Sorry to keep saying this but the blog has moved over to a dedicated website at www.mediangler.com. Could you bookmark that and go there?

I’m still getting dozens of people turning up here but the site now has a new address. Sorry for the inconvience. Please go to www.mediangler.com.

This strikes me as an underestimate giving scant recognition to the fact that IPTV will offer a range of buddy like services that powered myspace to 30 billion hits a month recently.It comes from a Diffusion Group report.

IPTV deployments in several key European countries are on schedule, with new launches expected in smaller Eastern European and Nordic countries. For these reasons, the EMEA region is expected to top 14 million IPTV households by 2010 with France, the UK, Italy, Spain, and German accounting for 87% of the total.The number of North American IPTV households is also expected to near 14 million by 2010, with the US accounting for 80% of these subscriptions. While the majority of 2005 and 2006 IPTV deployments have been executed by small rural operators, TDG expects the new deployments by Verizon and AT to greatly increase subscribers starting in 2007.

ATV’s News Archive July 10th – July 14th

I’m still trying to shift the blog over to a new address. Would you mind bookmarking this. http://www.mediangler.com.

Please go to:

http://www.mediangler.com

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson is touring the UK right now promoting his Long Tail book due for publication this month.

I’ve interviewed people who are tied up in the race to supply IPTV and related technologies to the unknowing public and to a man and woman they endorse the Long Tail thesis, that the future lies with millions of micro-niches.

Interesting then that Anderson is giving private briefings to the BBC and Reuters as well as Google. I’d have thought in the case of the BBC they could work it out – long term erosion of audience.

In fact just about every large content producer I talk to these days says the same thing. There’s a palpable sense of dismay around, as if these guys with audiences can do nothing to protect their legacy of monopoly and oligopoly.

The decent course of action for a public service broadcaster would be to begin taking the pile of cards down and leave the way open for new enterprises to grow. That is not going to happen. Big Media is like Big Tobacco, determined to keep growing whatever the cost.

But what are they going to grow? That is the bit they cannot yet answer. What’s actually happening is more edgy and contrived than a mere shift in economic forces.

Like alll theses Anderson’s is overplayed, at least in the minds of media moguls. Most media organisations are still highly profitable, one way or another. There may be high profile exceptions but what we are seeing is a significant downsiing among staff, putting people on the street (who can take up Long Tail opportunities), cutting frelance rates, and renegotiating the terms of trade.

There are few media organisations who really see a future where revenue will not cover cost. But there are many who are content to use the current Long Tail kerfuffle to rationliase a new round of lay-offs and renegotiations.

The question still remains though – for what? In mainstream business the strategic objective is always to be up there, to be in the top rank of companies in a sector, to have the best brand. Which traditional content producer has a really coherent plan for doing more, better?

Still trying to encourage people to go over this way. It’s the new mediangler address.

Yesterday, news organizations and other publishers who’d like to control long-term costs for delivering content online were dealt a blow in Congress.The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, in approving a major telecom reform bill, rejected an amendment that would guarantee “net neutrality.”

Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits

We should all be concerned. It means telcos will be asking high volume content delivery companies for extra fees for preferential delivery.

It adds to Google another way the web can be distorted (on the Google issue: it’s estimated over half of web servers are now on link farms out there to secure improved Google returns. Blogging software that produces dozens of blogs a day are also into this Google returns optimisation game).

Right now it’s a worry also because telcos have another revenue stream opening up to them: IPTV.

They could be tomorrow’s super-broadcasters facilitating niche content producers in the long tail.

Their reversion to a monopolistic mindset is maybe an indication that they don’t expect long tail economics to work for them.

Preferential delivery of content is already affecting mobile networks where one company I deal with has been unable to offer a half-time score service for local sports matches because the mobile operator puts non-core content at the back of the queue. Half time results end up going out when the second half has already started.

It’s a small example of what definitely what lies ahead if the net neutrality issue goes the wrong way.

I’m trying to wind this site down and move everything over to a new dedicated site.

Please change your booksmarks to http://www.mediangler.com

HGTV Video Guide. See also the partner sites: Living.com and Food Network. Streaming TV channels 24 hours a day.

It’s good to see information proliferating in the audio-visual sector. I know my friends in the search community are scratching their heads over how ultimately we will discover this kind of information.

technorati tags:content, new, media

I hear people say we are heading for a new browser war. Maybe. It’s important because the browser is our first port of call with the external world, the tool we use to encounter the network of networks. There could hardly be a more important piece of software.
Firefox though is over-rated and a clumsy tool in my view. I’ve been a Firefox user and dumped it. I think a lot of its kudos comes from being a Mozilla project but that’s not good enough.

Opera I like but it is too focused on being in the old browser war – it renders fast and has a few marginal advantages over IE. Flock is the browser that could overturn our understanding of what browsers can and should do.

I say this as an IE 7 beta user. IE 7 won me over from Opera. For years I’ve used Opera so I can integrate browsing and e-mail, and because I like to have my web sessions automatically saved for me. My time on the web (searching, browsing and communicating) was adequately served. Why I came back to IE is I learned how to use Outlook and once I’d done that I found it more important to integrate my desire to be better organised with my communications with that outside world. IE was in some ways the afterthought, having switched my e-mail from Opera to Outlook but an after thought with traction.

IE 7 displays some typical Microsoft elements. And this goes for Outlook too. IE has some interesting knowledge organising features. For example with tabbed widnows it is possible to set up multiple home pages, meaning of course that when you fire up IE 7 you can have available to you every home page you regularly visit. The problem is you don’t know this, just like you don’t know all the great things you can do with Outlook. Microsoft should be telling us more of what we can do, in ways that tempt us to make use of those features.

Flock is the broswer for Web 2 and the IE 7 team should be looking closely at what Flock are doing. With Flock I can organise my photos, create my own news page, blog direct from the website I might be visiting (great blog this! feature), and clip from websites and store bits of data. This is a browser for people who want to communicate in a variety of ways.

No browser yet has managed to fulfil my ultimate desire which is to allow the development of knowledge communities. I tried this with my own browser design five years back, assisted by an IE developer in fact. It is still a feature missing from every browser out there. Right now though Flock comes closest. Microsoft needs to think about leaping Flock. There’s no point playing catch up.

I was at a Microsoft presentation day, Tuesday, all gearing up for the November launch of the new operating system VISTA, Office 2007 and Microsoft’s collaboration tools and as I’m a user of IE7 Beta, we can throw that in for good measure.

Sure the headlines are going to say it’s a make or break for Microsoft but I don’t buy that one at all. These products are Microsoft’s mature market and there is no make or break. Only on Internet Explorer do I sense Microsoft is vulnerable but IE is hardly a cash cow.

First though VISTA. I’ve already written about Vista in the Irish Times. The aero-glass look and feel is a feature I enjoy. Semi-transparent views mean you can half see a lot of what lies behind any particular screen you might be looking at on the desktop.

Other admirable features are the sidebar where you can keep live applications or desktop gadgets like a weather forecast, and the bottom of screen menu which with a mouse-over gives you a view of all or any live window.

Your activities, then, are accessible in a number of ways.

Aesthetics are going to be increasingly important in screen communications and Vista is a step forward. It’s a comfortable environment for people like me who rely on intuition.

Still, I felt MSFT could be doing more. People want to enjoy their time at a computer and the PC’s functions are migrating to the TV where aesthetic appeal is far more important, so a few jolly features like being able to do something with a buddy on another PC across a broadband network could have been built in at the operating level, particularly by a company that owns Groove. But so far so good.

Microsoft’s information retrieval philosophy in Vista is a step to applaud. I’ve been keeping an eye on Fast company, originator of web search engine Alltheweb but now a highly focused enterprise search company. Fast’s philosophy is simple. Forget people organising data. Index and search it and then present it in ways that make intuitive sense.

Microsoft is trying to do that with its stacks. You can still be an old fashioned heirarchal person and use tree-structure folders to organise your data in Vista, but you can also leave the organising to the search engine.

It will return documents of all kinds in a variety of stacks. Stacks are reminiscent of Mac’s early hyperstack tools. The search engine will organise information for you by, for example author, document type, subject, date. You name it. They all constitute what is in effect a different stack.

The benefit of a stack is it gives you a way to change your relationship with data. Having searched for a document (or rather, having organised your documents) by author, you can create a different stack (date) and drill down to find the document you are looking for, at the same time creating a different context (timeliness, for example).

Great. And it looks good. But here’s the rub. Microsoft doesn’t have an aesthetic philosophy. They talk about listening to customers and rightly believe that to be progress. It means they build features cutomers have asked for. But the consumer world is after more that. Stacks could have been dressed up in a number of different and appealing visualisations. Stacks could give a multitude of visual clues to users. To devise and develop those visual clues you need to be thinking aesthetically and you need to understand the relationship between images, understanding, and pleasure.

This is where MSFT falls down and where Vista is in need of attention from artists and designers from other fields. Perhaps I am quirky in insisting that an operating system needs to be more beautiful. Vista is progress and I think it will move Microsoft forward. Where Microsoft is though is a hard place. Stuck between old engineering disciplines and the new aesthetic world it is slowly entering (IPTV, X-Box, Media Centre). You cannot easily port engineering values to those walks of life where people’s first priority is to groove… did I say Groove? Maybe Ray Ozzie is the artist to Bill Gates code-geek.

We know less about the future than we’ve ever done. Because I just turned up on technology voices I though this argument needed a revisit this time for a technology audience.

From The San Francisco Bay Area to the Austrian Alps, entrepreneurs and conglomerates are probing how the average viewer is evolving as a media animal.

The assumption, a pure business assumption, is that tomorrow’s media will be dominated by what Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine and author of an upcoming book by the same title, has admirably documented as The Long Tail. Big Media buys it.

“The major players [in the media industries] all buy into the long tail theory of content,” explains Michiel Pelt, a research manager at the research labs of telecommunications supplier Alcatel in Antwerp, Belgium. “Most content companies do,” he adds, “and are looking for ways to create business out of user content.”

But the Long Tail theory of media evolution, that there will in future be no mass markets for Hollywood films or formerly prime time television, misses the point. The future is not only about a highly fragmenting communications industry.

Consumers Evolve: “Right now, we are exploring new structures of knowledge and power through our recreational life,” says M.I.T media specialist Henry Jenkins who works in the C3 (Convergence Culture Consortium), “which are helping us to acquire new skills in collaborative problem solving which are already spilling over into other important sectors.”

Jenkins has written his own account of new media that pushes the argument beyond the confines of the content industries and underlines the significance of a newly enfranchised population to business in general.

But we face a situation Jenkins explains where our understanding of what is going on is no longer solely in the hands of experts and academics:

“The grassroots communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers are playing an active role in documenting, analyzing, predicting, and responding to media change, operating alongside of and in many cases, doing a better job than, traditional sites of learning and research,” advises Jenkins.

This collective strength of Internet users, and an inability to grasp its significance through the traditional mechanisms of research reports, academic papers etc, is about to pass to the television screen as well as to the Internet radio waves.

Another point I’ve made repeatedly here is that the values lying behind that are also important. We seem to be going back to a value system we last visited pre-Reagan and Thatcher.

Knowledge is made up of both elements, a vast dialogue where niche expertise is brought to bear on any subject, and a value sytem that predaates the capitalist moment of triumph.

Add in a new view of entitlement. People want not just luxury but glamour in their lives.

I wonder how many companies, media or otherwise have begun figuring this out.

Won't be much of it – I'm in a briefing from Microsoft on Vista and the Office launch. But will get back to you with news on Wednesday.

But hey, in the meantime take a look around, click the tag cloud or browse the categories. The site's starting to take shape.

Pluggd podcast community launched today

Seattle based start-up Pluggd opened their podcast directory for public use today; the company aims to make podcast listening easier for nontechnical users.

That’s the take from TechCrunch. Interesting how podcasting is getting organised. I’m hoping to launch my own podcast series next week which is part of the reason I’m spending a day in Dublin, sitting in with Microsoft Vista developers and then with podcastingireland.ie sorting out the pod.

As a journalist I never did radio but like everybody else now there’s nothing stopping me.

technorati tags:podcasting

San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves.

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » GoodStorm to offer e-commerce widget with 50% revenue split for bloggers

Just shows that nobody and no model is invulnerable. Good Storm is surely a threat to Amazon which gives paltry affiliate fees, and to the affiliate model which Amazon spawned. Companies that use affiliate programmes and performance-based advertising (the current buzz) will have to rethink their margins.

technorati tags:advertising

I'm having problems with column alignment on the new blog site, so please do not go there yet. Hoping it will be remedied by tomorrow.

The internet mob builds a worldwide web of punishment. Judicial forms of humiliating offenders have long been banned but they are making a sinister return online, says John-Paul Flintoff

The internet mob builds a worldwide web of punishment – Sunday Times – Times Online

I was struck also by the report above. I've said before I think the motivation for content co-creation, user content and all the rest, at least for an older age group, is to seek a return to a more moral period in our history. So new technology, old values.

What the Sunday Times records here is going a bit far of course but it does underline the fact that we need to understand change across a wide range of activity and values, which also goes back to something I've written on earlier, the need for the old guard in the IT industry to open up to new values.

technorati tags:values, content

I'm trying to transfer the blog over to a dedicated host/domain. The reason is so I can get more control over the look and feel and add in tag clouds and related stuff. Please go here and re-book mark the site. I'll keep this blog up for a few weeks yet and run the two concurrently for a few days at least.

This is from yesterday's Sunday Times in the UK. Now the Sunday Times is ultimately owned by a competitor of ITV so scepticism is warranted. Still ITV has shipped half its audience over the past twenty years and is now sacking staff.

"Investors switch off from ITV. Falling audiences and ad revenues put channel boss Charles Allen’s future in doubt, write Louise Armitstead and Dominic Rushe."

Investors switch off from ITV – Sunday Times – Times Online

As well as sacking people it's looking at reducing programming budgets. The response is typical across old media companies, reducing capacity in an era of media expansion. In the what we're seeing is companies being allowed toconvey an impression that they are under threat when in reality the are failing to seize opportunity. Who deserves firing?

technorati tags:old, media, new, media

BBCWATCH.COM

"The BBCWATCH reports demonstrate how the BBC consistently fails to adhere to its legal obligations to produce impartial and accurate reporting."

My impression has always been that the broadcast majors have for a long time seen their role as making us believe we live in jolly nice societies, ones with a bit of grimble around the edges (damned terrorists and criminals) but by and large it's a homely world and we should be damned pleased

When you earn staff salaries in senior positions in these places (and get all your taxis, and meals and travel paid), indeed life is agreeable.

Only a minority have that privilege. I was interested then to come across a swathe of websites that believe the BBC is inherently unfair, a view I also subscribe to, and websites that believe its power globally makes it a suitable subject for all and anyone to discuss.

As well as BBC Watch there's also this site. But there are more on the blog roll. I'm surprised to date the blogging community has had so little impact on the BBC, but then the BBC's online coverage is so much better than its broadcast coverage, and it has built a dominant position online, two possible explanations.

technorati tags:BBC, bias, error

UpYourBudget Treasure Hunt 2006

This is quite a way to use video! From Budget Car Hire.

Below is the weirdest form of business. It can hardly be true. Set up a few domains on the web (say 200,000) of them, attach a weather forecast and enable Google's Ad sense…. a $120 million business!

"Demand Media is building the next-generation of web media companies. Today, our collection of websites and domain names receive more than 25 million unique visitors per month"

Demand Media | Home

See the Red Herring article here and get your thesaurus out.

Flukiest is a fast growing interactive community for sharing and managing digital media by artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, directors, producers, and technologists. Flukiest provides a platform for members to share their work and ideas by enabling mobile and web technologies to seamlessly integrate. The Flukiest community combines the best features of an online social network with services such as photo and video sharing, blogging, music listening and reviews, artist interviews, clothing design and print.

Flukiest: Photo Sharing and Video Sharing Interactive Community

Well worth a look!

Mike Hudack, the CEO of Blip.tv, is on a mission to rescue videobloggers from video hosting sites and services that "aren't about individual empowerment." He feels that most of the video sites snag all the digital rights they can and make money on the backs of other people's work. Which sites? You(tube) know which ones.

Blip.tv, the videoblogger's control panel – Alpha Blog – alpha.cnet.com

This is a fascinating development, fascinating because few people have been thinking critically about the You Tube type business model.

Blip.tv is not to be confused with bliptv.com.

The Standard (the London evening paper) is trialing a broadband TV portal service, which will allow users access to on-demand video footage of news stories and user-generated content, on the Cube TV platform. Video classifieds would be broken down into sections like property and entertainment.

UK: Standard to launch broadband TV portal – Editors Weblog

An interesting one for people who wonder what the growing number of IPTV players are up to and how the IPTV platform providers will ultimately divide the market.

Personally I'd always assumed the multichannel portal would have been a user-generated knowledge base.

News that Robert DeNiro is thinking of buying the New York Observer is a high profile example but some commentators are saying newspapers' response to the internet will be: go back into private hands.

"Between analysts delivering ominous forecasts about the future of print media and the chaos of messy media group breakups, the American newspaper industry is going through turbulent times. From this uncertainty, a pattern is slowly emerging: the delisting of newspapers."

Privately owned: A way out for US newspapers? – Editors Weblog- Analysis

But could it be back to the days when the likes of the Astors owned the Times and Observer in London and Newsweek in the USA?

Nobody seems too worried right now as newspapers are looking around for solutions and in some cases paying silly amounts of money for online properties.

technorati tags:newspapers, online, content

Because so many of us look at screens all day the aesthetics of information technology need a little more attention. I've been trying to convince people of that for a while.

Right now I'm trying to convince Microsoft. That logo, the font, that butterfly…. well people's expectations of how things should look and the aesthetic values they impart have changed and various aspects of IT coverage and symbolism are out of time, over-influenced by function and benefits.

So you might say how should IT products look and what values should they impart. That's a matter of imagination and of realising the changing role that information technology plays in our lives. Like, we don't call it IT anymore. We call if social software. Social software needs a different aesthetic, something imbued with the wider artistic values that our societies strive for.

IT companies however are resistant to that notion, seeing themselves largely as engineers rather than communicators. Again a strange phenomenon. People who create change in double quick time are reluctant to address the need for change in their own outlook and sensibility.  I'm waiting on Microsoft to come back to me but meanwhile am pursuing the same theme with the Wall St Journal and the Irish Times.

I write a lot on food and health issues these days, as well as doing the digital culture stuff. I wonder for example what all the new media, IT and gizmo stuff is worth if you're not feeling well.

My wife went back into hospital yesterday with a heart complaint – which is savage at 45.

Like they always say in Ireland, at least I've got my health but when you haven't you start reflecting on the more vulnerable aspects of lifestyle. 

I know blogging is supposed to be a more personal form of reportage. Should I communicate my views of what counts in the new media world without mentioning the most personal things?

I guess some blogs reveal all but they tend to be young tarts sexing up the intimate parts of their lives.

Roos was diagnosed with breast cancer fifteen months ago and either the stress or the treatments are undoing her.

Does this matter in a new digital world? It colours my views of what's going on around me.

I think we have an immortalist media and IT industry, a political class that sees acute and morbid illness as a policy issue related to  aging rather than integral to our way of life.

The computer and TV have tied us to chairs. What we eat is making us ill. We are a generation of sickos. That's part of what I think.

technorati tags:cancer, cardiac, heart, relevance, new media

This comes from a New York media investment firm and the negatives for newspapers are backed also by the World Editors Forum, a think tank for newspaper editors. First the banker.

"The decline of the newspaper business is a crime we’re all witnessing, though it seems few CEOs are being called to account. With few exceptions, newspaper advertising is flat or down, while circulation slides dramatically and costs continue to spike."

That quote appears in a white paper on lead generation – or the future of online advertising. The thrust of the argument is that newspapers are now desperately looking to buy web properties or to initiate new web initiatives having underinvested in their own operations for years.

This is a December 2005 quote from the New York Review of Books. In an article by Michael Massing titled The End of News, Massing reflects on the declining audience for newspapers:

"It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent."

In the Uk profits are less secure because of newspaper price wars. The argument though is again relevant. All these newspapers had an audience. They made two fundamental mistakes:

They believed they had an inalienable right to the audience.

They believed that a particular voice, their own, was immortal.

"Is it any surprise, then, that media buyers are slashing newspaper spending? Or that they will inevitably take an axe to TV budgets as well?" That's the banker asking.

technorati tags:content, newspaper, new media

The world's most powerful broadcaster was at it again last night, confusing the role of news reporter, priest, advocate and self-publicist. On its main evening news the BBC ran an item about cognitive behavioural therapy claiming it could help cure the 1 in 6 British people who suffere depression.

Not even Mrs Freud would have made that claim for Sigmund.

Apart from ignoring the rules of balance, the item was an extraordinary implementation of feel good TV. There really is nothing to worry about Britain. Depressed you might be but it will all come right in the end.

No mention of why people might be depressed (the destruction of the British social fabric from Thatcher onwards).

Executives at the BBC have decided that making british people feel good about themselves is its best strategy for getting more licence fee money and for retaining audiences.

When I was wroking on a film there last year, the relentless message was to make programmes that make people feel good about themselves. The message clearly came down from on high.

There is one more extraordinary feature of the BBC's coverage and one that carries a lesson for how the media landscape is changing.

On the BBC's website there is not CBT story carry-over from the main evening news. There in new media BBC land CBT is treated with the appropriate level of reason and moderate scepticism.

In other words even within an established media behemoth, the new media hacks address issues with a degree of fairness and critical acumen that's disappearing from television.

What's happening, and a point I've made before, is no that technology is driving new media forms (that much is obvious) but that it is unleashing traditional values that the maisntream has reneged on.

technorati tags:bbc, media policy, content, IPTV, new media

For the launch of 2006 Broadcast Live, a few words about the impact of IPTV, podcasting and blogs.

If you still read newspapers or tune into your TV set in the evening then the changes ahead will be a mystery. If you're an expert in the changing media landscape though the future will be even more mysterious. Ignorance in this case is bliss. At least it stops your head hurting.

So what's really happenning?

• We're going to see the rapid demise of traditional media franchises around the world. National broadcasters, whose audiences have suffered a gradual decline over the past decade, will wilt suddenly (twenty years ago when I worked at the BBC every Monday morning the whole unit met to discuss every single prime time BBC programme and its ratings for the previous week – ratings' decline was already an obsession then).
• We're going to see more co-created material as mainstream media companies seek to hold onto audiences until they realise there aren't enough stars to go around (even small independent producers are now trying to sign up "star" commentators; meanwhile pro-journalist fees are going down).
• We're going to see the disparity between celebrity earning and those of citizen contributors become so wide that it will be self-evidently immoral. Once again the mainstream will appear dangerously unethical.
• We're going to see some of the new names in the new media world capitulate and take old media's shilling but so what.
• We're seeing a new ethos emerge based on a wholly different set of social values
• We will see advertisers and marketers looking for ways to build ethics as well as emotion into their products and services (when I worked in telco consulting, the guys I worked with openly searched for ways to confuse mobile phone subscribers with tariff plans).

What are those values:

• Fairness
• Honesty
• Consideration for the views of others
• Duty

Sounds like utopianism? No, it's more of what we had up to the mid 1970s.

Are these changes the result of technogical advance. Well, they began two decades ago. That's how long audiences of the major media franchsies have been in decline. So the technological changes are not the cause. They are being driven by a formerly resricted but now unbridled desire that people have to communicate. It didn't have to come out as fairness, honesty, consideration and duty and left solely to technology it wouldn't have.

What's changing is the ability of a vast swathe of people to express an ethical preference. The long term inmpact of co-created content is primarily a moral one, a universe created by an immoral pursuit of audience at any cost by organisations that previously owned the attention of half the population of the advanced world replaced by one where people strive to make themselves relevant through fairness and decency.

Then of course there's always the pornographic mindset and the frivolous and the Youtube generation.

technorati tags:content, blog, podcast, IPTV, new media

Being a fan of a world with a billion TV channels I hope things go well for GDB TV tomorrow. Go here to see what they're at during Broadcast Live and here and here for a look at some of their channels.

The surprise element of the IPTV world is the way old names keep coming back. Like Microsoft of course but IBM? Now there's a spanner pulled out of the works."IBM", the megacorps blurb tells us "provides solutions to help media and entertainment companies innovate; improve core business proceses, simplify infrastructure, develop open content platforms, create improved business flexibility and deliver new high-value services."

In my brief life as a consultant what got me chewing my own wrist bone more than anything was seeing large companies duped into using the big body shops like IBM for non- IT issues. I had the same experience a couple of weeks back talking with a leading media company who told me they use PWC to validate their business strategy.

It's a new world. Companies steeped in the old one don't have the new vision because by definition it's not where they're at. An IBM has great global communications infrastructure expertise but for IPTV it's best to look at what the little fellars are doing.

GDBTV are hoping to demo their global reach in IPTV at Broadcast Live tomorrow. See next post for a rundown on their channels.

technorati tags:content, IPTV

Internet comedy forums are almost as much fun as the programmes themselves, more so if you read them in retrospect. This is a thread on the Ricky Gervais series Extras. Not at all bitchy, not at all. You might take a look before reading the last post.

When Kate Winslett faked a blow job in a phone sex sketch for Ricky Gervais in Extras, you just had to say, give the lady a prize. More surprising though was the praise heaped on Gervais, "an extraordinary comic talent", when winning the Best Sitcom award at the Rose d'Or festival in Switzerland a month back. Have things got this bad?

Extras was workerlike and relied on those high school prankster skits we all remember and cringe at but to say this is an extraordinary talent is to raise an important question? Which one?

Is this the best we can do? How far can the mainstream sink? Why? Can no-one do subversion anymore?

In an era of unprecedented creativity…. Gervais's press reminds me of that other average English comic Eddie Izard. Skilled self-marketers what they do is just not that funny but each has self-awareness in sufficient quantities not to over-expose themselves, lest the gossamer snaps. Gervais ascent to podcasts is part of the strategy of seeking the break point.

The best that can be said for Gervais is he knows how to use the new media environment to boost the popularity of his programmes and his income. Gervais piloted podcast comedies for Guardian Unlimited and helped that left of centre UK daily get a strong toehold in the future media scene.

Now he's dragged his podcast act to the UK Daily Mirror. The Mirror claims it is creating a fun, informative and interactive website. When big corporations talk about "fun" it augers ill for viewers.

Nevertheless we see the media industries reformulating. The Mirror is working with boreme, an archive of viral emails, as well as Audible and it's good to see upstarts rubbing shoulders with the big corps, something that should have happened a decade ago.

technorati tags:content, blog, podcast, IPTV, new media

The weekend papers were busy trying out new ideas. Like – does Bill Gates' departure mean crisis, the final unravelling, or hmmmm, let's think.

In the UK the Sunday Times ran a full page opinion piece that bordered on a mystical incantation. It used to be called wish fulfilment, calling on God to sink the enemy's boat.

Microsoft it said is in crisis, despite nearly doubling its profits under Ballmer (two statements, one article).

That's after the Times ran the day before under the headline: "Gates move opens way to brighter future."

The New Tork Times Saturday was more even handed citing the changing relationship between Gates and his number 2 Steve Ballmer as the only source of a potential oil spill.

Both papers agreed that Microsoft had its work cut out in the age of converged media.

True enough but from where I sit MSFT is doing pretty good and is already opening up a new franchise.

It's called the living room.

Why the pessimism and the mark down on MSFT shares?The most obvious of facts is: Almost everybody has a living room.

When the European telcos later this year launch their IPTV services, Microsoft will be powering them in the network and in the set top box.

The little processor behind the next generation of TV will project the Microsoft icon onto the TV screen and families will gravitate back from the PC to the hearth and engage in sit forward TV with MSFT.

If this is a crisis then I want to start one now.

There are plenty of areas where Microsoft does not enjoy a monopoly but to be in control of the PC and productivity software and diving for the tape in networking computing, enterprise computing, game consoles, IPTV, video-on-demand….

technorati tags: Microsoft, Bill Gates

I'm in my second day as a flock user and I'm getting closer to saying it's a steal, the first quantum step improvement in browserland in a decade.

technorati tags:flock, browser

Late last year I served as rapporteur at an EU workshop where Europe's top search experts were looking ahead to the future audio-visual search engine.

Of course Fast company were there and they made the telling point that their business was flying as corporate customers begin to see search as the most important function in knoweldge management.

Companies don't want to hear about classification, directory or other volume constraints. They want mountains of information and pinpoint discovery.

So then there's audio-visual data which brings the person-in-the-street into the more demanding search tasks. How to find anything out inside a video, or inside a Video on Demand library?

We were arguing it's crucial for the next era of entertainment. While a few presenters showed image mapping technologies, the consensus was that some kind of social networking solution would probably win the day.

Duly the workshop report won Euro 50 million of funding and EU experts are now back in the labs spending it.

Enter click.tv, a system that allows users to comment, describe, and tag video content. Mike Lanza , CEO of click says he's currently focused on improving:

1) user experience
2) search
3) advertising

Yes, advertising. Companies running videos off their websites will be able to use click at a fee or allow click to run ads next to the service. It may be early days for click, but EU funders might want to take note. The actions is already on the web, not in the lab.

technorati tags:search, engines, IPTV, television, video

Thirty years of defining the nature of information technology, and latterly the future of gaming, and television, is tiring. Yes, I've decided enough is enough. I won't listen to Bill Gates any longer.

The reality of course is that Bill Gates has plenty of business interests to keep him going, some of which are beginning to flourish.

As we mark the end of his era, we're also marking the beginning of a new one, powered by us, or you. As well as playing with flock yesterday I was also looking at Squarespace and at scoop.

The momentum of non-professional content, news and information sources (newsvine, toppix, ohmynews, dailykos) is slowly taking the floor out from under the newspaper industry.

In this "end of news" post, dating back to December 2004 Michael Massing attributed newspapers' decline to right wing campaigns against mainstream media and to unreal profit demands by new owners.

But the positive side of the coin is millions of people want to create and the technology is simplifying the process of co-creating contenet. See Hotelchatter, for example.

A lack of investment in newspaper properties and a highly educated population will drive more industries towards the co-creation ethos.

What does it mean to companies that have relied on newspapers to disseminate recruitment or product information?

It means seeking out new intermediaries and managing relationships with them.

If I had VC money right now I'd be developing a system that allows marketing departments, PR agencies and ad agencies to manage hundreds and thousands of ad placements, site sponsorship deals and good will relationships with niche opinion leaders. Oh and it would manage ad space auctions too.

technorati tags:marketing, IT, Bill, Gates, Content, co-createion

This is a test of the flock blogging facility. Well a bit more than a test. I haven't been able in wordpress to use tags so far. Flock has a straightforward way of doing it.

technorati tags:browser, flock

I’ve been playing around with the beta of flock, the new browser that integrates with Flickr, delicious and your blog tools, as well as providing new search functions. At first glimpse flock looks like the integration a user like me needs. For example being slow on the uptakethe first thing I did to blog flock was come back to my WordPress write window, when in fact I could more easily have blogged direct from the browser. I also struggle with uploading photographs to my blog and flock promises to simplify that.

My deficincies make me a poor content co-creator which is why I, and I guess many people like me, will be on the look out for tools that allow us to project our ideas and creations on the web. For example I’m poor at RSS, but I’m a journalist. I need to be proficient in publishing, organising and using RSS.

I was a long term Opera user and  when I switched back to Internet Explorer, to test the IE 7 beta, I found it troublesome not to have my last session automatically there for me next time I turned the computer on. IE 7’s tabs is progress for MS but not when they disappear. Opera saved them all automatically.

Though I like IE 7’s way with RSS feeds there’s much to like too about flock, like having a news feed organiser, a toolbar for organising and uploading photographs linked to flickr, an alert for when sites upload new photographs, and having a pop up from which to blog.

Flock claims to be able to integrate web search with the browser history but when I fed in a keyword from a site URL I use regularly it failed to return that site. Either I did something wrong of flock is over-claiming on that one.

All in all though a great product and given that IE 7 is in beta without many of these features (though it does have the beginnings of an extensive plug-in library) it’ll be fascinating to see how the browser battles shape up. The more integrated functionality the better for people like me. Next – integrating video editing. That would be awesome.

Economists now use the Big Mac as a guide to inflation and the cost of living across the world, assuming that the price of the Big Mac will always tend towards equilibrium. In the IT business Microsoft might equally be used as a point of comparison for the popularity of community tools. If Microsoft start using Wikis then their time has arrived, no?

I dropped in on Microsoft’s MSDN WiKi this morning. “The MSDN Wiki site experiments with ways we can integrate community contributions into the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0.”

OK. And give Wiki’s one big boost in the process. The MSDN Wiki is basically a way to give leading edge users the chance to build up documentation on Visual Stuio and .Net. And of course it is another small step for content co-creation. There is a logic to where this will lead.

The co-creation projects that I know of, those in the pipeline rather than on the Web, are holding off the inevitable question. The more co-creation is encouraged, the more the question of ownership becomes fraught. For example if documentation is co-created with user communities what possible excuse is left for not opening up source code to the community?

It also poses ethical questions. If you look at Hotel Chatter, a co-created hotel review site you notice the strong ethical dimension deployed by the site owners. Ethical consdierations are what give the site owner the upperhand, or rather than ownership rights. They are guardian’s of the site’s fundamental purpose. They cannot however claim to be the owners of its content and retain an ethical position.

So the logic is that ownership is going to become rooted in something different than prorietary rights. It is going to be difficult to deny co-creators old fashioned ownership. It will be necessary instead to stake an ethical control.

I wrote an article last week (it appeared in the Irish Times) on the rising aesthetic standard of everyday objects. I didn't simply want to say that the iPod is beautiful or that my Sony phone is  a cool anthracite.

I mean the aesthetic standard people are now setting is closer to glamour than mere luxury. What are screen communicators, whether web site developers, ad agencies, or TV producers going to do about it?Glamour is the new luxury. How things look is not only important, it opens markets.

When the sports apparel maker Umbro wanted to take a slice of the fashion market, it went to world famous hat designer Philip Treacy and asked him to design a range of sports shoes. Umbro explained to me that their objective was to take a slice of the middle market but to do that they needed first to capture the luxury end. That in turn meant appealing to the baby boomer, the never-get-old customer who can pay $300 for sports shoes.

Capturing that glamour end of the market means further down market kids will do a bit of copy cat buying.

There are two fascinating elements to the logic. The first is that the '60s generation is back defining trends in what we wear. The second is the vital ingredient – not just how something looks but how many senses it excites.

The Internet's visual appeal is by contrast woeful. Though IT companies have abandoned some of the functional boxes from the 1980s and 1990s, software interfaces, web sites, and even television on the internet, often looks plain bad. 

In the article I praised Microsoft's Vista for at least being adventurous visually and a Microsoft aide replied, well they'll be flattered to be put in the same company as Treacy and co.

That of course was stretching the point. Nonetheless I wonder what the IT industry can do to up its visual presence. The time when IT is a reserve for geeks is well and truly over (particularly as media and IT converge). It's time for a little more everyday glamour.

Google is likely to launch soon a raft of services that link search returns directly to purchasing opportunities online, possibly providing some online stores with “trusted” status from Google, a way of improving click through for companies playing straight with online buyers. It’s one more incremental step to making the web a better place to find and buy than any traditional advertising medium.

It's been a busy posting day in part so I pay my dues in the public dialogue. Gradually the content and services section of the site should build into a mini-EPG for those of you looking for new audio-visual content.

Still I'm mindful that how I came to this kind of subject was through the cultural impact of computing and new media services.

“Right now, we are exploring new structures of knowledge and power through our recreational life,” says M.I.T media specialist Henry Jenkins who works in the C3 (Convergence Culture Consortium), “which are helping us to acquire new skills in collaborative problem solving which are already spilling over into other important sectors.”

That to me is the crucial change we're collectively bringing about. Jenkins goes on to acknowledge, in an e-mail interview I did with him a couple of weeks back that what we know is now being conditioned by the dialogue.

That means traditional sources of authority are less compelling than they used to be; they are less powerful. Traditional sources of expertise are devalued.

On the other hand what we endure for that change is that what we know becomes less certain. The main error of mainstream media outlets like the BBC is they continue to talk with conviction, as if they have a special insight that the community does not have.

And it will reflect increasingly in our political choices. Already today we've seen that the blogging community (readers and writers) think differently about politicians than do the majority of the population. They get what politicians are at more easily. It's being reflect too in the way products are made with more companies engaging the public in product design or adapting their marketing in order to provide users with free services, like Nike's soccer tricks upload site.

The traditional business attitude was that free ended with the dot.com boom, but free continues to grow. See it here too. And for the political momentum behind free go here. Free has become the big success story, audience the new name for customer base, content the driver for brands.

These are the kind of change we're looking to record here.

Updates on the net neutrality story (that’s the danger of telcos using our desire to access certain services frequently, e.g. Yahoo, as an excuse to charge) can be found here and here.

Can't see yet where this leads as a business but Click.tv is something special if you want to search inside video.

Just because I’m a low level user of mobile devices doesn’t mean they’re not the dog’s. Anyway Podcasts are the real democratiser and Podshow.com is doing a good job of becoming the meta site. So far I’m confused about what differentiates them from podcastalley and  indiepodder. Hope to answer that in the next 24 hours.

Well it's starting to show. People engaged in blogs have opinions quite different from voters who don't read blogs.

 This study comes from the blog Direct Democracy cross posted on The Daily KOS.

"The more frequently a netroots activist readers blogs, the less likely s/he is to have a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton. While netroots activists who never read blogs have an opinion of Hillary Clinton roughly comparable to all Democrats, netroots activists who regularly read political blogs actually have an overall negative opinion of Hillary Clinton, at 45% favorable and 54% unfavorable."

That's a tortured sentence but what it means is that people who read blogs, as well as those who write them, are forming an influential political group with opinions quite different from those people who depend on the mainstream media for news and opinion.

In this case, Hillary Clinton is shown deriving support from the readers of mainstream media but not from readers of blogs.

Yesterday I blogged on Comment is Free, the Guardian group blog site. Most blogs are open ended, in the sense that if I comment on your blog then my URL is available in the comment header so that future readers can click and follow me out of the page.

The Guardian doesn't seem to do this, unfairly corralling the reader on the Comment is Free site. I wrote to the Guardian yesterday for an explanation but so far no response. Maybe other readers could do the same.  comment.is.free@guardian.co.uk

Here you'll find outstanding observational documentary films ready for pay per view.

Sports coverage is the obvious big gainer from IPTV and Internet TV. GDBTV are already talking with the majority of English soccer clubs while BitPass are providing pay per view services for the Green Bay Packers. I don't want to use the "sign of things to come" cliche but it surely is.

I was playing around with Google's video beta this morning. They've launched their new video ranking system and believe it or not there's nothing there on the World Cup. Now I know the USA lost yesterday but still, no world cup clips in the top 100?

Well, they've created a whole sub-channel especially for the beautiful game. Try the footvolley video.

I’m the guy who asked for his GPRS connection to be disabled (I racked up four and a half hours of web viewing after turning it on accidentally). So? I don’t claim enough expertise in mobile content but I have spoken with the people at Wildlight and what they’re trying to do makes sense – movies on the mobile. Though I would prefer to play the movies out on the web too, those of you who want to try it out, it’s over there.

A quick, stand to be corrected post about the Guardian's comment is free, the paper's group blog. I find I can't click on the name of people who leave comments to go to their sites. This is hardly in the spirit of blogging.

People over in England are exercising their passion for self-reflection (or is it an indulgence?) over the flying of the St George flag during the world cup.

Now I happen to be an anti-flag kind of guy, though I think it's appropriate for world cups. What else can people do to show their allegiances. Write and recite poetry?

On the other hand nationalism is getting out of hand. 

Here in Ireland we have flag waving ceremonies when the local village win a game in the county junior championships. Not just any game of course. Key games like quarter finals and semis.

This you might think is a long way from football fans in Germany showing their allegiance to the former colonial power. However I think the two are connected.

The dispersal of media power has a curious effect. Not only are we engaged in citizen journalism, we're involved in citizen knowledge production.

What we know is being produced away from traditional centres of knowledge production like universities. That means the sense of authority that people seek when they need to apply knowledge, is lacking. That's also why TV personalities who previously exercised authority, are being reappraised.

What it all adds up to is people don't have enough certainty about what they know and have no reassuring figures of authority to turn to.

Instead they cling to the more mindless but knowable fact of where they are from and who their friends and enemies therefore are.

Pod Tech  the internet channel for technology news, brought to you from Silicon Valley, went Nova when Robert Scoble announced he would join from Microsoft.

Scoble, for those not in the know on techie issues, is one of the most influential bloggers in industry based solely on opening Microsoft up to the outside world.

The Scoble story apart though Pod Tech is a great channel idea and in principle illustrates the proposition that podcasting done properly is a challenge to IP TV.

Podtech "is a producer, aggregator, and distributor of professional podcast content for audiences worldwide." There's some great ideas here. We'll see how it plays out.

I picked this up on Paid Content, news of a new channel, this time for affluent youg people in the New York, New Hamptons area.

Designer Philip Treacy told me recently that we’re moving towards a more glamorous era, which suggests more of this is inevitable in the multi-channel future.

Core TV bills itself as a privileged lifestyle intelligence channel and I have to say it looks good and the topics (upscale men’s spas, slow cooking, wine, chich clothing, nightspots) – none of it surprises and that might turn out to be its weakness. Chic urbanites want to know what’s going on beyond the curve.

Right now it covers the New York lifestyle scene but opens up for Miami and L.A. soon. You can imagine the London, Paris, Dublin, Madrid, Manchester wannabee media enterpreneurs lining up for this one.

I keep an eye on what's happening at Narrowstep. I call it awaiting inspiration.Narrowstep, like GBDTV, are flying with an estimated 170 channels by the end of this year. Religion is beginning to make a strong showing in the Narrowstep Channel guide, joining the stalwart of the early IP TV era, Sport.

There are already 10 sports channels using the Narrowstep technology, delivering of course to the PC rather than the TV.

Other favourties are shopping, tourism and now faith.

The missing element is design.  Yes, each channel has a logo but in a world where design and luxury are dominating the minds of the marketers and consumers, IP TV offerings are woefully short on design concepts. We will be watching ever more screens but screen image aesthetics are poor, by design.

This happens to be the age of elevated aesthetic. Even the things we wear on our feet now participate in the global aesthetic elevants stakes (see Umbros new Philip Treacy designed sneakers). Come to that look at Umbro's screen aesthetics or check the standards at Joga.com.

These are sites with IPTV elements that integrate the physical world with font innovations and design values. You don't need to be a global corporation to do that.

IPTV is a media innovation, springing from a more general upsurge in creativity. More aesthics please.

In the FT's magazine this weekend John Lloyd returned to his analysis of changing media. "Without conviction" should have been the title.Lloyd's analysis goes something like this (to read it you need to sign up at the FT which is not something I want to recommend): The mainstream media is beginning to realise that it has framed news and current affairs coverage, in recent times, in ways that are inappropriate (over-cynical, disrepectful). Gradually the frame through which we see the world (as provided by old media) is changing. Though the dark says are undeniably upon us, light shines at the end of the tunnel.

This kind of hallelujah coverage is itself inappropriate though. The "frame" that old media uses to cover politics and current affairs is irrelevant to where media coverage of the world is going – apart from the fact that it has provoked general dissent.

Lloyd's use of the term "frame" suggests that old media uses a near coherent worldview or outlook to assess what's going on around us. Not quite an ideology but not far from it. Not quite a structure but nevertheless, almost.

Isn't it far simpler than that? What we know is beginning to emerge from dialogues rather than being handed down in tablets from the heights of conventional media mountains. Soon the F's views will be as relevant as its willingness to enter those dialogues.

There are features of the new media world that definitely tempt the unscrupulous.

I blog with WordPress but I imagine many of the facilities are the same across blog software types. WordPress allows a blogger to see the saerch termns people are using to land on their blogging pages. I’ve noticed already that the term “global warming” is a sure fire hit.  It brings more traffic to this site than any other term.

Knowing the search terms that people use to find your blog has a clear upside. It helps you refine the blog in response to your audience.

I have two reservations.

The first is: How tempting to keep using the term in blog titles.

The second is: Does this distort the news, as read through blogs.

In other words if we know what termns people are using to find us, and we use those terms more often so people will keep finding us, what effect does that have on the ebb and flow of opinion?

Last night the BBC reoprted on the approval of Herceptin for early stage breast cancer in the UK. Talk about talking the drug up!

Yesterday the UK Government approved the drug Herceptin for use in early stage breast cancer. Yesterday BBC's evening news talked up Herceptin's clinical effectiveness in a way that betrays the corporation's bias against reporting.

For a more considered view of Herceptin, from the BBC, you need to use their new media outlet.

Why bother with the BBC in a blog about new media? Because it's a powerful opinion former and because of its self-regard.  "Admired all over the world" is the kind of self referencing that needs a challenge, particularly when the obvious news values are missing.

Herceptin is a drug that helps combat tumours driven by the Her 2 protein. Her 2 tumours in early stage breast cancer are particularly dangerous. Any woman who has a Her 2 tumour will do whatever it takes to maximise her chances of survival.

On the BBC's website we start to find the news missing from its more influential news broadcast. 1. Herceptin puts women at risk of heart failure. 2. We don't know anything about Herceptin's effects longer term because trials were cut short in order to fast track the treatment.

Though the BBC's website does a better job of accurately reporting Herceptin, it too falls short of the standards taught in journalism schools.

Where are the sources of authority for and against? There are experts out there who feel the public clamour for Herceptin has undermined the approval process and there are experts who believe Herceptin is of very marginal benefit, if any ,once we know more about its effect on the heart and once we decontruct the hype.

Posting earlier on how wages in traditional media are often so low for freelancers that blogging can quickly be an attractive option, this link shows that some of the major newspapers out there are waiting to exploit the trend.

The Food and Drug Administration in the USA have fast tracked Gardasil, a vaccine for cervical cancer, produced by US pharmaceutical firm Merck, after a six-month fast-track clinical test. Why it's a worry….

Gardasil looks the business. The six month clinical trial showed almost 100% effectiveness against the human papilloma virus that causes genital warts that can in turn lead to cervical cancer.

The alarm bells ring though whenever the regular medical press corps reports a cancer breakthrough.

Reportage that queries clinical trial results is woefully lacking. These trials were extremely short and Merck has an obligation to follow up with more research to check safety and to look at long term effectiveness.

In the meantime the vaccine will go global.

We can hope there is cause only for joy. However, Merck has a tainted reputation after its handling of Vioxx, also a wonder drug but now described as a debacle.

Another reservation I have about cancer drug reporting relates to these long term issues – I am not saying Merck is wrong to go ahead and distribute Gadasil. I am saying the we the public have a rightful expectation that there will be independnet scrutiny of Gardasil.

The other recent cancer wonder drug, one which caused controvery over in the UK where women sued the health authorities to gain acess, Herceptin can have a demonstrable adverse effect on a woman's heart. I know. My wife takes it and is now showing left ventricular enlargement.

Afte chemo (some chemo drugs are harmfuf to the heart) left side radiotherapy (close to the heart) and Herceptin, women can be on the rack.

But ask any woman would she decline these treatmentes and the answer is a universal No,despite our lack of understanding of long term effects.

OK so the new Merck drug will fly but doubts over the FDA's procedures need to rumble on.

I was looking for an online space to protest after reading this (so far I didn't find one): New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

Anybody who thinks utopia is writing in the morning, taking a stroll through the world's afternoon before carousing in the evening, expenses paid, wake up. This is why distortions are hard to keep out of journalism. 

Not for one minute do I say the eager scribblers who try to forge a career in New York's news market fabricate the truth but look at the pay rates and you begin to understand the temptation that someone even of modest ambition might feel to cut corners – just to make a living.

The same is true of any journalism market I know if. In Ireland we're gearing up for more journalist redundancies as the cyclical downturn in advertising is about to arrive. That means more people out there in the marketplace, and yet lower fees.

On some New York papers a freelance writer will earn about as much as a citizen journalist gets out of citizen media powerhouse Oh My News. amNew York – $25 an article. Ohmynews – $20 an article.

The story is the same everywhere in the English speaking world. OK amNew York is an extreme example but other New York papers will pay $40 – $100 and to get that a freelance will have done preliminary research, then pitched several stories, then done the real work and written up. Add in the failures where the ptiches go down and you get a paltry income.

Large parts of the Irish media play around the Euro 100 mark per article. If you don't have a secondary intereset, a little PR work, how do you live? 

One way to resolve that? Well, only partially…. Don't do the number of interviews you need to, forego the luxury of findng the perfect combination of words to lend cohesion and strength to your story, exaggerate key points to make the story stand out.

The fact is financial pressure bears down on every facet of journalism at the old fashioned grass roots – that's where people are trying to make a living as distinct from an organisation trying to make a profit.

Whether in newspapers or on TV plenty of people are doing stuff for free or taking real chances with their liveliihood to be part of the media space.

It's routine now at the top London ad agencies for coopywriters to work on three month contracts with no job security. TV companies take people on at no salary until the novice proves some tanigble worth. Here are some examples of freelance rates in Britain.

The biggest threat to old media strats right here. Their relationship with freelance talent who now find it impossible to make a living.

Why is this important?

Because opinion is cheap, people en masse are drifing towards opinion, as are mainstream papers and magazines. The mainstream and the blogging alternative are becoming indistinguishable in their objectives.

After huffing about the Post here are two comedy sites that provide stand-up performances of a very different kind. Rooftop Comedy , unpredictable and potentially offensive (only potentially? what else is comedy for?) comes from the urban club scene. Zilo from the Campus. Student stand-ups on Zilo are confessionals, ain't that right Deb, who can also embarass use viewers but it's worth a compare and contrast. Pros versus UGC (the buzz for User Generated Content).

The Huffington Post is of course one great blog or should I say one big blog that looks great. And in today's Post you can see some way towards the root of America's journalism problem.

In a word Opinion. At neither The Huffington Post, nor Salon could you pick up clean news this morning. Plenty of opinion, plenty of argument but the challenge they're not laying down is revelation.

I can't be alone in thinking skilled and high professional opinion is not what the media revolution should be about.

The alternative is supposed to be a collective use of the new media airwaves to arrive at irrefutably better ways for our politicians to act.

So we've got over the weapons of mass destruction fiasco and we know the Iraq war borders on the illegal…. but does it matter that there are left-wing pro-war ideologues out there? Not once we've made the point once.

What I'm saying is there are more revelations to be heard i we can all dig in the right plot. Like how come we're forgetting now that France, Germany and China were the big losers in Iraq?

That's more important than Halliburton getting contracts. Bush and Blair risked splitting Europe and have antagonised an implacable enemy. Where are those dynamics headed?

Professional journalism is in danger of feasting too much on opinion, encouraged by the citizen version.

Those of us who think of the World Wide Web as oxygen are going to find ourselves panting for breath if this argument, is resolved the wrong way.So what's new you might ask, as telcos seek the ability to charge proportionally for the different burdens that different applications impose on their internet infrastructure.

What's new is the latest row over who runs the Internet should get us thinking about rewriting the rules of competitive markets.

First the obvious argument. The principle of network neutrality that lies behind the Internet means that the relationship between for example Yahoo or Google and a telecommunications company has no effect on our access to Yahoo or Google. Now the telcos want to bring differentiated services to the internet.

Over the past five years the major telecommunications companies world-wide have been preparing their own mini-Internets in preparation for delivering multi-channel TV.

The investments, that run into the billions to create a broadband IP network need recouping and it's not at all clear that the IPTV services will deliver the returns.

The critical factor is the culture of "free" evident in the early days of the web and reintroduced to startling effect by Google.

By transferring TV and newspaper dollars to the delivery of web audiences Google is applying the oxygen principle not just to yesterday's Internet activity but to anything that can be conducted over the Web. Most recently spreadsheets, soon to be followed by word processing and, the ever present, mass storage.

In this environment we find it impossible to accept anything other than network neutrality as an organising theory.

Telcos oppose it because they are old fashioned rentiers at heart. They see the Web as their property and they want landlord rights.

They belong to that community of companies such as Tobacco that need to develop theories of corporate obsolescence.

Having tried to be systems integrators in the 1990s and compete with the large systems houses for corporate services they came to the 21st century seeing themselves as media companies.

Their first acts as media companies, after deciding to roll out broadband capacity, was to offer to distribute Hollywood films and top rating TV programmes – in other words bringing nothing new to the mix.

Right now they're busy with user generated content but some way behind the gain line.

What we're witnessing here is the pristine capitalist philosophy of aiming for monopoly and compromising along the way, unravelling. Telcos, like energy companies, are unable to adapt to truly competitive environments and don't want to.

To counter the threat of the rentier we need to write into the theory of competitive markets the right for executives to enter their companies into a graceful decline.

The Internet's future actually relies on a very peculiar adaption. The problem will disappear only by rewarding telco executives for developing a strategy of reversal. For unpicking and shrinking their empires. For doing the opposite of what they were trained to do.

I believe in them but over at the WSJ online this article presents the civilised case.

It made the front page of US News and World Report on the 5th, according to tcsdaily, and Time as well as Vanity Fair have been there recently. Last night the BBC continued its series on Climate Chaos, the subject already of a few harsh words.

The programme was Five Disasters Waiting to Happen. Forgive me for flaying this one too but I think until serious broadcasters like the BBC get this right then the heat generated by this debate will have only a tepid effect.

The show showed two disasters that have happened (15,000 people dead in Paris, killed by a heatwave in 2003, 1,000 in Mumbai, drowned in an exceptional Monsoon, 2005). Apart from that it was London's vulnerability (again) to tidal flooding, Tu Valu disappearing into the ocean and Shanghai, over built and building up its own flood risk as a quarter of a million people arrive every year looking for a new life.

The BBC lumped these quite different stories together because it is responding, it claims, to its viewers' concerns. Sure viewers are concerned about global warming but that's because they know it's happening. What's the point in showing programmes that underline it? The purpose should be to show solutions or to show political barriers to change.

The one I'm waiting to see will show us how Blair's inner cabinet prepared for the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit in the rosy expectation that Bush would deliver a breakthrough on US environmental policy. Yes for 18 months previously junior aides preapred the ground, building expectation among environmentalists. This story would also tell us what other calculations went into backing Bush on Iraq. And it was tell us a way out other than awaiting a new US president.

Craig Winneker over on techcentralstation , now called tcs daily, is pushing the idea of a European Institute of Technology to match M.I.T over in the USA. Enough acronyms for now.

Research is important to the new content world because future content will not necessarily be pieced together by people. Application generated content is going to be an important source of corporate content (for a venture capitalist view of this see Peter Rip) and very likely our own.

If that idea is difficult to get your head around then it's worth remembering that current user-generated content is already ably assisted by the machine (flickr.com, veoh.com guba.com). By and large those these are primitive content applications.

Who will dominate tomorrow's media landscape will be decided by innovation in applications rather than narrative skills.

Why he's wrong is that the European Institutions have already stretched the idea of collaboration further than nature would allow. Look at Yellow Arrow below, a project that was up and running in the USA in 2004 but an idea which is only just being funded in Europe now – and we're talking of Europe here funding the big Telco and Telco supplier organisations.  Europe lags behind but it's not about the research.

Yellow Arrow is a startlingly good combination of ideas shedding new light on how Web and mobile applications will interact.

I know a dozen European organisations that are working on the interactive city guides built by the folks who live in them. I know some of the big Telcos are pinning their hopes for capturing citizen media dollars on developing applications that transform mobile content into cohesive publications. Right now they're still trapped in EU research programmes.

Yellow Arrow got there first. What does it do? Allows people who really know the underbelly of a city to provide first hand experience and interact with visitors and the site through the mobile. These maps guide you to the secret places that inhabitants know and that appeal to travellers on a mission to find out.

I got a concise response yesterday from the guys that make Take 3 (Our Generation, Our Life – really). Take 3 is aimed at those of us advancing in years but afraid to admit it. Like MediaStorm it brings back previously relished values to the screen, i.e. intelligent and sensitive observation, personal experience narrated in an objective way and suitable for consumption by people who have a yearning for learning, particularly about where life heads after 50.

Editor James Eng was brutally "sudden" in his answers to questions: "Take 3 is a monthly magazine produced by MSNBC.com that only appears online. It is not a TV program; it does experiment with new ways of storytelling over the web. You'll find a mix of high end video (shot exlusively for the Web), audio, photos and text.

The first issues came out last November. The vast majority of comments we've received thus far have been highly laudatory. I'm not aware of any direct comeptitors per se."

OK James we know you're busy but everybody has to invest a little time in tending the blogosphere.

Anybody contemplating what might have been the number one change in society (and the economy, stupid) over the past ten years could hardly do better than check this. 

Peter Rip’s thesis is it’s about the audience. Creating one you can monetise. 

“Now add Google to the conversation. (It’s now actually illegal in Silicon Valley to have a blog post on software without mentioning Google.)   Google has built a stunning platform for the rapid development and deployment of applications on a worldwide scale.  They have repeatedly taken revenue-generating software categories and made them free, media-supported businesses.  This leverages their economies of scale in delivery and their ability to aggregate, segment, and monetize audiences.   Free is a very effective appeal for a CFO or small business owner looking to reduce IT expense.  It may not work for Exxon and GM.  But it doesn’t have to.  If it works for millions of small businesses around the world, it works. “

So after venting a bit of spleen over the inbuilt bias of big media it’s back to looking at how convergence and new media are changing the ways we think and act.

This is from an article I’m putting together on the evolution of new, new media and how we think. I appreciate comments.

From The San Francisco Bay Area to the Austrian Alps, entrepreneurs and conglomerates are probing how the average viewer is evolving as a media animal. The assumption, a pure business assumption, is that tomorrow’s media will be dominated by what Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine and author of an upcoming book by the same title,  calls The Long Tail.

“The major players [in the media industries] all buy into the long tail theory of content,” explains Michiel Pelt, a research manager at the research labs of telecommunications supplier Alcatel in Antwerp, Belgium. “Most content companies do,” he adds, “and are looking for ways to create business out of user content.”

Thousands of viewers creating their own content might seem like a recipe for poor content and rampant egos but in an important sense the Long Tail theory of media evolution, that there will in future be no mass markets for Hollywood films or formerly prime time television, misses the point. The future is not only about a highly fragmenting communications industry.

Consumers Evolve

“Right now, we are exploring new structures of knowledge and power through our recreational life,” says M.I.T media specialist Henry Jenkins who works in the C3 (Convergence Culture Consortium), “which are helping us to acquire new skills in collaborative problem solving which are already spilling over into other important sectors.”

Jenkins has written his own account of new media that pushes the argument beyond the confines of the content industries and underlines the significance of a newly enfranchised population to business in general.

But we face a situation Jenkins explains where our understanding of what is going on is no longer solely in the hands of experts and academics:

“The grassroots communities of fans, bloggers, and gamers are playing an active role in documenting, analyzing, predicting, and responding to media change, operating alongside of and in many cases, doing a better job than, traditional sites of learning and research,” advises Jenkins.

This collective strength of Internet users, and an inability to grasp its significance through the traditional mechanisms of research reports, academic papers etc, is about to pass to the television screen. That’s really what IP TV is all about.

M.I.T. Professor Henry Jenkins, an expert in the dialogue taking place on the Internet, recently communicated to me his view that how we know stuff is changing.

Yes, what we think of as knowledge, along with what we see on our screens, is also in the mixer. Rather than academics being the ultimate repository of expertise, authority is now an emerging phenomenon, one that's maybe hard to see in a crystalline form because it is the result of many opinions and discussions. That's the result of media convergence.

The view gets a little more confirmation over here at Oh My News. Citizen Academics are on the rise. It's another of those emerging phenomena, not yet shaking the earth but surely another sign of people holding to their right to participate.

Under the heading "Back for More" the BBC this morning invites you to nominate your own choice as history's indefatigable Comeback Kid. Yes it's a story about Peru's Alan Garcia but they managed to bring Churchill into the headline anyhow. Why is the story misjudged and wrong?

First let's say what it is. It's a story about the election of a leader in a troubled part of the world being trivialised by a policy of building relevance into news coverage. Given that Peru is not relevant to the vast majority of Brits you can already hear the sub-editor on the BBC website scratching the side of her head.

Okay so let's make it relevant…. How about a quiz? Let's line up ten of the world's most charismatic leaders and ask the readers to spot the jerk that ran inflation up to 7000% (What by the way does that 7000% mean: 7 times, 70 times, 700 times?). You can't judge people by appearances but you can hang them with inflation figures.

Or how about we spin it in to a feature on Comeback Kids. Are there any more comeback kids? Churchill came back, Cinton came back. You know, I think we've got a feature.

And the archive material to spin it. And relevance to the British pubic. Churchill's relevant, isn't he? You the reader are invited to  peruse eight bios of leaders who "came back" and choose one of your own if none of these faces fit. Go on, choose.

Condescension of this kind is already being written into the opening paragraphs of Director General Mark Thompson's legacy, née clumsy attempts to use new media to improve the BBC's relevance to its license payers.

Roger Bolton, so long out of the BBC that it's marginally unfair to refer to him as the corporation's lost talent, or nearly man, agonised this morning over the mentality of journalists who seize on poor political decision making like dogs high on aniseed. He excused his argument that we journalists, as opposed to them politicians, don't have their complex decisions to make so we can't really understand, as potentially too generous to the political class but I tend to think the real issue lies at a tangent to Bolton's breakfast complaint.

Yes, journalists stick the boot in, no they shouldn't do it as a reflex action but more important why aren't they asking different questions? The same people who complained about politicial inactivity over Saddam's excesses now complain about the invasion, says Bolton. But isn't the real puzzle the fact that Saddam's trial began with a body count of only 140 people?

 I am an admirer of Brian Storm's new media, online old-fashioned-values-but-highly-innovative publishing business MediaStorm, so

I made contact and began by asking him

What is unique about MediaStorm and the medium Internet TV?

Video on the internet is exploding right now. The global penetration of broadband access coupled with the sophistication of new video publishing tools like Brightcove and distribution/social networking outlets like YouTube will be fueled by advertisers eager to place their video commercials in the digital universe. 

MediaStorm has the opportunity to create an important venue for multimedia storytellers to connect with an audience eager to be both educated and entertained. Our goal is to publish timeless stories for a worldwide audience. I'm leveraging everything I learned while working for big media companies to now take advantage of the incredible things that an independent publisher can do in today's digital environment.

Do you have a vision of the breakthrough film you’d like to see on there?

The stories we publish are timeless. They aren't driven by deadlines or in response to a single news event. I want to produce and publish stories that will be relevant 10, 50, 100 years from now.

Knowledge is power and the more access people have to stories that help them understand the world the better off we should be as a society. A colleague of mine, photojournalist David Leeson, once told me that his goal was to make a photograph that would stop all war. If someone does capture that image I'd like to be the place that publishes it!

Is Mediastorm a for-profit enterprise?

Yes, we are for profit even though we have a .org domain.

For our publication we pay contributing artist licensing fees and we generate revenue via three models:

1. Site wide sponsorship – Currently with The Washington Post and we are in the process of adding additional sponsors

2. Pre-roll video advertising – Go to http://mediastorm.org/0001_ad.htm and then click the play button to see the execution

3. Transactions – Click on the buy tab to the right of most projects to  see how we drive traffic to transactional sites like Amazon and iTunes  

Finally, MediaStorm acts as a production studio, developing content packages, building sites or implementing workflow solutions for major media companies like MSNBC, Getty Images and Slate. You can see some examples at http://mediastorm.org/services of projects that we've produced in the past.

 Last night the BBC’s Panorama managed to set a new low in political film making. Climate Chaos was previewed as an investigation into how George Bush’s Presidency suppresses information on global warming. Now am I the only one who remembers May’s Vanity Fair doing exactly the same? But let’s leave that to one side for now.

Last night the BBC’s Panorama managed to set a new low in how a political film making. Climate Chaos was previewed as an investigation into how George Bush’s Presidency suppresses information on global warming. Now am I the only one who remembers May’s Vanity Fair doing exactly the same? But let’s leave that to one side for now.

We should be worried about what Panorama does because the BBC is still the most powerful single media organisation in the world. It’s reflective attitude, i.e. what it thinks it is doing and what it says its objectives are, counts even if its reports are bad. And when you watch programmes like this getting the morality wrong you have to say, that’s why audiences are looking around for something new.

Here was a film about the most powerful man in the world that used spaghetti western music (Once Upon a Time in the West, the Good, the Bad, the Ugly) as a soundtrack. Now a lack of  deference is a good thing but coupled with this music mischief, it makes you want to ask: Who allows that kind of subliminal manipulation of reportage? Reportage or investigation are important contracts with the public. It’s like saying, listen to me now because I’m the honest guy in town and I won’t try any tricks.

So don’t do it.

Apart from that dubious attack on the viewer’s sensibilities, Panorama used an actor reading from a confidential report. The man was made up and lit to look satanic.

I hate what Bush is doing on the environment but when I watch programmes engineered to make me despise him I want to offer the guy my support.

On the programme Panoarma also hitched a ride on Vanity Fair’s coverage of the Appalachian open cast mining catastrophe. In West Virginia they are taking a mountain away because it contains huge amounts of coal. It’s wrong. But it has nothing to do with this programme and its inclusion was gratutious.

And those references to Dick Cheney and Halliburton and Bush’s other big oil contacts – please. We have not been asleep for the past five years.

Finally the Appalachian story did elicit in passing the acknowledgement that Bush’s administration is investing heavily in clean coal technology – here at last is the beginning of a current affairs story. Yes, oil may have peaked and coal is back, a very important fact for British people to be aware of. The cheer leader for big oil, is in fact histories largest spender on coal. Or Global Warming – how and why did Blair miscalculate his relationship with Bush?

I can see stories galore in Bush and the environment but this one not only felt like treading in old footsteps. It created a sense of weariness, the fact that the current affairs’ flagship was flying on the wrong boat again.

News that former Carlton chief Steve Hewlett has been appointed Visiting Professor at Salford University should ring some alarm bells for students who want to plot a career deep into the future.

An accomplished journalist, Hewlett has allowed himself to be best remembered for allowing Martin Bashir to secure that hour long interview with Diana Princess of Wales. Two things about his appointment disappoint.

Salford are an established media school so they should know an old hand in old media will not provide the grounding students need for the new media world. Second though, Hewlett has been scracthing around for a role since losing out in the Carlton/Granada merger. Visiting Professor is not it.

I'm reading a book on metaphor (called Metaphors We Live By) that shows how we people routinely rely on metaphors to structure our thinking and it does a good job of showing how confused we really are. So I thought I'd post this picture and ask the obvious question: where are all the real surrealists?

This is a recent discovery for me but hell, the guy’s already famous. I’ve put it in the links section. It’s a lesson, for me anyway and I’m still learning, in what to do with a blog.

I know from time to time I make assertions that seem a bit extreme but I think the way communications changes also changes the way people's minds work. Look at the social behaviour of bloggers… dialogue in screen print is so novel and it forces a degree of openness on people that's also new.

Here's an example. That is of me hedging my bets.

Yesterday I sat down with a leading multimedia company to discuss new media projects. At one point we got on to the new radicalised audience. We both agreed that some areas of news coverage are deeply affected by the pharmaceutical industry. If you look at AIDs' treatments, there's a valid argument that much could be done with high dose intravenous Vitamin C. In order for doctors around the world to realise that, there has to be a system of communications in place that will endorse the use of intravenous Vitamin C. There is and it's owned by the pharmaceuticals. They are the ones who can guarantee to get a treament proselitysed around the world in next to no time.

The unspoken part of that conversation is neither I nor the person I was meeting would want to make too much of that argument in a newspaper article – the pharmas are big job ad placers.

I say this because in an earlier post I'd discussed the FT's John Lloyd's contention that journalists somehow have a higher ethical standard than the average person. That argument is brewing also over here.  I think we use different words. Writing stories in a way that suits a PR company…. that's wrong. Not writing stories that undermine the economics of a newspaper – that's reality.

The news that citizen journalism site Ohmynews.com's reporters will rub shoulders with pros in the International Herald Tribune is the news some of us have been waiting for. I returned to journalism only three years ago after a decade out. I'd like to have been back earlier but the barriers even to re-entry are high: cliques, outdated ideas and smugness, attitudes that are now having to change.

Ohmynews analysis of citizen journalism's growing success is that it allows newspaper websites to compete with broadcast rolling news and to fill the gap left by afternoon and evening papers. Citizen journalists can file any time of the day and as long as there's a rewrite desk, the sites keep bang up to date at little additional cost.

Twenty two years ago I worked on a TV programme that handed editorial control over to citizen editors. The Friday Alternative went out on Channel 4 but commissioning editor of the day Liz Forgan axed it after only one year. In the interim little has been done to extend the media franchise to the public. TFA was a brave attempt and many weeks a bad programme but we were all learning. Channel 4 axed it and went on to win a reputation for stylish innovation. Some of the TFA staff went on to become bastions of TV and to preside over its demise. Could these events be connected?

The future media landscape will be populated by smaller deals. I say this having talked yesterday with Jim Deans who runs GDBTV. Most Telcos gearing up for IPTV, Jim points out, have gone for the big blockbuster packages to tempt in consumers. But there's practically no differentiator in blockbusters. Cable companies use them, broadcasters use them, and now Telcos.

There may be more user-interaction with a Telco IP television offer but content-wise there's not enough focus on local.

GDBTV expects to launch 300 local channels across the UK between now and year's end (there's even two for Brighton). That's at around £20,000 for the year (set up and bandwidth). Jim is competition for the Telcos. A GDB set top box allows niche content to be delivered through the unmanaged Internet to people's TV sets.

Telcos are going to have to go for these sites and for the niche subject programmers but they're not going to be offering a lot back in terms of audience exposure. That's why a lot of small deals need doing.

I can relate to that. I'm currently out persuading media majors to outsource their content production. I'm a small outfit. Doors are opening. Small deals are in.

And not just the thong. Belatedly I worked out how to get this photo to the site from e-mail, and at no great cost in bandwidth. This is a publicity still for The Strand (see last post), made by the Blair Witch Project people.

I found these two over at Brightcove. One is from Brian Storm the other Daniel Myrick, co-creator of the Blair Witch Project. 

Myrick now runs Gearhead picture, producers of The Strand (see below). They have a new movie in production and to find out more go here or visit the blog.

THE STRAND is one of the first live-action, independently produced; narrative episodic shows intended specifically for the web – well at least from a renowened cinema figure. The pilot webisode can be viewed at www.strandvenice.com , free of charge. Audiences will be able to watch subsequent webisodes at $.99 each. Myrick fillmed 50 hours of video in 9 days on Venice Beach, and made a web series out of it. This is one of cinema's great innovators so well worth a look.

Mediastorm is a multiproject site hosted by Brightcove.  Never Coming Home is about losing loved ones in Iraq, Chernobyl Legacy about children and their long term suffering in Chernobyl, It Ain't Television…. It's Brain Surgery, is about an operation for Parkinson's Disease. This is old fashioned issue programming, the kind we thought we might not see much of in future, available on a PC near you.

One of the great unpublicised areas of the web is how well affiliate marketing (as well as viral marketing of course) has helped build online brands. EBay for example runs one of the biggest affiliate programes on the web (paying up to 70% of revenue in commissions). I was surprise to find out that there are companies earning in excess of $200,000 per month from well conceived affiliate programmes.

Now it’s the case, according to Jeremy Allaire, that around $150 billion a year is spent on audio-visual content but to get people to spend a portion of that online or through IP TV pay-per-view, is it possible without affiliate programmes on the scale of Amazon? And when IP TV professionals complain that, yes it wil be hard to find content, that’s also the case with the world’s great online book stores, so they’ve created lists and recommendations. Right now there’s precious little incentive for people to get involved in an IP TV equivalent.

And so do we. This is a site we're putting together on Squarespace, to give a better impression of our thinking.

Work we admire,
originally uploaded by media_angle.

This is one of those images that captures changing times. It's the Pink Lounge at the G In Galway designed by Philip Treacy, most famous for hat designs. What the G says is luxury is out. Glamour is in.

Our view is that as the world becomes more visual, we'll all be upgrading from luxury to glamour. Luxury is all around us. Glamour is still rare but it will become more common. Philip even designed the door handles at the G in the shape of a woman's back. A hat designer designing door handles?

People in the content business have to learn a new visual language.

A couple of things need figuring out on the road to the new media landscape.

The first is that plenty of companies are gearing up to launch their own TV channels on IP networks, or on the internet. "Brand advertising is definitely changing dramtically, and many brands are launching their own Internet TV channels to reach consumers who are spending more time online and less time watching traditional television," Samatha Stone of Maven Networks wrote to me recently. Maven are at the forefront of those developments.

The second is the nature of content.

As companies begin their lives as content producers in direct contact with their audiences, so their audiences are gaining experience in content production through blogs and video/audio casting.

The previous lives of companies, when advertising agencies organised and designed their communications with the public, revolved around illusion. Blogs and podcasting revolve around honesty and personal testimony.

So a value-shift is needed. But that's not all. The content business is an unforgiving one. Errors, misjudgements, arrogance are all penalised by audiences that will happily turn elsewhere. This is the trick that corporate TV channels have to pull off: engage honestly, engage on a personal level, be error free or admit errors quickly, and avoid arrogance. Misjudgements on the other hand seem inevitable and will need to be explained in public.

Companies that go into internet TV or IP TV will have to become content experts and will have to account for their decisions to the public they succeed in attracting. It's a very different future. 

The question is worth asking because hundreds of thousands of people work in creative industries and millions more wish they could. Understanding creative urges will help us understand where niche media is headed.

Creativity has to be about difficult truths.

A few days back I sat with Julian Castagna, winemaker. Julian used to shoot adverts for TV. He worked with James Garrett, one of the most influential advertising guru’s in post-war advertising. Briefly in the 1980s I worked with his son Stephen Garrett, who now runs Kudos, producers of spy series Spook for the BBC.

Julian has pedigree. This is why he gave up making ads. “Every meeting I went into it became an issue of the politics of getting the film done, not the film itself. I didn’t enjoy it anymore.”

He’s an advocate of doing things because you love it, because you have passion. That’s different from getting a high or a kick from doing things.

Most people in the media world have given into a different process: sticking in there, making the profits, getting the film out, getting the paper through the door. I don’t say they submit to these processes for egotistical reasons. But they are not creative processes. A creative process begins with an intractable problem or a breakthrough opportunity. You have to be dealing win the near impossible, the near unsayable.

Routine, however varied, doesn’t invite these intractables. As much as people at the top of the media tree believe they work in creative environments, in reality they work on a production line, second guessing audiences. That was a real surprise to me – the extent to which all decisions are guided by attempts to second guess what an audience will watch and how an audience will think. That’s why I say it is a production line. Making wallpaper and chairs is also about second guessing audiences.

My one anxiety for niche media is that it’s more of a production line.

To explore further where the media industry is going I started this blog. I work in the media industry. I’m not convinced that mainstream media does the good job it claims to. In fact my own  experience of it has been a story of moral compromise. I only came back into journalism and TV three years ago, after a twelve year stint in industry. I’m surprised by what I see. People prepared to work for nothing, people forced to work for very little, people prepared to treat the creative process as a production line.

Last year I completed a film that drew an audience of 3 million on the BBC, and my press articles are read by an audience of half a million, then they get circulated around the web.

So far this blog has had 36 visitors. In terms of exposure to an audience it is the worst investment of time I could make. On the other hand it gets me asking questions about why I write and what I’m trying to achieve. I know I’m a net gainer by writing it, but have yet to work out exactly how.

Just an addendum to the previous post, Comcast set up this award for creatives who are taking risks with the next generation of advert. It runs from June to end August. Worth keeping an eye on.

Chris Anderson is doing a great job of raising awareness of co-created content in the Long Tail - that’s the zillion small producers who will pack the IP TV and Internet TV space with great content for smaller audiences.

A couple of days back I made contact with Jenni Moyers of Comcast, the cable operator, trying to tease out where consumer-produced content  is headed. I got the nod on Comcast’s work with next generation media from Jim Sheehan over at SeaChange, so many thanks Jim.

Consumer produced content is now becoming an integral part of COMCAST’s offer to the 10 million American homes that subscribe to its digital services.

Senior Director of Corporate Communications Jenni Moyer says the comany’s Get Local services are turning out to be hugely popular. They range from locally produced video of a High School football game to local on-demand dating services. Comcast’s on-demand services are showcasing at www.selectondemand.com.

They include the apparently absurd Pets on Demand which is in fact a service for animal welfare organisations to publicise the animals they care for that could become pets for viewers, Karaoke on Demand (explanation enough I think), Guitar lessons, and even movie intermission ads.

“Since early 2004 we’ve had about 2 billion on-demand views,” says Jenni, adding: That’s from a base of 10 million homes who have digital access”.

Like Josh Goldman (see interview), Jenni sees evidence of a sizeable shift and it’s not so much in the way people behave but in their fundamental attitudes. The figures, she says are “a big endorsement of people consuming TV on their own terms.”

It’s also giving Comcast scope to experiment with advertising. Comcast Spotlight, the group’s ad sales division, is experimenting with long form ads, as well as classifieds on demand. The momentum towards an I, Creative community is hotting up.

In an interview with StreamingMedia.com Jeremy Allaire head of online distributor Brightcove said last week that Internet television will come to look like the Internet today, a radically diverse medium with hundreds of thousands of programming entities supplying content. He also pointed out that like the Internet today, Internet TV will draw on the consumer. The consumer has a role. Virally sharing content that's of interest, in recommending and helping people to find content, these will be central to the future TV experience.

These are radical changes that the existing distribution channels need to take account of and the people I've been interviewing suggest that only a minority of the brand managers out there are aware of this change. When the light goes on ….

ROO, one of the world’s largest online broadcast networks and a global leader in online video solutions, and Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, a leading radio broadcasting company in the United States, today entered into an agreement for ROO to become the online video partner for the Citadel Broadcasting Company (NYSE: CDL).

Under the agreement ROO will provide Citadel with a turn key video solution including online video content across a number of genres including news, music, business and fashion and the tools to sell online advertising targeted by demographic and location, for the Citadel Interactive network. Citadel will, in turn, significantly increase the reach of the ROO network and supply a variety of exclusive specialized content and events to run across the ROO network.

Citadel Broadcasting currently owns and operates 222 radio stations and their associated websites in 49 markets located in 24 states across the United States.

Citadel will work with ROO to expand its online presence to include broadband video offerings to its audience. In particular, Citadel will engage ROO to develop a compelling online video experience for its RightNowRadio.com internet radio initiative, which is to launch in the summer of 2006.

Internet TV pioneer Brightcove and Limelight Networks, the world's leading Internet content delivery network for digital media, today announced a strategic partnership to bring advanced services and next-generation business models to the growing Internet TV industry. Read about it here.

This is the nub of it:

"Brightcove's vision for the future of TV–where consumers can watch and interact with millions of on-demand broadband channels delivered through the Internet and content creators can reach global audiences with a truly open distribution platform–is driving innovation across the media industry," said Bill Rinehart, chief executive officer at Limelight Networks. "To make their vision a reality, we are working together to give media companies access to our content delivery platform, which provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to distribute massively large video and music files across multiple platforms to audiences of any size."

I’m trying to catch up with Tim Manners, an exponent of the idea that  all companies need to be thought leaders, that they need to participate in the content game and be good at it. In a creative economy what Manners says makes perfect sense. The future of content belongs to all of us, with honesty and intelligence at a premium. So a prerequisite for companies is to recognise they are in the content space and make sure they look smart. Tim’s insights are summarised here.

A list of VoD insights dropped into my e-mail box this morning courtesy of 3Vision. The Bath, England-based company consults on content issues in cable, IP TV, mobile and other advanced media environments.

The list strikes me as a primer for companies in the triple pay business. Yet the game is heading towards quad-play. Systems that allow “buddy” interaction, for example allowing people in different houses to co-watch a programme, sharing notes, showing rewinds, and being virtual.

Mediangle is not here to criticise. Nothing wrong with being on top of the  world we live in rather than the one we will be occupying. Here’s insight number ten.

10 – Focus on Consumer Benefit
To maximise the effectiveness of VOD as a customer acquisition tool you will need to make VOD central to your overall TV proposition, focussing on the benefits to the consumer rather than the technology.

The EU has a number of ways of funding IPTV developments. The main method though is its R&D programmes. At the back end of last year they held a couple of workshops in Brussels to discuss the upcoming research issues created by the arrival of massively interactive audio-visual networks. These workshops have morphed into a new workshop on how to spend EU Euro millions in the audio-visual sector from 2007 onwards.

My main complaint with EU programmes and EU funded research is the pace. By the time they get these programmes up and running competitive companies can get products and services to market. Two cases in point are citizen media and audio-visual search, areas where the EU will spend hundreds of millions in the next four years but which are already hot in the market.

If you can reconcile your business model with the habits of a bureaucracy then these workshops are for you. At the very least they are worth the networking opportunity.

That's according to Josh Goldman, CEO of IP TV aggregator Akimbo. Josh agreed to speak with Mediangle and gave some forthright opinions on where advertising is going.

"The world of forcing people to watch an advert – that is going away." 

Josh was also explaining his decision to do with a download model for IP TV. Akimbo currently has 11,000 hours of pogramming on offer and is about to launch with AT&T's Homezone, opening Akimbo content out to tens of millions of viewers. 

"Most on-demand systems have only hundreds, at most a small number of thousands of hours of video because when you stream you have to have a very different kind of server, and a very expensive server" says Josh. "We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars because the viewer is watching on your server, fast forwarding on your server, and rewinding on your server. Downloading overcomes this. And now we see devices with memory in the home, our business is based on that, storage in the home."

What's proving popular in Akimbo's electic content mix? "Foreign language content (Chinese, Indian, French, German, Korean); independent films, music videos now that MTV doesn't do so much music video, lifestyle programming. Gay and lesbian lifestyles not necessarily adult content. Lifestyle and political. Fawlty Towers was one of our biggest for weeks."

Can the small guy make money showing their content on Akimbo? It's like blogging suggests Josh. Good content well presented is making money for people and there are a few making a living from it on Akimbo. As Akimbo goes to the tens of millions of households life for the long tail of content providers is looking up. On adverts here's the last word.

"There are people who don't get it," says Josh,  "and who just hang on to the 30 second ad, asking us what's the most popular video." For those who do get it Akimbo has the demographics and profiling technology to make ads relevant enough that they appear like content.

I came to CUBE TV with the same expectations I've brought to all the IP TV channels and services I've looked at. Sad to say this was a let down. I registered, pressed the Channel buttons, spent some time waiting around for content to appear, watched the digital clock count down. Nothing.

CUBE has a small number of channels up there (two ITV locals, HYP, Fine Wine, Information, Music and Real Estate) but only the last of these worked for me. What use a channel you can't see?

It was only when I went to the Electronic Programme Guide that I found out all the CUBE channels were off-air (though Real Estate worked). But none of this makes sense. It should be a 24/7 experience; if there's maintenance going on we should be told. The interface shouldn't leave us staring at a blank box.

This is the first time I've felt negative about an IP TV initiative. Hope CUBE can explain.

In the past advertisers paid for advertorial, ads backed by pallid, unconvincing editorial. IP TV changes that. Brand managers can now go editorially creative in their own right.

Two recent examples: Landrover TV and Nike’s Joga TV. These are exciting developments.

Using the Narrowstep platform LandRover TV’s Go Beyond site celebrates achievements in adventure sports. Not confined to motors it also does travel (Great Palaces), Lifestyle (interiors), even cocktails.

Maven’s Joga TV is less ambitous in breadth but it couples the Nike ad series, Joga Bonito fronted by soccer legend Eric Cantona, to compelling visuals on soccer artistry starring the likes of Ronaldhino and Ronaldo. Maven’s fame claim of course is that it pioneered High Definition images over the Net which gives it a strong claim on the attention of brand advertisers. Joga TV also allows viewers from all around the world to upload soccer tricks’ videos and it’s supported by Joga.com, a soccer playing portal created by Nike and Google.

“Maven’s technology allows Nike to directly reach its audiences with an interactive experience that genuinely demonstrates the future of Internet TV, and enables them to accurately target and measure their campaigns. True Internet TV channels are redefining how online content is distributed, experienced and monetized,”  say the Mavenizers.

NIKE is following in the sneakersteps of trail blazers like Mountain Dew, Bud and others. Landrover though is consolidating a deeper principle, that adverts-as-entertainment, and niche  customer websites are one thing but brand managers may also be capable, willing and ready to manager whole TV channels.

Watching these initiatives evolve it becomes clear why terrestrial TV companies are desperately looking for product placement ideas. Is time running out for regular TV? 

What is it about corporate statements that don't share the dream? I don't connect with this kind of stuff: 

ROO is an online broadcast network and a leading global provider of digital media solutions and technology that enable the activation, marketing and distribution of video content over the Internet and emerging broadcast platforms such as wireless mobile devices and set-top boxes.

A bit more of the character of the service becomes visible over on ROOTV.com. You land at rootv, you hear the rappers, you see George Bush, it's so MTV and CNN. But get up to the top of the page and the navigation bar will take you to hundreds of VOD short films on health, science, business, fashion, comedy, even vegetables.

Looks promising but the snag for me is when I start watching I don't know who has made these films. I wrote to Roo's press agent today and hopefully will be able to update you soon. There's great potential here. There is a lack of interaction on the site and the provenance problem needs to be sorted out. Hope to hear from Roo soon.

I wanted to come back to that debate about standards and about vested interests. Old media is dying out for a simple reason. No, not necessarily because blogs are great and technology is outpacing all of us. The reason is about a decade ago old media organisations stopped paying media professionals a living wage.

It is possible to make a living as a journalist – if you have a staff job. Most staffers I know are so overworked though they wouldn’t have time to check and double check all their stories. And I’ve been involved in my share of compromises in a recent BBC film I produced. The priority these days is to shove a product out the door with as little downside as is feasible within the constraints of inadequate budgets, even in a world where there is plenty of money to do better.

Among the freelancers I know none can live by reporting alone. The same is true of television and newspapers. When TV broadcasters began outsourcing to independents the obvious but unexpected happened. Instead of one profit centre there were now two. And gradually independent producers have come to see themselves as part of a harsh commercial reality.  At least that’s how they like to tell it.

So those two profit centres squeeze budgets, gladly use inexperienced staff, reduce the opportunity to travel, meet and qualify interviewees, and generally force a get-the-job-done mentality.

The National Union of Journalists in the UK is right now running a campaign to keep journalism relevant (to newspapers and TV broadcasters). That’s how bad the situation now is. But this is not yet a cash poor industry, just one with artificial profit centres.

The mainstream media don’t pay a living wage to the people that matter -the journalists – unless you are a celebrity. The same is true of TV and newspapers. It’s common these days for a journalist to have to source pictures for newspaper articles for example, limiting employment for photographers, and increasing the time-burden on a low paid freelancer writer.

The irony of this is that many of the people at the top of the independent television production tree began life as radicals who stepped outside the safety of the big broadcasting institutions with a view to saying something new, and making TV in different ways. What they achieved is stifling free speech because broadcast journalists have fled the business, or daren’t speak the truth for fear of harming the commercial prospects of their occasional employees.

Blogging is a great response to that.  Producing or helping to plan minority, niche channels has a healthier feel than the relative oppression of the network and the newspaper. And clearly readers/viewers love it too. That’s a lot of momentum against traditional ways of doing things.

So a few words about who this blog is aimed at. It will evolve but my first priority is to understand changes in the visual media as they effect people like me, a journalist who needs to make a living from writing but who also believes that the public debate, the dialogue, is stronger than the old system. That’s the one where editors, owners, and political intruigers had the final word.

Second I think there’s a level of deteail in those changes that needs bringing out.  Few people beyond the magic circle in the visual media know who’s who or which company is doing what. When I look at the websites of Narrowstep, Maven, Roo and other IP TV players I don’t get their character. Future monarchs of the visual world they have pretty flat textual decriptions of themselves that don’t engage me. So a few interviews here might help change that.

Then there’s an important debate to be had about the dying days of traditional media (see next post). 

Finally I hope the blog will develop some technique pages, and it might help a reader or two get their stuff onto Akimbo or any other video aggregator.

Truth took a long holiday over the past thirty years and it's amazing right now to see truth moving up so many different agendas at the same time.

What a coincidence that the means of communication have been democratised at the same time politicians have become irredeemably dishonest (some coincidence!). The most cosntructive form of communication is one where what we say isn't parsed by politicians, journalists or brands and thankfully that's the direction we're finally headed in. While the Cluetrain Manifesto triggered those changes in the world of marketing, there's as yet no equivalent in political and social life. The Euston Manifesto in the UK looks like being a decent stab at it. How come politics is trailing behind commerce though? Really makes you understand why people feel disenfranchised.

Imagine a near future where people co-create products in the style and quantity they need, sold by good neighbours Tesco or Wallmart, in a system mediated by a sense of fairness. Hmmm. Those are the kind of aspirations that take me back a few years. 

Ad experts have been making much of how brands have to move beyond advertising and into co-creating content. IP TV will be a step backwards initially – because the brand agencies still have a TV centric focus.When brand managers realise that the multitude of special interest channels represent a great way to support content and people and engage in their creative activities, time will be up for the mainstream.

Here's an example. Late last year I wrote up a project for three of the European telcos. One of its components will be enabling the average person to co-create a City guide. Who knows better than its inhabitants what goes on in a major (or minor) city?  Equipped with a high spec mobile phone any one of us can create 20 second mobisodes on our favourite location, view, place, people, restaurant.

But wouldn't we be biased? Nothing wrong in that. And because these audio-visual guides would also be WiKis they would be open to correction.

What's the role of a brand in that? Nokia could offer citizen media discounts on high spec camera phones, Vodafone or 02 could offer tariff discounts, airlines could get behind it as could hotels and tour operators.

The idea is extendable into rural tourism, eDemocracy, in-company expertise building. In fact where there's a WiKi application there's an a-v co-creation opportunity. Branding agencies need to think lower res, and migrate glossy brands from the heights of the Sunday Supplements and brand flag carriers like Vogue to my local City guide, our village tourism, the boutique hotel guide. Trip Advisor is showing how engaged people are by co-creating truthful accounts of human experience.

Narrowstep announced recently that earnings had almost doubled over the past twelve months. The company is still losing money but less of it. Annual revenue in the April 2006 announcment included $1.5 million from narrowcasting and related activities, compared with $520,000 for fiscal 2005, an increase of 288 percent.

This is how Narrowstep describes itself.

The Narrowstep system, TV Station in a Box(TM), enables comprehensive delivery of video content and television-like programming to mobile, wireless, internet, broadband andbroadcast services.

I've had personal dealings with Narrowstep. I've discussed with them a possible lifestyle channel that I am interested in putting together and I've found them business-like, though as yet I've made no decision.

Their service is comprehensive – Narrowstep will shoot the video as well as play it out – and offers credit card payment support for click-to-buy opportunities that you might want to put on your IP TV channel. Right now Narrowstep is TV on the Internet but I know there are companies out there looking at migrating Narrowstep channels to pure IP TV plays on managed networks.

I'm surprised that a company whose business has been essentially in the UK, listed in the USA. Seems to me the reporting procedures in the US would be an unwelcome overhead. But Narrowstep believe it has increased the liquidity of shares.

On the channel front they now have about 80, mostly European, and hope to expand their share of US channels in the next 12 months and they've made a start with Massachusets TV. Big pluses include the ITV Local services in the UK (ITV is the biggest independent broadcaster in Britain) and the London TV and Glasgow TV services. From what I can see Narrowstep is blazing a trail in the way it is monetising IP TV.

This is the spec for their new Mbed technology and it should captivate the marketer/advertiser audience

mBed™ is an advanced TV on IP distribution and marketing tool that allows customers to quickly and easily 'mBed' a direct stream from their channel into any partner websites, utilizing the video stream served through Narrowstep's telvOS™ system.

• mBed™ has been designed to:
  enable viewers to watch a continuous video channel stream on a partner site – no need to 'pop up' or click through;
  quickly and easily install on websites to extend reach;
  open up the full channel from within the video frame;
  track performance of each placement directly;
  enable all functions to be controlled through telvOS™ remotely;
  be viewed full screen at top quality with a double-click.

I promised yesterday to write about Akimbo, as one of a number of profiles upcoming. Curious, just thinking back to those comments about journalists and PR, when I e-mail people using my journalist hat I get ready responses. When I e-mail saying I want info for the blog there’s a tendency to ignore me. That takes some getting used to.

Akimbo though have been great so hat’s off (which one?) to them. Akimbo was one of the first into the IP TV space and these are their current fame claims:

• 10,000 titles on the Akimbo Service and over 100 more added each week
• Available on Microsoft Media Center PCs as part of Microsoft Media Center’s “Online Spotlight” offerings
• Media Center subscribers can also use an XBox game player as a media extender to show Akimbo programming on TV
• Available on AT&T’s Homezone
• First exclusive footage last December from Expedition 360, about a group English explorers who are attempting to circumnavigate the world only by human-powered means

This information came courtesy of Blaise Simpson who works for ar partners, Akimbo’s PR people, who’s also offered an interview with Akimbo personnel. I’ll be taking Blaise up on that in the next few days.

I’ve been following the debate in the UK about journalistic standards, blogging and PR. It has been enlivened by two events. The We Media Conference – it took a hammering from Suw Charman on her Strange Attractor blog, and the debate between John Lloyd, FT Magazine editor, and others on the relationship between PR and journalism, that’s been taking place on Comment is Free.

This comment comes from Jackie Danicki, and takes up some of the points after a public debate at the London School of Economics.

“What I found somewhat disturbing about Lloyd’s comments later in the panel was his contention that traditional journalism is something of a civic service, and one that we should be very careful to preserve. This sentiment smacks of the current, hysterical cries coming from old media types who are far less aware than John Lloyd – the idea that journalists are the guardians of truth and that, to some extent, we should take a kid glove approach to this most holy of disciplines.”

Lloyd in his Comment is Free blog on the other hand contends that journalists need a forum for discussing issues with PR Agencies – he was supporting Julia Hobsbawm, a leading London PR agent, whose company Editorial Intelligence did what Lloyd says is necessary, brought journalists and PR agents together underone corporate umbrella.

Underlying this debate is are the twin assumptions that trained journalists always know when their integrity is about to be compromised and will therefore not let it happen.

Here’s my stance on this. I’ve worked in industry as well as journalism and in both I’ve found my integrity compromised more easily than I had hoped it would be. Temptation to be first to a story, or to claim credit or to make money plague us, whoever we are. On the other hand if those moments are part of a public discussion I imagine they are harder to give in to so I believe blogging, citizen journalism, citizen media, call it what you want are rational enterprises to engage in as a journalist but also as a citizen.

I don’t think I or any journalist is capable of pristine objectivity and it’s morally dubious to claim that I, more than others, can rise above temptation and self-interest. I can’t, you can’t, we can’t. Citizen media, and IP TV, which I hope will have a still greater impact than blogging, are necessary.

There’s no directory to all those new channels out there and soon the audio-visual space on the World Wide Web will be crowded with videoblogs. Still there’s time to find a few favourites.

Here’s one IP TV service that is working well in the United States. Akimbo has been running for about eighteen months and one of its more exciting new initiatives is to take on video blogs. Vblogs need aggregators and Akimbo, like any media company, will be able to carve out a role there for ambitious media citizens with a webcam and an interesting story. I’ll be making contact with Akimbo later and will report back on what they have to say about IP TV USA.

This is from the Guardian, UK reporting a story from the Wall St Journal….

“The Fox network is to sell episodes of hit drama 24 via MySpace, the News Corporation-owned social networking website. From next week, users of MySpace will be able to buy episodes from the first two series of the cult thriller at $1.99 (£1) apiece, the Wall Street Journal said.”

Strange to see a paper doing that rather than go to the source. Still, selling TV programmes over the Internet…. This is a temporary adjustment to your picture. Companies like News Corp are clearly wondering what a world without ads, or at least with a dramatically reduced ad revenue stream, will feel like.

Longer term, old media won’t make money out of selling downloads because IP TV channels will be attractive enough to corner your time and because people who download episodes of 24 and Desperate Housewives will be considered sad, given that there will be no need. IP TV offers video-on-demand.

Ads/brands will gradually raise their game and either become social institutions supporting good causes and allying themselves with are soft aspirations or they will become all out rebels, anarchically allying themselves with the disaffected (and well off). The changes we’re going to see are bigger than ad/no ad. As Terry Leahy of Tesco said last week – brands have to become good neighbours.

What is it about big media organisations that they can’t do democracy? A recent conference in London called We Media (it was pretentously styled a Global Forum) in part organised by the BBC was designed to allow big media companies to understand better how democratised media works.

The next day the BBC held an internal seminar with Citizen Media advocate Dan Gillmor attending:

Then he asked the panel: what is it about participatory media that really changes the relationship between the BBC, say, and its audience?Gillmor: It’s a shift from lecture mode to a conversation/seminar. The BBC can bring former audience/participants into the journalism itself, engaging them in your conversation. It’s necessary, but not easy.

Well, actually the emphasis should be the other way round. An orgnisation funded by a special tax on every household should not find conversation difficult. It has several million obligations to deliver on.

The emphasis is important. Organisations like the BBC don’t exactly face an un certain future. They have revenues of over £2 billion a year but they are still in the old IBM phase, rigid with conformity.

This post from digital lifestyles caught my eye perhaps because it shows that now aspect of the future will be free from the camera. Reporter Gerard Tubb and producer Jon Gripton are doing video reports from the slopes of Everest as a team of soldiers tackle the toughest ascent. SKY TV in the UK are broadcasting the peices as a videoblog.

This kind of hybrid or regular TV and modern technology is bound to become more common and it raises a really interesting question. Right now professional broadcasters tend not to pay for citizen media content. Once it starts to become an obvious economic factor in the life of a profitable media enterprise, how long can the SKY, BBC, ABC or NBC and other media conglomerates hang on without ponying up a realistic price?

I’d say in future content will be a home business, a spare cash generator for thousands of people. Much more interesting than licking envelopes.

Literally? It means television delivered through the Internet Protocol but there’ve been some false starts with delivering moving images over the web. Remember a few years back Windows Media and Real Player became the duopoly for Windows-based web media delivery? Then there was Apple’s Quick Time? And there’s always been atom there providing short movies and animation…. All very interesting but in 2006 we’re talking full play out of television programmes over broadband with next to no delay.

Progress in programme delivery means you don’t have to compromise your standards to enjoy watching TV over the Internet but better still this multi-channel universe is heading to your TV set. That means many of the computing tricks and flix will be there in your living room, or bedroom if you need privacy!

Take personal TV. Microsoft and Alcatel are working on a buddy system that will allow you to alert one of your buddies (anywhere on the network) to what you happen to be watching. Got Clooney on screen? Tell your girlfriends what they’re missing with an IM type message through the TV. Better still IP TV on your telco’s network will allow you to record and then show your girls friends. The recording takes place in the network so you don’t have to set up a TiVO or other device.

These are hang on to your hat applications that will become available later this year. Meanwhile, what’s going on now. One of my favourite channels is cycling.tv. I happen to be luke warm on cycling though for the past few years try to catch the Tour de France. Cycling.tv is for cylcing nuts, people who would spend the whole day with a race commenary in their ear. It’s a small operation run out of London and that’s the best of it. People with an obsession who become integral to that obsession, TV magnates in their specialised world. By the way it is very professionally done.

For French viewers there is l’equippe.fr, a specialist sports channel that covers the range of popular sports, 24/7 on the web.

Is IP TV only about sports? Certainlynot. The Baby Channel does what it says on teh box, brings you information about the health and well being of small children and women during preganancy. Yes, it is also a bit of a shopping channel but so what? There’s a European Affairs channel too, bit heavy handed on the propoganda for my taste. And more shopping…. Then there’s travel, learning and real estate. Much more of course.

This is post number 1. So why a blog on IP TV? First for the under-initiated IP TV is one of the most exciting developments in information broadcasting, ever! Some of the IP TV stations out there are two person operations. TV for two. It’s a great moment in the democratisation of media and the Blog is a way of drawing attention to it.

Who are the players in IP TV? Clearly the big names will dominate press coverage. Microsoft and Alcatel are big on the infrastructure side. BT, Swisscom, France Telecom and the likes will be big on service provision. But there are other names we could mention and will.

Coming up – the channels.