Wired editor-in-chief and blogger Chris Anderson writes a great post on exploding TV, with more promised.
Long Tail TV
TvI spent a few days at CES in Las Vegas last week, mostly to get an impressionistic sense of the hot categories in consumer electronics. Aside from the freakish, seventh-seal scene of snow on the Strip and way, way too many huge plasma flatscreens, what struck me most was the explosion in innovation around freeing TV from its distribution shackles.
As your thumb crawls through your several hundred digital cable channels, TV may appear anything but shackled. Yet it is. What seems like everything imaginable is instead a very thin slice on the video world. The existing channel structure mostly rewards focused programming with enough depth to fill a 24/7 window every day of the year. So the DIY channel and History en Espanol now pass muster, but the Halo 2 Physics Hacks channel does not. An acceptable loss, you say? How about last year's great season on Bravo, long ago overwritten by your DVR to save space?
Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything. TiVo may have helped by at least taking the tyranny of time out of the equation, but we are nowhere near the iTunes model of being able to download everything ever made, anytime.
There are several reasons for this. First, TV has some gnarly rights issues. Content is locked up in all sorts of ways, starting with broadcast network carriage agreements and finishing with syndication. Then there are the costs of streaming high-quality video, which amount to about $2 per hour. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the small matter that most TV is free to viewers, subsidized by advertising. It's not clear how to make downloaded video a good medium for advertising, given that you can't know in advance when it will be seen and TiVo-trained viewers are getting all too good at ad-skipping.
At CES a host of companies were showing and talking about ways to get around these problems, extending the celestial jukebox model to IP TV through subscriptions, pay-per-view or some form of advertising support yet to be developed and made skip-proof:
* TiVo announced that it was shifting its focus from bundling deals with cable and satellite companies to delivering video from the web, including movies on demand from Netflix.
* Microsoft discussed its own progress in developing its Media Center 2005 system into an IP TV platform that any content provider could use to distribute their own wares.
* Akimbo, another TV-over-the Internet company, continued to build its library of streamable video and discussed its strategy to be available on Media Center PCs in addition to its current dedicated DVRs. I also spoke to executives at Vidmark, a new company still in stealth mode, which has similar plans (details when they decloak).
* Meanwhile iFilm and AtomFilms are offering more and more streaming video and short films, including iFilm's brilliant Viral Video service.
* Yahoo! and Google are launching video search services on the route to delivering IP TV of their own.
* Then there's Blog Television
longtail.typepad.com
I'll be blogging more tomorrow about what Long Tail TV might look like once these companies get traction. But while you're waiting, here's a teaser in the form of Jeff Jarvis explaining "How to Explode TV News in Four Easy Steps".
How to explode TV news in four easy steps
Try this:
1. Slice.
Cut up your shows into stories and put them all online.
After you air a story, it's fishwrap. Nobody can see it. If they missed it, well, that's tough for them. Is that any way to treat your public? Well, you don't have to anymore.
You should put up every story you do -- and not just as a stream but as files that the people can distribute on their own.
You can still make money on this -- in fact, you'll make new money: Put ads on the video; track those ads; and tack on a Creative Commons license that says people can distribute the video but cannnot muck with it. And you'll find something magical will happen: Your audience will market your product for you and distribute it for you and it won't cost you anything more. It's free money, damnit. Tell that to your stockholders.
And while you're at it, take your script for the segment and associate it with the video as meta data (that is, post it on a blog with a link to the video) so people can find your stories on search engines and then watch them.
This means that people who really want to see your stories and are interested in them can now do so. We're no longer captive to your schedule and your selection; we can watch what interests us. We are in control.
The result: You will get a more interested and involved audience. You will get a bigger audience. You will get more people who will like what you do and start watching your old-fashioned shows. You will benefit. We will benefit.
If you really care about informing the public -- which, of course, you do -- then this is the first step to doing it a new and better way.
2. Add.
You have more material for every story you do: I've seen how much goes into a 3-minute piece and how much is left out.
Now in most cases, I do think that stuff that's cut is extraneous to most people.
You're right to edit and package. Keep it up.
And in the early days of online when news people thought this medium was all about getting more time to tell longer stories with more stuff and another chance to show off cute writing, I screamed in protest: No, your stories are already too long anyway. Find the nearest period!
But for those who are intensely interested in a story or who want to look deeper into what we say, why not put up all the rest of your material? Why throw it away? Put up entire interviews and do it in chunks so people people link directly to one piece or another and, in essence, put up their own remixes. Show the world your great reporting.
If you're doing your job right, this will help your credibility and reputation, for most people will see that you really did pick the right stuff and did tell the story well.
More important, you enable people who need more information to get it. And that is our job, isn't it?
3. Link.
It's as simple as that: Link outside of your own echo chamber of a newsroom. Link to your competitors and show what they did on stories -- stories you did better, stories you didn't do. Do not assume we are your captive. Assume we are smart and want to be informed and want to find the best reports we can. Also assume that we are a thinking public and we want to see and hear different perspectives on a story so we can decide what we think. So help us. We'll appreciate it.
Link to your competitors. It will be good for you. It will make you want to do better jobs on stories than they do.
4. Listen.
Listen to the people you used to call your audience but should see as your equals.
The next time bloggers suggest a fact of your may be wrong, CBS, listen to them. Quote them. Look into what they say. Thank them. Learn your lesson, huh?
And it's not just about fact-checking your ass. It's about knowing that your former viewers have something valuable to say. At first, it's just about quoting their words.
But you know that it won't be very long before we're all equipped with cameras and we'll all be witnesses to our 15 minutes of news. The wise news organization will create an easy way to collect and remix and redistribute all that. Wouldn't you like to have eyewitness video from the heart of a new story? Recognize that anyone can be a reporter. Anyone who sees and reports news is a reporter. So widen your world. Listen. Quote. Make your public a star alongside your anchors.
: When you've done all that, you've turned news into a conversation.
You've turned the spotlight away from the anchor -- the mere personality who got you in trouble -- and you turn it onto the news itself, where it belongs.
You've engaged the people you used to call your viewers, who used to just sit there but have since started walking away, into the news.
You've made anchors what they should be: supporting players, second bananas. (And you've saved yourself a helluva lot of money along the way.)
And you've informed the public. Isn't that what news is about instead of an anchor's fame?
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