SlideShare is a new web application that lets you upload PowerPoint (.ppt and .pps) or OpenOffice (.odp) slideshows to the web for people to use and share. The site (which is in an invite-only beta right now, though accounts are granted within minutes of a request) feels a lot like the now-merged Google Video and YouTube. Slideshows come up with a unique url, copy-and-paste embed code for bloggers, tags, a comment stream and links to related shows. Clicking a “full” button on the viewer controls enlarges the slideshow to fill up most of the screen. Here’s one I found humorously diagramming soccer strategies from various national teams:
Another resemblance to Google Video and YouTube: SlideShare rides the tidal wave of Flash-based applications that has swept through the web over the past few years. By achieving near-ubiquity with its plugin, Flash has become the gel capsule that makes rich media content easy to swallow across platform and browser (there’s a reason that the web video explosion happened when it did, the way it did). But in a sneaky way, this has changed the nature of our web browsers, transforming them into something that more resembles a highly customizable TV set. And by this I mean to point out that Flash inhibits the creative reuse of the materials being delivered since Flash-wrapped video (or slideshows) can’t, to my knowledge, be easily broken apart and remixed.
Where once the “view source” ethic of web browsers reigned, allowing you to retrieve the underlying html code of any page and repurpose all or parts of it on your own site, the web is becoming a network of congealed packages — bite-sized broadcast units that, while nearly effortless to disseminate through linking and embedding, are much less easily reworked or repurposed (unless the source files are made available). The proliferation of rich media and dynamic interfaces across the web is no doubt exciting, but it’s worth considering this darker side.
Category Archives: youtube
book trailers, but no network
We often conceive of the network as a way to share culture without going through the traditional corporate media entities. The topology of the network is created out of the endpoints; that is where the value lies. This story in the NY Times prompted me to wonder: how long will it take media companies to see the value of the network?
The article describes a new marketing tool that publishers are putting into their marketing arsenal: the trailer. As in a movie trailer, or sometimes an informercial, or a DVD commentary track.
“The video formats vary as widely as the books being pitched. For well-known authors, the videos can be as wordy as they are visual. Bantam Dell, a unit of Random House, recently ran a series in which Dean Koontz told funny stories about the writing and editing process. And Scholastic has a video in the works for “Mommy?,” a pop-up book illustrated by Maurice Sendak that is set to reach stores in October. The video will feature Mr. Sendak against a background of the book’s pop-ups, discussing how he came up with his ideas for the book.”
Who can fault them for taking advantage of the Internet’s distribution capability? It’s cheap, and it reaches a vast audience, many of whom would never pick up the Book Review. In this day and age, it is one of the most cost effective methods of marketing to a wide audience. By changing the format of the ad from a straight marketing message to a more interesting video experience, the media companies hope to excite more attention for their new releases. “You won’t get young people to buy books by boring them to death with conventional ads,” said Jerome Kramer, editor in chief of The Book Standard.”
But I can’t help but notice that they are only working within the broadcast paradigm, where advertising, not interactivity, is still king. All of these forms (trailer, music video, infomercial) were designed for use with television; their appearance in the context of the Internet further reinforces the big media view of the ‘net as a one-way broadcast medium. A book is a naturally more interactive experience than watching a movie. Unconventional ads may bring more people to a product, but this approach ignores one of the primary values of reading. What if they took advantage of the network’s unique virtues? I don’t have the answers for this, but only an inkling that publishing companies would identify successes sooner and mitigate flops earlier, that the feedback from the public would benefit the bottom line, and that readers will be more engaged with the publishing industry. But the first step is recognizing that the network is more than a less expensive form of television.
three glimpses at the future of television
1. When radio was the main electronic media source, families would gather around the radio and listen to music, news, or entertainment programming, not unlike traditional television viewing. Today, radio listening habits have shifted, and I only hear the radio in cars and offices. Television viewing (if you can even call it that) is experiencing a similar shift, as people multitask at home, with the television playing in the background. With the roll out of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) in South Korean last year, the use of television is starting to resemble radio even more. DBM is a digital radio transmission system which allows television signals to play on mobile devices. Since its 2005 debut, a slew of DMB capability devices, such as GPS units and the PM80 PDA from LG have been released in Korea. DBM systems are being planned throughout Europe and Asia, which may make mobile television viewing ubiquitous and the idea of a family sitting in front of a television at home seem quaint.
2. I recently posted on a partnership between youtube and NBC, which will create a channel on the video sharing site to promote new shows from NBC this autumn. NBC seems to have taken the power of youtube to heart as is producing new episodes of the failed WB pilot, “Nobody’s Watching,” which never aired. The pilot was leaked to youtube and viewed by over 450,000 people. I’m waiting to see how far NBC is willing experiment proactively with youtube and its community to create better programming.
3. In the US, the shifting of television from large boxes residing in living rooms to desktops, laptops, and portable media players, has often meant viewing pirated programming uploaded onto video sharing sites like youtube or downloading files from bit torrent. For those who don’t want to break the law, Jeff Jarvis reports that legal streamed and downloaded content will be helped by an announcement by ABC that 87% of viewers of their streamed video were able to recall its advertising, which is over 3 times the average recall of standard television advertising. While legal content is important, I hope it doesn’t kill remix culture or the anyone can be a star ability that youtube provides.
lulu.tv testing some boundaries of copyright
Lulu.tv made recent news with their new video sharing service which has a unique business model. Bob Young the head of Lulu.tv and founder of the self publishing service Lulu.com also founded Red Hat, which commercially sells open source software. He has been doing interesting experiments in creating business that harness the creative efforts of people.
The new revenue sharing strategy behind Lulu.tv is fairly simple. Anyone can post or view content for free, as with Google Video or YouTube. However, it offers a “pro” version, which charges users to post video. 80% of the fees paid by goes to an account and the money is distributed each month based on the number of unique downloads to subscribing members.
This strategy has a similar tone to the ideas of Terry Fisher who has been promoting and the related idea of an alternative media cooperative model. In Fisher’s model, viewers (rather than the content creators) pay a media fee to view content and the collected revenues are redistributed to the creators in the cooperative. Lulu.tv makes logical adjustments to the Fisher model because other video sharing services are already offering their content for free. Because there are a lot more viewers of these sites than posters, the potential revenue has limited growth. However, I can imagine if the economic incentive becomes great enough, then the best content could gravitate to Lulu.tv and they could potentially charge viewers for that content. Alternatively, revenue from paid advertising could be added the pool of funds for “pro” users.
Introducing money into environments also produces friction and video sharing will be no different. Moving content from a free service to a pay service will increase copyright concerns, which have yet to be discussed. People tend to post “other people’s content” on YouTube and GoogleVideo, which often contains copyrighted material. For example, Hey Ya, Charlie Brown scores a Charlie Brown Christmas Special with Outkast’s hit single. It is not clear if this video was posted by a pro user, or who made the video and if any rights were cleared. Although, for instance, YouTube takes down content when asked to by copyright holders, many holders do not complain because that media (for instance 80s music videos) have limited or no replay value. With video remixes, creators have traditionally given away their work and allow it to be shared because there was no or little earning potential for the remixes. However with Lulu.tv’s model, this media is suddenly able to generate money. Remixers who have traditionally allows the viral distribution of their work, now they have an economic incentive to host their content in one specific location and hence control the distrbution of the work (sound familiar?)
I’m quite glad that Lulu.tv is experimenting in this vein. If it succeeds, the end effect will push the once fringe media and distribution even deeper into the mainstream. For people concerned with overreaching copyright protection, this could be also be disastrous depending on how we as a culture decide to accept it. The copyright holders could use Lulu.tv has a further argument for yet stronger protections to intellectual property. On the other hand, it could mainstream the idea that remixing is a transformative use. The tensions between media producers, copyright holders, distributors and viewers continue to be evolve and are important to document and note as they move forward.
nbc and youtube, friends once again
Late last year, a friend asked me if I had watched Saturday Night Live on NBC. I said that I hadn’t seen the show in years. He mentioned an amusing skit entitled “Lazy Sunday” with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell playing two kids who rap about eating cupcakes, their favorite online mapping engine and watching the Chronicles of Narnia movie. I had thought that it was just another drop in the “can’t see everything” bucket. Fortunately, around the same time, Apple announced the video Ipod, video download services on iTunes and a free download of the SNL skit. Later, SNL had equally funny skit with Natelie Portman doing a bizzarre, much censored gangster rap, which I didn’t see live either. This time, NBC made the video available on their own website. Both clips were uploaded, although initially the site was very unstable and I had trouble getting their videos to play correctly. Since then, they have posted a few other clips from SNL, however, none of them were nearly as funny as the first two. The problem the internet solves is that it saves me the trouble from having to sit through hours of mediocre skit comedy to see the gems. Of course, advertisers might see it differently.
Ever since the Saturday Night Live skit “Lazy Sunday,” was popularized on the Internet, NBC has been experimenting with ways of using video clips of their shows to attract viewers. Earlier they forced YouTube, the popular video sharing site, to take down clips of the video, as they were launching their own web clip service on their own site.
In an interesting twist, this week NBC confirmed a report that they will be launching a joint project with YouTube, offer clips from their shows on a NBC “channel” within YouTube’s site. As currently the lowest rated network, NBC is not surprisingly exploring new ways of using the Internet to get people to watch their programs. ABC has been experimenting with making episodes of their hit shows on iTunes Music store. However, the major difference here is that ABC has the luxury of having the popular shows “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” which people are willing to pay to download.
I’m looking forward to seeing how NBC implements their YouTube channel. There are many directions they could take, and it will reveal how they understand YouTube. One of the key things about YouTube, is that is it is democratic. A vast amount of material is posted, and users vote on the content they like by, viewing, commenting, and sharing the link. This process is the polar opposite from NBC’s current strategy of curating the “best” skits.
The open question is, then, how effective will NBC engage YouTube users and allow them to participate with NBC content. Will they allow for open comments? I would be very surprised if they let users post NBC content, but will they post clips based upon users requests? If NBC just want eyeballs and think they can just post clips vetted by NBC execs, then there won’t really be much of a change from hosting clips on their own site, save perhaps having more stable access to users.
I hope that the NBC execs are not assuming that posting clips on YouTube is some magic viral marketing silver bullet. In that, the key issue for NBC is to realize that they cannot control viewers. Hosting SNL clips are there own site was only mildly successful. Was the reason because of technology, poor word of mouth, or uninteresting content? Random clips on YouTube get half a million views because people chose that content, not the other way around. 500,000 views may seem small in absolute terms of audience size to the television marketer. However, I would be interested in seeing the cost per view to generate an television audience versus YouTube.
In the end, bad T.V. is bad T.V and putting clips on YouTube is not going to fix that. If NBC has shows they truly believe to be good, but under watched, YouTube can be a powerful tool to build a community around the show. The secondary media ecology surrounding ABC’s Lost is the current gold standard. Something on that level cannot be produced on demand. That is, a network cannot build a sustainable community around a show that no one cares about. For this venture to be successful, NBC will need to engage the audience and it cannot assume it understands exactly their preferences. If you look at their current ratings, it is unclear if they understand what viewers want. Let’s see what happens.
a girl goes to work (infographic video)
It’s not often that you see infographics with soul. Even though visuals are significantly more fun to look at than actual data tables, the oversimplification of infographics tends to suck out the interest in favor of making things quickly comprehensible (often to the detriment of the true data points, like the 2000 election map). This Röyksopp video, on the other hand, a delightful crossover between games, illustration, and infographic, is all about the storyline and subverts data to be a secondary player. This is not pure data visualization on the lines of the front page feature in USA Today. It is, instead, a touching story encased in the traditional visual language and iconography of infographics. The video’s currency belies its age: it won the 2002 MTV Europe music video award for best video.
Our information environment is growing both more dispersed and more saturated. Infographics serve as a filter, distilling hundreds of data points down into comprehensible form. They help us peer into the impenetrable data pools in our day to day life, and, in the best case, provide an alternative way to reevaluate our surroundings and make better decisions. (Tufte has also famously argued that infographics can be used to make incredibly poor decisions–caveat lector.)
But infographics do something else; more than visual representations of data, they are beautiful renderings of the invisible and obscured. They stylishly separate signal from noise, bringing a sense of comprehensive simplicity to an overstimulating environment. That’s what makes the video so wonderful. In the non-physical space of the animation, the datasphere is made visible. The ambient informatics reflect the information saturation that we navigate everyday (some with more serenity than others), but the woman in the video is unperturbed by the massive complexity of the systems that surround her. Her bathroom is part of a maze of municipal waterpipes; she navigates the public transport grid with thousands of others; she works at a computer terminal dealing with massive amounts of data (which are rendered in dancing—and therefore somewhat useless—infographics for her. A clever wink to the audience.); she eats food from a worldwide system of agricultural production that delivers it to her (as far as she can tell) in mere moments. This is the complexity that we see and we know and we ignore, just like her. This recursiveness and reference to the real is deftly handled. The video is designed to emphasize the larger picture and allows us to make connections without being visually bogged down in the particulars and textures of reality. The girl’s journey from morning to pint is utterly familiar, yet rendered at this larger scale and with the pointed clarity of a information graphic, the narrative is beautiful and touching.
via information aesthetics