DISQUS

Mashable - The Social Media Guide: 2008/10/31/web-tv/

  • adam · 1 year ago
    Here is one way I believe to win, make something entertaining that people want to watch.
  • Andrew Brown · 1 year ago
    One of my favorite websites is Channel 101, Where they go against the grain to of TV standards and produce shows in less than 5 mins. Its all about under-doing the competition by building every entertaining content at lower costs by having amazing story. They have some story structure lessons by Dan Harmon which are great. Be sure to check channel101.com if you haven't
  • Alex Guest · 1 year ago
    "In order to deliver all those YouTube clips, and now, webisodes and favorite shows, speed and good compression are needed. Until recent years, the Web just wasn’t there."

    That's absolutely fundamental to how the Web is used (of course). It's been about ten years since video streaming got going in a very basic way. Remember those tiny little windows in corporate web brochures, which took 30 minutes to deliver a 60-second clip?

    Well, then, where's this all heading? Once we had sufficient speed and compression for UGC, the likes of YouTube. Now we have the iPlayer and Hulu delivering professional, near broadcast quality streaming. So, all of sudden, everyone thinks TV is going to become VoD only.

    That's not right, in my humble opinion. People love watching scheduled TV. Nielsen has just put out a report saying that the guys who watch the most online video are the ones who are watching the most traditional TV. Companies like mine, Zattoo, are banking on how much people love traditional TV. And in the last couple of years, the technology has been developed to make it a reality online.

    So I agree, Patricia. Success is going to depend on keeping one foot in the TV camp and another at the forefront of technology.
  • Wev TV Reviews · 1 year ago
    Interesting comment Alex. Is the Nielsen study you are referring to available to the public? I tend to think the market will split in two : the older segment that will only make the switch to digital TV ... and maybe the PVR and the younger segment who will take control of their TV content experience which will probably involve the Web as the primary source.
  • Alex Guest · 1 year ago
  • Web TV Reviews · 1 year ago
    Thanks!
  • adam · 1 year ago
    Tv is lean back and web is lean forward, but once the wii, playstations and xbox get into the mix and the content gets delivered to sofa friendly environments then platforms will become more important. Providing it can entertain.
  • Alex Guest · 1 year ago
    "Tv is lean back and web is lean forward". That's what they say. The popularity today of online TV suggests either that the dictum is untrue or that the Web 2.0 society is hooked on lean forward. Either way, people spend hours watching video online, whether back-to-back short-form UGC or professional, long-form content.
  • Giacomo · 1 year ago
    On my view it's quite obvious that the television, intended as a television set, will be substituted by the computer set. For most people computers are just televisions with a mysterious box nearby them. However Computers still lack something. They lack of remote controls. I mean that it should happen when you go for buying a PC that you are given a remote that can
    switch on and off your PC,
    browse all TV Channels present on the net,
    play or stop a dvd in the disk driver or in the hard disk,
    turn on/off the speakers and so on.

    The key here is laziness. People are lazy, need to sit down on the sofa and just press one or two buttons.

    Ant this was about television as a piece of furniture... what about television as content provider? Of course people want to see quality stuff and easily get bored with user produced videos. But this is the market. I mean when all the major TV producers and broadcasters will be on the net and people will be able to browse their content from the sofa, more or less the audience sharing will not change to much in respect to the present. I mean that people which looks for CSI today will look for it tomorrow, and people who look for grass-root citizen journalism on the net today will look for it also tomorrow.

    Finally, there is an other point I want to stress: the copyright boundaries. They are structured by that XIX hundred territorial stuff which we still call nations... so providers of TV content on the net restrict the content by IP controls. This is quite irritating for the user. If X produces a TV series and so retains the rights of broadcasting it on the net, why not creating a global distribution copyright? If you are the producer you can sell that right to every internet service of broadcasting and everyone on the net will be allowed to watch at that show.

    Someone can say that in this way, if the producer is in the US and probably produce the show in English only English speaking people will watch at it. So it's better to sell it to different countries with different copyrights so it can be translated or subtitled. But not all people in one country want to see a TV show in their homeland language. Heroes in English rocks, in Italian it sucks.

    So if the problem is that CBS, for example, will never invest for translating their shows in every world language, this just calls for having rights of distribution related to language and not to territories. I produced that video in English and I distribute it on my platform in English independently if the PC of my fan is physically in Germany or Japan or USA.
  • adam · 1 year ago
    It's try that people spend hours watching online, but they are not watching large chunks. Youtube and similar (not profit making yet?) sites make up that bulk of hours but made with many many short snacking type videos. Each needing some choice and selection in between them. How many people however will sit and watch hours and hours of non-sto content on the tv every night in millions of homes around the country. How many millions of people watched say one episode of coronation street last night and how many sites can boast that many views of a piece of content in one evening. (And make a huge chunk of money off it) Quality entertainment programmes (CSi, Lost, Heroes etc) are only made because they can recoup the cost of production, otherwise you end up with shows like kate modern which sadly is at the top end even with its sponsorship deals and income. TV shows start at around 15-20K for rock bottom half hours and rise rapidly to around 100k -200K for top end progs. Docs and the run of the mill stuff come in around 40k That's pounds not dollars.
  • Patricia · 1 year ago
    wow guys. thanks for all the comments and feedback! brilliant thoughts!!
  • Diamonds · 1 year ago
    For some reason they haven't perfected streaming yet. I cannot understand why my cable box is still faster than my computer, both use the same cable line and the computer is fast. They still need to work on speed, speed speed.
  • philip · 8 months ago