For your holiday amusement, this item from Cult of Mac’s Pete Mortensen about the unhinged pundit Bill O’Reilly’s recent rant against…the iPod. It seems that in the midst of a discussion (ahem) of violence, O’Reilly went off on the iconic device. Mortensen offers this transcript excerpt from O’Reilly’s show:
I don’t own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?…I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.
Of course, O’Reilly’s concern about iPods fostering jihadism (is that his concern?) doesn’t stop the host from selling $50 premium memberships to his show, which offer members podcasts of the programs. Irony of ironies, O’Reilly’s show uses an iPod photo mash-up to hawk the memberships.
Business Week’s Arik Hesseldahl tried to make sense of O’Reilly’s tech tirade and just hopelessly short-circuited certain parts of his brain in the process.
I’m a little unclear as to what my neighbor - O’Reilly’s employer, Fox News Channel is across the street from my office - is trying to say. Because there are “jihadists killing real people,” which I don’t dispute, he seems to think that “computer geeks” shouldn’t be making products to sell to the American public like video games and iPods. Is that it?
Ari should have stopped there, because he then goes on to seriously deconstruct O’Reilly’s statement…
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:38 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Ad Age contributing editor Bob Garfield has this take-no-prisoners, interestingly written piece in December’s Wired magazine about YouTube, the rise of user-generated video and the inevitable end of traditional mass-market advertising.
Garfield doesn’t hem and haw about the decline of traditional media and the rise of what he calls monkeyvision, the mass creation of individual videos that show us, our friends, our neighbors, our peers doing stuff.
Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over. “The era of the creepy blue light leaking out of every living room window on the block is now officially at an end,” says my pal and occasional colleague Steve Rosenbaum, founder of video-sharing startup Magnify.net and one of the inventors a decade ago of citizen video. “The simple, wonderful, delirious fact is that people like you and me can now make and share content.”
Garfield also doesn’t mince words when it comes to what he thinks will happen to traditional TV — it’s a “spiraling vortex of ruin.”
Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin. Fragmentation has decimated audiences, viewers who do watch are skipping commercials, advertisers are therefore fleeing, the revenue for underwriting new content is therefore flatlining, program quality is therefore suffering (Dancing With the Stars. QED), which will lead to ever more viewer defection, which will lead to ever more advertiser defection, and so on.
The trick, of course, is how to monetize this new world of video so that advertisers move their $65 billion budgets away from the “vortex of ruin” and toward the Internet. Right now, despite the rapid decline of traditional TV, the massive fragmentation on the Internet is not worth much because advertisers don’t know how to deal with the multitude of ad slivers posed by YouTube, for example. Or as Garfield points out “100 million people can’t be wrong. They can, however, be useless.”
When it comes to user-generated video, advertisers are faced with an even more difficult concept: unpredictability of content. Garfield offers a colorful and a very darkly humorous hypothetical facing an advertiser on YouTube.
For instance, if you are, say, Meow Mix, and you bought ads adjacent to cat-related videos, how surprised and disappointed you might be to learn you have sponsored a YouTube video uploaded by someone named mrwheatley and titled “exploding cat.” Or the one from qu1rk89 titled “exploding cat.” Or this one: “ma907h eats dead cat,” which shows a guy… oh, never mind. As Cory Treffiletti, VP of media services for interactive agency Real Branding, grimly observes of the metadata describing a YouTube video, “Right now it consists of only a few key terms the user selects. And there’s no blank to fill out for ‘cat vivisection.’”
Ironically, YouTube’s main competitive advantage over other video web sites is that it reaches a mass market.
In one form or another, YouTube will survive. And prosper, despite everything, for one overriding reason: 100 million streams a day. “The only barrier to creating a YouTube competitor is that so many people are already on YouTube,” Denuo’s Tobaccowala [Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a new media consultancy] says. “What it has going for it is its sheer size. In a fragmented world, there is a need for community and a need for massness.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:11 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Whoa. Massness? Could the irony be any thicker? The old model is a flaming ruin, disintegrating into nothingness, and what rises from the ashes ’ in the vast, distributed, exploded, long-tailed galaxy of the Internet - is a mass medium? A general-interest destination? YouTube as the new boob tube?
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