Mobile video resources
Access Intelligence, the publisher of Studio Daily and Studio Monthly, has just launched Mobi-lize. Though in the works previous to the iPhone announcement, the launch timing couldn’t be better. A good number of video professionals are giving mobile video a serious look for the first time. If the premiere issue is indicative of the site, it’s going to be a go-to resource in the space. (Of course, you have several months to launch a site only a week to begin rolling out the updates.)
I’d like to call out two articles as good places to get your footings in the space. Ten Rules of Mobile Distribution is a solid primer for those looking to strike their first mobile content deal. A lot of the suggestions hold for web and IPTV distribution as well.
Is Mobile Marketing Ready for its Neanderthal Phase? opens the discussion about what makes for good mobile marketing media. The theme of the closing paragraph about the tendency of new media producers to mimic the approach of older media producers will be familiar to those who follow this blog.
Another good mobile video resource is Fierce Mobile Content. As the name implies, it’s content focused. The site is more news-based than Mobi-lize with a heavy emphasis on press releases and announcements, but there are also links to third party articles and analysis.
I play a lawyer on YouTube
ArsTechnica ran a nice summary of the legal challenges YouTube faces. Even for curmudgeons who care not a lick for videos of cats flushing toilets, YouTube rulings are likely to have an impact on every video professional’s future.
Legal eagles are focusing on the Viacom case as a litmus test.
That would mean that if any case has some real likelihood to affect the legal landscape of the Internet, it would be Viacom’s. Why the Internet and not just YouTube? The DMCA’s Safe Harbor provisions aren’t just important to video sharing sites; they’re important to almost every sector of Internet-based business. “Nearly every major Internet company depends on the very same legal foundation that YouTube is built on,” said von Lohmann.
“A legal defeat for YouTube could result in fundamental changes to its business, potentially even making it commercially impossible to embrace user-generated content without first ‘clearing’ every video. In other words, a decisive victory for Viacom could potentially turn the Internet into TV, a place where nothing gets on the air until a cadre of lawyers signs off,” he said.
Perhaps Google will find ways around an adverse ruling. Maybe GoogleCue will make the task of filling out music and stock footage cue sheets easier.
iPhone plans announced
Apple and AT&T announced available service plans for the iPhone. No big surprises, but a few small ones.
ATLANTA and CUPERTINO, California—June 26, 2007—AT&T Inc. and Apple® today announced three simple, affordable service plans for iPhone™ which start at just $59.99 per month. All three plans include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. With everything else already included, iPhone customers can easily choose the plan that’s right for them based on the amount of voice minutes they plan to use each month. In addition, iPhone customers can choose from any of AT&T’s standard service plans.
- Unlimited data services. Nice, on anything other than an EDGE network. Seriously, this will encourage browsing and opportunities for upselling. This could be a nice shot in the arm for mobile video. Currently existing mobile plans’ pricing models discourage usage.
- Only can be activated through iTunes. Very nice. You get to avoid Skippy in the AT&T store. (Skippy was solely responsible for my current Verizon contract.)
- In order to use the iPhone as a music and video player, it has to be activated as a phone. Sounds like it will be pretty difficult to hack a method for using the phone with other carriers.
The first iPod seemed insanely expensive for a music player, but it caught on by being the first MP3 player to get it right. The problem here is that there are already a lot of phones and music players with satisfied owners. There were no switching costs involved with iPod adoption. I’ll be out $150 if I opt out of my VZ contract for AT&T.
Keep a close eye on the early adopters. These are the people who will be defining the mobile video space going forward. Of the most interest, will the YouTube connection combined with unlimited bandwidth spawn a new trend in participatory media? What will be the role of the citizen journalist? Will there be Final Cut Phone?
The business models can evolve. Since the iPhone is true Internet device, it’s not subject to the carriers’ walled garden approaches to online commerce. Content can be purchased via the iPhone as it is via the PC browser.
Rumor mill
An ArsTechnica entry asserts iPhone will work with Microsoft Exchange.
The COW groans
A little issue is brewing in various forums and mailing list regarding Creative COW’s moderation policies. The COW has always been pretty upfront that it moderates posts. Tim Wilson celebrated as much in a 12th anniversary congratulatory piece.
Today, this seems head-slappingly obvious. Every single significant online community, including the few, small email-based communities that remain meaningful, every single one of them is moderated. Zero exceptions. Forum members across our industry even want to be moderators themselves. THAT’s why it seems obvious now.
Yet The Lindebooms came under personal attack for years, and sometimes still do, for a practice now virtually universal in our industry, and in the hundreds of thousands of forums across the web that have been founded since Ron & Kathlyn started theirs.
By the way, it’s not that nothing off-topic is ever allowed. Off-topic conversations are sometimes critical for keeping the community together–as long as they don’t tear the community apart.
Please note that the following intends no disrespect whatever. But it’s worth noting that one of the longest and strongest holdouts to moderation was our dear friends at the Avid-L, some of whom are also leaders in The COW. “The L” came to an acrimonious split in 2005 over the lack of moderation. The core of that group in its new incarnation moderates both its membership and topics.
Again, no disrespect intended. I’m just saying that moderation works. The Lindebooms started it in our industry. Others have followed.
I look back on all of this and remember what they say: history is written by the victors. Well there you go.
Understood. But that’s not the whole story. Avoiding flames and way off topic posts is laudable. The COW goes much further, disallowing posts that mention competing sites. A COW user can’t say to another, “The answer to your question can be found at this site…”
That’s too bad. Ron, Kathlyn, and Tim should be a little more secure than that. In the age of Google, eventually the user will find that answer anyway. Would they rather Google be that user’s first option? The COW is big. It’s successful, and it can afford to allow the free flow of information — or eventually it will become irrelevant.
Most troubling is the extremely misleading error message (pictured above) one receives when mentioning the unmentionables like DigitalProductionBuzz, Total Training, or Pixelcorps. Would you trust a site that isn’t totally upfront about its moderation policies?
Moderation works, but censoring the free flow of valid information is a poor strategy. Lots more on this at GeneralSpecialist.
Most hated words
Last week, Nate Anderson had a funny piece in Ars Technica on the 10 most hated words spawned by the Internet.
UK pollsters YouGov have just completed a survey on the web’s most-hated words, the abominations that threaten to turn English into a long series of “plzkthxbye” utterances. At the top of the list (and rightly so) is the word “folksonomy.” It’s followed by:
- Blogosphere
- Blog
- Netiquette
- Blook (don’t ask)
- Webinar
- Vlog
- Social Networking
- Cookie
- Wiki
To those I’d like to add the most hated prefixes “i,” “e-,” and “cyber.” Enough already. The most hated suffix, or trailing adjective, is doubtlessly “2.0.” Personally, vlog has always been my least favorite. What idiot coined that term? Vlog should be an onomatopoeia for feline vomit. Though most of what passes for a vlog pretty much meets my preferred usage.
This got me thinking about what are my least favorite video terms making it into our 21st century lexicon. My list:
- TV snacking I first heard this insipid term spew forth from the CEO of MobiTV. Are they gone yet? Television is not to be confused with sustenance.
- Appointment television This one is only hated in its misuse. It was originally used to describe specific shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, and The Sopranos. These were the shows that you scheduled your life around. Today there are very few such shows – less due to TiVo than to generally crappiness of what’s on. Believe me – people still want to sit in front of the set for six hours a day. There are still shows such as Lost (which I don’t get) and Desperate Housewives (which I don’t like) that are talked about the next day around the proverbial water cooler. Now the term is used as some sort of tribal slang for all broadcast fare.
- Democratization This is a term only used by people with no understanding of markets. Wonderful tools like Final Cut Pro and Red One, along with disintermediating technologies like IPTV, are said to be democratizing production. That’s a euphenism for “cheapening.” It’s not about spreading democracy, it’s about commoditizing formerly expensive niche products. Is Wal-Mart a force for democratization of disposable diapers? I didn’t think so, let’s move on.
- User-generated content I hear this from executives all the time. There’s no vision of what this content actually is, what the presentation layer will look like, or how it will be curated; but damn YouTube’s doing it so we have to too. Do you have Google’s billions to throw at it waiting for it to make money? Thought so. Sorry, gotta do it the old-fashioned way – write a story, shoot it, and edit it. It’s work. There are no short cuts. User generated content might be free, but distributing it isn’t. As Google’s learning, Proctor and Gamble isn’t going to spend millions advertising next to twelve second video of a parakeet surfing in a toilet. (By the way, it’s not surfing. It’s dead.)
Fun with buzzwords. Ask the next person you hear use “long tail” in a sentence not about lemurs what the phrase means. Record it, add a laugh track, and post it to YouTube. Now that’s user-generated content!
