>The story of the YouTube killer
>Wired has a very interesting article about Hulu with an interview with Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. Jason explains how he came to be involved and how from March 2008 to August they created the 8th largest video site in the US.
There is a great quote in response to the viewing figures the web receives in comparison to TV, from Peter Chernin, president of News Corporation, Fox’s corporate parent.
“So what?” Chernin says. “You can’t protect old business models artificially.” This is a truth the tech community knows well, but it’s not what you expect to hear from a media baron like Chernin. What he and Zucker [chief of NBC Universal] have come to understand is that the media companies no longer have a choice: If they don’t put their shows online, someone else will. “The best way to combat piracy is to make your content available,” Zucker says. “We don’t know for sure what the impact is going to be on our established businesses. But we want to make sure consumers know they don’t need to steal our content. That’s really what Hulu is about.”
Read the whole story, it’s an interesting read.
Read MoreTelly writers think we’re all geeks
>I love it when writers of mass media refer to new technologies on their programmes. These embarrassing attempts usually happen when they feel they have to keep the programme current or of the time. Sadly these excursions into the real world are almost always highly embarrassing, mainly illustrating how far most TV writers are behind the rest of us technopeople – the folks who use the internet, ipods and gasp, mobile phones.
British Soaps are usually fairly good at it, dropping in a telltale beep beep accompanied by someone fumbling in a pocket for a mobile. Then comes the inevitable very still and overly long extreme close up of a four year old phone showing a text message. Where they tend to really fall down is that usually the message is in awful text speak with lots of GR8, CU 2Nite action. It doesn’t matter who sends the text, whether they are fourteen or forty, that’s how the technopeople talk when using Short Message Service technology.
The Archers radio soap (now available as a podcast) does this a lot as well, but someone I’m more forgiving of this, maybe I’m just more forgiving of The Archers in general. Several years ago there were the Ambridge website storylines, which still crop up now an again. ‘We’re avin a plowin competition and we’d like to put a story up on the website’. It’s endearing, but we all know that putting anything on that site is pointless, it must get minimal traffic.
Just recently an older couple (Phil and Jill I think) are going on a trip to Hong Kong and their granddaughter Pip has been setting up an email address for them. At one point a blog was mentioned but thankfully the idea was poo pooed.
Which brings us round to a recent attempt on CSI. It’s all going fairly well, nice and brief screen shots of Twitter, hey we’re cool with Twitter, IM, blogging, we don’t need to make a big deal about this. But then woops, the writers slip up and reveal what they really think of us technopeople. See if you can spot it:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5yCnEr8kQ&rel=1]
Yip, ‘they don’t expect privacy, they value openness’. Pause. I’m not sure where to even begin with this. I do like the other chap’s response though.
The writers then run out of words and make a schoolboy error, throwing in the word ‘virtual’. Nobody uses that word anymore, not even my Aunt Hilda who just got email and broadband. And nobody would ever ever use it in the phrase “looks like a virtual love triangle to me.”
Yip telly writers thing we’re all geeks, although we do value openness.
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