Broadband Jungle Blog

Public Service Administration

Another example of how YouTube owns this election: On their YouChoose '08 initiative comedy gems and informative bits and pieces from voters like you and me co-exist in harmony with complete archives of campaign spots from the various camps. Refreshing.

The maverick comedy team of Public Service Administration recently added a particularly delightful episode: "He said it first" spoofs a breaking news story about presidential candidate John McCain from the pov of the newsroom. Here's the bleeped version just in case.

Internet Metering - Back to the good old bad days?

During peak times, 5% of Internet users are hogging 50% of the bandwidth?

How to reply if you're a service provider? Metering? Open access? Tiered plans?

Mark Cuban already cast his vote and kicked of a thunderstorm: Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS.

'Leave and take your bit torrent client with you.'

While cable giants like Comcats and Time Warner and telecoms like AT&T are figuring out how to add valves to their pipelines to reign in some of their hard-core users, industry mags like Mediapost's Blogs have long been engaging in the debate.

Now the New York Times is weighing in with a clarifying survey from Brian Stelter.
His article from June 15 compares the potential of 'Internet metering' to the industry's clumsy business models from the early days:

'The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web’s popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by the hour.'

Stelter compares some of the plans in discussion and the perspective is grim: Bandwidth allotments appear to favor the very casual Internet user simply sending e-mail and reading the news.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like “Saturday Night Live,” “Family Guy” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple’s iTunes store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com can use up to a gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix’s new online service can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact, could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner’s trial in Beaumont.   

What this could mean to our fledgling rich media loving industry is pretty obvious:

“We hate it,” said a senior executive at a major media company, who requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits. Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for online video streaming.

Welcome to GoGooroo Blog

It took us 2 months into our public beta to finally launch the BIG blog. Go figure.
Anyhow--we've been more than pleased by the warm embrace we've received from the blogging community and trade journalists around the globe. Take a look.

A big shoutout goes to Kristen Nicole at Mashable to get the ball rolling. Looks like there really was something missing in the marketplace and a lot of video fiends out there were suffocating under the weight of all their bookmarks. I know we did.

So here's the goal: We're determined to create the most useful and user-friendly platform for all these great and inspiring broadband video channels out there. In spite of our efforts, a lot of them still get lost in the shuffle. We believe in niche programming, and we believe in monster blockbusters to keep the industry's momentum going.

Not so sure how we feel about television, though--it might be the golden age of TV writing, but the platform itself seems tired and stale. We'll just have to see how far the broadband revolution goes. Creatively we certainly are experiencing an eruption of visual content not seen since the advent of cable, maybe even television.

Don't get me started about the movies -- broadband video might be what independent producers have been waiting for since the creatively insane ran the asylum in the 1970s. I do believe that. It could also mean the end of distribution and exhibition as we've known it for the past century. If you're pumping HD on demand broadband into your home theater, who's going to drag their butt into a poorly run theater anymore?

GoGOOROO is clearly a company with a global mindset. It's no coincidence that we launched parallel in  the US and Europe, and we have big plans to add more localized portals as we build this community. We also have aspirations to take a leadership role when it comes to syndicating and hosting video content for our viewers.

While we're currently indexing every channel known to man, we're also determined to create and curate some of these great new channels nobody had thought of. We're big on collaborating with other video portals and aggregators, because we're all Davids in the same boat struggling with Goliath.

And that does include Michael Eisner, a recovering Goliath. He's new to it just like we all are and that's probably what he likes about creating Prom Queen with the skills he learned in the good old TV days.

Anybody who claims they have it all licked, whether it's production, advertising, distribution, finance or storytelling is simply telling a lie. Nobody has a clue and we're all learning and making it up as we go along, just like it should be.

Gary Carter, CCO of the company who brought us American Idol, expressed it extremely well at January's NATPE conference:

“Technological development is a story which runs through human history and which shapes and is shaped by it. And part of that story is the rise (…) of what we call ‘media.’ This is about us, in a very deep and a very profound way, and it’s about the way in which we as a species are driven by creativity.”

That said--follow the Gooroo and have a great time!

Good Night Burbank

Ever wondered what’s going on during the commercial break on your favorite local news show? Do anchors, commentators and production staff really get along? More importantly: What happens when the cameras stop rolling?

Good Night Burbank is your answer. Created by and starring veteran TV producer / writer Hayden Black as an online comedy format, the low budget stage of this fictitious news show is skillfully populated by various talented Second City and Groundlings alumni. Shulie Cowen is particularly effective as co-anchor Kelly Jones, pronounced in the traditional ‘Latino’ manner.

With undercurrents of Ricky Gervais' light touch for unbearably embarrassing moments, it's not surprising that the show is written with quite some bite. GNB goes far beyond portraying local news in its race for total urgency and absolute political correctness. Topics range from inter-office relationships, to racism and pornography, real-life stuff that’s funny and absolutely not covered on local news.

The tone is credible and entertaining, looks like Hayden spent the odd hour in control rooms here and there, studying the various business anchors are capable of conducting three, two, one and half-a-second before being back on camera without ever breaking into a sweat.

As far as fake news go, Good Night Burbank is an instant classic. Would be wonderful to see this show find the means of production to air as a daily online alternative to the Daily Show, like the latter it’s already spawned its own spin-off: Good Night Burbank – Breaking News.

Also listed on GoGOOROO.

Onion News Network

…instant gratification and the answer to JibJab's prayers? Just in time for Fox News Channel’s dire stab at comedy and after months of rumors, the master satirists at print and online publication The Onion have finally launched Onion News Network, their 24 hour fake news broadband outlet.

First up: “Immigration: The Human Cost,” a dead-serious CNN-style spoof about an illiterate Mexican immigrant replacing a crushed SVP at bogus Lucent Technologies, Inc.. Extremely well produced, the Human Cost features anchor Brandon Armstrong, a newsroom set, several commentators, great writing and a nasty bite. More to come!

From ONN’s press release: "The Onion News Network has set the standard for globe-encompassing 24-hour television news since it was founded in December, 1892. The network boasts channels in 171 languages and can be viewed in 4.2 billion households in 811 countries. Now get the only news you need on the web and from our esteemed media partners."

Immigration: The Human Cost

JibJab—What We Call The News

Can’t stop watching the latest JibJab video: A recap of primetime news from television’s early days to today’s pleasant infotainment showers.

JibJab’s history lesson comes across like Network redone by Monty Python’s and therefore without Howard Beale's  "mad as hell" outburst.  We get it anyhow. Extremely clever, stunningly executed and with a lot of subtle edge towards…hard to say, us, the news media, everyone?

My favorite part: The JibJab logo elegantly blended into a black and white ‘Please stand by’-sign from the 1950’s. Very cute and very subversive at the same time. These guys definitely know how to position themselves and have the confidence to do so.

I’m hoping they turn this into a regular series of fake news clips, but then again they’re already supplying an entire portal with new and old comedy masterpieces…

What We Call the News | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

The Yahoo! Current Network arrives

Current TV co-founder and figurehead Al Gore yesterday announced the launch of a multi-channel VC2-themed collaboration between Current TV and Yahoo!, lavishly called the Yahoo! Current Network.

So far, four channels went live today:
Yahoo! Current Traveler, featuring the familiar mix of Current TV contributors with the occasional celebrity video thrown in. U2 front man Bono’s delicious launch present is a series of segments depicting “A Day in the life of The Edge”, showing an initially reluctant guitar player being woken by his singer in Miami.

Yahoo! Current Driver is celebrating the thrills of horsepower-hungry, gas-guzzling subcultures in surprisingly unashamed manner, considering that the network was founded by ‘Ozon-Man’ himself, as FishbowlLA so endearingly called Al Gore after An Inconvenient Truth opened in the spring.

Yahoo! Current Action takes on the extreme sports crowd that’s otherwise been abandoned outside of x-games season. Skateboarders, FMX fans, surfers and snowboarders will find everything they need here.

Yahoo! Current Buzz seems to be a compilation channel for now, with an occasional nugget from the Current TV archives thrown in.

News about an upcoming Current TV broadband collaboration with one of the Internet’s pioneers had been posted on the news podcaster’s website since early summer. Evidence pointed more towards Current TV shareholder and Yahoo! nemesis Google, on whose board the former vice-president resides. Google even hosts a branded viral clip segment on Current TV that’s now been moved to every hour on the half hour.

All in all, a great move for the cable network to increase their broadband foothold, but there’s a lot in it for Yahoo! as well, especially with their once very ambitious video content divisions all but abandoned up until now.

Rocketboom

Looks like Rocketboom is way over the Amanda Congdon dramedy from earlier this summer: Joanne Colan, her successor, is already knee-deep into starting her own legacy. Who would have thought?

Joanne’s obviously done her homework and got a terrific sense of the complexity of current events in new media land. And she gets the subcultures involved. Blending well into Rocketboom’s quirky sense of humor, she brings great energy and professionalism to the table. When was the last time you saw an anchor give a cohesive interview in pitch-perfect French on any American network?

Rock on.

Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, in America

CNN / NBC / Yahoo! correspondent Kevin Sites recently completed his mission of spending an entire year in the Hot Zone of traveling through 22 armed conflicts in 19 countries in true 2.0 fashion: The journalist filed his compassionate reports of mostly unspeakable events from around the globe by blogging and writing an online diary, keeping a photo journal on Flickr and uploading video segments straight to the site.

What seemed like a trip to hell actually brought tremendous insight as he recounts in the post “Our Journey so Far:”

“That is one of the two most important lessons that I believe were revealed to me on this journey. First, that the world is indeed filled with conflict, pain and suffering, and that amazing people overcome it everyday.”

With a tremendous gift to gain trust wherever he went, Sites often pointed his camera directly at the lives of civilians affected by war. He’ll repost these stories in the order he experienced them over the next few weeks.

“This will give you a chance to see the full scope of our year's work in a condensed time period, while also allowing us to rest and retool for the launch of the next phase of the Hot Zone, which will primarily focus on putting a face on the untold stories in America.”

Way to go!