BlogSat

Caveat emptor 1: Though, I work on YouTube I haven't really chatted about this with anyone that currently works on this feature. This just stuff coming out of my empty mind. Caveat emport 2: It is also based on how I use a certain product feature, and my usage patterns. For all I know, I may be in the minority. I've been favoriting a lot of vid eos lately, but I realized I'm probably not doing what the designer of the feature intended me to do. Let me start at the beginning. If I designed a feature to "Favorite": essentially a list of videos that I allowed the user to mark as ones she liked, I'd assume that the primary intention of this list was to allow me to save videos that I can come to visit later. Other benefits would be sharing this with others on YouTube, as well as implicitly ranking this video so that it can be considered for YouTube honors and in lists. However, I find that when I favorite something, my real intention is that it gets up by my Fri...

Matt Harding and Yahoo If you haven't seen the Where the Hell is Matt Harding? video, take the few minutes right now.:) I like good corporate rah-rah videos and this Yahoo effort with Matt is a good one . Yahoo had Matt Harding dance at different places in and around Yahoo (snap below; click through for video.) More on Matt Harding here . The Paris Hilton response After the McCain ad , this was comedy genius. Background here . See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die Robert Downey Jr. trailers Hmm...Robert Downey Junior was in my favorite two trailers of the summer.:)

I'm a fan of the FX show " Rescue Me " I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit. But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First the mini-sodes are actually good! they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote they were clearly pretty cheap to produce through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube , Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu These do exactly what they're supposed to do new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009 , the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and...

So here's what happened. Maybe because its set in Chicago, or maybe just because the writing is so good, I really like My Boys. So its on my DVR list. I get home excepting to watch the show a few Thrusdays ago, except that something funky happened and the recording got messed up. My options: wait a few days and record the re-run, or catch it online right away. I decided I wanted to watch it right then, and went to TBS' website. Here's what the th ought-stream went like after that Click. Woohoo, they have full episodes on the sites Click . Huh? Ok. the show isn't online yet; maybe in a few hours? Click . The new episode will be online on the 19th; exactly 8 days from now! Argh! WTF? Click . Fine, I still want to watch the show now, so twenty minutes later I did watch it on my laptop, but TBS didn't get a chance to serve me ads in the middle of the show and severely reduced the probability of my visiting TBS.com ever again. Using windowing strategies (i.e. making thi...

Liz Gannes has a great personal post . The moral of the story: find a way to make your content available online allowing people to time/space as they need to. You're not making more money by hoarding your content. Britain's Got Talent vs. America's Got Talent : I've watched both shows mostly on the YouTube. I'm partial to the British version. The particpants are about the same, but the audience can be meaner and less reluctant to boo off the performer in the British version.:)  Steven Speilberg is funding a social network around alien sightings . Ugh! It was this obsession that led to the alien theme in the latest Indy movie, didn't it?

As Hulu continues to eat up my time over the long weekend, I couldn't help wonder how much the fortunes of these two companies have changed over the years. As much as I dislike Google Trends  as a means to draw conclusions. the graph below does tell a story. As Hulu continues to add pretty decent features, execute steadily on a monetization strategy, and add interesting content (well, in the US anyway :)) ,  Joost just continues to struggle in each of these departments and more. The major lesson here? Like most good advice, it can be summed up by something you would hear from you mom: "Don't judge a book by its cover." Don't be too quick to judge: The assumption was that great pedigree, and early content deals were an indicator of the success Joost would have. Don't be too harsh to judge: Too many people assumed that their Old Media backers would mean that Hulu would be incompetent/execute poorly. Be charitable early, instead of late: Instead of mocking it ...

Unsurprisingly the media reports YouTube stats went up during the holidays. (Note: I neither confirm nor deny:)) Here's what I'm worried about though, I did watch more YouTube than usual during the holidays, but I spent at least two orders of magnitude more time on Hulu

I've had a number of friends that have stated confidently (for quite a while now), "But 99.99% of web video is rubbish. The only thing that people want to watch online is stuff that's already on TV." They aren't talking about the random personal clips, specific humor videos, or extracts from TV that still form a major part of sites like YouTube, but semi-professional stuff that people put out there as actual shows; with story arcs, character development and all that stuff... I hadn't watched enough of these to form an opinion one way or the other. YouTube/Google's strong belief in the existence of the Torso is pretty clear. The proposition is that the underlying economics of creating content have changed in such a way (cheaper to make videos, the Internet democratizes the distribution process etc. etc.) that compelling content that needs to appeal to a smaller set of audiences can now be created. The producers have the tool to make this content (for the r...

A couple of days ago, I shared (via Reader) this article by Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch . His basic premise was that Big TV (networks in the US) just weren't getting it. His basic arguments were that the increasing use of Bittorrent (and other alternatives) meant that the networks couldn't really justify products which didn't offer broad choice (i.e. all the programs that they could make available) restricted based on geography (i.e. certain shows are only available in the US) had an expiry date (i.e. only TV shows broadcast in the last x weeks are available) had bad content (because more options now exist on long-tail stuff) I ended up thinking about the third of these practices the other day, and decided it wasn't really as bad Duncan made it out to be and may not be just about future DVD sales as he suggests. In fact, if you wanted to be charitable, its a creative attempt to figure out a business model in a changing environment. Price-discriminating with respec...

I thought this was kinda cool...not Hulu , though they're not bad either. Last weekend, someone asked me how I thought Hulu would affect YouTube. I thought about it for about 1 second and out popped "I don't think they're competing." I was asked the same question at work on Monday. I thought about it a little longer (3 seconds?) and out popped the same thing. Guess what GigaOm had to say about it ? "Hulu doesn’t seem like a YouTube (GOOG) competitor. (This is yet another thing I was wrong about.) What it really is trying to do is time shift — and place shift — television on a massive scale. It’s basically an attempt to counterbalance the tight control that cable and satellite networks have over distribution." I think the service is fascinating, has a decent product/business model ( I'm not annoyed by inserted ads ), pretty compelling content ( if you're a TV junkie like me ) and quite frankly...it was about time something like this came around. ...

Yes, I realize reviewing a product about a year after its been released is kinda pointless, and the irony of having the word "quick" in my title is not lost on moi either.:) But I ended up installing Vuze last week, wasn't really expecting much, and hence was pleasantly surprised. Vuze is the "corporate" version of the open-source p2p bittorrent client: Azuereus . It does 2 things well, and thats why I was pleasantly surprised. Its adds a decent skin on top of the basic Azuereus client UI (which you can access by clicking on the 'Advanced' tag.) Sure, the normal UI looks just like iTunes, but what video download service now doesn't?:) Its probably not a big deal for most Azureus users who'll just ignore the new UI, but I've had a lot of friends say to me, "Hey, I can't figure out how to get Bittorrent to work." Well, this goes some way to solve that problem once they try it. ..and the content will give them some reason to actu...