C-Span recently ordered YouTube to take down copies of its coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner, at which Stephen Colbert digs into the President mercilessly (the President is sitting to his right). Aside from proving that Colbert has huge balls, this is an instance of a company controlling the viral spread of their content.
NYTimes has an article. Thought people might find the video funny and the article interesting.
Over the last week or so, Jeff, ER, and Andrew have all written about advertising. Andrew argued that enough people still watch ads that the death of the 30 second spot is oversold. I agree - the 30 second ad will be a valuable mode of advertising for a long time. But the very fact that we need to make an argument against its demise implies that the medium is weakening. Personally, I am much more interested in what the advertising industry might do to fill in the gaps where the 30 second spot is losing ground.
ER gave us a full review of Firefox’s new ad blocking plugins Adblock Plus and Filterset.G Updater. AdBlock Plus blocks ads and Filterset.G Updater automatically updates AdBlock so that it knows what sort of code constitutes an ad. Firefox, extended with these plugins, is capable of blocking most ads by default. Using these plugins a Firefox user might never see an ad again. Beyond just blocking ads, AdBlock has a “Support Site” feature that configures Firefox to download the ads of your favorite site without forcing you to see them. This feature let’s the site to reap a pay-per-view payment from their advertising patrons without the advertiser reaping the benefits of their payment. The upshot is that Firefox users are now able to completely circumvent the purpose of online advertising with minimal effort.
You might think that these plugins signal the death of online text and banner ads in the same way that TiVo is supposed to kill the 30 second spot. As usual, the statistics are unclear. What is clear, however, is that at least 65% (probably more like 80%) of Internet users run Microsoft Internet Explorer. The current version of IE has no ad-blocking technology. So, ala Andrew, foretelling the imminent death of banner and text based ads is not realistic. Nonetheless, the fact that a significant proportion of Internet users can avoid advertisements entirely means that advertisers will look for alternative ways of communicating their message.
Jeff and DoubleClick make the point that, if advertising stops working as intended, content providers might be forced to charge for content. Jeff argues that this is not the worst thing in the world - HBO does it, the New York Times does it, and all magazines do it. But as Jeff also argues subscription based service is not the only possible solution. From my perspective it’s not nearly the coolest one either.
One of the things I have noticed recently is a convergence of content and advertisement. Apple recently came out with a series of commercials comparing macs to PCs. Many of my friends watched them for entertainment. They’re even on YouTube, along with thousands of other commercials that people found entertaining enough to post. I’m sure some of the corporate message gets across, even on YouTube or Google Video.
My point is that, at least online, there is significant blurring of the line between commercial and content. Ads need not be baners on the sides - they can be the main show. If an ad is clever enough it is bound to be entertaining to someone. If an ad is subtle enough it might be taken as content.
Heavy.com is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Heavy offers lots of videos geared 18-34 year old men. Ninjas, monkeys, beer, and boobs abound. And there are ads - lots of ads. Heavy drew about 5.5 million viewers in February alone. About half of the videos on Heavy.com are blatant advertisements - created by companies in order to convince you to buy their products. Because the ads are funny and clever people watch them of their own volition.
Make cool ads and people will want to see them. The idea is so simple, and yet so out of line with traditional advertising models that it’s revolutionary. TV and movies got advertisers used to having essentially captive audiences. The Internet has broken that paradigm time and again.I can’t help but think that advertisers will adapt admirably to the new reality of Tivo and AdBlocking. There are far more options than simply charging for content, and some of them are really compelling.
(For more examples of product placement and advertisement as content, see BMW Films, American Idol’s short Ford-sponsored music videos, and this Wall Street Journal piece on product placement in comics.)
The New York Times has an article today about a virtual world introducing a real world ATM card linked to your virtual wealth. (Requires NYTimes account to read.)
When I went into class this week I was only mildly familiar with the range of (legal) video content that is available online. Sure, I knew about the giants iTunes, Google Video, and You Tube. I was not really aware of Slingbox (aside from Greg’s earlier demo), MLBTV, Democracy TV, or any of the other video resources online. But even our time in class didn’t come close to giving me a sense of the breadth of sources for video content online.
I left class last week and went to pick up my mail in Frist. The only piece of mail that I had was an issue of Wired magazine. Quite coincidentally, this month’s Wired has a piece called “The New Networks,” which is all about the television revolution that we spoke about in class.
The Wired piece is not so much an article as it is a list of cool new TV oriented technologies. For those of you who are interested, the piece lists about 80 web sites and services. I highly doubt it’s exhaustive. The very first one listed, Akimbo, that really piqued my interest. Akimbo is essentially reverse Slingbox. Rather than broadcasting your television over the internet, Akimbo allows you to download and watch internet video on your TV.
To get Akimbo working on your TV you need to have a broadband internet connection, drop $200 for the box, and be willing to shell out $10 a month for service. In exchange for your continued monetary support, Akimbo provides you with ~100 “channels” of on demand content. Essentially, you pay for their indexing and hosting lots and lots of video (10,000 tv shows alone) so that you don’t have to go looking for it online or on TV. When you want to watch something, it is automatically downloaded to your Akimbo box and played for you.
Akimbo currently has over 100+ channels, with new ones added each week. Unlike TV channels, Akimbo Channels are collections of programs from Akimbo’s partners, and all programs are available for viewing on your schedule.
As you can see, “channels” is really a misnomer. Surfing through Akimbo’s website it looks like these channels are actually just categories of video that exist to make finding what you want easier. There’s a news category, a business new category, a cartoon category, an anime category, a sports category, a baseball category, and yes, even an adult category. There is not even a hint of time restrictions for when you can watch certain content.
For me, though, the most exciting thing about Akimbo is that they seem quite open to partnering with nobodys, so to speak. The following comes from their “Partners” page.
Get your content seen on Akimbo!
Interested in providing video programming to the Akimbo Service? If you have more than 10 titles, totaling more than 5 hours, please contact us directly at partners@akimbo.com.If you have fewer than 10 titles, click here for information about our Indie on Akimbo program and submit your content online submission.
They also have an option for video bloggers to register their vodcast with the company. As we usually think of corporate partners as other corporations, the term “partner” is also something of a misnomer here. Virtually anyone can be an Akimbo partner. So really the whole thing is a big time-shifting and narrowcasting machine (get excited Greg!).
I find Akimbo much more attractive than Slingbox. I have no particular desire to be able to watch TV more often and in more places than I already do. What I’d love to be able to do is watch the video content that I want when I want to do it. It seems to me that Akimbo is moving the television revolution in a direction that is both sustainable for large companies and really cool for users and small content producers.
Large video producers can deal with Akimbo much like they would a local cable provider. Akimbo collects fees from users and can pay partners for their content. Since the model is so similar to cable TV it should be clear to corporations that there is money to be made here. What is revolutionary about Akimbo is that this process is open to mid-sized video producers as well. You need not be an established cable channel or studio to get your content on there. Funds can be divied up based on the popularity of content. This might even force large to studios to produce more good stuff.
Users can deal with Akimbo much like they would with their Tivo or cable box. The machine allows you to browse through all available video by channel and select what you would like to watch. It allows also allows people to “subscribe” to feeds of certain types like music videos or news. Really small video producers like video bloggers can register their content (which they were producing for free anyway) and use Akimbo as a distrobution platform.
Akimbo brings some good change to the world of television, but not so much as to completely devastate the landscape.
(If you’re interested, here is a review of the Akimbo platform’s hardware and software. There is also a story of how AT&T is using Akimbo as their video on demand provider.)
The New York Times Magazine ran a really interesting article on Google’s China decision. (Requires registration)
Last week we discussed computer security - viruses, spyware, botnets, etc. It turned out that we found it somewhat difficult to pin down how exactly computer security (or lack thereof) affects our lives and our businesses. Most people’s first inclination was to argue that malware and computer insecurity lead to lost productivity, and that this is its real downside.
Andrew Kovacs argued in his recent post that lost productivity is really quite hard to measure. For him the imprecision makes it hard to argue whether computer insecurity really affects the economy. It follows that Andrew is uncertain whether the US computer market undervalues security, since it is uncertain whether security is really a problem.
Personally, I think Andrew’s argument amounts to navel-gazing. Who cares if productivity is hard to measure? We don’t measure the value of a person’s life and autonomy, and yet we are perfectly comfortable criminalizing murder and rape. We don’t need to measure things to know that they are bad. Malware is bad (by definition). It is clear that malware does bad things to people and to businesses. It is not a stretch to argue that computer insecurity affects economies as well, but we simply don’t need to make that argument. The really important questions are: Does the computer market place a reasonable value on security? If not, then why not?
Just looking at the size of the botnets referred to in this Wikipedia article and this Washington Post article convinces me that people in general just don’t care about computer security and that their lack of care has serious negative consequences. Even if there is no technical solution to malware (which there isn’t) we should be able to write software that is closer to bug-free than this. So why don’t we spend time developing better consumer software? Why don’t software companies spend more time and money hunting down existing bugs? Let me take a stab at answering those questions.
The computer market in the US is actually two markets - the consumer market and the corporate market. By the corporate market, by the way, I mean really big companies with large budgets for machines, not small businesses. Having worked in the corporate world (R&D at Bloomberg) I have no doubt that big companies care about computer security. However, they care about it on a large scale and not at all in the same way that a technology savvy individual would.
Large corporations have the ability to run technical support divisions to set up and fix employees machines. An individual computer is a fixable and ultimately replaceable item. So their security concerns get shifted to the macro level. When big businesses talk about computer security they are concerned with issues like protecting their trade secrets, keeping their network running, and keeping their business data secure. Technology savvy individuals and small businesses don’t have the luxury of this outlook. Their computer is a required tool and often the lifeblood of their business. They are much more worried about keeping the computer working than protecting their database (should they have one).
So the kinds of computer insecurity we spoke about in class - viruses, trojans, spyware, etc - do not affect large companies in the same way that they affect individuals. Big businesses have the leverage needed to make computer manufacturers and software vendors place emphasis on this sort of security. What they don’t have is the incentive to use that leverage in a way that is helpful to the little guy.
Now imagine a case where an individual’s computer is infected with spyware. They can’t replace the computer because new a new one is too expensive. So they remove the spyware or pay someone else to remove it because that is much cheaper (though not cheap in either time or money). But what can they do about the larger problem? They can’t convince the software vendor to spend millions of dollars to care about their problem because the vendor (Microsoft in most cases) cares a lot more about their big business customers. Big business doesn’t care because for them the malware problem is negligible or at least not of central importance. Other individuals and small businesses don’t care because they are people too, and so are intrinsically self centered. No one really cares except for the one person or small business who got hurt.
So when will the market care about computer security? When enough of the little guys get stung.
Yesterday in class we discussed whether enforcing network neutrality would be a good or bad thing. For those of you who don’t know, network neutrality is a view that holds that a computer network should not discriminate between content or types of content that travel over it. The paradigmatic example of non-neutrality is that of an Internet service provider that simply drops voice over IP packets so that Inernet phone services like Vonage cannot compete for customers with the ISP’s phone service.
This seems to me to be a particularly nasty example of non-neutrality and probably need not be specifically regulated by network neutrality legislation; it likely falls under the general category of anti-competitive behavior that we discussed earlier in the course. There are, however, less egregious and less clear-cut cases.
The most prominent issue that people have in mind when they discuss network neutrality these days is the question of whether ISPs should be allowed to provide tiered service to web sites. That is, should an ISP be allowed to sell `preferred’ status to a company so that requests for the company’s web site are given higher priority than other requests?
When I first heard of this question, my immediate inclination was to argue that such a system would lower the value of the web for users and that we should employ legislation to protect the value of the web. I assumed that non-preferred web sites would necessarily get slower service than they do currently. It is my experience that, while I use a few big sites (Google, Wikipedia, Slashdot) often, in the aggregate I spend more time on smaller sites than larger ones. Big web sites that could afford to pay for preferred service are often simply stepping-stones to smaller sites where the real richness of the web lies.
I haven’t changed my mind about network neutrality, but I have since changed my mind about why I think it is a good thing. It is unlikely that the facts would unravel as I previously described them. Non-neutrality would probably be introduced in tandem with the rollout of a newer and faster broadband infrastructure in the US. Broadband service is an order of magnitude faster in Japan than it is here, so it is not a question of our technological capacity to build this new infrastructure. It will happen eventually. As such, I doubt that non-preferred sites would get slower service than they do now. Indeed, they will likely get much faster service.
The real problem in my mind is this: what happens when lots of ISPs start to offer this service? Non-preferred service might not be fast enough for future media-rich web sites like a future Google, Wikipedia, or YouTube. Wikipedia especially, as a non-profit, is unlikely to be able to afford preferred service from enough of the providers to reach their entire audience, and will be forced to pick a small subset of carriers to buy this service from so that they can reach the largest number of users with the smallest expenditure.
These media-rich sites have a lot of draw for consumers – they make the web valuable and entertaining. Even if they do not create this value themselves, they link us to it or host it for us. If large sites are forced pick and choose which carriers they can buy service from, users will undoubtedly follow those sites. This seems to me to squeeze the mid-sized ISP out of the market, something which I am extremely wary of doing.