Reel Pop

First Impressions: Hulu

Hulu, the long-awaited "answer to YouTube" co-venture between News Corp and NBC, launched in private beta this week. You can get a full rundown of Hulu's features from any number of sites. Here, I'd like to draw out the most powerful characteristics of the site:

Hulu vs YouTube
Comparing these two sites is a nuanced proposition. On the surface, they have little in common. Both allow you to view and share videos. But while YouTube offers user uploads, comments, and social networking features, Hulu is almost entirely presentational. Despite Silicon Valley's insistence that social networking features are tantamount to success, I would argue that 80% of consumers simply want to watch free video without comments or clutter. Hulu gives them that, and does it much better than any of the individual network sites. In fact, it does it better than YouTube. The basic competive landscape between then two sites is simple (see graphic below).

The real comparison between Hulu and YouTube is on the business level, i.e., will Hulu be a more profitable advertising machine for the networks than YouTube? I'm willing to bet the answer is yes, but only marginally. What Hulu really does is give the networks self-sufficiency in the online marketplace, thereby freeing them to be more aggressive in negotiations with YouTube, both in and out of the courtroom.

The Good Stuff for Consumers

1. Custom Embeds. Can't stress how important this is. The very fact that you can embed videos opens Hulu to a wide audience. Even better: You can custom-cut a section from a video to create your own clip (kinda like vidshare site Motionbox). What this does is empower the audience in a way previously accessible only to dedicated video editors. It will create discussions around single moments -- like, say, Miss South Carolina stumbling through an answer, or Jan saying something particularly funny on The Office.
2. Timeline Jumping. Extremely easy to jump to different parts of a video without the inconvenience of buffering.
3. Multiple channels/shows. Good out of the box selection: Fox, NBC, FX, SciFi, Bravo, E!, Fuel, USA, others.
4. Ease of use. A very simple, uncluttered interface that makes browsing and searching for titles easy. This is very important, because basically the networks are competing for the attention of consumers who want something for free. As one of those consumers, I have several choices: Bittorrent, YouTube, a variety of video-sharing sites, download on iTunes, Amazon UnBox, etc. Among those Hulu, hands down, offers the best combination of price and quality.

The Bad Stuff for Consumers

1. Time limits. You can only view the last five shows from a currently running TV program. Probably done to protect syndication revenue and DVD sales. Understandable, but not good enough. Hulu's forcing consumers into a course of action, the options of which include downloading illegally. Why not make it easy to download legally for a price?
2. Few movies. Only ten or so. Although they do have Conan the Librarian.
3. A few anemic features. Especially the "details" option on the player, which offers very little information, just like the "info" button on most cable boxes. Why not provide links to Wikipedia, or an in-house store of information about the video?

And now: Conan.

Japanese commercials with American actors

Via VSL, a YouTube repository of Japanese commercials featuring Ben Stiller, Hulk Hogan, Kiefer Sutherland, and other Hollywood stars hawking goods in 30-second spots. Below, Kiefer as Jack Bauer in a commercial for an energy drink.

Review: MySpace's Roommates

MySpace's Roommates rips off The Hills. That's ok. It doesn't take a wonder of production profundity -- or some special insight into the mammalian psyche-slash-boxer shorts -- to make apple-cheeked, pearl-teethed, nubile girls in bikinis alluring, bankable fare. It's simple T&A. No, no, wait. It's T&A and -- this being MySpace -- it's also interactive.

Let's start there. Roommates is a scripted faux reality show about eight post-college girls (four in an LA house, four mysteriously cavorting elsewhere) that promises character profiles, vlogs, and the opportunity for the audience to affect the storyline. IOW: You get to tell hot girls on camera what to do. Sort of like webcam stripping, but with a thin patina of MySpace respectability and a major advertiser (Ford).

There isn't much of a story so far to interact with. The season opens with a short introduction to the girls, who prance around their house in booty shorts and lingerie. There's a tiny dog. The girls fart on each other. That's episode one. Episode two's a girl's-night-in party which ends, apparently, with one of the girls (Heather) going out afterwards and hooking up. We find that out in episode three, in which the girls talk in the kitchen. Episode four: The girls watch TV. Episode five: The girls play in the hot tub. If you suspect I'm not doing the story justice, simple say "peace out, bitches" five times and you've reiterated the entirety of the dialogue.

There is one other component to the story. According to the storyline, the person filming Roommates is a pleasant looking fella named Justin, the girls' best male friend from college. Justin doesn't appear on camera. He doesn't talk. He's just always there. Kinda like Tom on MySpace.

If there's one thing that will save Roommates from complete mediocrity, it will be the interactive component. One worries, though, that this time MySpace is relying too much on that, to the detriment of creating something an audience would want to interact with in the first place.

[view the site | read about Roommates at hollywoodreporter.com]

No such thing as oblivious

There's a local-kid-makes-good story going round today about how an 18-year-old London student's YouTube vid about the iPhone was picked up by Apple's ad agency. The heartwarming lesson: Normal people can be advertisers, too. Or something.

Really? This story seems implausible. Or, at the very least, disingenuous. First of all, according to the NY Times story, the video had only been viewed 2,000 times before it was picked up by Apple. Hmm. Some marketing peon must've had a hard time upselling that idea based upon such a small popularity base. Or maybe he didn't, since the video is so similar to/derivative of Apple's current style of advertising. Either way, Apple's decision to incorporate UGC is little more than a PR stunt.

And then there's this myth of the oblivious multi-media producer who toils away out of pure "passion." There's no such thing as a person who doesn't understand the global reach of YouTube. YouTube may have been a means for sharing amongst friends at one point, but anyone who posts to the site now must know they're sharing with a tremendous audience. Everyone's hoping to get discovered, whether they admit it or not.

Interaction vs. storytelling?

After reading Rex Sorgatz's excellent article in Wired on our increasingly game-based reality, I was struck by how much this ethos has infected online video. IOW, interaction is sometimes being used in lieu of story development. Examples: Vuguru's Prom Queen, MySpace's Faintheart, MySpace's Roommates, and any show (online or otherwise) that promotes social networking or user-created components. While it's too early to make any definitive judgements in this regard, it's certainly a possibility that networks are starting to see user interaction as a proxy for story creation. It's kinda the same dynamic as reality TV vs. scripted. Cheaper. More profitable. Easily digestible. And utterly flattering.

The Venice Walk

Since you've been wondering what happened to Bob Hegyes after Welcome Back Kotter, let me disabuse you of any hope that he's made good by pointing you towards his magnificently horrendous new show, The Venice Walk.

From the press release: Anti-O.C. Teenagers on Probation. Bad kids getting Badder. And who better to tame new age juvenile delinquents than an older aged juvenile delinquent? He’s not a Crip. He’s not a Blood. He’s a Sweathog! Robert Hegyes, Epstein from Welcome Back, Kotter, a veteran actor, writer and director, has created a new series for the Internet with partner and feature film scribe, Craig Titley (Sam Raimi’s upcoming remake of 20 Thousand Leagues Under The Sea) revolving around a retired NYPD Gang cop turned Venice Beach Juvenile Probation Officer, and the seven Venice High School delinquents who must report to him.

Break a Leg

A friend at Slate forwarded this online comedy series to me today. Swingers + Gamblers  = Swamblers. Plus a Scandinavian guy named Jennifer. Recommended.

Chevalier + Darjeeling = what exactly?

This is amazing. Next week theatres will begin to show Anderson's 20-minute Hotel Chevalier prequel before Darjeeling. I reviewed Chevalier for Reporter a few weeks ago. In brief: There's awkward conversation, talk of feelings, and no resolution. The short ends. It's kind of like a Raymond Carver short story, if Carver's stories were illustrated by Dr. Seuss. Or maybe Chris Ware?

There's no immediate lesson to be learned from the studio's/Anderson's decision to include Chevalier with Darjeeling in theatres. You can't really construe the decision as a victory for "online video" (whatever that means), since any merit to the piece is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that Natalie Portman appears nude in it. Not full frontal. She's sorta in a Rodan-meets-Jane Fonda repose. But still. "Natalie Portman nude" sells tickets.

Then there's the question of whether Chevalier actually served its purpose, which was to drive interest in Darjeeling. Darjeeling, at $2.5 so far, doesn't seem to have benefited. Does that mean that cross-medium promotions don't work well?

No easy answers to these questions right now. Despite that, I argue that deciding to release Chevalier online was a smart move. And I guarantee if Darjeeling was released online shortly thereafter, the studio would have a whole lot more than $2.5 mil in their pockets.

Roommates

MySpace's first exclusive series, Roommates, debuted today. Here's the story in Forbes. I'll watch a few episodes before reviewing it, but so far I'm not impressed. Between episodes of Prom Queen, NBC's Coastal Dreams, our collective titillation at lonelygirl15, it's pretty easy to see that professional online video -- far from being some new vanguard of media -- is becoming little more than amateur porn.

FWIW, I like how the soundtrack's immediately available for purchase.

NBC leaves YouTube

NBC, one of YouTube's first big media partners, seems to have ended their relationship with YouTube over the weekend. General speculation on the reason is because Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp, is expected to launch sometime this month.

But that doesn't make much sense, at least not from a publicity POV. If a media company's goal is to use video to drive television viewing, then putting those videos in front of as many people as possible would seem to be the best strategy. On the other hand, if NBC/News Corp is using Hulu as an ad sales vehicle, then that would explain why the YouTube channel was pulled.

Why Online Nation was cancelled

While wondering why CW's Online Nation became the first cancellation of the season, it struck me that there's a tremendous disconnect between watching clips on television and watching them online. The disconnect is all about context.

Example: Online Nation featured what seemed to be an entirely arbitrary selection of weird videos. Like, tourettes-level arbitrary: Dudes throwing sunglasses, playing music with bubble wrap, a faux Britney Spears leg amputation video. On television, these videos have nothing in common. Nothing that is, except for the television, or the hosts' feeble attempts at commentary.

The Web is obviously different. The only way you'd encounter that selection of vids online is if your friends sent them to you, or via blogs, or via searching yourself. In each case, the connection is your personal choice, your predilections. You're in control. The you is the most important part, and Online Nation removed "you" entirely.

Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 presentation

Wasn't able to attend the Web 2.0 summit this year, but per usual, Mary Meeker has made her presentation on technology trends available online. (PDF)

The video highlights:

• Global broadcasting and cable TV revenue = $284B in C2007E, or +5% year over year
• compared to YouTube's 206MM unique global visitors, or +185% year over year (I'm noticing on the graph a slight leveling during the summer months -- possibly connected to summer TV slump? Need to look at more graphs to figure that out.)
• YouTube has been encouraging community w/new features (video responses, edit online, etc), which Meeker says is important to overall traffic growth
• 50 YouTube partners running InVideo ads at the bottom 20% of videos.

Media/Web coalition sets guidelines on copyrighted video

A coalition of major media and Internet companies issued guidelines yesterday for handling copyright-protected videos on large user-generated sites, according to USA Today.

Walt Disney, Viacom, CBS, NBC Universal and News Corp. joined Internet companies Microsoft, MySpace, Veoh Networks and Dailymotion. Google announced their own filtering technology this week and didn't participate. The coalition requires the sites to use filtering technology to block unauthorized uploads, as compared with YouTube's filter, which compares uploaded videos to a database then gives owners the option of removing the vid or placing ads around it.

The coalition sounds like a good idea -- always good to see companies working together rather than suing, which is the incentive in this case. But I have my doubts that a coalition of companies will be able to create a better filter than Google, which has struggled mightily to deploy its own (admittedly) imperfect system. In any case, infringement will continue to be a problem on sites not owned by Google or the four web companies in the coalition. Stop gap measures at best, forestalling a larger change in business models.

Viacom, The Daily Show, Filters and Lawsuits

Viacom's going to try to pull off an impressive trick today: Though currently suing Google/YouTube for $1 billion worth of copyright infringement, the media company is unveiling its own archive of every Daily Show segment recorded since 1999. The site (not up as of this posting) is searchable by both date and topic. It's a Shangri La of Stewart. There's going to be a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of this maneuver, so let's just break it down here:

Cons:

1. Viacom doesn't benefit from YouTube's massive traffic...
2. ...and thus doesn't gain additional viewers it might have gained
3. Viacom pays for streaming costs
4. Viacom pays other overhead, such as maintenance, encoding costs, personnel, writers to write captions, etc.
5. Viacom retains complete control of the product, and doesn't benefit from user mashups, remixes, blog embeds, etc.

Pros:

1. Viacom retains complete control of the product (see Con #5, above). This allows Viacom to control presentation, which is the business they're accustomed to being in.
2. Viacom also retains full in-house ad sales abilities, a further degree of control that will possibly deliver greater margins than YouTube ads (or allow Viacom to offer the ads as part of a package deal for advertisers mainly interested in TV).
3. Viacom doesn't cede mindshare to YouTube.
4. Viacom grows its own web presence, hopefully building the support structure for web-only shows and further creative possibilities.

What am I missing here? For my part, I think this is only a good move for Viacom. But it doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive proposition. The best of both worlds would be to seed YouTube with a percentage of those clips (using YouTube's new filter), and use them to draw traffic to Viacom's own web properties and TV shows. But for that, you need to settle a $1 billion lawsuit.

Vimeo goes hi-def

NY Post has the story. Not sure I understand this move from a business angle, since showing video that's four times as sharp costs four times as much. The Post mentions that Vimeo's user base is mostly amateur filmmakers who will appreciate the hi-def option. If so, I wouldn't expect other video-sharing sites to make the same move for a while.

IntotheBox.tv

Videoblog on Manhattan real estate, including interviews with local residents/real estate magnates and an option to upload photos of your own apartment so others can critique them. Fund while feeling delightfully smug about my own shoebox manse in Brooklyn.

Bait and switch videos

Interesting article in the LA Times yesterday about bait and switch tactics for videos, e.g., tagging a vid with sexually-suggestive keywords, or placing a suggestive image in the middle of a video so it appears as that vid's thumbnail during searches.

These are simple UI problems. Thumbnails can easily be replaced with something as simple as an animated GIF, which shows a brief sequence from the video in question, i.e., one image from every 20 seconds of video. I've seen at least one video site do this, though I can't remember which one.

Tags are a more difficult problem, since they're usage goes right to the crux of user-generated content rights. You can't easily deprecate their usage without either breaking a site's search function or upsetting users. And there's the rub: Sexy tags increase views, as do misleading thumbnails. Until their usage makes the user experience unbearable onerous, my bet's the big vidshare sites won't do much to correct the problem.

YouTube vids in Google Earth

Geotagged YouTube videos now appear in Google Earth.

NBC's Coastal Dreams

As the old business maxim goes, there are three ways of delivering a product: Quickly, cheaply, or good. Choose two. The same applies to NBC's latest online project, a 90210-ish soap opera called Coastal Dreams. In NBC's case, they chose quick and cheap, and not good at all.

Coastal Dreams is a slight and insincere, straight-to-web melodrama that barely pretends to be anything other than a twice-a-week commercial for Stayfree maxi-pads.

The series does a remarkable job of aping the characteristics of successful online programming -- three-minute episodes, barely-nuanced characters, interactive elements -- without establishing a cohesive identity. It's the barest of outlines. It's TV lite. It's what a network executive would recommend if she either didn't understand the Internet, or hated it.

The story, such as it is: Recent college grad Zoe, a budding jewelry designer, flees her ex-boyfriend stalker and arrives in "Pacific Shores" California with her BFF Stacey. The gal pals bunk at the beach palace of cousin April, a model-turned-global businesswoman who's sleeping with her cabana boy. The cabana boy's apparently working for the ex-boyfriend, who instructs him via text message. Dark machinations, all at a breezy 72 degrees.

The tragedy here is that NBC apparently thinks a web series is nothing more than an even-more-vacuous TV show. But the reality is that a good web series has to pack in more information in shorter amounts of time. It can't be melodrama light. It has to be melodrama dense.

Duty as a journalist to read the paper?

Poynter's Roy Peter Clark writes "It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper -- emphasis on paper, not pixels." Is there any irony in the fact that he's making the argument online? That I heard about the article through the online journalism listserv?

Here's the rub, Roy: No amount of guilt-induced personal/professional subsidizing will counteract this simple fact: Journalism's all about inviting people to the agora, and the online agora simply accommodates more people, and more efficiently. Embrace it.

I am Stamos

When character actor Andy Shrub makes a wish to be a leading man, he magically begins to photograph as John Stamos.

How to survive a horror movie

New CBS short films based on the book by Seth Grahame-Smith. In this post-Scream, post-Date Movie era, you think they'd call it how to survive a spoof on surviving a horror movie. Or something equally absurdo-meta.

Hope is Missing

Alternate reality game comprised of videos about a missing woman, leading up to the October 20 VOD release of Head Trauma, an indie horror film.

Joost live TV

Joost to offer live TV in '08. Exactly what the platform needs. Also: Joost will offer widgets allowing viewers to bookmark favourite sporting moments and keep scores - some co-written with content partners, others by the community.

Ron Howard's Grand Theft Auto

via Dark Roasted Blend.

Prom Queen international

Vuguru's Prom Queen will be distributed through French and Japanese media outlets under deals that will  revamp the short Web films into programming for local  audiences.

Netflix screenings hosted by Dana Carvey

Dana Carvey will be introducing 11 classic films streaming on Netflix this Friday and Saturday. The films will be showing from 12am PST Friday to 12am PST  Sunday, here. Films include: Warner Brothers' "Gorillas in the Mist," "North by Northwest," "Singin' in the Rain," "Soylent Green," "The Exorcist," and "Rio Bravo"; Sony Pictures' "Five Easy Pieces" and "The Way We Were"; NBC Universal's "Harvey"; Paramount Pictures' "Jackass"; and 20th Century Fox's "True Lies."

You are the new public access

Justin.tv opens platform to everybody. Justin.tv has always struck me as one part public access, one part Strange Days.

Berkeley Lectures on YouTube

I like this idea. Videos here.

Opening Titles

A collection of excellent opening title sequences in movies. Though I've never seen the movie itself, the title sequence for Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is amazing.

The Shock Doctrine

I only recently became aware that Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, directed this short film for Naomi Klein's recent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein has a piece from the book in the latest Harper's.

Table Cloth Challenge

To quote Peter Vinkman: "...And the flowers are still standing."

MC Pee Pants

A song from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, made into a music video. Infectious. Incredibly, incredibly infectious.

Tape it off the Internet

Haven't used this yet, but recommended by a friend: Tape it off the Internet, a TV info aggregator that provides links to downloads sites, and which is launching today.

MK12's History of America

MK12, the Kansas-based firm that designed the opening credit graphics for the film Stranger than Fiction, recently released their 30-min short History of America. Sort of a re-imagining of our national creation myth. Includes cowboys vs. astronauts. Recommended.