your playlist if you have signed up for the premium service. The basic features are free. You can search by show or by topic. Clicker indexes television shows, movies, music videos, and original web content. 

Clicker recently received $11 million in expanded venture capital funding. The series B round was led by Jafco Ventures. Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The company has now raised approximately $19 million since its launch in January 2009. The site does not provide video itself. It links you to the growing amount of content that others are producing. The Clicker catalog now includes more than 600,000 episodes from 10,000 shows. It lists those titles in more than 14,000 categories.

Jeremy Scott provides a nice Clicker review at ReelSEO,  Clicker Wants To Be Your Web TV Search Engine – They’re Mine. He writes that Clicker solved his frustration in finding out what is on the Web after he dropped cable. Jeremy gives the example of searcing for his favorite show, Lost. It “reveals a host of options.  The first thing you’ll notice are some brief stats:  there are apparently 129 episodes of Lost available online for free, with another 86 available for purchase.”  Plus there was a lot of related content on the same theme.

This is a nice discovery and one that will make Web video content much more attractive to me. It will be interesting to see how Clicker evolve as the Web and broadcast TV continue to converge.

 

Will Apple iTunes Impact the Business Model in Television, Like Music?

Things continue to move fast in the TV sector. Apple and other Web apps have certainly impacted the music industry and print publishing.  Now there is a move to impact television by changing the business model. Instead of subscribing to cable for a fixed fee to get a lot of stuff bundled, Apple wants to sell TV programs one at a time, like they do with music, for a low cost per program. A recent Fats Company article best that they will succeed (see: Apple's iPad Disrupting the Network TV Business Model? I'd Buy That for a Dollar!).

Naturally, the TV industry is exhibiting broad concern over this plan. While they're want to get on the Apple's iPad bandwagon as a TV player, they are worried that lower prices will cut into their revenue streams. Now TV has its markets to protect but there are also 125 million registered iTunes users, representing a huge potential market, waiting to be tapped by someone. The main worry on the TV side is that production is expensive and each show represents a huge investment in time and money. Can they get their money a buck at a time?

The FastCompany article, which builds a story in the New York Times, suggests that they would be fools to not do this. If they do not offer programs at attractive prices, people will just steal the shows as it is not that complex to do in the digital world. If the price is right, it will convince most people not to do to the trouble and potential risk to resort to piracy.  It will be very interesting to see how this shakes out. We feel that Darwin can help the winners, whoever they are, with both news gathering and impact analysis regardless of the winner as TV moves closer to the Web (see Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public Service Media Part Two: Addressing the Issues). 

YouTube Attempts to Increase Time on Site Through Discovery

The New York Times had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue. Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead, it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better make up your own mind. 

Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV? - Tim Dillard

Social Media is moving into television on an increasing basis as I have covered a bit on this blog. This is the theme of a post by Tim Dillard on TheNextWeb: Will 2010 be the Year of Social TV?  For example, fans of certain TV shows from different time zones are saving the latest episodes of their favorite shows and then arranging common viewing times with their friends to watch the shows whilst discussing the action together on Skype,

The shows themselves are also launching efforts, sometimes with mixed results. In the UK, high profile post-apocalypse drama, BBC's 'Survivors', launched with stream of tweets from 'survivors'. They were supposedly trying to get messages out to a world in which most of the population had been wiped out by a mystery virus. However, the effort did not last. In another failed case, Fox tired integrating Twitter during reruns of sci-fi series 'Fringe' in the US. It got criticism almost immediately from the show's fans by swamping the screen with tweets from the cast and crew of the show, thus obscuring much of the action. Sounds like those tweets do blast you with multiple tweets in a row, except even worse.

It seems the most successful efforts so far are user generated. For example, with Twitter, real-time conversations about TV shows at the shows are broadcast live are linked together through the use of hashtags.  This is the same with online communities. The television shows will need to move better in this direction by listening to their viewers and being creative. 

Unlike Newspapers, TV Rises in Popularity, While Mobile Devices Also Move Up

Television does not seem to be suffering the same way as newspapers, its older mainstream media cousin. Deloitte’s 2009 “State of the Media Democracy” survey reports a 26 percent increase in the Americans choosing TV as their favorite type of media compared to the previous year. This is likely influenced by the recession. More than 70 percent of those surveyed rank watching TV in their top three favorite media activities. When ranked alongside activities such as surfing the Web, listening to music or reading, 34 percent of consumers place it at the top. This is a substantial increase from last year and more than double those selecting the number two choice, the Web, which came in at 14 percent. 

When watching their favorite TV shows, 86 percent of respondents prefer watching on their television set, either live, via their DVR/TiVo, or using an “On Demand” feature.  While less than 10 percent of Americans say they prefer watching the same content online, a growing number of consumers are using online platforms to watch their favorite TV shows. 

Consumers are watching close to 18 hours of television programming on their home TV in a typical seven day week — up notably from less than 16 hours last year. Looking at the interest in TV – Web convergence, 65 percent of respondents would like to be able to easily connect their home TV to the Internet so that they can view videos or downloaded content. This is a significant trend that has gained strength over the last three years. Of course, the reverse could occur with more TV on computers.  A move in this direction would allow for more search and data mining capabilities.

The study also looked at mobile device use. One-third of surveyed consumers use their mobile phone as an entertainment device and 47 percent of smart phone owners identify the device as one of their three most valuable media and entertainment products — a significant increase from 20 percent last year. I certainly use my iPhone as an entertainment device as much as a mobile phone.

The Deloitte survey also indicates that mobile phone use is rapidly separating the Internet experience from the desktop for almost half of the population.  Forty-eight percent of those surveyed have data plans for their mobile phones and 42 percent are using their phones to access the Internet. The report suggests that this decoupling is expected to facilitate new consumer behavior including mobile search, social networking and purchasing.

The most popular mobile activities, according to the survey include: text messaging (72 percent), accessing the Internet (42 percent), online search (30 percent), downloading applications (27 percent) and using GPS (26 percent).

The report also looked at advertising. TV still holds strong here with 83 percent of consumers identifying TV advertising as one of the top three media with the most impact on their buying decisions.  In the online world, over half of all U.S. consumers believe that online customer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than any other type of online advertising, and 51 percent have purchased products based on an online recommendation. In addition, 24 percent of U.S. consumers would like to have an online service that recommends a product based on other consumers’ preferences.

Social networking continues to rise. According to the survey, one-quarter of U.S. consumers are socializing online almost every day and nearly 60 percent currently maintain a social networking site, up from 48 percent last year. The connections maintained over social networks provide powerful sources for trusted recommendations.  The content generated through social networking provides a rich source for understanding the collective mindset of consumers. A tool such as Darwin’s Awareness Engine (TM) can help understand the themes emerging from these conversations and discover the unexpected. 

Will Apple Brings Us iTunes TV in 2010?

Here is more on 2010 predictions. I am a great fan of Apple. I have a Mac, and iPod, and an iPhone. Now there are rumors about Apple taking its already big iTunes library of TV shows and its Apple TV hardware device and greatly expanding what content they offer and what they can do. Rumors are surfacing in such posts as: 2010’s hottest contenders: 8 products to watch, iTunes turned the music market on its head. Could iTunes TV do the same for TV?, and more aggressively, Apple May Be On The Verge Of Kneecapping The Cable Industry. Finally. This move would certainly enhance the convergence of TV and the Web I have been discussing from time to time.

Venture Beat writes that iTunes TV is “likely to do for TV what iPod did for music industry. Apple, as usual, will bundle the service with its hardware to sell more Apple TVs. In the meantime, better broadband speeds and dedicated hardware will make the internet-TV watching experience comparable to TV quality on cable. Key, however, will be Apple’s ability to get content producers on board.”

There are a number of hurdles here. For now the Apple TV hardware device has limited functionality. I looked at it myself in an Apple store and could not see the reason to get one yet.  However, this could change if Apple was able to bring in more quality content partnerships. They could do what they do with music: break even on the content to sell more hardware. This hardware could be several devices, just as iTunes music is a driver of iPhone sales as well as iPod sales. Apple has the best hardware (outside of TV sets), including computers, iPhones, and iPods to play the TV shows.

I am listing to iTunes on my computer as I type this and play iTunes on my iPhone in my car or whenever else I am away form my computer.  Goodbye CD player. I already have a big screen monitor next to my laptop when I am home. Will these devices also become my TV player?  Of course I would need a lot more memory but that is likely doable. Another option mentioned is to move iTunes(TV) to the cloud.

Once all these delivery issues get worked out, the strategy of cheap content to sell hardware would allow Apple to give better deals to the quality channel provides than the cable companies.  However, expect a knock down drag out fight here. The cable companies have seen what Apple did in the music industry.  Hopefully the consumer comes out the winner here and quality content gets good distribution. 2010 will be an interesting year to see what happens in this space.

 

Rising Demand for TV - Web Convergence

Rob Paterson recently did a post, TV and Radio and the web, where he reported some interesting survey data. The desire to hook up their TV to the Web is rising in US Internet users. In 2009, the percentage of US interest users that would like to hook up their TV to the Web:  ages 14-26 – 74%,, ages 27-43 – 71%, ages, 44-62 – 59%, and ages 63-75 – 46%. In talking with a number of people in their 20s and 30s, they say that they only watch TV in the OnDemand mode. I have tried this and it was a great way to watch and tape the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert.

Rob wrote that he has cancelled his cable access and has been connecting directly to the web for 2 months now. He writes that the reasons for doing this are: greater control, , no ads, no paying for unwanted content, and plenty of good Web TV content. Also the the pathways there – iTunes, Veoh, YouTube are good enough and getting better. He uses a simple mini connector on his MacBook to link to his TV set and uses the screen management feature to synch the screens. I can do the same on one of my TV sets, the one I purchased in 2009. Rob adds that in 2010 even these simple technical hurdles will go away.

Rob predicts that in 2011 the Web will be the channel for TV. Others have said it will happen in 2010. For example, eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey writes in his 2010 Predictions Round-Up, “The Consumer Electronics Show in early 2010 will usher in TVs with direct Internet connectivity, or with on-screen access to content portals such as YouTube, Blockbuster and Netflix. As online video becomes intertwined with the living-room TV experience, download and streaming services will take on a prominent role in the home entertainment ecosystem.”

I am looking forward to this as I watch Van Morrison’s live performance of Astral Weeks on my TV through DVD. It should only get better. 

Other Journalism Blog from Bob Stepno

Here is a list of 91 Journalism Blogs and Websites You Will Love that I found from Bob Stepno through Twitter.  In this post I want to bring your attention to Bob’s own Other Journalism Blog where he discusses online journalism. His blog is on the list and it is an excellent resource. I have known Bob since the early days of the Berkman blog group. Bob now teaches journalism, media studies, digital culture, and Web production at Radford University in Virginia. 

Bob provides useful coverage of the recent of Editor & Publisher. This publication was a trade journal for the newspaper industry,” which, Bob writes, “in recent years has made it a chronicle of the industry’s decline, while juggling its own print and online editions.” Bob writes about the need to preserve E&P’s archive for journalism historians and offers links to other coverage.

There is a nice post on the Online, ‘cross-generational’ features of the new PBS NewsHour.  This is another creative combination of old and new media.  PBS merged broadcast and digital staffs in an expanded newsroom, with part of the goal to provide reporting, “that is cross-generational, diverse and dynamic.” They have also created a partnership with GlobalPost, a Boston-based network of international correspondents already online as http://globalpost.com. Bob mentions that, Hari Sreenivasan, a major part of the broadcast/Web crossover, will write a news commentary blog that will share links to primary source documents so that viewers can make up their own minds about stories. This is a nice old-new media combination feature. There is more about out how the online and broadcast operations are being reorganized by Anna Shoup, local/national editor of the program at her PBS MediaShift blog. 

Welcome to 2010: Its Time for Social TV

Happy New Year’s Day.  This is the time of year for predictions and Steve Rubel predicts that television will integrate social media (see: What To Watch In 2010: Social TV). Television has always been a focal point for conversations. It is a common experience that people often like to discuss. New media work often get a great start when they offer new ways to do this we have been doing all along.  So far social media and television have been largely separate e. People certain talk about TV on the Web and through social media but the is discussion has not been integrated into the TV set itself. Now this will change as I have been discussing on this blog from time to time.

Oprah is getting in on it so we know it is big.  There will be the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), a joint venture between Discovery Communications and Oprah Winfrey launching January 2011. This goes along with her departure from traditional TV. OWN is betting that the hundreds of thousands of viewers that have participated in Oprah’s Webcasts will partake in other social experiences. And that social TV, more so than the Web, "could provide the right vehicle for advertisers who want to combine the reach and audio-visual power of television with the engagement and two-way dialogue offered by social media," said Robert Tercek, president of digital media for OWN quoted by Rubel.

Mark Kroese, general manager in the advertising business group of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, believes that Oprah's departure from network TV is a sign of the times. Rubel quotes him. "The lines between television, video and gaming are beginning to blur," wrote Kroese on Microsoft's blog. "When the entertainment history books are written, and the long, inexorable decline of The Big Four (networks) is a well-documented Harvard Business School case, I think we're going to look at the creation of OWN as the tipping point. And I predict 2010 will be the year that most major brand advertisers shift substantial portions of their budgets toward more targeted, measurable, engaging and accountable mediums."

It will not just be traditional television sets that will be more social. The gamersa are getting involved. In October, XBox Live updated the platform to pull in users' Facebook and Twitter streams. Rubel writes that already, it's a hit. Microsoft last month said more than 2 million Xbox Live users logged into Facebook.  Next we may have social refrigerators where we can discuss what to cook for tonight, There are already social scales that lets us share the outcome of these meals (see Tweeting Your Weight - But Not Mine). 

Is Online Video Moving to Look More Like Television? Or the Reverse?

Here is another angle on the convergence of TV and the Web. The digital marketing firm eConsultancy asks the question, Is online video destined to look like television programming? They quote Brian Stelter in The New York Times: "News Web sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like television." Brian also writes that online ads are booming, if they’re attached to a video.

They report that traditional television has been impacted by commercial fast-forwarding, but with online it does not work quite the same way. And as much as people complain about pre-roll ads, they are increasingly watch them instead of skipping through them.

Digital video earned $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009, which is an increase of 38% from the same time period last year. By online standards this may seem small as online search is estimated to be a $10 billion market this year. However, this growth is good news for struggling media companies. Especially since online views are not poaching traditional TV viewers. During the daytime, online is popular, but at night viewers are switching to television. I think people will switch to online videos as a diversion while working on their computers but will prefer the bigger TV screen for more devoted recreational viewing.

I have written elsewhere that traditional media cannot not simply reproduce itself on new media (see Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media and The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media) and this post agrees. It points out that in the longterm, merely reproducing TV content online at a quicker pace is not likely save the networks. They quote Todd Teresi, chief revenue officer at Quantcast: "We need to get to solutions that are as elegant as search. The power of the search marketplace is that Google does not sit there and tell you what you should buy. Google gave people control. That fundamentally is why that marketplace works so well."

I wonder if traditional TV will ever gives us the same control and the online world? It could be a very powerful move. Will hardware be the driver or content?  (see TV Moving Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web). 

Comcast Getting Ready for Web and TV Convergence with its NBC Merger Plans

Comcast’s well-publicized attempt to acquire several cable networks (CNBC, Bravo, and the USA Network), a leading Hollywood movie studio (Universal Pictures), and a major broadcast television network (NBC) will impact how we watch television.  However, it may be that forces are in play that will drive these changes and Comcast is just positioning itself to between ride the new wave as TV and the Web converge.

Mark Guarino at the Christian Science Monitor recently discussed the move in “Three ways the Comcast-NBC merger could change television.” He outlines these impacts: more content, fewer subscriptions since the new company would have both Hulu and Fancast to access online content. There will also be more ne-stop viewing. Like AT&T, Verizon, and other carriers, Comcast offers bundled deals involving broadband internet, cable, mobile, and landline phones. Finally there will be more online viewing outside the television. Comcast will be able to integrate its cable, Internet, and mobile phone services with its new library of content, allowing subscribers to access a vast number of TV shows and movies in new ways.

All of these impacts reflects the Web – TV convergence and will only provide further support for it. I found the quote from Paul Levinson, a media analyst at Fordham University in New York especially telling, “In the next five years, more people will be seeing ‘The Tonight Show’ online than on their television sets.” The convergence will be so extensive that in 10 or 15 years, we won’t be talking television screen versus online because they’ll all be the same screens.”  This is what we have been saying for some time and it sets the stage for an online TV schedule search engine such as TVissimo.

We look forward to seeing how this unfolds. Rick Munarriz, senior analyst for The Motley Fool noted that some 95 percent of Comcast’s current revenue comes from cable subscriptions – a business model that is “not sustainable,” he says. Targeted ad revenue can come through a search engine such as TVissimo as it knows what people are looking for and obtains a profile to match against these moves. 

Television’s Survival Might Rely on Hyper-Local Coverage Online

MediaPost recently reported that Akamai Technologies CEO Paul Sagan warns that television is about to experience the major impact that print and music have already felt. Akamai Technologies facilitates more than one-fifth of the world's Web traffic so they have a good view on the subject. What will cause this transformation? The article states that, “the ability to match high-def TV picture quality with Internet interactivity is creating a sea change for online video that will begin rippling through the television industry in 2010. Only TV station owners that leap to the new arena, playing the strength of their hyper-local connections, will survive.” Otherwise they will feel the same big impact form the Web that music and print have felt.

I am reminded of a past transformation in news coverage when the telegraph first appeared, the news outlets of the day came together to form the Associated Press to capitalize on the new technology and share its promise.  It does not seem that a similar event will happen here. Now it is everyone for themselves.

Traditional television content producers and distributors that are among Akamai's deep client base are in peril according to Sagan. The audiences for this content are rapidly moving to the Web. The article goes on to report that, “too many broadcasters are obsessing about cannibalizing their content instead of using the efficiency and convenience of interactivity to expand their local power base. While increasing numbers of TV stations are going online with real-time and on-demand local news, sports and other live events, they do not have the interactive online advertising in place to fully monetize their content.”

This sounds like what happen to the Rocky Mountain News.  There is a way out. Television content producers can take advantage of the ability of the Web to address the long tail of specialized content.  The large players are global and generic. Sagan says that “the window is still open for broadcasters to create long- and short-form programming that -- when expertly presented and searchable -- can be monetized and generate a new audience and new revenues.”

However making effective use of interactive advertising is essential for hyper-local online broadcasting to become a viable business.  They are not there yet but must make the transformation to realize this opportunity.

Another success component is effectively harvesting breaking news about local events to generate this hyper-local content. Often local stories first break through “non-professional” reporters on little known sites. This is where Darwin Ecosystems’ Awareness Engine™ can help.  Through it you can mine the long tail and discover interesting relationships between stories that enable you to provide added value to breaking news. 

Web Passes TV to Achieve Biggest Ad Revenue in UK

The UK has become the first major economy where advertisers spend more on internet advertising than on television advertising, with a record ú1.75bn online spend in the first six months of the year according to the Guardian.  The paper notes that this change marks a watershed for the embattled TV industry, the leading ad medium in the UK for almost half a century (or perhaps a waterloo). It has taken the internet little more than a decade to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK.

It is somewhat ironic to read this in another embattled media that is being challenged by the Web (see for example, Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? John Temple at WebCom 2009). The Guardian reports that the Web now accounts for 23.5% of all advertising money spent in the UK, while TV ad spend accounts for 21.9% of marketing budgets. I wonder what percentage traditional print newspapers account for.  Also, it would be interesting to see what portion of the Web advertising comes from online versions of newspapers and what percentage of newspaper ads revenue is from print versus online.

The survival of traditional media was a topic at the recent Webcom 2009 in Montreal, see Who Killed the Rocky Mountain News?  Our firm, Darwin, provides a way for news organizations to use the Web to their advantage by discovering stories beyond the expected.  My colleague Thierry Hubert presented a number of examples of this in his presentation, Case Study H1N1: Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos.  

TV Moving Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web

I recently asked, Will Phones, TV, Music Player, and Computers Really Converge? Information Week ran an article, Comcast Pushing TV To Phones, that addresses part of this question. Comcast CFO Michael Angelakis said it would eventually allow its cable television subscribers to watch shows via the Web at no additional charge. This would also be open to cell phones via a mobile browser, or potentially as applications on devices like iPhone or BlackBerry smartphones. Angelakis also said he could envision the company's On Demand video service having a wireless component in the future.

So here is more evidence of TV moving to both computers and mobile phones. Information Week said that “mobile television services have long been popular in markets like Japan, but the service has yet to significantly take off in the United States despite strong investments from the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless. One inhibitor of this service is that it has generally carried a monthly fee of $10 or more, but there are signs that the market is poised to grow.”

Other carriers like Sprint are getting into the act. If it Comcast adds wireless voice services, it will be able to offer customers the "quadruple play," where one company provides users with home telephone, mobile phone, cable TV, and Internet services. Others can already do this. If these services are offered by one provider, it will also increase the likelihood of the services coming through the same hardware device.

Simultaneous TV and Internet Use Continues to Rise

Nielsen recently reported that 57 percent of TV viewers in the U.S. who have Internet access use both mediums at the same time at least once a month. That translates to more than 128 million U.S. consumers (see Viewers hunger for Web and TV at same time: study). This is yet more evidence of the TV Web convergence.

Because of this trend, TV industry executives and marketers are considering ways to adjust their broadcast shows and play into viewers' simultaneous use of the Internet. One medium can be used to reinforce the other. Broadcasters hope some viewers will turn to the Web to learn more about their shows, but they have to be wary of losing the attention of their viewers. The Nielsen study found the average TV viewer who uses the Internet simultaneously does that for 2 hours and 40 minutes a month, and that 28 percent of the time they are on the Web at home, they are also watching television.

Based on my own sample of one, most of the time the viewer is just multi-tasking and there is no connection between the TV viewing and the Web use. That is the case as I watch sports on TV while I write this post. However, the two channels are open, the first step toward taking advantage of the dual channels. You can encourage people to look up background information on TV shows and check schedules, something I have done on a number of occasions.

At some point the channels may converge on the same hardware (see Will Phones, TV, Music Player, and Computers Really Converge?). Nielsen said even as viewership of videos on the Internet and on mobile phones increases, Americans still prefer to watch video on their television, as shown by how many more hours they spend in front of the tube. It will take some more innovation in technology and creativity in programming to realize the complete convergence.

Who Will Win: TV Sets or Computers?

As broadcast television and online video continues to converge, will we be watching TV shows on our computer or will we be surfing the net on our TV? Paul Graham places his bets on the computer in the post, Why TV Lost. He writes, “About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers.”

Paul attributes the victory of computers over television sets to four factors. The first reason is the open market place created by the Web. Anyone can build what they what so innovation and speed is on the side of computers. This make sense so far.

Second, is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth allowing for fast access to video. (see my post, When Online Video Consumption Moves to Exabytes in 8 Years: Will Phones, TV, Music Player, and Computers Really Converge? and ReadWriteWeb, Online Video Consumption Will be Measured in Exabytes). One other winner might actually be the hand held device formerly known as the telephone.

Paul writes that the third reason computers won is piracy. Users prefer it not only because it's free, but because it's more convenient. YouTube has already trained a new generation of viewers (off all ages) that the best place to watch shows is on a computer screen.

He writes that these first three are predictable. The fourth, and less predictable one, is social media. I have already written about social media can enhance television (See How Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More and Twitter Takes on Television Making It More Social. People like to discuss and share their views on shows and other things than appear on television such as political and sports events. Social media offers the means to do this.

He closes with an interesting point. Television shows will change dramatically when they come through the Web. He writes, “On the Internet there's no reason to keep their current format, or even the fact that they have a single format. We'll get whatever the most imaginative people can cook up. That's why the Internet won.”

Television through computers will basically be a new medium. The networks will no longer be gatekeepers but that is just the start. Radio first offered stage shows and television first offered radio shows until the new medium found its own capabilities. I wonder what “television” through computers will do?

When Online Video Consumption Moves to Exabytes in 8 Years: Will Phones, TV, Music Player, and Computers Really Converge?

Good thing I got my iPhone. According to ReadWriteWeb in 8 Years, Online Video Consumption Will be Measured in Exabytes. Of course, I learned about this on Twitter. They say that one exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Oh well, I should have gotten the 32 gigabyte model. Coda, the U.K.-based research firm claims that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video per month.

ReadWriteWeb says that the bandwidth problem will get worst before it gets better, but it will get better. They go on toe argue that bandwidth speeds have accounted for many of the major revolutions the internet has seen including the abundance of high-speed data connections in 2005 that made the video-sharing site YouTube a hit. Then by 2007, Hulu, was launched as a video-streaming site for commercial content in an effort to compete with pirated peer-to-peer downloads as well as iTunes, which by now was serving up TV shows and full-length movies. Next, in 2008, the launch of the 3G iPhone brought the high-speed internet to the mobile phone and my iPhone.

Ironically, the major use for my iPhone so far, besides being a telephone, is a greater mobile music player. I now use it instead of a car radio or CD player and now have music wherever I am with no need for electricity or wifi. I no longer bring my iPod an d speakers on trips, the iPhone is my music player, just as my laptop is the music player while I work. I have my entire iTunes library on the iPhone. I should have gotten the 32 byte version, then I could do movies and downloaded TV shows better.

Now they predict that by 2017 with the promise of 4G, the mobile phone could deliver things like live streaming HDTV. It will really no longer be called a phone and the convergence of computers, TV, and telecom will be close to complete. We may look back at today and wonder what it was like when these devices and channels were separated.

More TV and Web Convergence during Last Year's Oscars

Here is some interesting data from last year’s Oscars harvested through Nielsen’s “Convergence Panel” – a sample of homes in which we measure both television and Internet in the same households. A study was done to monitor the people in the panel who were simultaneously following the Oscars on live television and over the Internet. They found that:

More than 1 in 10 people (11%) watching the Oscars this year did so while logged onto the Internet. This is nearly four times greater than the normal rate of simultaneous usage they observe.

While there was some expected surfing to places like IMDB for more information on movies, the true winner of the night was Facebook. People who used Facebook during the broadcast used it for an average of 76 minutes. This compares to a little more than 30 minutes on average for MySpace, and just a little more than 20 minutes for the major portals. People who used Facebook while watching the Oscars watched about 50% more of the broadcast than the average Oscar viewer.

Also more than 100,000 messages were sent via Twitter during the broadcast - that’s more than 400 message per minute, or nearly 7 per second. Tweets came in from all over the world in a range of languages. It was a true world wide event and yet the content reflected what you might find in conversations in the average living room.

I wonder what will happen during this year's Oscars. I discussed the possibilities earlier in the post, Twitter Takes on Television Making It More Social. It seems that twittering about TV while watching is not limited to the Oscars. Darren Waters in a BBC blog post, TV becomes social again, discussed how, “Last night I was watching Eurovision with Twitter running on my
laptop. In real time, my Twitter friends and I shared comments and made observations about the event as it was happening. Twitter was being used to extend the experience of watching the event together, but also for people to share links to sites with backstory, or explainers etc.”

The possibilities are interesting. In fact according to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is working making Twitter feeds available on TV screens to its FIOS subscribers. What is next?

More on Web TV Convergence: A Counter View

Yesterday I posted on some Google moves that might impact TV and Web convergence. Here is another view Matt Richtel tries to put a damper on the topic with his New york Times article, What Convergence? TV’s Hesitant March to the Net. Matt pointsout that you find the Web on almost all the screens we use today except perhaps the biggest one in our lives, the television. He writes that there is movement by chip makers to spur a new generation of TVs with full browser capability, like a personal computer. Intel released its own TV-centric chip in October 2008 and many other semiconductor designers and manufacturers are following them. However, Matt adds that television manufacturers such as Sony and Sharp do not seem to want this TV and Web convergence to occur. They claim that people are not ready for this. I find that hard to believe.

Matt speculates that television viewers do not want Web viruses to infect their TV during the Super Bowl, a valid point. He adds that TV viewers are used to a passive relationship with their TV and would not want to have the active involvement the Web brings. I think most people would welcome it. He also writes that TV manufacturers do not want to added cot of adding TV functionality to an already thin margin activity. Perhaps so but that is punishing the consumer. Let them decide.

For these reasons few TV manufacturers are using the new Intel chip. I think the winners will be the ones who do. TV makers risk losing control of the process if they do not figure out a solution soon enough. Perhaps cable boxes will allow for a work around. There is hope as Gordon Campbell’s new company, Personal Web Systems, is now shipping its first product, a $150 adapter that will attach to televisions to make them fully Internet-enabled. They are reducing the technology included in the TV adapter device into a single stamp-size semiconductor that would enable full Internet access in TVs in more developed markets. I see promise here.

Google’s Purchase of Video Compression Provider On2 Moves it Closer to Desktop TV

Google recently purchased video compression provider On2 Technologies for about $106.5M. As Gartner’s Andrew Frank writes, this is a “relatively small sum in the heady world of Internet valuations, for a company that’s been steadily losing money on less than $20M in annual revenue.” However, they have an interesting technology and the On2 purchase may be the clear signal of the plans Google has to enable video beyond the computer, taking it out of the home office and into the living room.

Google appears to want to be a player in the future of television. They must believe that video distribution to TVs and mobile devices will evolve to be more like the Web, Google favorite playground. So far in video, however, Google has admitted that profit from YouTube has proven more elusive than originally thought.

YouTube has been slow to get off the computer and penetrate home television, where the real money is. Working with microprocessor designer MIPS Technologies, Google has already positioned Android for set-top deployment, while also raising its involvement with addressable TV advertising with pioneer Visible World.

Andrew Frank outlines three things benefits form the On2 purchase:

First, Google gets some important embedded infrastructure through On2. It brings a wealth of online video distributor relationships who have been licensing its technology for some time, including Adobe, whose Flash platform continues to power the majority of online video Sun Microsystems, whose JavaFX platform is embedded in the infrastructure of most standard advanced television platforms.

Second, it’s important to Google’s home television goals that the public Internet continues to develop into a reliable way to deliver high-definition video to TVs in a “net-neutral” way: in other words, without cable, satellite, or IPTV telcos charging for quality of service or otherwise limiting video access to screens.

Third, as Google moves to balance control of video standards among companies that include Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe, ownership of On2 gives them leverage to ensure its platforms (Android, Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Apps and Gears) include native video capabilities that are independent of control or licensing by any of its potential competitors.

See Frank’s post for more details. We look forward to see where this goes. A player like Google can certainly make things happen.