Attn: RIAA! Quick, Sue ListenToYouTube.

It must be so tough being a RIAA lawyer. Every morning you have wake up and face the fact that 100 new sites just popped up hoping to make music more fun and accessible and it is your job to sue them out of existence as quickly as possible.

Today, RIAA is going to have to decide how many hours ListenToYouTube.com is allowed to live:

ListenToYouTube is a simple web-based application for pulling the audio out of a YouTube video and converting it to MP3. The service is free and simple: you plug in the URL for the video, it grabs the audio, you download the MP3. LINK

Considering how easy it is to find nearly every song ever made on YouTube it is only a short step from there to creating your own entirely illegal collection of ripped music.

Poor RIAA.  Some many people to sue and so little time to do it.

Chuck Fans Go Subway To Save Show

A few weeks ago there was what appeared to be some mild uproar about an especially blatant product placement in an episode of NBC’s “Chuck,” in which not only were Subway subs featured, but someone on the show actually spoke the brand’s current tagline.

Many asked if this was going to far and if it was a sign of TV being destroyed by advertising.  They wondered if fans would stand for it!

Turns out, not only will fans stand for it, but if it will save their show from being canceled they’ll embrace it:

Chuck diehards are organizing a campaign to buy Subway sandwiches on the night of the show’s season finale next week in an attempt to influence NBC via one of the show’s main sponsors.

Got that? Fans clearly don’t mind product placement done reasonably well and anyone who blames a show’s failure on branded content elements should probably look at the writers and directors before blaming the products.

This weird “church and state” notion of original content and advertising is out-dated and instead of fighting the integration, the smart people are out there looking at how to maximize value of content to both the viewer and the brand sponsor.

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Is “Angel of Death” a Hit or a Success?

Hey, have you heard about the redhot webseries “Angel of Death” over on Crackle.com?  Well, if you have, you are in a minority.  Still, it sure looks, at first glance, like “Angel of Death” is a hit:

During a recent interview with comic book podcast iFanboy, Brubaker said Angel of Death had been seen by “7 million people.” This was kind of vague, so we contacted the folks at Crackle who said Brubaker misspoke, and provided the more specific, yet completely different metric of 4.7 million total views.

That is certainly a lot of views in the world of webisodes, especially when it comes to dramas.  Of course, one has to take into account that the viewcount is a tally of all views over a ten-episode season.  NewTeeVee dug deeper to find these numbers:

Episode 1: 950,000 Episode 2: 675,000 Episode 3: 625,000 Episode 4: 525,000 Episode 5: 275,000 Episode 6: 350,000 Episode 7: 800,000 Episode 8: 100,000 Episode 9: 300,000 Episode 10: 200,000

Granted, there are some cable shows that struggle to pull these numbers, but the fact is that only around 20% of the audience for episode one stuck around until episode ten.

Then there is the question of that pesky ROI (Return on Investment) that just won’t leave us alone.  Well, the series cost a reported $1,000,000 to produce.  The simple math says they paid $4.70/view.  I guess, depending on how their advertising and sponsorship deals work, this could be a profitable price-point but I don’t think so…

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G.I. Joe No Go Outside US (except…)

It seems like big media companies waste endless time and energy doing everything they can to control and, in effect, limit who can watch, listen to and/or interact with their content.

While these efforts will stop some casual users from getting the content (way to lose a fan, guys) those who really want it will find away around the controls put in place.  Sometimes this can involve P2P filesharing, but more often than not, it’s just a simple matter of finding a site that has the content streaming.

Great case in point:

Warren Ellis has written a new series of GI Joe cartoons, reimagining the infra-dumb 80s toy-sales vehicle as a serious war comic. Adult Swim has the original episodes, but they’re blocked outside of the US, so if you’re in the UK like me, you can watch ‘em on YouTube.

Why don’t these media companies simply embrace the fact that there is now a potentially mammoth global audience hungry for their content and provide it directly to them instead of letting middlemen step in and do the job.

Ashton, Snoop and Other Stars Hot on Live Webcasting. Why?

This has been a big year for live webcasts and especially for UStream, a site that seems to have a dominant position at the moment.

Live webcast’s big moment came late last year with the sensation that was the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam.  Tens of thousands of people were tuned in at any given moment to the six little puppies and it is thought that the total number of viewers was over 20 million.  Not bad for some puppies.

Now, it seems, live webcasting is moving beyond puppies and live camgirls to include a growing number of celebrities.  I’ve already discussed Snoop Dogg’s “Wake-n-Bake” show and Kevin Pollack’s chatter and now comes word that web-happy celeb Ashton “1 Million Followers” Kutcher has plans to do a live version of his chestnut “Punk’d” for UStream.

The question is, why this new interest in live webcasting?  It is hard enough to drum up an audience for an original webseries without the added pressure of forcing people to tune in at a specific time.  Even network TV is finding a drop in appointment viewing.

My minimal research (checking out each show a couple of times) indicates that only a few hundred people are interested in either Snoop or Pollack when they are live.  It will be interesting to see if Ashton has the kind of pull needed to make a live show a true hit on UStream or if the only thing we really want is more puppies.

RIAA Will Have To Sue Them All – Who’s Next?

If the recent court decision against The Pirate Bay is any indication, it looks as though groups like RIAA and MPAA are going to be able to sucessfully sue anyone who provides links to copyrighted content, especially if providing that access is the key purpose of the site.

I’ve already discussed how this, theoretically, opens Google up to a big ol’ lawsuit, but what about the thousands of other sites out there.

For instance, I recently read about a site called Just Hear It:

Enter a song title or artist’s name, and Just Hear It returns a list of possible matches–including not only audio tracks, but also YouTube videos.

Gee, that sounds great, and highly suit-worthy.  Now, the CNet article notes:

According to the “About” page, the site is legal–it pays for licenses from the three major organizations, BMI, ASCAP, and CESAC, and it apparently pays publishers royalties based on the number of plays they receive. But although paying publishing rights is sufficient for traditional (“terrestrial”) radio, Internet radio stations must also pay performance royalties, which are owned and managed by a completely different group of bodies.

Wow, that is pretty complicated.  So many hoops to jump through, licenses to obtain and organizations to pay just for helping people find music they want to hear.  Even if Just Hear It believed it was doing something “legal” there are still plenty of grounds for challenging that legality.

That’s why even CNet seems to think the site won’t be around for long.  Of course, another clone will pop up quickly since it turns out people like being about to listen to a specific song without paying $1.29 for the privilege.

This is the endless goose-chase that groups like RIAA will be on until they finally realize that they will never win this battle in the courts and begin to truly innovate – or just DIAF.

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Baby Shaker iPhone App Short-Lived

Considering how hard it was for iFart to be approved for sale in the iPhone app store, one really has to wonder how an app called “Baby Shaker” made it through all the red tape.

For a relatively brief time, “Baby Shaker” was available for purchase at the iTunes app store. Now, after a few major blog posts and tons of twitters, the app has been removed.

Still, how did this ever get listed in the first place?

Other apps recently pulled by Apple include Nazi Sympathizer, iKKK, Puppy Kicker Lite, Skin the Cat, PedoFinder2 and Sexting: The Game.

G.I. Joe and Adult Swim in Web-to-TV Experiment

Now seems like as good a time as any to “re-invent” G.I. Joe for a new, darker generation and the folks at Cartoon Networks AdultSwim are attempting just that with a series called G.I. Joe Resolute.

However, instead of simply putting the new cartoon right into the TV line-up, they are trying something a little bit different:

The show, which was first announced on Ellis’s blog last summer, is a 60-minute story that will be broken up into 11 episodes. The first ten episodes will run for around five minutes each and the finale will run for ten minutes.

Only the first ten episodes will air on AdultSwim.com. At midnight on April 25, the finale will air as part of a special viewing of the show in its entirety on Cartoon Network.

This will be one to track in terms of how much buzz and traffic can be created and how many people will follow the series from the web to TV.  Unlike pervious attempts to combine these platforms, like streaming a premiere episode or transplanting a series, this feels like a more organic approach and I believe it will benefit all involved.

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Related articles by Zemanta

• G.I. Joe Resolute Clips Now Online (themovieblog.com)
• Warren Ellis’ Animated ‘G.I. Joe: Resolute’ Debuts With A Bang… Lots Of Them! (splashpage.mtv.com)

New Balance Web Series Solid and Unseen

New Balance is behind an extremly well-made doc-reality series called SEASON IN THE BALANCE, that follows around a high school lacrosse team.  As AdRants says, “Think Friday Night Lights with lacrosse sticks.”  Also reminds me of MTV’s “Two-a-Days” series.

It appears that a great of deal of thought and at least some financial resources were dedicated to this project but it looks like it is being nearly completely ignored.  This is based mostly on the viewcount on YouTube, where the five episodes posted so far are averages something like 200 views.  Now, to be fair, there could be huge traffic to the home site or maybe on some other platform but YouTube tends to be a solid indicator of popularity and 200 views is miserably low.

Even if these numbers are lower than the actual viewership, it can’t be much lower. So, what went wrong here?

For starters, the only way I even found out about the series was via a posting in the industry-centric AdRants.  I’ve seen no promotions or press releases or ads that would create even a whiff of awareness.  Since the nature of the content is not sensationalistic or star-filled or just plain crazy, there is little chance of the videos gaining traction in the world of Facebook updates and Twitter ReTweets.

Oh, and it is about lacrosse, a sport this country has shown an extreme reluctance to embrace outside of high school and college.

What can we learn here?  First, just making a great series and putting online is not nearly enough to guarantee viewership.  TV networks spend millions to promote their shows so that they can boast of huge viewerships and raise their ad-rates.  If a brand goes it alone and creates and releases their content outside of the traditional TV network marketplace it is now up to them to do that marketing.  Otherwise, the show will go unseen as will any embedded marketing.

Second, you need to target your key audiences.  Maybe New Balance did this and I am just not part of that target (fair enough) but if they did it was clearly unsuccessful.  I wonder how many high school and college lacrosse teams have been directly contacted and made aware of a series that speaks directly to their life experiences?  Not only could these players become viewers but they could also become brand evangelists for New Balance.

As it stands, this is a great looking webseries that deserves some attention but this won’t happen all by itself.

The Nation’s Newspaper Solution? Collusion, of couse.

There are numerous reasons why traditional newspaper are facing the need to change or die.  Technology is evolving to a point where many people simply don’t see the need for a dead-tree format while at the same time the technology needed to obtain and transmit news has allowed many more players onto the field.

Of course, the majority of old school thinkers simply blame “the internet” for stealing the news and then giving it away for free.  This is such a Luddite view of the world and misses almost all the important factors that have led to a change in the way news is gathered and disseminated. This wrong-headed thinking has led to some presumably smart people making really dumb statements about how to “save” newspapers – a concept they often confuse with saving news or saving journalism, things that do not need newspapers to thrive.

For my money,  Michael Moran, writing for “The Nation” has made one of the most bone-headed suggestions yet:

The online information ecosystem that has grown up around their freely proffered content will barely notice if one–or even a half-dozen–major publications put their news behind subscription walls. The only way newspapers can save something of the franchise that took hundreds of years to create is to work together to stop giving away their content without charge.

Call it NOPEC–the Newspaper Owners Print and Electronic Cartel. Only when newspapers cast aside the ethos of free content can the revenues needed to support serious journalism at home and abroad return.

That’s right, Mr. Moran is suggesting that newspapers collude in a price-fixing scheme that will somehow remove any form of competition and force people to pay an artificial price for new reporting.

Besides being highly unethical and possibly illegal, it’s complete unworkable.  There will always be those who either want to provide news for free or who are able to make a profit through other revenue models than subscription or micropayments.

NOPEC is my winner for Worst Idea Ever to “save” newspapers.

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