Tag Archives: entertainment

Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles

Google TV is coming (and we told you so)

2010/03/18 Carlos Granier 1 Comment

The New York Times (Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold) and Web TV Wire (Google TV On Way â€“ Search Giant Teams With Intel & Sony For Android-Based Set-Top Box) are reporting that…

Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes. (NYT)

RED66 readers (yes, all three of you) got a glimpse of the future and already knew about this development four years ago, when I wrote about “Google Media.” Some choice quotes from that article:

Google has been quietly getting ready to bring the power of its brand and technology to the way you experience music, television and media in general.

Google has the equipment and expertise necessary to set up a massive media distribution and tracking network, integrated into their existing search and advertising technologies.

Google is also making inroads into the set-top box business, hoping to bring ~~television~~ media straight into your television (whether itâ€™s in your living room or your mobile phone).

At the time I wrote that article (April, 2006) I made a mock-up of what a Google Media Dashboard could look like, based on their Google Finance interface. What do you think?

Read the original article here: Google Media.

And, as always, feel free to comment below and share it with your friends (hint: use the retweet button at the end of the article).

Digital Media Strategy, Rest and Relaxation, Social Networking, Software

33 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online

2007/09/25 Carlos Granier 27 Comments

Now that you’ve got yourself a digital camera, what can you do with all those wonderful photos? Here’s a list to get you started:

Organize and share them:

These services allow you to upload your photos, share them with friends and family, tag them, make slideshows and send them out for printing:

Flickr – Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr offers both free and premium services. You can tag your photos, add comments to any part of an image, create sets, collections, slideshows, print out photobooks, postcards, snapshots, etc.

Zoomr – Think Flickr, but map centric. Zooomr offers nice photo storage functions, closely integrated with geotagging (placing your photos on a world map) and e-commerce (selling your photos) functions.

SmugMug – SmugMug is a wonderful website for storing your images. It’s fast, well supported, and offers plenty of sharing options, including making photos private and password-protecting them. There’s even a special offer for Yahoo Photos customers who are looking for a place to store their now orphaned images.

Photobucket – Photobucket also offers tons of features including easy options to share your images online (particularly useful for bloggers and photographers sharing their photos in online discussions)

Shutterfly – Primarily a photo-printing business, Shutterfly also lets you store your photos, create photobooks, postcards, share your photos, etc.

Fix them:

These services will let you upload your photos and edit them online. Useful if you don’t have an image editor on your computer, or when you need to quickly edit a photo while at a cybercafe.

Picnik – I was impressed by this one. Picnik will even let you play with their software without creating an account (Scrapblog will too), a clever way to let you try Picnik without forking over your personal information. Slick looking, fast and powerful. Worth trying, even if just for fun.

LookWow – Java-based online photo editor. Will let you apply effects to an image, undo, compare and save.

Snipshot – Another really good looking online photo editor. Not as powerful as Picnik, but worth trying.

Phixr – Has a nice set of tools, but took forever to load.

Create:

MyPictr – Quickly create image thumbnails for online social networks. Upload your photo, crop the area you want to keep (usually your face), choose the network you need your photo for and MyPictr will spit out your image in the proper size and format.

Quick Thumbnail – Great when you need to quickly resize an image. A useful feature will resize your image to several sizes at once (i.e., 25%, 50%, 75%)

ePassportPhoto – The Internet equivalent to a passport photo booth, it will format your picture so that it can be printed and cut into six passport-ready photos. No more paying $8 for 19 cents worth of prints. Make sure your photo is passport-worthy before uploading.

BigHugeLabs – Do almost anything with your Flickr images. Calendars, frames, print-out projects… too many to list.

Fun:

Scrapblog – Online scrap books. A wonderful service by my Miami friends. You can give Scrapblog a try without creating an account (you can create an account later and recover your trial project). Connects directly to your Flickr account, so using your existing images is very easy. Amazing flash-based interface will leave you wondering what else is possible on the Internet. Let your inner Martha Stewart run wild.

Spell with flickr – A fun service that will turn any word into its Flickr image letters.

Photagious – Online Slideshows, themes, editing, text, unlimited uploads. Should probably be listed under “Organize and share them” but their slideshow functions are in a league of their own.

Riya – Although it’s been transformed into a “visual search engine,” you can still access their original image storage and sharing service. Riya’s technology will let you search for items containing similar items to a reference image. It will also let you identify a person in an image and find additional images where that person appears.

PikiStrips – Turn any image or images into comic strips, with text balloons and special effects. Look through the earlier examples uploaded into the system for the better quality stuff. It seems the latest ones are mostly people making gang signs.

Map Them:

You don’t need a GPS to map your images online, though one certainly helps. These services will let you identify the geographical place where each image was taken and show them on a map.

PanoramaBuilder Build panoramic images by stitching together your photos. Now you can pan around a place as if you were (almost) there.

Virtual Panorama Tours on Google Maps – A list of panoramic images overlaid on Google Maps. Mostly used for real estate.

Panoramio – Map centric photo storage and sharing. Geotag your photos, correct photos others have wrongly placed. Panoramio photos are regularly uploaded to Google Earth so that other Google Earth viewers can see them by activating the Panoramio layer.

Make real stuff:

Your digital images don’t need to stay trapped inside your computer (or the Internets’ tubes). Make books, posters, postcards… almost anything you want with these links:

Mpix – Photobooks, Cards, Magazine covers, greeting cards, calendars, bookwrap, tickets, puzzles and statuettes (these last ones you HAVE to see… worth every cringe-inducing penny!)

QOOP – Photobooks, postcards, mugs, stickers, canvas prints, mini photobooks, shirts, hoodies, mousepads, calendars, greeting cards, etc., directly from your photo storage account. Works with most popular photo storage sites.

Flatenme – Create customized children’s books with your little rascal’s image in place of the book’s hero or heroine.

The Rasterbator – An application which creates rasterized versions of images. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters. See website for details.

Improve your technique:

Microsoft Research Group Shot – MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. Erase someone in the background, fix faces with eyes closed, etc.

Fascinating! Content Aware Image Resizing – An amazing image resizing algorithm. Watch the video and rest easily knowing that the scientist behind is already working with Adobe on the next Photoshop.

Improve your photography with classical art – An interesting technique that uses traditional classical paintings to correct the light and color of your photographs.

Automator Actions: Photoshop Automator Actions v3.5 – If you’ve got a Mac and Photoshop, these scripts might make your photo-editing life a bit easier.

Manage your digital images on your computer:

These programs will help you manage your entire photo library on your PC or Mac. Most will allow you to do minor editing, cropping, resizing, color correcting and printing. Easily upload your images to your favorite online photo storage service.

Picasa – PC/Linux photo management, also includes online photo sharing for anyone with a Gmail account.

iPhoto – Mac photo management. If you’ve got a recent Mac, then you have iPhoto installed already.

Apple Aperture – Professional photo management for Mac.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Professional photo management for Mac and PC.

Updates:

2007/10/01: Make that 34 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online. Abhiram Sarat of flauntR sent me an email highlighting their quite promising online photo apps:

flauntR one-click effects – Online photo editing and effects. Includes uploading from your computer or flickr account and is nice enough to include sample images to play with. You can try out the apps (currently PhotostylR and PhotoeditR, soon PhotoprintR) without registering.

Featured Articles, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Content-centric Communities

2007/09/18 Carlos Granier 12 Comments

Bernard Lunn, at Read/WriteWeb wrote an interesting article about the failure of Eons.

Eons is a social networking website aimed at the over-fifty crowd, headed by the founder of job-site Monster.com. After raising $32M, Eons is now cutting it’s workforce in half – not exactly a measure of success.

In his article, Lunn touches a point I’ve been making for a long time: people gather around content, not around demographic variables (see “The Advertiser’s Dilemma”, “Rethinking Ratings” and “Why Google Should Buy YouTube” for my previous articles on content-centric ratings analysis).

Lunn think the problem lies in Eons’ strategy to connect people around age, a traditional demographic variable, and not around content or common interests. He’s hit the nail squarely on the head:

“…people want to connect around content, not around age. Connecting around content is what Blogs do. You connect on something that interests you. (…) As you get older, you get a more varied set of interests and human relationships across all ages.”

Age/Sex/Location is not a social network

Demographic variables allow advertisers and their clients to easily target their products to artificial segments of the population that probably have very little else in common, other than age/sex/location. In a small-town-world these variables may have been good enough to create desirable advertising targets, but we now live in a connected world where people of all ages and genders interact and share common interests on a scale seldom seen before.

And while you can still use demographic variables to target your product, you’d be missing a much more interesting target, one capable of creating die-hard fans and viral awareness of your product, by ignoring content-centric connections.

As for social networks, look at the successful ones and the “glue” that keeps them together:

facebook: college students (now everyone)
imdb: movies
dogster/catster: pets
flickr: photos
digg: tech news
youtube: videos

Building a social network around content will not magically make it successful, just like putting wings on a box won’t make it fly; but those wings sure help once you put the rest of the airplane together.

The Content-centric Connectivity Chart

The following chart is an example of how people of different ages, genders and cultural backgrounds gather around common interests (caveat: networks are not drawn to scale, connections do not attempt to imply actual traffic for these sites, and age/gender/race were limited by the avatar icons I could find on the net).

The Content-centric Connectivity chart highlights two key ideas:

Successful networks are built around content, not around demographics.
There’s a huge opportunity for anyone who learns how to target their products around content-centric communities.

Conclusion

There will always be products that need to be targeted around demographic variables (e.g., feminine products, some toys, acne-medication, denture products), but the opportunities and tools for expanding your product’s appeal have never been this good.

Ratings Analysis

Two Interesting Articles from Advertising Age

2006/11/14 Carlos Granier 2 Comments

Advertising Age has a couple of interesting articles today:

Ad Age Digital

User-Generated Video Gets Its Own TV Channel

According to this article, Fame TV is a new channel dedicated entirely to consumer-generated videos, airing on the BskyB satellite network in the UK and Ireland. Users can upload their videos for a $3 fee -there’s also a deal with Revver for content- and these will be aired using an innovative format: nine boxes will be on the screen at all times, each one showing a different video. Each box has a code so that viewers can vote via SMS for their favorite show. In the case of Revver videos, Revver will pay a percentage of the SMS revenues to each video creator.

I’m assuming that videos getting lots of SMS votes, will be aired more often to create even more revenue. Judging from the success of shows like “America’s Funniest Videos,” the success of the idea seems guaranteed. It’ll make for a great time-waster and sure beats channel surfing.

It will initially lack advertising, though a good idea would be to run advertising in the center box (an even better idea would be to user-generated advertising, a la CurrentTV’s V-CAM (Viewer Created Ad Messages)).

Locally, this would be a great idea for networks to fill an hour or two of late night infomercial infested air time.

and the other article is:

Ad Age Media Works
Why TV Needs Commercial Ratings — Now

CBS‘ Chief Research Officer, David F. Poltrack, explains in great detail why it’d be smart for the television networks to measure ratings by the number of people watching commercials instead of the number of people watching the shows.

While this may sound counterintuitive at first, he gives a detailed explanation oh what’s happening with DVRs. Viewers are increasingly using DVRs to watch TV shows at their convenience. As I’ve previously mentioned here, network competition is moot when you can record both competing shows and watch them both at a later time.

When viewers have a DVR, more of them watch the shows after the fact than live. And about 40% of these viewers actually watch the commercials. Well, according to Poltrack, these eyeballs are not being counted, since the current system relies on live viewings (because advertisers automatically assume that DVR owners will fast-forward through their expensive commercials).

With the proper measuring system in place, viewers who watch the ads will be accounted for, while those who skip them won’t. Sounds fair to me, but go read the whole article… recommended.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Demographics, Digital Media Strategy, Ratings, Web Video

Social Networking

An Informal Chat with Second Life Creator Philip Rosedale

2006/11/09 Carlos Granier 4 Comments

The first Forbes MEET Conference was a blast. The panels were great and the people attending were even better. The conference is more than worth the price of admission for the networking opportunities alone.

On day one I had the good fortune of sharing a lunch table with Chad Hurley and Chris Maxcy of YouTube, Neil Kleinman, Dean of the College of Media and Communication at UArts, Janet De Vries (Director of the President’s Office at UArts) and Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life.

Neil is doing some wonderful stuff over at UArts, including getting the College of Media Communications online and the students interested in all that the new media technologies have to offer. It would be great to see art students presenting their creations in a Second Life exhibit or theatre majors opening their shows on Second Life‘s version of Broadway.

Second Life, for those unfamiliar with it, is -to quote their website- “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” You travel to Second Life’s world by downloading a small program from their website and registering your “avatar” or virtual representation. Once inside the game, you decide whether you want to be male, female or something entirely different, like a bug. Choose your clothing, change your looks… anything you want. You can also buy land to build a house on (or a cabin, high-rise or space station). Set-up a clothing store and sell your shirts to other Second Life residents. Anything is possible here…

Many companies (Sun, Pontiac) have set-up shop inside Second Life, several residents are making good money buying and selling stuff (houses, cars, condos), and even Reuters has sent one of its reporters full time into Second Life – which I find mind-boglingly wonderful.

I don’t really have all that free time at the moment, even if I could build a lucrative business inside Second Life. So I asked Phil when will I be able to send my Second Life avatar to do work for me and report back at the end of the day. Phil laughed… this simply isn’t possible, yet. But, wouldn’t that be great? I guess that, eventually, avatars will be programmable to follow certain scripts and maybe even interact on their own with other avatars. Maybe then I could create for-hire armies (ok, or gophers) inside Second Life and rent their services out for a nice sum.

On a more serious note, Phil did mention that great things are coming to Second Life’s audio/video functions, including 3-D audio, which would allow you to determine where a sound is coming from (much like you do in games like Counter-Strike).

Technorati Tags: Second Life, YouTube

Featured Articles, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Rethinking Ratings

2006/10/24 Carlos Granier 9 Comments

Summary: An analysis of current television ratings methods, why they’re inappropriate for the timeless internet and digital video recorder era, and suggestions for improving them.

Traditional television ratings reports let TV executives and analysts study the behavior of a particular show or series, displaying the number of viewers each show had, broken down by demographic targets. This allows the television industry to determine which show won a particular time slot (e.g., Friday 9pm to 10pm), how it performed among a particular demographic (e.g., Males 18-34yrs) and how it has evolved (in the case of serials) over time (e.g., Are there more or less people watching it).

But what happens when viewers can watch any show at any time? When viewers don’t have to choose one show over another on a rival network? What happens when you can’t tell for sure who your viewers are?

The internet and TiVos give the viewer unprecedented freedom over when, where and what to watch. Soon it won’t be possible to tell for sure how many people are watching any given show, using traditional ratings tools such as AGB/Nielsen‘s Peoplemeters. Programming executives won’t have to worry about what the rival networks are showing at the same time as their new hit show. And ratings analysts won’t be able to track a new series’ behavior by simply looking at how each episode did on its air date.

Two hit shows going head-to-head on rival networks? Not a problem: watch one and record the other for later viewing (or get it from the Net). Missed last week’s premiere episode? No problem there either: watch it online, download it off bit torrent or pay for it on iTunes. Some of this you can easily track, but some you can’t.

Analysts will need to track each episode over time and then track the series as a whole. A VERY SIMPLIFIED graphic might look something like this, with a running total for each episode over the time of the series:

Any viewer can watch any episode from its air date to the end of the series (and beyond). This allows viewers to catch-up after the series has started or to catch any episode they may have missed. Of course, the whole concept of missing an episode disappears in the TiVo/Internet model. But in addition to tracking how many times a particular episode was watched or downloaded, you should also be tracking what’s happening with the rest of the show’s internet presence. Are viewers reading the characters’ blogs? Are they discussing the show in the forums? Are they setting up fan websites? Linking to the Myspace profiles? Uploading mashups of show clips? Not only must you track the show’s behavior over time and over several distribution methods, but you must also track and measure the user experience surrounding the show.

And finally, how do you solve the demographic problem: if you don’t know who your viewers are, how do you target them? The answer is both simple and complex. I believe that traditional demographic targets are on the way out. Social networks and special interest groups are the new targets… and these are much easier to track via the Internet than the old ones. You may not be able to tell whether a particular viewer is male or female, young or old, wealthy or not, but you can tell what news s/he reads, what games s/he plays and which people s/he hangs out with (to a certain degree, of course). One minor detail… you can’t (or shouldn’t) add apples and oranges. Traditional television ratings data categorizes viewers by demographic targets such as age, sex, location and income (because someone takes the time to visit each household in the sample and verify this information). And whereas traditional ratings analysis has always relied on a sample set of data subjects, internet traffic and behavior analysis has always examined the whole dataset. Eventually it shouldn’t be too hard to homogenize both sets of data, either by linking traditional television viewers to their online behaviors, or simply by expanding their interviews to include enough data to categorize them.

Currently, Google and YouTube limit their video data to a traditional web-traffic analysis mindset: most viewed, most recent, most subscribed. Coming from an Internet world, they fail to see the need (or maybe even the possibility) of better, more detailed reports (Yes, it could also be that they keep these reports hidden from the outside world).

As for me, I’d love to know how the most watched videos on YouTube evolved over time. Have they peaked? Are they growing? Who watches them? How about a Google Finance like chart, linking views to blog/news mentions? Which video has been linked-to the most (this one is actually on YouTube)? Which videos have been dugg and how many diggs did they get? Actually… I’d just love to work there and get it done myself!

Digital Media Strategy, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

CBS Launches YouTube Channel

2006/10/20 Carlos Granier 1 Comment

CBS, one of the US leading television networks, has launched a YouTube channel. So far the content is limited to short clips from late night television, sports highlights, program promos and news items.

I’m not particularly impressed with the available content (no full length shows yet) but I really like the fact that CBS has taken this initiative. Late-night clips were already showing up on YouTube, so why not offer them straight from the source?

As of this writing, CBS’s YouTube channel has about one thousand subscribers and 33,000 views. As more -and better- content from traditional networks goes online, it’ll be interesting to see how they compare with user generated content. Will they reach the 37 million views attributed to smosh or surpass lonelygirl15‘s fifty thousand subscribers?

It’s great to see the traditional networks embrace their fears and venture online. CBS already has content distribution deals with iTunes (Lost is sold on iTunes for US$1.99 per episode), but I’m guessing they’ll release their shows for free on YouTube under a Google advertising supported model.

Interesting times, indeed.

Uncategorized

Google Buys YouTube for US$1.65 Billion in Stock

2006/10/09 Carlos Granier

According to an MSN Messenger Alert I just received, MSNBC is reporting that Google has indeed bought YouTube for US$1.65B in stock. More details as they come in.

UPDATE: Both TechCrunch and Mashable have confirmed the story at this time.
UPDATE 2: Google has issued a press release.

Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Why Google Should Buy YouTube

2006/10/09 Carlos Granier 2 Comments

There’s been a lot of speculation lately about a possible Google buyout of Internet video website YouTube for US$1.6B. A lot has been said about the potential value (or lack thereof) of YouTube and its future success (or demise).

But why, exactly, would Google drop one-and-a-half billion dollars on YouTube? After all, Google already operates a similar service, Google Video, complete with money-making functions such as advertising and pay-per-view/download.

What value can YouTube bring to Google?

The first obvious answer is market share. According to some estimates, YouTube serves up 60% of the online video market… more than 100 million videos per day. But you’d think with $1.6B Google can boost their own market share (estimated at 10%).

Content would be the other possible answer, but I don’t think YouTube’s collection of user generated content is worth that much, even if you manage to place advertising on them.

Some people have gone as far as suggesting Google simply needs to invest some of their war chest money and somehow came upon YouTube as an acquisition target. If that’s the case, then let me suggest Google should buy lottery tickets instead.

The rest of the theories revolve around Google buying a YouTube to eliminate competition. While a valid point, Google hasn’t normally resorted to gobbling up competitors, usually preferring to buy companies offering services that complement rather than compete with Google.

So, what does Google see in YouTube?

I like to think Google is a smart company with big plans, so I analyze them with this in mind. Think Big. Think Smart.

Google wants to dominate online video distribution and with it, online video ratings. Without ratings you can’t really sell highly-profitable advertising. And without a majority of distribution market share, you can’t really accurately measure ratings.

Google is allegedly interested in competing with Nielsen in the ratings market and in collaborating with Apple on their upcoming iTV product. I’ve written previously about Google’s potential as a Universal Personal Video Recorder (Tivo on steroids). And just recently Google held a think tank with the top US media executives (YouTube was also present). Something’s definitely cooking.

YouTube offers a quick ticket to this online media distribution empire, because YouTube has the market share but, more importantly, the data.

YouTube has over a year of extensive viewership data, detailing how / where / when and what people like to watch. Make no mistake, this is VERY valuable data. In a country with an estimated 110 million television households, YouTube’s 100 million videos served daily provide a treasure trove of data, ready to be mined, analyzed and monetized.

Buying YouTube would give Google a majority share of the Internet video market, along with the important rating’s data to monetize these videos via Google Ads.

More importantly, owning a majority share of the video market would allow Google to collect and commercialize CREDIBLE ratings data, which it could then share with the major networks and content owners, distribute their videos online, and get a cut of the ad revenue.

The Copyright Issue

A favorite argument of late is that as soon as a big player buys YouTube, said player would be sued into oblivion by copyright holders. While that may hold a grain of truth, YouTube has actively policed the website for copyright violators when alerted by the rightful copyright owner. YouTube has also signed agreements with major players, such as the one recently signed by my good friend Alex Zubillaga of Warner Music, for content distribution and revenue sharing via YouTube.

I believe Google has even better relations with these major players and with credible and comprehensive ratings data to share could easily sign distribution and revenue sharing agreements with them.

The Big Picture

All of this won’t certainly come together over night. Too many loose ends need to be tied, agreements need to be made and signed, and technology needs to be put in place. But I can certainly see a road map outlining the steps ahead for Google.

1. The first stage involves the acquisition of YouTube and its integration into Google Video. Agreements with the major networks and content producers will allow the distribution of videos via Google. Most of these players already distribute their videos online for free, so a bigger potential audience combined with ratings data would certainly be appetizing.

2. Stage two would involve integration with services such as Apple’s iTV, allowing viewers to play downloaded content (along with ads) on their televisions. Google could combine viewing history with search history to further finetune the ads displayed.

3. Stage three would allow viewers to record programs on Google’s servers and watch them at a later time. Additionally Google would have the capacity to allow revenue sharing agreements with local network affiliates, according to the viewer’s geographical location.

Of course all this depends on whether Google is indeed interested in taking a shortcut by buying YouTube. And if YouTube is not yet aware of these ramifications, if I were them, I’d certainly start raising the price.

Comments are always welcome. I’d love to discuss these ideas.

UPDATE: Shortly after writing this article, Google did indeed proceed with the purchase of YouTube for US$1.65 Billion in stock… which I actually think is a bargain. Stay tuned for a post-buyout article.