Looking at Video on the Web with Ken McCarthy

…And all the odds are stacked against you

My friend Rick Goldsmith has just received his second nomination for an Academy Award, this time for his feature length documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America” which he made with Judith Erhlich.

Rick’s previous nomination was for “Tell the Truth and Run.”

That was back in the days when the web was young (mid 1990s.) Rick and I put together one of the first web sites built around a movie. The site looks pretty primitive now, but pioneering things often do. (We haven’t updated it in at least ten years, but it still gets the job done!)

It’s pretty amazing to get nominated for an Academy Award, even more amazing for it to happen twice.. especially for films made on a limited budget and on serious subjects.
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I like the way HD looks, but for the longest time it seemed like overkill.

I mean do we really need digital transmission and HD quality on our television sets? Really?

But here’s a use of HD that is truly exciting: real time transmission of live performances to theater audiences around the world.

A variation of this has existed for a long time (ex. championship boxing matches), but this is a much more interesting use.

The next best thing to being there

The pioneer of this new approach seems to have been the NY Metropolitan Opera.

Make senses.

Opera is expensive to produce and it’s near impossible to take a Met show on the road which means hard core opera fans (and there are few thing more hard core than a hard core opera fan) were deprived of the Met experience.

Prairie Home Companion is another logical candidate

Much of Prairie Home Companion’s charm is the fact that it’s a LIVE show, but of course, a live show can only be in one place at a time.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of fans listen to the show on the radio every week. It will be interesting to see how this works. I have a feeling it will be a hit. It’s great to people watch, eat popcorn and laugh along with a good show.

These days, it’s looks like I’m posting every three months. C’est la vie.

The Internet video revolution has come, saw and conquered. What’s left to say?

Well, occasionally things happen that deserve attention.

Here are two big ones that jumped out at me while I was in the UK:

1. YouTube hits 1 billion video downloads a day

Holy smokes!  There are only about 1 billion Internet users. Does this mean that everyone on the Internet is watching an average of at least 1 video a day on YouTube?

I guess it does and then there are people who watch 50 or more a day. Me, for example. It’s not hard to do.

I don’t watch TV. Why bother when I can call up anything I want whenever I want? TV is doomed.

2. The Internet creams TV

Speaking of the UK, the amount of money spent by advertisers on Internet advertising in that country just exceeded the amount spent on TV advertising. The numbers are 1.75 billion for online advertising vs. 1.64 for TV advertising. More evidence that…TV is doomed.

And this is only the beginning.  Looks like the things I predicted when I started this blog four years ago are starting to come to pass.

Speaking of beginnings, I’ve been going over to the UK occasionally for years but something “clicked” for me on my latest trip and after tidying up some business here, I’m heading right back.

Next year, I’m planning on spending a few months there as I do in New Orleans ever year.

One of the reasons I’m going back to the UK so soon is that a bunch of my Internet marketing friends are attending the UFC fights in Manchester. System grad Lloyd Irvin has a team in the competition. To fill out an already busy week, I’m bringing New Orleans jazz poet Chuck Perkins over to do some gigs in that poetry and music loving city to help open the door for other New Orleans musicians looking for new markets to perform in.

Never a dull moment.

Interestingly, all the guys who are coming over for the fights and the seminar are heavy users of Internet video – that’d be Lloyd, me, Greg Davis and Ben Moskel.

Heavy users of video in our marketing – and we’re all doing well. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Ken

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Hard to believe, but it's been three years since I wrote about a little company called Pure Digital and its
interesting – but dumb – idea for disposable video cameras.

While it was cool to be able to buy a video camera for $29, being able to use it only once was not cool

That's where the hacker came in.

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Can you put your offering in a headline with the formula "Attention (fill in the blank)"?

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I'd didn't have much time for blogging this year.

Instead I spent my free time making and promoting videos.

(Hint: Making and promoting Internet videos pays better than blogging.)

Results: We crossed the 11,000,000 video view mark for 2008 yesterday. No one is more shocked than me.

Total costs to host, serve and promote?

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It seems like a hundred years ago.

Overnight, it became dead simple to copy and post video to the Internet and everyone started doing it.

Copyright owners wailed and gnashed their teeth. Can you blame them? Suddenly, it was easier to copy and repost their uber-expensive products than it was to make paper copies. (At least you have to pay to make photocopies.)

To get the ball rolling, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube.  (That lawsuit is still pending I believe.)

In the meantime, someone got intelligent.

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Well, I have one.

A genuine viral video

How about 1,234,411 views for one page in September – with no advertising, no SEO, no nothing? Just raw viral power. 

Just in case you didn’t read that right, that’s over ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND views for one page in one month.

Now that I am a genuine viral marketing "expert", here’s what I’ve learned…

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We did it.

We took an important subject that the media wants to ignore and put it – and kept it  – at the top of YouTube’s "New and Politics" charts.

As I write this, the video – "The Truth about Katrina" – is the #10 highest rated video in this category of this month. Amazing when you think about what we’re up against – McCain, Obama, Palin, Wall Street melt down, etc. etc. and the fact that the Katrina anniversary and Hurricane Gustav are long over.

The underdog – in this case the people of New Orleans and Southern Louisiana – can win…if the underdog has some Internet savvy.

Speaking of savvy, YouTube is adding so many cool "bells and whistles" that it’s hard for me to keep up.

Can anyone point us to a good online resource (maybe hidden somewhere on YouTubes’s site) that goes into the fine points of creating and customizing a YouTube channel and using all the other new stuff they’re offering (text annotation, automatic transfer to another video, click from video to a web site)

The speed of change in this medium has swamped my ability to keep up. If you’ve got anything to share on this point, I’m sure fellow SystemVideoBlog readers will appreciate it. I know I will.

(Please limit posts to this subject.)

Thanks.

Ken