Allen Weiner

As I build out a TV studio in my garage, I have been going through all the online and offline nests where I have video content in an effort to consolidate my content. When I arrived at Jumpcut, a really cool browser-based video mashup service from Yahoo!, I see the site is no longer accepting new content. After nuking Live, Yahoo! appears to be sunsetting Jumpcut. Based on those two moves, I would have to question Yahoo!’s commitment to the more cutting-edge elements of the consumer content business. I believe I still can upload videos to Yahoo!, but until the portal actually consistently puts a video tab on its home page, it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

For those who follow the newspaper industry, the announcement that the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News (it’s a JOA town) is scaling back on home delivery comes as no surprise. The Free Press will be delivered Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays starting in March, while The News will be delivered Thursdays and Fridays. Ownership of the papers (Gannett and MediaNews Group) say the way forward is to focus on digital delivery channels. Beyond the web, it’s likely the News and Free Press will explore the sorts of e-edition channels Mike McGuire and I profiled in a recent report, “Publishers Explore Digital Editions, Devices as New Channel Opportunities.” No doubt, vendors and service provides including LibreDigital, Zinio, Microsoft and Adobe are beating a path to the Motor City (does that nickname still apply?) to showcase their solutions.

Forgive me for a detour down memory lane, but I cannot help but think of my first newspaper job, 30 years ago, which was in a suburban bureau of a large metro daily. My desk backed up to one of the regional circulation managers responsible for local home delivery, trying to provide efficiency to an inherently inefficient process. It was a system solely dependent on young carriers who delivered the paper to local doorsteps by car, bike, skateboard or plain old shoe leather. These young people generally took pride in their work (often saving money for college), but when one of them called in late or sick, the harried circulation manager either had to find a replacement or hop into his car and back fill. Working in circulation is not one of publishing’s more glamorous jobs especially when the phone rang off the hook with the complaint, “Why is my paper late?”

At my second newspaper job, I became close friends with one of the circulation managers and on slow news days, I would hop in his car and go on “bundle runs” to deliver papers across the region for carriers to who called in sick or were MIA. Needless to say, I quickly became an expert in Snohomish County geography. By the same token, I also realized a carrier’s job was a tough one, rising early in the cold, dark and wet climes of the Pacific Northwest to delivery a consumer’s primary channel for local news.

I find no solace in the adage that “all good things must come to an end.” I also find no solace that our prediction from Predicts 2009: The Media Industry Looks for Equilibrium that states “by year-end 2009, at least three iconic daily newspapers located in the U.S. and Europe will cease print publication” is likely to come true.

HD camcorders from such CE companies as JVC are likely to be the rage at CES next month.

Here’s a short video preview on what we may (or many not) see on the show floor.

CES 2009: HD Camcorders on ParadeA look ahead at what we are likely to see @ CES 2009 in the realm of consumer camcorders

There’s little doubt that one of the major themes for CES 2009 will be the plethora of efforts to grab video from the PC and move it to plasma TVs in the living room and elsewhere around the house. My colleagues and I hope to see of many of this new marvels as possible (and of course, share our findings). Here’s a preview of a new Netgear device reviewed by Engadget.

What we will be looking for are those devices that stream to the living room offering a “walled garden” approach versus those who allow consumers to stream anything they select from their PCs. Stay tuned for our postings from Vegas starting Jan. 7, 2009.

A few year’s back, I told anyone who would listen that there’s a huge opportunity for a mobile handset that included functionality and applications that were geared for content creators. That segment is a fairly broad one with bloggers at one end and professional reporters at the other. One mobile handset company feverishly took notes as I rambled on , but nothing came of it. At Nokia, in 2007, a special news on the go package for the N95 was built in conjunction with Reuters Labs the results of which can be seen at ReutersMojo. Beyond that one implementation, there seem to be little if any use of this cool, mobile reporting suite. For everyday folk, the N95 also allows you to directly upload video (via Vox) and photos (via Flickr) but there is negligible ability to create “stories” out of those rich media assets.

And now, the iPhone (and some smart developers) come to the rescue. Flying in the face of bad newspaper karma, KnoxNews, the online companion to the Knoxville News Sentinel, has come up with its very own iPhone application allowing users to upload their own reports including photos. The application could easily be utilized by staff reporters as easily as it is by those pretending to be reporters. This sort of innovation gives old news fogies like me a glimmer of hope that incumbent news brands will survive.

The window has closed on my idea for a content creator’s handset. With the iPhone and Android-powered handsets, there will be many applications that allow everyday folk to be reporters (or at least pretend to be reporters). To maximize the opportunity, these applications will work best on handsets that have good built-in cameras, higher-quality video capture and a user-friendly QWERTY keyboard. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google come up with a mobile Blogger application sometime soon. And what about Microsoft? Spaces (Windows Live’s sort-of blog platform,) for the next rev of Windows Mobile seems like a natural. Real reporters and those playing journalist hope someone is listening.

Economy in trouble? Layoffs coming in horrific waves? Daily newspapers filing for bankruptcy? Oprah packing on the pounds? Hah. We’re not worried about any of that sort of mundane sort of trivia. What we want to know is does a straight beat a flush. Or what did Paris Hilton wear to some wonderful after-party. Or can Sarah Palin really see Russia from her front door.

According to Lycos’s tally of top searches for 2008 (I guess it’s over before it’s over), nothing related to jobs, Iraq, McCain, Obama, financial bailouts or gas prices made the top 10 searches for the year. The top searches are: Poker, Paris Hilton, YouTube, golf, Sarah Palin, Brittney Spears, Clay Aiken, Pamela Anderson, Facebook and Holly Madison. And since I had no idea who Holly Madison was (not related to Dolly Madison), I searched and found out she’s in that reality TV show with Hef and his “granddaughters.” (Couldn’t resist that one).

For the record: man of the year based on Lycos searches? Clay Aiken, not Barack Obama. And if you are wondering why NBC is thinking about cutting back on prime time programming? Consider that the top TV programs based on searches were “Star Trek Enterprise” (is that still even on?) and “Dancing with the Stars.” Now that’s entertainment.

What will the top searches for ’09 be? Hard to predict, but unless you’re playing with plastic chips, I am betting poker won’t be one of them.

Much as airlines such as United and Delta sought the cover of Chapter 11 bankruptcy to reorganize and attempt to meet the demands of changing market dynamics, the venerable Tribune Company publisher of eight large daily metro newspapers, is teetering on the edge of Chapter 11 as it faces billions of dollars in debts it is unlikely to have the funds on hand to satisfy. Selling the Chicago Cubs could help somewhat, but putting a Major League Baseball franchise on the block is slightly more complex than listing a sewing machine on eBay.

In a Gartner document published in May 2006, “Transforming Value in Digital Publishing Companies,” Mike McGuire and I suggested that incumbent publishers trapped in businesses laden with large infrastructure expenses might be wise to consider some sort or cost-realignment based on the airline industry model where many airlines lease rather than buy costly fleets. It was our belief, then as now, that newspaper publishers must attempt to do their businesses over with a focus on future opportunities, most of which can be met without print-related expenses. Or, at least look for efficiencies that would allow a publisher to keep both web and print channels alive. One such trend is the editorial hub and spoke model, where newsrooms are organized by topic (sports) as opposed to function (web vs. print). Any newspaper (or magazine for that matter) not implementing such a strategy must strongly consider it as the economic slippery slope for publishers shows no sign of letting up.

For The Tribune Company, one mandate appears clear (at least to me). In the four major markets in which Tribune owns both a newspaper and TV station, it will be crucial to merge those organizations as tightly as possible. Not only is there IT areas of overlap that can be scaled down, but the hub and spoke should work well for TV/print news operations. The Tribune is in the process of doing this in South Florida, but escalating such efforts across all properties should be a priority. In addition, Tribune must do more to leverage its ownership (full or partial) in such web 2.0 assets as Classified Ventures, Careerbuilder, Metromix, Cars.com, Apartments.Com. Zap2it (TV listings) and Topix. Alternatively, Tribune might consider selling off some of these assets to raise some cash. Some of these subsidiaries might be attractive to the new class of media cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google or Apple.

One thing is for sure. All publishing eyes are on the Tribune; a successful execution of reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy is likely to cause a ripple effect. Sounds like it’s a good time to be a bankruptcy lawyer.

It comes as no surprise that YouTube has made some changes to its business, some that have been well publicized–such as its attempt to shed its “mature” content and give video creators the ability to easily add licensed music to their clips–and others a tad more subtle. In late November, YouTube’s player suddenly changed its viewer from a 320×480 experience to a 480×360 window. Those who closely follow the world’s largest online video site noticed but the move was done with little fanfare. And, to take advantage of the new player, it seems (also without a big PR splash) YouTube now serves up HD quality for videos uploaded in HD. The exact nature of that HD requires further investigation, but look at one of my clips shot with my Flip HC camera and be sure to click the “play in HD” button to the right below the viewing window.

If I were to add another prediction to our recent report, “Predicts 2009: The Media Industry Looks for Equilibrium,” it would be that cyber-historians will note that 2009 was the year of the Steel Cage Match between YouTube and Hulu. I doubt that folks at Google appreciate the fact that Hulu has been successful at applying an advertising model to its business and that Hulu’s traffic spurt has allowed it to climb to #3 on the U.S. video list behind YouTube and Yahoo! with more than 6 million viewers for September 2008. By ridding itself of its lower-end UGC (think cat on a skateboard in the backyard shot with a camera phone) and improving the viewing experience, advertisers are likely to be more favorably inclined to spread their dollars around YouTube’s extensive inventory.

Hulu, on the other hand, will continue to add features that allow viewers to find more of what their looking for as well as broaden its content base. The guess here is that Hulu will crack the code in adding premium global content (who doesn’t want to see an uncensored Gordon Ramsey) to keep it ahead of the pack.

Hulu-YouTube: one fall, no time limit. Maybe not a zero-sum game, but pretty close

Faster than you can say, I am part of the Mapple Universe (thanks Lisa Simpson), a number of video services including Joost, mDialog and YouTube have brought rich on-demand versions of their web offers to the iPhone. Powered by innovative transcoder Ripcode, who has cracked the code in transcoding while a download is in progress, MySpace soon will find a spot on Apple’s iconic handset. But, as they say on the evening news, the big story is Livestation’s plans to bring its live streaming service to the iPhone in 2009. When exactly depends on ironing out some issues related to scale as well as Apple’s review of the application.

Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi (demonstrating the application in the below video) says key to being able to get his live service to run on the iPhone was to figure out a way to get past the issue that the version of Quicktime on the phone does not support live streaming. What Livestation does is convert the live streams to .mp4 files which Quicktime recognizes as very long files. One has to wonder aloud whether Apple will figure out a way to nuke this process as it reportedly did with Boxee when Boxee first hacked its way onto the Apple TV.

Berlucchi says his engineers need to test scalability before his company submits the application to Apple for QA review. He feels it will pass muster technologically, but is interested to see Apple’s reaction to a service that takes the video market to a new direction. To date, video providers offer their applications for free to consumers but as an increasing number of ad-supported video (live or on demand) make their way onto the iPhone, Apple will no doubt be forced to examine its model as it receives no downstream revenue from any ad-supported application.

if Livestation’s iPhone application works as promised (and as demonstrated in a live briefing it aired on its current desktop service) a few business models come to mind, most notably signing up cable news and sports networks receiving ad avails in exchange for carriage. Belucchi says that Livestation can target ads by IP address and provide detailed analytics on ads that run on its service.

Beluchhi makes an interesting gamble by going public and demonstrating Livestation for the iPhone. He does run the risk of a well-moneyed competitor (Google/YouTube, already in bed with Apple on the phone and Apple TV) beating the UK upstart to the market. In the other hand, by “planting his flag,” Berluchhi not only can field interested partners but perhaps backs Apple into a corner by creating enough consumer demand that Apple is forced to make the application available to customers.

As I walked through the Austin Farmers Market on November 22, a local organization was handing out flyers telling locals about the February 17, 2009 deadline for the analog to digital transition, the point at which time local broadcasters would cease analog transmissions. In short, death to rabbit ears. Now, here’s the irony: Nov. 22 will go down as the de facto day that the incumbent TV business died as it was the night YouTube Live aired on the web, streaming content to a reported 700,000 concurrent users using the resources of CDN, Akamai, and perhaps other bandwidth providers who are content to stay out of the headlines.

If you think about 700,000 concurrent users, that equates to the number of TV households in the number 44 market in the U.S., that being Albuquerque. That is households that have a television set, not actual viewers at any one given time. That number (called HUT, households using television) is always far less unless you’re talking about the Super Bowl or other mega event.

As far as content goes, this former TV critic thinks the show was pretty bad. User Generated Content as an art form does not translatewell into live television; for that matter, it doesn’t translate into much of anything. Nonetheless, the deployment of web TV technology was impressive. Google and its partners delivered a good-looking on-screen picture with very few frame freezes, even at full screen. There were three cameras, one on stage and two backstage and you could easily click from one to the other with only a slight delay. There was a comment board, but you needed to refresh to see the latest remarks. And, of course, there were ads/sponsors, including Virgin Airlines and Pure Digital (makers of the Flip camera). I didn’t like the fact that when you clicked on an ad, you were taken out of the live experience to another website. That will need to be improved in future live programs.

And that begs the question, what’s next for YouTube as a live web broadcaster. Anyone who thought that live was taking a back seat to on-demand streaming, overlooking the success of such efforts as Operation MySpace, and election night coverage from the BBC, CNN and Associated Press, should now be a true believer. 2009 will go down as the year that not only broadcasting transitioned from analog to digital, but also the year that web TV went live. Being able to provide robust live services could be what begins to thin out the ranks of Online Video Publishing Platform Providers.

As for Google/YouTube, one wonders if this was just an experiment/warning shot with Google flexing its muscles and saying “here’s what we can do if we decided to go into this business.” What we don’t know, and it’s doubtful Goo-tube will reveal this information, is what it cost to run this live event and whether it made any profit. Webcasters, broadcasters and consumers await what’s next with a mix of excitement and fear.