Verizon announces changes in wireless plans

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Mobile

Rumor has been going around lately that Verizon Wireless was about to change up its wireless plans.  Looks like Verizon is tired of the rumors, and has issued a press release detailing the changes that are about to go in effect on Monday January 18.  The changes are mixed, some being welcome changes, some seeming to almost be a step backwards in terms of customer relations.

The first big change for Verizon is the introduction of new Unlimited Talk and Unlimited Talk & Text plans.  The plans will cost $69.99 and $89.99 per month, respectively. Those plans will allow for unlimited calling to anyone, and unlimited texting to anyone, possibly eliminating the annoying calling bubbles the current plans provide.  The family plans for each will cost $119.99 for Unlimited Talk and $149.99 for Unlimited Talk & Text, which includes the first two lines.

Verizon is also decreasing the price of it’s Unlimited Data plans, bringing it down to $29.99 rather than the current $44.99 for unlimited data usage.  However, there is also what could be a small problem with the data plans.  Verizon has decided that any phone it deems a “3G Multimedia” phone now requires a $9.99 per month data fee.  The fee includes only 25 MB of data which is a bit of a joke.  The phones include the Samsung Alias 2, LG enV3, LG Chocolate Touch, Motorola Entice, and Nokia Twist.  So basically, Verizon’s most popular feature phones now require an extra $10 charge per month for data most users probably won’t want from them.  Data plans make sense on smartphones, but putting them on feature phones that have 3G, but are more likely going to be used for texting might make those cheap Sprint or T-Mobile plans look more enticing.

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AT&T rolls out unlimited text, voice, and data plans - CNET

Reuters

AT&T rolls out unlimited text, voice, and data plans CNET AT&T on Friday joined Verizon in revamping its calling plans, announcing a series of new unlimited plans across all devices, especially high-end smartphones. Without tethering, AT&T's unlimited data plans for the iPhone should be taken with ... Verizon Wireless, AT&T lower voice plan prices, expand data plan requirementABC News Verizon and AT&T Cut Price on Unlimited Mobile-Calling PlansBusinessWeek Verizon and AT&T dial up wireless plan warsCNNMoney.com ABH News -Macworld -Apple Insider all 706 news articles »

Apple adds iTunes Store page for Haiti donations (Macworld.com)

Conan O’Brien, do you want to be a CrunchGear intern for a little while?

All of us here at CrunchGear are fairly angry at the way NBC has treated you, Conan. So here’s our offer: if you and the peacock decide to part company (and you really ought to, provided the network takes care of your staff and everyone else who moved from New York to Los Angeles, and provided you walk away with some fat cash), we’d like to offer you an internship. That’s right: Conan O’Brien, CrunchGear intern. That has a nice ring to it, no?

Just ask Jimin what it’s like to be a CG intern. Since I don’t know where Jimin is right now, I’ll give you a preview: have you ever wanted more USB thumb drives than you know what to do with? CG interns get them in spades, since that’s how companies give you product images and whatnot from live events. (I personally took home something like 10 USB thumb drives from last week’s CES.) What you do with these USB thumb drives after you copy over the data is your business—maybe you’d like to paint President Obama’s face on them and sell ‘em in Union Square in New York? That’s your call.

All of this assumes, of course, that NBC doesn’t consider interning for CrunchGear to be a competing job. You’re going to have a few months of non-compete time, right, before you (hopefully!) get a show at another network? Spend ‘em here with us, you’ll have a blast. We’ll make jokes in the official CrunchGear Chat Room.

So Conan, if you’re thinking of a way to sit out your non-compete time, the door is wide open for you here at CrunchGear.

Only The Paranoid Are Scared Of TV Everywhere

Editor’s note: This guest post is by Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur and an advisor to Arts and Labs, a collaboration between entertainment companies, software providers, telecommunications providers, artists and creators.

Some people don’t like TV Everywhere, Comcast’s and Time Warner’s plan to bring cable TV to the Web.  They are just paranoid.

Allow me to explain. In his 1964 Harper’s Magazine essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that American politics has often been a stage for excessively conspiratorial and suspicious minds from both the left and the right. What disturbed Hofstadter most of all was the sanity of the paranoid. “It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that make the phenomenon significant,” he explained. By infecting normal people, Hoftstadter worried, the paranoid style had made conspiratorial fantasy a troublingly recurrent feature of American political culture.

Hofstadter is correct. From Andrew Jackson to Joseph McCarthy to contemporary Americans on both the left and the right, the paranoid style—with its obsessive targeting of the Roman Papacy or Russian communists or Wall Street bankers or Muslim terrorists—has replaced rational discussion with what Hoftstadter called “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy.”

As the Internet has become more and more of a central political issue in American life, so the paranoid style has, unfortunately, begun to infect our public discussion about technology and media. Much of this paranoia focuses on the supposed selfishly monopolistic intentions of mainstream media which, for many otherwise sane people, represents a deadly threat against the so-called “people’s Internet”. Thus, from Rupert Murdoch’s obstinate determination to protect the economic value of his content on the Internet to Bono’s latest defense of intellectual property to the perpetual hysteria around the Network Neutrality debate, any criticism of piracy or defense of paid content is viewed in the darkest and most apocalyptical terms by paranoid advocates of an “open” and “free” Internet.

Richard Hoftstadter’s “angry minds” who, in the 19th century, obsessed over the threat of masons, Jesuits and munitions makers, have, in the digital 21st century, discovered record labels, movie studios and, above all, telecoms and cable companies as the root of all our problems. Take, for example, the paranoia that has greeted Comcast and Time Warner’s announcement of their TV Everywhere pilot. On the face of it, the non-exclusive TV Everywhere service is a perfectly rational and reasonable effort by the cable companies to combine the values of their offline and online businesses. The test scheme – which is about to be rolled out to 5,000 Comcast customers – enables subscribers to access content from Time Warner’s TBS and TNT channels which they’ve paid for on their cable boxes for free on the Internet.

So what’s not to like about TV Everywhere? If you choose to pay for cable service, then you’ll be able to access this content for free on the Internet. If not, then you won’t. And if current cable subscribers object for any reason to the TV Everywhere scheme, then they can simply end their commercial relationship with Comcast and go elsewhere to acquire their media.

But TV Everywhere has been greeted with exaggerated suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy by some Internet groups. This paranoia is particularly palpable at lobbying groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge—organizations which often appear to be intrinsically opposed to the online business initiatives of large, established media companies.

For example, Josh Silver, Executive Director of Free Press, has argued that TV Everywhere is really a “desperate bid by old media giants to crush the emerging market for online TV.” And here’s the paranoid language with which Marvin Ammori, senior adviser at Free Press, characterized TV Everywhere:

The launch of the TV Everywhere model indicates that Comcast wants competition nowhere. These are transparent efforts to preserve the cable cartel that gouges consumers. Comcast wants to be the gatekeeper to the video programming world. This service is a threat to innovative online video and an attempt by the industry to impose the cable-TV model onto the Internet.

Well of course Comcast —a part of this supposedly evil “cable cartel that gouges consumers” —wants to be the gatekeeper to the video programming world. That’s their business model, their very raison d’etre. But the idea that TV Everywhere could be a threat to “innovative” video start-ups like Vuze, Roku and Hulu is an example of the kind of paranoia about large media companies that has infected groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge. Content businesses such as TNT, TBS and CBS are free to run their content on both TV Everywhere and ad-supported free websites like Hulu. It’s their choice. And that choice—as all commercial decisions—will presumably be determined by solid business criteria. If Hulu or TV Everywhere makes sense in commercial terms, then content producers will allow their content to run on these networks. If not, then they won’t.

“If Comcast is not attempting to stifle competition, then why is it only available to Comcast cable subscribers and not nationwide for all Internet users?” Ammori goes on to ask about TV Everywhere.

But why would Comcast make its content available for non-subscribers who haven’t paid to access this content? Does Ammori imagine that this multi-million dollar business initiative is really a charity intent on the public good? TV Everywhere shouldn’t be confused with TV For Everyone. If you don’t pay, you don’t play. Like it or not, that basic economic truth applies to both new and old media.

Not all truths, however, should be applied in exactly the same way in both old and new media. In contrast with traditional media, on the Internet the more empowered consumer has become comfortable with picking and choosing the content for which they pay. Thus the success of iTunes over the Rhapsody model. So the really interesting business question which TV Everywhere raises is whether the old media model of bundling all-you-can-eat content in a single monthly price can work in the digital age of this empowered consumer. Perhaps, in parallel with TV Everywhere, cable companies would be wise to also offer the option of paying for online video content on an a lá carte basis.  But that is a different discussion.

Beyond all the paranoia, TV Everywhere is actually good for consumers who choose to legally access high quality video content on the Internet. The paranoid camp would, of course, disagree. “Under the TV Everywhere plan, no other program distributors would be able to emerge, and no consumers will be able to ‘cut the cord’ because they find what they want online,” Gigi Sohm, Public Knowledge president argued last year.

But Sohm’s pessimism about technological innovation is misguided. TV Everywhere is good news for program distributors because it opens up a potentially huge online channel for new content that wasn’t previously legally available on the Web. The more consumers who watch commercially viable video on the Internet, the more opportunities will exist for innovative online entrepreneurs. TV Everywhere represents one of the most promising business initiatives for bridging old and new media. By putting some of their most valuable content on the Internet, Comcast and Time Warner are doing all non-paranoid consumers and entrepreneurs a huge favor.

Photo credit: Flickr/Photomish Dan

EU pushes for deeper carbon emissions cuts

Free apps roundup for January 15th, 2010

FROM APPLETELL - Ed Parry covered for me last week while I was at CES, but I still feel a little bad. Hopefully this week’s extra large list will make up for my absence last week.
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AP Exclusive: Network flaw causes scary Web error (AP)

AP - A Georgia mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place: strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

How The EFF Lost Its Way By Defending Hate Mongers And Tunnel Rats

Free speech is a basic human right and is essential to creativity and innovation.  But every society places limits on this, particularly when it transgresses into “hate speech” – which disparages someone or some group on the basis of race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and so on.  Calls to violence are tolerated even less.  These often lead to jail terms.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been the tech world’s champion of free speech since its inception in 1990.  I have always admired this group for defending the oppressed.  But when organizations achieve too much success, they often develop a sense of confidence and arrogance that, when unchecked, leads to their downfall.  They begin to believe they can “do no evil”.  A recent statement by the EFF makes me wonder whether it has reached this stage and needs to have its “Google China” moment. Michael Arrington wrote in 2007 that the “EFF may be getting a tad overzealous in its desire to defend our right to violate copyright and other intellectual property laws, and needs to take a step back and consider if the oppressed are now becoming the oppressor”.  I’m beginning to believe that Michael was right.

Let me explain the background of a case which the EFF has just passed judgment on so that you can decide for yourself whether this is indeed the situation.

The anti-immigrant groups and xenophobes I’ve written a lot about see the H-1B visa issue as the beachhead in their battle against skilled immigrants.  Nearly all foreign skilled professionals (such as engineers, scientists, and doctors) need this visa to work in the U.S.  As with the tax system, Medicare, and the big bailout, the H-1B visa program has its flaws and is occasionally abused.  You don’t see much visa fraud in Silicon Valley, because skills and competence are the only things that matter.  But for grunt-type IT work, cost is a bigger factor.  Most large service companies are highly ethical and go by the book. There are, however, a few shoddy body shops that bring in low-skilled workers and pay them below market wages.  These are a small minority.  Nevertheless, they make an easy target.

One of the most vocal members of the anti-immigration alliance is a computer programmer who calls himself “Tunnel Rat” (he doesn’t have the courage to reveal his real name).  He maintains several websites including ITgrunt.com and Endh1b.com, that focus on attacking Indians, Hindus, and H-1B workers, whom he calls “curry-scented slumdogs”.  His websites are laced with racial slurs and profanity in English and Hindi and openly advocate hatred and violence.

Here are some examples from these websites.

Immediately after the massacre at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last November, which left 13 people dead and 29 wounded, Tunnel Rat put up a blog post that tried to link the killings to the H-1B program.  It said:

“American tech professionals have been forced to cower to the Indu-Invaders in I.T. because if they stood up for themselves, they would be labeled racists.  And thus, like the Feds, they said nothing, even as they were training their slumdog replacements and packing their boxes”.

A few days later, a gunman shot six people in Orlando, Florida.  According to CNN, Jason Rodriguez had worked for a year at RS&H, a facilities and infrastructure consulting firm, as an entry-level engineer before he was put on several months of probation and fired for “performance issues”.  Then he worked at Subway for two years before losing his sanity.  Kim Berry, President of a group called the Programmer’s Guild (which claims to represent the technical and professional workers of America, and which, according to Wikipedia, had 400 members at what was presumably its peak in 1999), posted on a blog suggesting that the murders might not have happened if RS&H (which has 800 employees) had not applied for six H-1B visa slots in 2007 and 11 in 2008.

Tunnel Rat piled on:

“It is my belief that Rodriquez was pushed aside to make room for an H-1B…  I predict that this is just the beginning of a massive wave of violence as middle-aged American men reach their breaking point and start to settle scores.  … H-1B program is now a national security issue.  We can’t have an invasion of curry-scented pod-people displacing millions of Americans”.

All of this is bizarre, despicable and disgusting, but other than the racial slurs, may not cross any lines. It is still free speech. Here is a posting from Tunnel Rat that does cross the line:

Now that the slumdogs have taken over Google, I can no longer trust them to protect my anonymity…  That is why I am protecting myself and my family by stockpiling weapons and ammo…  My greatest hope is that some techie goes crazy and acts out violently against his slumdog replacement and the collaborators that hired the feral jackal.  That techie in Pittsburgh was way off the mark by going after women at a gym.  If he was going to kill himself anyway, he should of stopped off at the nearby law offices of Cohen & Grigsby.

[Cohen & Grigsby has been in the news for a talk one of its lawyers gave on how to work the H-1B system].

In another post he responds to an Indian concerned about his racist remarks: “You should be concerned about THIS [link to article about violent attacks against Indians in Australia].” Tunnel Rat also gloated about having emailed the person “pictures of dead Indians and other nasty things” and said:

Here’s a deal, SLUMDOGS.  Get rid of Vineet Nayar, “the highly respected CEO of HCL Technologies” and I will stop blogging.  Here’s a picture, so you can identify the FAT FUCK…  Go ahead, eliminate that fucker.  I promise I WILL STOP BLOGGING…  The ball is in your court.

I can cite many more examples of threats of violence and “retribution”, but I am sure you get the idea.

One of the companies maligned, Apex Technology Group, filed suit against these sites.  In late December, a New Jersey court ruled in favor of Apex and ordered the sites to shut down, although allowing them enough time to file an appeal.

After the decision, the EFF put up a blog post criticizing the takedown order and claiming that the “… order dangerously overreaches.  By restricting access to entire websites, it places a prior restraint on all of the speech on the websites, even if that speech is unrelated to Apex”. EFF argued that this would be like “a court shutting Amazon.com or Yelp.com because of a disparaging review of a single product”.  I’m not sure whether this is a good analogy.  In my mind, those sites clearly cross the line from protected speech into terroristic threats or harassment.  A better analogy would be a Jihadi site posting hateful propaganda and calls to violence.  These sites use the same techniques: posting misleading information and hateful rants and suggesting that readers do something to right the alleged wrongs.

So I e-mailed the author of the EFF blog post, Kurt Opsdahl, a senior staff attorney at EFF, to ask him what gives.  I asked what if the site EFF had been defending were attacking African-Americans or Jews: would EFF be taking the same stand?  What if the site had been advocating a holocaust or calling people “niggers” instead of “slumdogs”: would this cross the line?  I also told him that I had received death threats traced back to the domain names in question via email and in the reader feedback section of BusinessWeek in articles I had written about immigration.

Kurt would not respond to the substance of what I asked.  The jist of his response: “A court order should not shut down any website unless the entirety was not protected speech.  While a ‘true threat’ is not protected speech, there are many views which are protected, even if repugnant”.

What shocked me about Kurt’s response was this comment: “I have not read the sites, since they were offline before this matter came to our attention”.  I find this absolutely unbelievable. Doesn’t the EFF know how to search the Google cache?  Doesn’t it have a responsibility to ensure that it is using its power effectively and wisely?

What sort of “power” does the EFF have exactly?  Right after its blog post, ComputerWorld’s Patrick Thibodeau wrote this article condemning the judge’s decision, which, like the EFF statement, didn’t even mention the nature of the speech on the site ordered to be shut down. (Patrick has been a vocal opponent of H-1B visas, something else he does not disclose in his coverage).  Likewise, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Oakland Journal posted articles holding up the EFF blog post as a shining beacon of justice.  The favorable media coverage became a major victory not only for opponents of H-1B visas but also for the general white supremacist, neo-Nazi, “kill all dark foreigners” crowd.  Nice company, EFF.  I’m sure you’ll get invited to the David Duke annual Christmas party soon.

You can debate the merits of the EFF stance from a legal standpoint.  But the EFF cannot function in a contextual vacuum.  I am certain its employees feel overworked and underpaid like those of many other non-profits.  But, by siding unwaveringly with some of the most hateful sites on the Internet and not even mentioning the nature of those sites, the EFF betrayed its charter of upholding justice.  A simple Google cache search would have easily shown Kurt and his colleagues that the sites in question were vitriolic.  By giving Tunnel Rat a free pass, the EFF encouraged several major media outlets to echo its one-sided defense of the ability to talk about killing and hurting Indians and H-1B holders.  If people want to have a debate about whether H-1B visas are good for America, let’s have it.  But if the most spirited response they can muster is to threaten the lives of their opponents, they’ve already lost the debate.

The only silver lining on this dark cloud is that it has brought this sort of xenophobia and racism out in the open. The anti-immigrant groups have claimed to be fighting a righteous battle for American workers.  Now it is clear what lies beneath the surface.  They can only fight with hate because logic escapes them.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Updates:

Tunnel Rat wrote to say that he did not own a third website which was mentioned in the original post: Guestworkerfraud.com.

Kim Berry wrote to say that his post about RS&H use of H-1B visas was not on the Endh1b.com site. He wrote “Someone else apparently cross-posted it. But it does appear to be an accurate copy of what I had written”. He also asked that it be made clear that he “did not suggest that the murders “might not have happened if RS&H had not filled 17 engineering slots with H-1b.” His quote is: “Perhaps if the job market were not flooded with H-1b (and the dozen related visas) willing to do anything to work in the U.S. the employer would have tried to find a suitable position for this engineer rather than terminating him. But the availably of $50k indentured servant engineers is hard to resist – and hard for American workers – both new graduates and people with 20 years of experience – to compete against.”

Alternate Disc-Tractions: Gamer on Blu-ray (with digital copy)

FROM GAMERTELL - Click through to find out whwther or not you should buy, rent or download this gritty, bloody movie that puts people in control of people…
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'Massachusetts Miracle' Video Goes Viral

'Massachusetts Miracle' Video Goes Viral

What we craved this week: Nexus One, Netflix to Wii, bear country - CNET

Globe and Mail

What we craved this week: Nexus One, Netflix to Wii, bear country CNET This week has been big on Google. The company's Nexus One's pricing has gotten a few tweaks and The Woz declared it his favorite gadget--quite a statement coming from the co-founder of Apple, makers of the iPhone, the Nexus One's direct ... The Macalope Weekly: Free Apple tablet!Macworld Google Cuts Nexus One Price for T-Mobile CustomersABC News Google's Nexus One: An Evolution, Not RevolutionPC World V3.co.uk -Wall Street Journal -ABH News all 695 news articles »

Courts Want 'Sexting' To Be Punishable By Law

12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote a post about the state of online video. In this post he follows up with some thoughts on what’s holding back this budding industry. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 100 million streams since 2006. Photo credit: Flickr/Paraflyer.

After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn’t obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below.

Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years

Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser has been “at this” for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don’t speak a common language.

Heck, we’re not even on the same planet. The first thing you realize about video advertising is that most of the money being generated from video content isn’t derived from in-stream advertising (such as pre-,mid-, or post-roll) but rather by in-banner ads (be they standard display ads or rich media). Yet when you look at the projections being forecast by eMarketer and Forrester, they focus mainly on videos sold inside the video player.

Meanwhile, as online video consumption continues to soar, it is clear that the share of total advertising for video content is going to be much larger than the projections suggest.  YouTube, for example, sells pre-roll ads on an infinitely small percentage of its videos. They generate the lion’s share via display banners. Personally, I think that while display banners aren’t worth much in articles because a reader scrolls down quickly past them, next to video content they are worth a lot more.

But with so much video being consumed on third-party sites, how can producers stay in business, let alone thrive?

One answer, of course, is branded content, which remains unproven at best, and the latest fad at worst.

Surprise #2: The Myth That Branded Content Is a New Thing

Branded content can be many things. It is ultimately the blurring of church and state, or information and advertising. Examples are numerous and include:

• Soap operas, which were funded initially by Procter & Gamble
• That ubiquitous Coca Cola cup on American Idol
• A web series about a couple trying to conceive sponsored by a home pregnancy test
• How-to videos featuring products, such as the use of a particular vodka or gin in a how-to-make-a-martini video.

Whereas publishers have always relied in part on advertiser support, branded content tends to be fully supported by a marketer.  With the so-called death of the 30-second spot and the short-form nature of online video entertainment, the appeal of branded content is growing among video producers desperate to make a buck.

Problem is if a producer waits for the green light from a marketer to produce content that bakes in advertising, they just won’t scale their libraries, which means they won’t grow overall streams.

Also, it begs the question: does branded content fall into video advertising or sponsorship? That detail isn’t clear yet. But with so many competitors vying in the genre, it’s worth questioning how important it will be over the long term and if audiences will accept it.  What looks like the light at the end of the tunnel for many struggling online video producers could turn out to be an oncoming train.

Surprise #3: It Takes A Different Playbook

The biggest difference with regards to monetizing videos as opposed to articles is that it requires a “distribution-over-destination” strategy. When Quincy Smith took over as CEO of CBS Interactive, he said that the Tiffany network’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

No wonder then that the first video content companies went out of business—because they sought to build “owned-and-operated” properties. This strategy might work with text content but is nearly impossible with videos. Search engines don’t pick up video content well. Hosting videos is expensive. Plus, audiences who read a business article don’t automatically watch business videos (and so on).

Looking at the leading video destinations, you quickly realize that they are all basically aggregators or traditional media companies who still reasonably view online video with suspicion and fear.

Surprise #4: Video Consumption Patterns Are Whack

From our experiences, we see that audiences (readers, listeners, viewers) consume content by type (video vs. articles vs. podcasts) and not categories (auto, business, fashion, etc). And when it comes to videos, some categories are much more popular than others, which lead to unreachable expectations for marketers.

According to TubeMogul, 25% of views come in the first four days after a video is published and, over time, the average YouTube video is seen 500 times. Articles are the opposite: search engines tend to drive people to older articles.  This is alarming. In order to win, it is imperative to grow video views over time and generate exponentially more video views than the average.

Surprise #5: Just Because You Build an Audience, Doesn’t Mean The Advertisers Will Come Knocking

There are three main ways to build an audience: the old way and the new ways.

1. The first is a retail approach where viewers watch your videos on your site and your network channels. This is historically how publishers have built audiences.
2. The second is through wholesale partnerships, which are facilitated by MRSS. (RSS – or Real Simple Syndication – has change the way users consume content and publishers ingest and distribute content  Analogously, MRSS – or simply Media RSS – was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community. Unbelievably, it has made distributing videos even easier than syndicating text content).
3. The third is through social media: be it bloggers and/or social media referrers on Facebook, Twitter and the countless other outlets.

YouTube pioneered the embedding and viral distribution of video.  It is certainly true that bloggers are the new “newspaper editors” who can make or break a producer. Similarly, the same way that MySpace helped build YouTube’s success at the macro level, social media referrers will help a video take off on the micro level.

Between MRSS simplifying distribution and video’s embeddable nature, syndication exploded . . . but revenues didn’t. But don’t worry.  Over time, marketers follow the audience, they always will.

Surprise #6: When It Comes to Sales, Sell Your Audience, Not Your Videos

Historically, publishers sell ads by audience. But with online video and the lure of branded content, some have developed a tendency to pitch individual videos or a series of videos to advertisers.  Publishers don’t sell by individual articles, so why should they think that they should sell by individual videos, especially when you consider the widespread nature of videos and where they ultimately end up.

Nonetheless, I see way too many producers sell videos over audience, and then when they fail to generate any meaningful distribution, the marketer gets disappointed, blaming the strategy over the tactic.  You have to create audiences for your content. It can be one audience or it can be many.

With a magazine, you can take any one article and project the demographic of that one piece to the whole publication. With videos, due to their embeddable nature, each video can have its own audience profile and as such can embody the demographic of the site that embeds or distributes the video.  So videos have the potential to reach a broader demographic than content locked into one site.  Regardless, until videos generate more revenue from in-stream ads than in-banner ones, videos’ embedding nature remains a double-edged sword.

For a producer to distribute through third party distributors, it means:

1. less recognition of your reach initially. This hurts producers in the short term, but over time, services such as comScore and Nielsen will catch up and offer something while startups like TubeMogul seek to establish the best practices. More importantly, agencies recognize this phenomenon and will let you build your case.
2. less control of the ad inventory, which can be seen as a negative or a positive. Ultimately, as a producer, you have to position this as a plus because you can offer advertisers more reach and share of voice across a larger segment of the online video universe. But, it takes time, especially with a lack of data to support your reach.

Surprise #7: The Myth and Danger of the Viral Video

Too many clients get enamored with the idea of green lighting a viral video. You might as well just flush your money down the toilet instead of approving such a campaign. It is impossible to actually plan for this and if the ad agency you hired is guaranteeing video views, then fire that ad agency yesterday!

But by the same token, who cares if a video generated a million views last month. If an advertiser runs banners next to that video next month and the video fizzles away, it’s moot. This is why it is more important to publish and syndicate videos that over time can generate incremental and sustainable views.  This makes the real estate before and next to the video more valuable.

Surprise #8: With Advertisers Sitting on the Sidelines, Partnerships Need to Make Sense for Producers

Historically, advertisers seek revenue-share deals with publishers to mitigate risks. With video, advertisers have sat out the dance, so the commercial nature boils down to producer/publishers and distributors, who in turn seek revenue share deals with producer/publishers. Problem? Most can’t generate any sales, so producer/publishers don’t get any revenue out of the deals. So my advice is to seek revenue guarantees until advertisers really embrace video advertising.

By and large, most revenue share deals flop because:

• Media companies have great sales teams, but they are only warming up to online video. So while they might be starting to generate revenue from online video, it is immaterial to their operations. Most of these traditional media companies are not producing or publishing enough online, so they are turning to new media producers like us. However, even though they have great sales organizations, they lack volume to make a dent.
• A lot of the video views are coming from video social networks, but most of them are just not set up to sell ads. They are technology companies operating in the media space, not media companies that understand advertising. Often times their VCs bring in experienced sales executives but have very unrealistic expectations. They also have not yet mastered shifting large portions of their audiences from non-sellable user-generated or pirated material to professional content. It has been stated that YouTube, for example, only sells ads next to 15% of their total streams.

However, social media and user generated content has increased pageviews and ad impressions greatly on these sites. Across the web, there is a chance the equilibrium is broken for good. As a result, CPMs are dirt poor and sell-through rates are abysmal. This adds to the challenge and forces a producer to take over the sales process which, while expensive, should ultimately be the end-goal.

Surprise #9: Don’t Chase Hits

Chasing hits is perhaps the most surefire way to kill your business. We adopted the Field of Dreams content strategy: creating content we’re passionate about and/or think audiences will watch, build an audience around it, and only worry about monetizing it afterwards.

It’s not ideal, but the reality is that what works online is very much random. When we look at our most popular videos, we are flabbergasted! This is why online video is such a challenge to TV companies, because they cannot program a show in a time slot and force it down audiences’ throats.

Surprise #10: YouTube is More Open than Challengers

What kind of online video article would be complete without an observation on the leader in the space: YouTube. While far from perfect, YouTube has actually been fairly friendly with producers by allowing them to sell ads around their content.

Surprisingly, this is an “open” strategy. Usually, open strategies are adopted by challengers, not dominant market leaders. You would think that Daily Motion, Veoh and others would allow for this, but they don’t. This hurts their standing and importance in the space. Time will tell if they change their policies and follow the market leader YouTube.

Surprise #11: Everything Won’t Be Ad-Supported

To quote Ty Ahmad-Taylor, it’s true that in theory “if you make television shows, films or music, your business is actually the audience business.  In practice, however, right now there aren’t enough ad dollars to support the “audience” business. So let’s leave the theory for academics. Those in the trenches will tell you it’s about survival, and judging by the past year… it is still about surviving more so than thriving.

After we got disappointed by weak revenues in our earliest syndication deals, we held back distribution and began to pursue licensing deals.  Licensing can generate insanely high eCPMs for a producer, but most producers don’t have the kind of libraries that can command guaranteed and recurring licensing fees. So your best bet to keep the lights on is to command licensing revenues in the short term while you position yourself for syndication revenue over the long term. By doing that, you will in turn build a large enough library to command the richer branded content deals that will push you over the top.

Surprise #12: Search and Video are Still Miles Apart

Ultimately, video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the online ecosystem is still looking for a business model. But history repeats itself and without a doubt video streams will be monetized just as search queries were.

But differences shall remain, with the two leading ones being:

1. Expectations: Google saw over a dozen search companies precede it, most of them had gone out of business, sold or exited search for portaldom. By the time the Nasdaq crashed, Google had an open field with practically no competitors. Video is the exact opposite: even though only YouTube has had a gargantuan exit, VCs have continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into so-called YouTube clones (Veoh, Daily Motion, Metacafe) as well as enablers (CDNs and content management systems) and advertising networks (Tremor, Broadband, Yume, Scanscout).  It seems as if everyone is looking for the Google of video, even though for all intents and purposes, Google will be the Google of video thanks to its acquisition of YouTube.
2. Short term vs. long term nature of the payoff. Search is largely a performance kind of medium, whereas video is a branding one. While search captures intent, video captures interest. Both are valuable, but in a very different way.

We’re still early in the development of the online video business, but we are starting to figure it out.

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