Media

Some links for my latest presentations

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Eirikso EBU Connect
Okay, so this image is a bit old. It’s from my speech at EBU Connect in Croatia this spring, but it is very difficult to snap pictures of myself while speaking, so I didn’t have any images from my latest presentations…

For the last couple of weeks I have done a lot of them. For very interesting, diverse and utterly intelligent audiences. It’s a privilege to be able to meet so many interesting and skilled people. After all presentations people keep asking about a copy of my slides. Because I use a presentation style completely free for bullet points and complex technical charts the slides are not worth much unless you remember every word I said. For my presentations the slides are only a set of illustrations.

I try to post as much as possible on this blog and here are some links that discuss parts of the issues I have been talking about lately:

Articles related to my presentation
The power of citizen journalism
Content isn’t king
When will a new technology break through?
Helpful clues for the media industry
Understanding a new channel
Predicting the future
The convergence that makes things difficult
Commercials gone wild
The future of TV distribution
Five ways to check a web site
Idiots
The Long Tail in your living room
Viral Ads: It’s an Epidemic
Kjøpe en iPod Nano
Some essential blogs to read
A brand new video channel!

I am also interested in presentation styles and skills. I have posted some thoughts on what I think makes a good presentation. You find some of them here:
Two essential tricks in PowerPoint
How to avoid making boring presentations
How to make illustrations

For my regular readers all of this is old thoughts. If you want to keep yourself updated the best thing to do is to subscribe to my email updates or my RSS-feed. You find the information you need here.

Some links for my latest presentations

Content isn’t king

eirikso5 Comments

Cory Doctorow nails it:

Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Or, if you could choose between your portable DVD player and a mobile phone…?

I think conversation is also the biggest difference between YouTube and GoogleVideo. Eventually Google had to buy YouTube to get into that conversation.

Content isn’t king

Helpful clues for the media industry

eirikso1 Comment

 

Okay, Doc Searls calls it helpful clues for the newspapers, but on the internet there isn’t that much of a difference anymore. So these clues are important for any media company that want success on the web. If you are going to follow one link today, visit Doc!

Eighth, uncomplicate your webistes. I can’t find a single newspaper that doesn’t have a slow-loading, hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive, confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things. Quit trying to “drive traffic” into a maze where every link leads to another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park.

Now, if you add Doc’s clues for radio as well you have something to think about over the weekend.

(Via Buzzmachine)

Helpful clues for the media industry

Understanding a new channel

eirikso4 Comments

NBC have been distributing trailers on YouTube for a while. Mostly trailers that they also run on traditional TV. Then, they get some negative comments about being commercial in a medium like YouTube.

It’s of course possible to simply put traditional videos on YouTube, and even have great success doing so. If the content is good you have the possibility to reach huge amounts of viewers.

However, the interesting stuff happens when you really use this new medium. Lonelygirl15 is an example of something that we’ll see more of. Using traditional story telling, but in a typical YouTube wrapping and form.

It’s the same old story. “Oh, we invented TV. Let’s take some radio presenters and put them in front of a camera”… And 20 years later this new medium of television has evolved.

Maybe we don’t need 20 years this time. NBC gets the message and produce this excelent promo, only for YouTube.

Link to video.

The trailers from NBC on YouTube have resulted in more than 6 million views in total so far. The most popular is the exclusives, previews and of course this one.

(Thanks, Linn)

Understanding a new channel

Idiots

eirikso7 Comments

I stole this headline from Jeff Jarvis. He is talking about Fox News:

FoxNews takes the Bill Clinton interview down from YouTube. Fools. They would be getting a whole new audience. They’d be even more part of the conversation.

I agree. Fools. One thing is that taking it down is a fight that they can’t win.Here is the results for the search “bill clinton fox news” on YouTube right now. And that’s only YouTube. Once it’s out there you can’t stop it.

But Fox is a commercial company. Of course they want to take their content down from YouTube. How on earth are they going to earn money from this distribution channel?

They want people to watch the clip on www.foxnews.com. In their own web-TV. A web TV with some problems:

  • less accessible
  • no discussion
  • not easy to link directly to a clip
  • not possible to include the clip on web pages where people discuss this interview
  • problems with less used browsers and operating systems

After emailing myself the link from the FoxNews player I was able to provide you with the direct link to that clip – FOX News Video: Heated Discussion. Warning: it’s a popup, so the player wil probably be stopped by your popup stopper.

So, people want it on YouTube. They want to discuss it. They want to paste the clip on their blogs and comment on it. So what should Fox do? I actually think that having the clip on YouTube will drive more people to their traditional channels. That they will earn more even if they can’t directly tie an income to the clip on YouTube.

But my suggestion right now would be that Fox take control. It should have been Fox that posted the clip on YouTube in the first place. They should have made their own submission the preferred among the YouTube crowd. By submitting it first. Maybe even before it was aired on traditional channels. They could also have added extra value to their own submission by including clips that was not aired on traditional channels.

YouTube are kind enough to provide Fox with a counter that will show how many people watched the clip on that channel. How about including commercials in the clip they post on YouTube? It shouldn’t be too difficult to price it, given that they have the number of viewers.

Idiots

The Long Tail in your living room

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Oyvind answers my quick link to Fortune Magazine with a very good post on how the net will change your media habits. I decided to comment on it with a separate article here:

Moving the internet into the living room has been done before. But the big problem with the WEB-TV products of the late ninties was the fact that the companies making those products didn’t understand the living room situation at all and thought that web pages as we know them today would be a good idea on the big screen. They soon realized that it was a horrible idea. Traditional web pages are not designed for the big screen and a remote.

So, over the last couple of years products like the media center softwares you find here and connected hardware boxes like the proposed Apple iTV box, the Xbox 360 and other devices starts to bring content from the internet into your living room with a front end that is tailored for the big screen and remote control navigation.

The quality on YouTube and Google video is not at all tailored for the big screen, but that quality will be better. And I think we’ll see that the audience develop a tolerance for low quality on certain types of content combined with a need for high definition and very high quality on other types of content.

This is the long tail entering a space where the big broadcasters have been ruling for the last decades. I repeat, we’re up for some groundbreaking change…

The Long Tail in your living room

Windows Media DRM – Cracked!

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For quite some time there has been some tools that would let you strip the DRM from encrypted Windows Media files. However, they have been difficult to use and have not worked on all systems.

Now a user called viodentia over at the Doom9 forums has posted a tool called FairUse4WM. It lets you remove the DRM from files that you have a valid license for on your computer.

Meaning that you can now safely buy music on all the Windows Media Based music shops and easily “set it free” so you can play it on whatever device you want.

This is great news for consumers and pretty bad news for some content owners and of course for Microsoft. They issued a patch for Windows Media Player shortly after the first release of FairUse4WM. The patch stopped FairUse4WM, but it took viodentia a couple of hours to release a new version that worked on patched media players as well. Let the good old cat and mouse game begin!

It seems like Cory Doctorow was right. DRM doesn’t work.

I have tested FairUse4WM and it works very well. First you point it to a media file that you have a working key for. You can download this one and play it once so a key is issued. Point FairUse4WM to it and when it has done its wonders on that file you get to the next screen where you simply drag and drop DRM’ed files. When you have added the files you want to make device independent you hit one button and FairUse4WM strips the DRM and saves the new files in a location that you have specified. It adds “[NoDRM]” to the name. Simple as that.

Please note that I am not in any way encouraging piracy here. FairUse4WM should be used on media that you have legally obtained and of course you should never redistribute media that you don’t own the rights to.

However, this tool is great if you have been stupid enough to buy music on any of the Windows Media DRM’ed shops on the net. This means that you can unlock and convert WMA and WMV so you can play it on your iPod, your Linux player or whatever box that has not been blessed by Microsoft. It means that buying music from the MSN Music store no longer is so stupid after all…

More information:

An article on some of the first tools to break the WMV DRM from Chris Laniers blog back in february 2005.

Engadget covers the story and publish an open letter to Microsoft. The Slashdot crowd chimes in. And, well – it’s all over the blogsphere and all over the net.

Windows Media DRM – Cracked!

Essential listening

eirikso1 Comment

Chris AndersonEven if you’re not too interested in media centers, this edition of the media center show podcast is essential listening. Ian Dixon has interviewed Chris Anderson. They talk about the long tail and how it will change the media industry.

There are three things that are driving the long tail content:
– The democratization of production
(cheap production tools)

– The democratization of distribution
(the internet)

– The connection of supply and demand
(the search engines)

…you learn about these issues and a lot more over at The Media Center Show. Listen to it directly in the web page or transfer to your MP3-player.

And while I am mentioning essential listening you should also load your iPod with this little gem:

How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times

This is important stuff — it explains why we’re socially willing to commit nigh-infinite social resources to fighting terrorism, though statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen…. …it explains why people buy lottery tickets. It explains a great deal about many kinds of human activity. This is both sensible and entertaining audio.”.

Link to article and MP3-clip on BoingBoing.

Loic Lemur and Joi Ito
And if that’s not enough, you find a great little video clip of a conversation between Loic Lemur and Joi Ito over here. They talk about games, creative commons and the media industry. Some very interesting thoughts on the future of media there as well.

There’s a lot of things happening right now and there’s a lot of people out there that is kind enough to share their thoughts!

And when you head out to buy Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail” you can support eirikso.com by using this link:
The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Essential listening