BloGiza

Old Media Strikes Back

Gil Dibner had a good post this morning about the recent flap between Hulu and Boxee. Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp, is an ad-funded free service which streams video content from NBC and Fox (at least to those lucky folks living in the US). Boxee is one of the most interesting online media startups provides software for watching online media on your TV, providing a very slick content library and social networking features.

Boxee has been working with Hulu to provide easy access to Hulu content via Boxee’s software. Well, no longer. Citing concerns from content providers, Hulu announced that it was pulling its content from Boxee.

On the one hand, Hulu’s move can be viewed as slightly idiotic. In addition to pulling content from Boxee, Hulu has also stopped providing its shows to TV.com, a rival video streaming service owned by CBS and CNet. But while TV.com has emerged as a direct competitor, Boxee is more of a delivery channel. Also, it’s unclear from the statement on Hulu’s blog exactly what the “concerns” of content providers are regarding Boxee.

I’m guessing that the problem is not with what Boxee is offering per se more than it is a general and unspecified discomfort with the idea of releasing premium content online.

For the last couple of years we in the media/tech-geek community have developed this belief that premium offline content will eventually migrate completely online. And online content is on a one-way march towards a state of free. In other words, that people will transition from the old way of doing things (e.g. paying for content) towards freemium and ad-funded service. In this context, the old-guard media companies – the recording, TV, and film industries who have been slow to adapt to the new realities – come off as pitiable dinosaurs, unable to adapt themselves to the new reality.

And yet, what we’ve been seeing lately is that the dinosaurs still have a lot of bite left to them. The recent trial in Sweden of the founders of the Bittorrent sharing site The Pirate Bay is another example. While the outcome of that trial has yet to be seen, it is clearly an indication that the industry not content to lie down and accept the adage that content wants to be free. We will most likely be seeing more such initiatives in the future, especially if the verdict goes against the Pirate Bay.

Bottom line is this: don’t count out old media just yet, and don’t hurry to bury the paid content model.

Jack Shafer has an interesting article in Slate this week where he argues that there is still a lot of potential yet for paid premium content. This is especially true for those services that deliver the content via applications other than the Web (think the iTunes store or the Kindle).

If you look at it this way, we can imagine a scenario where Hulu and Boxee manage to hook up again, perhaps as the two key components of a set top box type service.

Joost Update

I've been playing around with the beta of Joost (nee The Venice Project) for a couple of months now. Or should I say playing around as time permits and otherwise smugly enjoying being an early adopter.

At any rate, it seems that the general public will soon have a chance to experience it for themselves. The company has announced that it will be moving to open beta at the end of the month. In addition, Joost has signed some major advertisers and will be adding some new premium content from Sony and Turner.

My thoughts at the moment:

• Everyone expects Joost will be a huge success. In fact, it's almost taken as a given. Which, if you take a step back and look at the situation objectively seems a little bit odd. After all, we're talking about a paradigm shift in the world of televised media which brings with it tremendous risks both technological and business. But I guess after Kazaa and Skype, Zennstrom & co have enough magic pixie dust to allay all fears.
  
• There is some decent content on Joost right now, but the majority of their programming doesn't speak to me. There's a lot of music content, some independent films, and some documentaries. Perhaps I'm older than the target demographic and that's why I don't connect.
  
• IMHO Joost will need to get a lot more popular mainstream entertainment before it can really take off. There's a lot of good independent content out there, but I don't need a dedicated application to access it. (I would go to Network2 or other competitors). The newly announced deal (which includes programming from CNN and Adult Swim, as well as old episodes of "Charlie's Angels") is a step in the right direction.
  
• Having said that, it will be interesting to see what kind of premium content they manage to get. Will it end up being a repository for old TV from the '70s and '80s? Would that be a bad thing if it happened?
  
• Joost also needs to work on its UI before it becomes ready for prime time. After three months I still find it awkward to get things done, including fairly simple operations like finding the list of all available channels and exiting the application. And if I have a problem with it, I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to my mother-in-law if she tried to use it.

NBC Does Video Convergence

Today's New York Times has an article about this week's latest YouTube phenomenon. This one comes courtesy of "Saturday Night Live". Last week's SNL aired a parody music video called "A Special Christmas Box".

The clip features Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg singing a smooth R&B number about making a special Christmas present for their girlfriends.

The premise behind the joke (and the gift in the video) just barely passed NBC's censors, who insisted on that a  certain word -- that appears 16 times in the film -- be bleeped out. In an unprecedented move, the creators of the film asked NBC if they could post the un-censored version of the clip on YouTube. And NBC agreed.

(The uncensored clip can be seen here; I'd put it up directly but we are trying to run a family-friendly blog).

Okay, It's incredibly amusing. But why am I writing about it?

Because it is the latest example of one of the year's most interesting trends: the migration of mainstream content to the Web. The migration pattern is one particular facet of what I call the YouTube effect. Increasingly, major production studios and television networks are harnessing the Web both to provide another broadcasting channel for existing material as well as a way to provide new material that complements shows on the air.

NBC blundered onto this phenomenon last year when another SNL music video, Lazy Sunday, became a sensation after users posted it to YouTube. Originally, NBC had YouTube take the video down. But they soon realized YouTube's potential and have gone so far as to open up their own channel on YouTube where they broadcast clips from NBC shows.

I suspect that we will see a whole lot more of this in the coming year and by the end of 2007 there will be a hell of a lot of overlap between broadcast TV and the Web.