I love this story on TorrentFreak about the supposed pirating of a new single from the band BuckCherry.
Last week the band vehemantly denied anything to do with the leak and bitched about how much they hate those pesky pirates.
Well, something didn’t ring quite true about the whole thing so a little investigation ensued:
“It turns out that the uploader, a New York resident, had only uploaded one torrent, the BuckCherry track. When we entered the IP-address into the Wiki-scanner, we found out that the person in question had edited the BuckCherry wikipedia entry, and added the name of the band manager to another page.
This confirmed our suspicions, but it was not quite enough, since it could be an overly obsessed fan (if they have fans). So, we decided to send the band manager, Josh Klemme – who happens to live in New York – an email to ask for his opinion on our findings. Klemme, replied to our email within a few hours, and surprisingly enough his IP-address was the same as the uploader.”
Yup, the pesky pirate was their very own manager and the whole thing an ill-fated attempt to gain some publicity for a band that is not exactly screaming up the charts.
A much commented upon study has come out that shows quite a big jump in online viewership of episodic network television shows:
“With over 12 billion videos watched online in the U.S. during the month of May, its hard to argue against the ubiquity of the PC as the king of media. To further this claim, market research company, Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), has released a study that claims that almost 20 percent of primetime “episodic” television shows are watched online.” (via)
So, the argument that people only watch short clips online no longer rings true. However, it would be tough to argue that there have been any legitimate orginal online “hits.” (ok, some will argue LonelyGirl15 but even at it’s height it has never been widely viewed)
The question is why. The most obvious reason is that there haven’t been any great online originals yet. Sure, there have been some mildly entertaining bits out there (Wainy Days? The Guild? We Need Girlfriends?) but nothing that has been strong enough and consistant enough to build a solid audience.
The second reason is that nobody knows what’s online. There is no advertising or marketing. Relying on the “viral” nature of the internet might work for a one-off but it will never build the kind of audience that could some day be self-sufficient.
With the networks and bigger-name creatives placing more time and money into online originals things might change but for the time being the best way to be a hit online is to be a hit on TV.
Tags: Arts, guild, IMMI, Integrated Media Measurement Inc, Television, Television network, Television program, United States, US, wainy days
Uncategorized | admin | 
July 30, 2008 9:22 pm | 
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Gawker, of all places, points out this quote via the NYT:
“The number of times Senator John McCain’s new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds.
The number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen.”
I’ve often wondered why news programs air political ads in their entirety. There is the idea that to discuss them they must first show them to everyone but they’re happy to discuss a speech without airing it first in its entirety.
This free publicity is common on the web, where linking and embedding are just part of the landscape – making an ad that bloggers will latch onto is not bad way to get far more publicity than you can afford.
McCain’s attacks on perceived media-bias would make a great ad for McCain. He could air it once at 5 in the morning in Topeka and CNN and Fox would spend the next week re-airing it across the nation while discussing the issue ad nauseum.
Just as I suspected, Scrabble was in no way prepared to handle the fallout caused by their forced shut down of popular clone Scrabulous:
“We’ll be back up shortly,” an apologetic error message read. “We’re working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!” The game is slated to exit the beta phase in the middle of next month, and some (my colleague Rafe Needleman among them) initially found it to be a better-quality game experience than Scrabulous had been.
But in the wake of a server crash, Facebook users weren’t too pleased, as the message wall for the Scrabble application revealed. “Wow, does this suck,” one Facebook user wrote. “Why can’t you guys work out a licensing deal with the Scrabulous boys? Now we’re back to square one and have to go through all of your debugging process.” (via)
Not only did they fail to provide Scrabulous users with a valid alternative, they increased the level of overall dislike already aimed their way.
Nice work, Hasbro.
Ok, not even sure what I mean by that headline but I was going for shock value.
According to Tilzy (and, I’m sure many others) the people behind the Muppets have released a whole bunch of funny Muppets videos that seem to be out there to build interest for a return of The Muppet Show in some form or another.
The weird part, as Tilzy points out:
“Each video was uploaded by a different YouTube user, though they all had similarly recent signup dates, were friends with one another (and nobody else), and sported quirky Muppet-themed profiles like weirdowhatever, deumnborkborkbork, and meepmeepmeepow. Each video even featured its own concluding jabs from Statler and Waldorf who garnered over 200,000 views for their own harrumphing over at heckleu247.”
Why try to make these seem UGC or “viral”? Who doesn’t want to see new muppets content? Why not make a clear, focused release of these videos across the webosphere for maximum penetration and viewership? It just doesn’t make any sense.
Here’s a video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpcUxwpOQ_A&hl=en&fs=1]
It all started with the rise of the UGC video and YouTube. People went nuts. Look at all the viewers!
After watching from the sidelines for a bit some big media companies decided they should be getting those viewers. Following some deep study of internet content everyone decided that the thing that really worked online was comedy.
A flood of “pro” content hit the interwebs and suddenly everyone from Warner Brothers to Sony had their own dedicated comedy video website.
A year later and none of these sites or any of their shows have gained wide-spread acceptance or notice. Most have completely failed by any reasonable assessment.
One could argue that most of these efforts failed because, a) they weren’t very good and b) they weren’t publicized.
Of course, if you are a big media company, it can’t be your fault. It must be the genre’s fault. So, after a year of failing with comedy comes a big wave of Sci-Fi web shows:
“Not all of these will succeed, but science fiction already has a strong track record online. lonelygirl15 turned from a vlog into a thriller with tech overtones. Sanctuary was one of the early big-budget sci-fi series, it was even picked up to run on the Sci-Fi Network. And most recently, Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog darn near crashed the Internet.” (via)
Check out NTV’s whole post for a good look at what’s to come. When these fail, due to being not good, I’m sure everyone will move onto proceedurals – it’s what saved the networks, at least for a while.
TechDirt has a little look at the growing fight between textbook publishers and the students who are tired of paying thousands of dollars a semester and are instead finding more and more pirated scans online:
“…rather than responding to the root cause of the downloads, textbook publishers are trying to come up with systems that students can’t get around paying for, such as online subscriptions to “extra” information to go along with a textbook.”
Doesn’t anyone want to learn anything from the failings of the music industry? The only way the textbook companies will beat the pirates is to offer their books for a fair price in a format that is open and friendly to the students.
Yeah, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, either. So, expect to see plenty of new textbooks coming to a pirate site near you. Supply and demand, people. Supply and demand.
Tags: books, business, college, Education, pirate bay, piratebay, pirates, Publications, publishing, Shopping, Textbook, United States, university
Uncategorized | admin | 9:52 pm | Comments (0)
After months of wondering what they would do, Hasbro acted and has forced Facebook to take down the unauthorized clone of Scrabble, the extremely popular Scrabulous.
“If you try to pull up the popular game, you get the following message: “Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.” If you click, you get a form from the Scrabulous founders asking for your e-mail address so they can keep you posted on further developments.”(via)
Here’s the big question: will Scrabulous users be so mad at Hasbro that they will go find new games to play or will they decide that they really want to play Scrabble and if the only way to do that is through the official site, so be it?
Of course, much will depend on whether or not the official version works as well as the clone. Hasbro better hope it does or they could be dead on arrival.
There is an overwhelming amount of press today about the new search engine cuil.com.
So far, I have learned that is was started by ex-Googlers and that it is pronouced “cool.”
Yes, nearly everyone is saying there is no way they can beat Google or even come close to competing in the search market for all sorts of technical reasons but I have yet to see anyone come right out and tell it like it is:
It will fail because nobody can pronounce it. And when you finally learn how they would like you to pronouce their madeup word you feel like punching them in the face.
I never liked the whole “drop a vowel” school of web 2.0 site naming (fickr, et. al.) but this whole make up a word and make it sound like a word we already have is truly ridiculous.
If the first big explosion of web video centered around UGC and the second wave was all about comedy than the third was is drama.
MediaWeek has a good overview on the state of dramatic webseries:
“Among the more ambitious projects is Foreign Body, a 10-week, 50-episode, adult-targeted soap produced by Michael Eisner’s Vuguru (Prom Queen) that serves as a prequel to a Robin Cook medical thriller arriving at bookstores Aug. 5. Yet shows like Body face numerous obstacles, including the lack of established viewing patterns or creative formulas, along with a risk-averse attitude among some advertisers, who theses have plentiful options for placing video ads on the Web.”
In fact, “Foreign Bodies” has been basically a failure, racking up something like 1 million views over all episodes on all platforms.
SAI has word on another book-to-web series/promo experiment:
“Stephen King has long wanted to break free of traditional publishing, and CBS would love to show there’s some synergy between its oldest and newest media.
So rather than just release another scary story in book form only, publisher Scribner — a unit of Simon & Schuster — and CBS are trying a new approach: Convert an unpublished novel “N.” into a series of 25 video episodes distributed by CBS on the Web and mobile devices.”
You can take a look at a promo for that here.
With more regular TV shows being watched online and the quality of product rising constantly, it isn’t surprising to see people trying to tackle meatier material. While there is lots of talk about ideal episode length and the importance of hooks, the truth is the same as it ever was: if you don’t make a good show nobody is going to watch. The platform is secondary.
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