• "I Am On a Twitter"
    Just seconds before the self-satirizing Old Spice "Man on a Horse" character wore out his welcome, the hyper-manly bastard crushed it this week with a brilliant combination of social media and video. Agency Weiden + Kennedy produced scores of videos of actor Isaiah Mustafa responding in near-real-time to questions posed on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. According to a full run down of the project at ReadWriteWeb, the actor and a crew from the agency invited high profile members of various social nets to pose questions to the Old Spice persona.
  • PS3 Gets Into Next-Gen Video Game
    Microsoft's designs on the living room entertainment experience have always been crystal clear in the Xbox 360. They wanted to run video and advertising here pretty much from Day 1. Sony's ambitions with the Playstation 3, aside from winning the hi-def disc wars with Blu-ray, were less clear. They were slow to expand their video library and have always suffered from a poor content navigation interface, I believe. This week, however, Sony poured it on. They announced today the availability of Hulu Plus for select members. This finally brings Hulu formally into the living room.
  • Viral Video: The Summer Reruns
    Some of you youngsters may be too young to recall a time when there wasn't cable TV around to program against broadcast cycles. Somewhere around mid-June each year the big nets would fall back to rerunning some of the year's episodes. TV viewing tanked and some truly bizarre programming would crop up as summer replacement series. I am pretty sure summer hatched "The Sonny and Cher Show." For TV addicts like me (I had TV Guide memorized) this was the only way to catch up on the second tier shows you hadn't watched. Long before DVRs, VCRs, DVD collections and …
  • At Media Summit Google And Others Look For iAd Effect
    For as long as I have been covering digital media, almost all elements of the online ad supply chain have been wringing their hands over the dearth of good creative. "What was the last online ad you can remember?" was the stock question I always heard asked from professional conference stages. A decade after I first heard this lament, the self-flagellation continues online and now has migrated to mobile. Playing a bit on digital media's own inferiority complex Steve Jobs promised that his new iAd format was going to bring the "emotion" of TV and video to mobile advertising.
  • Web vs. App: YouTube Pumps Up HTML5
    The ongoing tussle over HTML5 usually gets framed as a battle between Adobe and Apple, Flash vs. the emerging HTML standards. Actually the more interesting fault lines may lie on the iPhone itself, between app and Web apps that re becoming increasingly rich under HTML5 development. To wit: the release last week of YouTube's new mobile Web site at m.youtube.com that leverages HTML5 to make a damned fine app that circumvents the usual app download.
  • YouTube Leanback Could Use Less Google and More Pandora
    It's been years since I heard the concepts of "lean-in" and "lean-back" tossed around regularly in digital media parlance, so I was struck by YouTube's use of the terminology to name its new TV-like mode YouTube Leanback. I go way back, you see, to those innocent days of Time Warner Pathfinder and early "push" technologies that wrecked your desktop. Back in the day, youngsters, the pioneers of digital used to use the "lean-in" and lean-back" distinction as if it were a fresh and precious new theory of media consumption. This new "interactive" mode was all still quite new.
  • I Want My App TV: Adam Curry Channels Old MTV for New App Age
    There are loads of video-enabled apps out there for the various mobile platforms. Most of the major cable networks and broadcast networks have mobilized access to some of their shows or clips. As we saw last week hulu launched its hulu Plus subscription program on iPad, iPhone and Web. But most of these apps are catalogs of recent video clips that your rifle through and choose to view. One of the refreshing things about The Big App show is that it is exactly what the packaging promises, a video show in an app. You open the app and press the …
  • Does BP Oil Spill Video Represent the Future of Media?
    Oil, oil everywhere, but what the hell does it mean to the media world? It represents the future, claims In-Stat in a research brief. The video feed from BP of its relentlessly gushing hole in the earth "is now the longest continuous running underwater online video feed in the history of the Internet." I have no idea how that record was determined, but I think the "underwater online video feed" qualifier gives them some cushion there. We've mentioned here in the past that the BP's Gusher-TV is certainly the video of the year online. It may come closest to being …
  • National Archives Makes History Into Show and Tell
    The National Archives is one of the world's massive repositories of history. It is so filled with artifacts and stories that its catalog of items is numbing. No collection is more in need of careful curation and a simple show-and-tell model to bring things alive. And so it is great to see the Archive launch its own video series this week in tandem with Independence Day. "Inside the Vaults" is an attempt to make its collections more accessible to the public and to bring some of the personality behind the institution forward.
  • Magazine TV: Print and Video Teach Each Other Some New Tricks
    For the magazine industry, the Internet has been a challenge from the beginning. When Time Inc. launched its doomed Pathfinder collection of online magazine brands back in the mid 1990s the hope was that this World Wide Web thingie could be just another publishing platform. In truth, almost every aspect of the magazine industry didn't map well against Internet culture and media. The monthly editorial cycle was immediately challenged by the 24/7 Web. add video and you have an industry that was royally screwed by the Internet. Online magazines suddenly found themselves competing with cable networks, online portals and network …
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