On first glance, the latest Neilsen Online numbers suggest Youtube continued its utter domination of the web video streaming space in September, delivering over 20 times the number of streams delivered by runner-up service Yahoo Video and roughly 35 times the number of streams delivered by Hulu.

But take into account that while the typical Youtube stream averages only 2-4 minutes in running time, the typical full-length TV episode Hulu streams tends to be at least 10 times that length - and that while the ongoing Viacom lawsuit has effectively forced Youtube to remove all unlicensed copyrighted material from its site, Hulu offers more widely appealing current mainstream TV fare.
Then the simple aggregate number of streams delivered starts to make a less illuminating metric.

So, program length and mass appeal – two attributes that fundamentally differentiate Youtube from Hulu.  As it happens, Youtube is moving to address both.

Program Length Although a 10 minute/1GB maximum remains in place for the unwashed masses, this restriction has been removed for a select number of approved Youtube Channel partners.  One such partner is CBS, which is at least sticking a toe in the water by making full-length episodes of vintage shows such as ‘Star Trek’ and ‘MacGyver’ available.  Not exactly ‘The Office’ –  but while (like theWB.com and the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ queue) the tentative nature of the move is betrayed by the staleness of the content, it’s interesting to note that major Youtube parner CBS also happens to be the sister company of Youtube’s intellectual property rights nemesis Viacom (CBS and Viacom were spun off from each other in 2005).    What’s also worth noting is that it’s not only full-length TV content Youtube is moving towards – with its Screening Room channel, YouTube is streaming an increasing number of full-length independent films – an entirely new paradigm for the king of short-form video over IP.

Mass Appeal Historically, the prototypical Youtube content provider has been the amateur, uploading self-generated content of the ‘check-out-my-dog-skateboarding’ variety (in other words, amusing stuff but not worth sitting through embedded ads for).  These days, however, the typical Youtube upload is just as likely to come from a corporate entity such as Universal Music Group, the BBC, Britney Spears, or CBS - all of which currently post clips of their proprietary content via dedicated Youtube Channels (with customizable wallpaper, the channels can look almost as individually branded as mySpace, although thankfully less visually chaotic and noisy).
The most-viewed of these channels is in fact run by CBS.

So…  is Youtube looking to compete against Hulu directly?  It would appear so: some CBS clips now contain very Hulu-esque embedded ads - another paradigm shift for Youtube.  With its unrivaled amount of eyeballs, the Google-owned service has already proven to be a potent (and free) promotional resource for the commercial entertianment and advertising industries – so as Youtube now moves from streaming short-form clips and viral videos to long-form/short-tail (mainstream) commercial entertainment, it’ll be interesting to see if their dominance in short-form/long tail (niche) user-generated video will be a factor - and if the non-embedded ad revenue model will give way to more embedded ads.

But for either Hulu or Youtube, one issue remains – the longer the running time of the content, the more necessary it becomes to bridge that pesky 10-yard gap from the home internet access point behind the computer to the television in front of the couch.

Here at digitalmissive, we believe that sooner or later it’s gonna come down to hardware.

There it was. Noticeably forlorn between marketing for Dr. Zizmor skin treatments, ConEdison, and the Apex Technical School, a singular display ad for web darling cnet.com - of all places on New York’s subway, the C train from 186th street to Euclid Ave.

What struck me was the seeming lack of context. I have not seen any other c|net ads anywhere since. Not on the subway or outside.

So what’s the genesis of this oddly-placed ad?

Maybe it was CBS’ recent “digital” c|net acquisition that auto-triggered the new parent’s media agency to spend traditional “analog” ad money on what’s essentially a web-only property.

The big picture: To this day, long held dynamics between brand marketers, agencies, and media outlets continue to dictate where budget flows, and how much.

To that end, despite the significant increase in online ad sales (folk, these Lehman Bros. stats clearly are pre market melt down), brand marketers and their media agencies still are much more comfortable buying traditional marketing spots.

This is where the big budgets go, and with that, buyers’ year-end bonuses.

Hence my assumption: Once c|net became “analog”-owned - swoops - “analog” ad money was automatically allocated for, of all places, what seems to have been a single subway car in New York.

To me anyway, it seems as unusual a choice as somewhat misplaced - as I doubt the subway ad in  question will meaningfully spike “click-thru” for cnet.com.

Not to mention the rather “bland” poster design.

But hey.  Another morning on the subway in New York.

UPDATE

With my recent c|net display ad find, I have started paying more attention to seemingly misplaced ad buying decisions inside hybrid analog / digital media companies.

This one’s with McGraw-Hill’s Business Week magazine and their Technology & You podcast series of which I am a long-held fan.

Tuns out, what started with Intel and Audi branded audio pre-rolls, I am now greeted by, of all things, a pitch for Clinique skin products for men.

How did Steve Wildstrom’s decidedly (great) geeky discussion over the ins and outs of tech topics from Android phones and flash memory, to WiFi vs. WiMAX grab the attention of an ad buyer tasked to sell facial creams?

I want to assume that somehow this checked out as a targeted ad buy; that somehow this all made sense as part of a greater marketing mix.

In the meantime, this day and age, I wonder whether beauty cream products sold during a technology podcast are as smart as giving me diaper ads during The Simpsons or The King of Queens.

I am just not the desired target group.

This day and age, there are better, more targeted technologies to connect me with the right ad.

Why not try it?

I always considered those 3rd party rubberized iPhone protector/sheaths too bulky and ugly: an almost complete negation of the sleek Apple design (something like the pocket protector for the 21st century).   Then I discovered that although you have some leeway dropping your new iPhone onto a linoleum or wood floor (having thoroughly tested out both scenarios within just the first few weeks of ownership), if dropped even one or two feet onto a completely non-yielding surface such as a sidewalk or tiled airline terminal floor, that glass screen is gone, son: a spider web of cracks.

The real cost of the iPhone is heavily subsidized by the service plan contract, so it’s easy to forget just how expensive these things are (check out the price of an ‘unlocked’ iPhone 3G on eBay).  Just repairing the glass alone is a $250 trip to the Apple store, but I was resolved to repair it as inexpensively as possible.  Not surprisingly, there’s a healthy online iPhone 3G parts market out there already, and several days later I had my new glass panel/digitizer and was searching for directions as to how to open the thing up and do the repair.

A few things: on a hardware level, the iPhone turns out to be very conscientiously designed, well-machined, and solidly built – if you’ve ever opened up a computer or two, physically it’s more like a Sony in there than a Dell (which is gratifying, given the price).  Secondly, the replacement process is a considerably more involved than the parts sellers would have you believe: at one point you’ll be holding your wife’s hair dryer on the broken glass/digitizer, trying to melt some very tenacious adhesive just enough to be able to pry it off its fragile plastic bracket.

That moment with the hair dryer was the low point, when I was convinced I’d end up at the Apple store with a handful of iPhone parts in a bag, prepared for the full scorn of the Geniuses in return for a rescue.   But I pressed on, and after some mistakes on my part involving the placement of some impossible tiny and fragile ribbon cables and a bit of poor “glue-control”, I finally just about had the thing back together.  As I put the last microscopic screw in, I calculated there were at least five ways in which I might have irrevocably broken something, but lo and behold… my iPhone came right back to life!

That the phone worked perfectly when I was done with it wasn’t the strangest thing, though: earlier on, with the glass and LCD screen removed and everything in pieces spread out on the dinning room table, I happened to get a call, and the phone rang!  It was a little creepy, actually - like a chicken with its head cut off, or maybe something out of a Stephen King story: “The Smartphone That Would Not Die”.

In an action aimed directly at the iPhone (which now accounts for almost 39% of Apple profits vs. only 30% for all Macs), the EU is now considering requiring that all mobile devices allow easy user battery replacement, but expect Apple to fight the major hardware redesign that would entail.  In the meantime, while it’s gratifying that it worked and it’s nice to know the device is so solidly constructed, I would *not* recommend opening up your iPhone.

Unless you’re the type that builds ship models inside bottles in your spare time, that is…

The New York Times has discovered (or rediscovered) thin computing: a small simple device (or ‘terminal’) with just enough under the hood to send mouse & keyboard clicks to a server doing absolutely everything else.  Initially hyped as a challenge to Microsoft’s domination of the workplace desktop, the concept had its 15 minutes as The Next Big Thing a few years back, only to fall from favor due to network performance issues (while it’s acceptable if an application’s a teensy bit slower over the network, sluggish mouse and key response is a non-starter for most users).

But look at the advantages, though: rather than a $1000 workstation with Windows and Office installed, we’re talking about a simple paperback-sized box and monitor for $400, all in.  Granted, MS Terminal Server (and especially Citrix) licenses do cost, but on the other hand consider that there’s no fan noise, no hard drive failures, no long boot-up time, no virus susceptibility, no user-installed malware, space savings, power consumption savings – the list goes on and on.

And I speak from experience – several years ago, as the network administrator for a small business with half a dozen retail and office locations spread across  the country, I moved a good portion of my remote users to these devices.  This not only solved my problem of how to install and maintain remote these workstations, my client (who was growing quickly at the time) loved the immediate savings compared to the workstations they had been buying (even taking the cost of terminal server licenses into account).  I was a hero; life was good (in a keep-the-trains-running job like network administration, you tend to savor those win-win moments). 

While I chose devices from Wyse, as the NY Times article points out, thin client computing is becoming The Next Big Thing all over again - so there are more and more manufacturers out there.  So many, in fact, that it begs the question:

What about the home market?

What I’m getting at is the return of the web appliance.  Like thin clients, this is another concept from a few years back that never quite took off – the only difference being the addition of an onboard web browser of some sort (maybe the well-received Opera browser, since Sony is already embedding that into its new Internet Video Link hardware).  Because in a world of Hulu, Flickr, and Google Docs (services which, unlike Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, are generally free), a simple little box with a browser and a handful of drivers for peripherals would about do it for a lot of folks, wouldn’t it?

Clearly, cloud computing is The Next Big Thing now – at least Google thinks so, and Microsoft thinks so too.   The potential reliability and privacy issues of cloud computing might be a little easier to take if one also imagines potential upside of being able to radically simplify things for the home user.

So thin computing is back. Who knows, maybe the time is finally becoming right again for the web appliance too; maybe the browser is the new operating system.

Interesting! A number of German towns actually started objecting to Google’s Street View cars mapping the country’s streets and roads.

The idea that there is “someone, all the way from America” to photograph local streets, homes, and people for the rest of us to retrieve online (understandably) raises some concerns.

To put things into perspective, imagine someone from Germany - or any other overseas country for that matter - deciding to send black-colored vans with roof-mounted cameras down main street USA.

Remember, there’s still a considerable number of people that have never heard of Google, let alone used it.

To be sure, on both sides of the Atlantic, plenty seem increasingly concerned personal data protection is being ignored as more information is digitally disseminated and stored outside our reach.

From state-side online trolling and Google’s recent Chrome browser launch, to Germany’s scandal over T-Mobile subscriber data theft, these are only a few examples of what might go wrong if digital data gets misappropriated.

Add to that the latest uproar over Skype’s leak of Chinese dissidents information, and it becomes clear why public trust in personal digital data privacy is waning fast.

Of course, the trojan horse of personal digital data capture has been out the barn for years.

Google and other software vendors have long been aggregating civic data sets, to fuel both innovation and commercial interests wrapped in a single free and “viral” application.

Plenty of us have come to appreciate that and gladly use resulting applications to make our lives easier.

Clearly, if we want our location-based services to actually work and function as we would expect them to (ever sat in a car and the GPS system lead you the wrong way?), we will need to let someone collect prerequisite hyper-local information to improve personalized application capabilities to the benefit of you and I.

Even if things don’t quite go as planned?

In a recent conversation with a European friend of mine, he mentioned his ability to discern from Google Earth images that it was his very own neighbor that had rudely parked in his spot the day his area was “data captured”.

He then went on to tell me about a female resident nude-bathing on the rooftop of an Amsterdam apartment building, only to be camera-captured, you guessed it, by Google Earth.

Clearly, on the user-side of the discussion not everything is perfect in geo-tagging land, but most of us have long and willingly participated enjoying the mostly productive advantages from actual usage of such application and the underlying data harnessed.

In fact I wonder if we could ever again live without?

But brand and user perception differs among cultures. Any company seeking to expand and succeed beyond its own boarders needs to be able to address local idiosyncrasies first.

In other words, what is felt productive and OK in parts of the US can easily be misconstrued outside.

Unless you adopt to the local “lingua franca” of regional acceptability, people will have a harder time understanding you and the products you seek to offer over time.

How much traction is online digital distribution gaining?  Look at what’s going on these days vis à vis DVD release windows…

Hancock Several months ago, Sony crossed a line when it announced it would be releasing the Sony Pictures/Will Smith vehicle “Hancock” over the internet (exclusively to the Sony Internet Video Link device) prior to the DVD release date of November 25.  A good move on Sony’s part: leveraging their unique position as one of the six major film studios and a major CE manufacturer to help drive sales of their new video over IP hardware.

Wall-E At the time, I wondered if there might be similar synergy (remember that word?) in an exclusive release of Pixar’s “Wall-E” exclusively to iTunes/Apple TV before the DVD release, given the close Disney-Apple relationship (when Disney acquired Pixar from Steve Jobs, he became Disney’s largest individual shareholder and was given a seat on the Disney board of directors).   As it happens, Disney/Pixar is planning to release “Wall-E” to Apple TV concurrently with the DVD release, on November 18th  (and will do the same for “The Incredible Hulk” on Ocotber 21st).

The Office On the TV front, last month the well-received Fox/NBC-Universal initiative Hulu announced the online availability of several NBC shows’ 2008 season premiers (including flagship comedy “The Office”) prior to their air dates.  I thought this was a particularly bold move, and was frankly surprised by the relatively little press attention it received (see my take on Virginia Heffernan’s theWB.com article here).

Iron Man Sony Pictures and Disney have obvious options for hardware partnerships (Sony and Apple, respectively), but what’s a Paramount to do?  Enter Dell: the two companies have just announced that for an extra $20, Dell customers can now have the Paramount summer hit (along with bonus footage) pre-loaded onto the hard drives of newly ordered Dell machines.  But while watching a sitcom on the computer is (marginally) acceptable, what about longer-form content such as movies?   Um, no.  Not gonna happen, at least not on any meaningful scale.

For that, you need two additional specialized pieces of hardware:      a television.     and a couch.

Dell Fact 1: Dell and Paramount know the limitations of movie-watching on a PC.   Fact 2: Dell also makes televisions.  It all adds evidence to the rumors of Dell rolling out even more CE hardware and (drumroll…) an iTunes-like service at some point in the future…. but to do that, Dell will have to do two things: retool its workplace-centric brand, and hire some new product design talent  (because I’m not sure Dell understands the benefits of simplicity).

Who knew? A Twitter feed, large on a flashy screen, during a live conference workshop Q&A.

While attending the recent Web 2.0 Expo software love fest in New York, what struck me, those Twitter posts came from audience members right in the same room, only steps away from a microphone and free to pose the same questions to everyone “organically”.

Rather than raising their “analog” hands and voices, they opted to type questions into a digital device.

Afforded seeing everyone’s “twittered” questions come in live, this seemed info overkill, distracting from the verbal live discussion unfolding at the same time.

Later, walking past the Web2Open area (set up for free-wheeling “anti-conference” discussions among peers), more participants seemed tied to their handhelds and laptops then actually talking to each other face-to-face.

All in, to get real people to engage in real meetings was never easy.  With the advent of Web 2.0, could we have added yet another layer of complication?

No doubt, despite its relatively short existence, Web 2.0 (the trend, not its name-sake conference) has had fundamental, positive impact on consumer digital life.

But during this industry conference, the community of evangelist and software architects seemed surprisingly stuck between “old world” idiosyncrasies and “new world” paradigm. (In all fairness though, some Web2Open discussion certainly did take place).

In his most recent testimonial ad,  Sprint CEO D. Hesse makes a valid point. ”Technology is only great when you know how to use it”.

Web 2.0 Expo attendees certainly know how to “use technology”.

But even to the best of us, it seems still somewhat awkward to navigate both analog and digital worlds simultaneously - especially if both are “anywhere, anytime” and “always on” to reckon with.

So, what is the right mix of “synthetic” communications and “organic” conversation at the dawn of the 21st century?

For anyone with interest in the bigger picture behind all of this, during the conference, Intel social scientist, Genevieve Bell, gave an impressive to-the-point presentation.

Wanna’ discuss this further?

Please no analog “old world” calls.

Instead, post a digital “new world” message right here.

Oh wait, why don’t we talk AND twitter ;-)

Does the world need another blog post on the iPhone?  I’m gonna go with ‘probably not’ – but as in most big cities where a car culture doesn’t hold sway, we’re all about our mobile devices here in New York – it’s something to do on the trains we ride and the streets we walk, so maybe our smartphones matter a little more to us here.  With that in mind, here’s the first of a few posts on some thoughts I’ve had about my “leetle friend”…

1. no adobe flash
And don’t expect it anytime soon.  While I’m sure Adobe would be happy to whip up an iPhone/Safari-optimized Flash Player, it think Apple would rather sit back and see if the iPhone can’t instead help drive more adoption of their QuickTime platform for video streaming .  Although Adobe’s Flash is the ubiquitous video streaming browser plug-in, Apple’s Quicktime does a perfectly credible job of streaming video content in the open MPEG-4 format (witness the Quicktime-based youtube iPhone App).
If that’s Apple’s strategy, it appears to be working - content providers are coming around: hit the NBC.com site from your iPhone, navigate to a show, and you now can stream episodes in MPEG-4/Quicktime - despite NBC (along with Fox/Paramount) happening to also be behind the well-received (and Flash-based) Hulu initiative (on a wifi network, the experience is pretty impressive).

But speaking of streaming…

2. no streaming (or over-the-air 3G sync) of audio podcasts
While there are a few nice iPhone IP radio apps out there (Pandora and Flycast come to mind), what about podcasts?  With this shiny new 3G network we’re paying for, it’s a little disappointing to have to wait until getting back to the mothership (i.e. a computer runnning iTunes) to sync up and get the newest ones.

Streaming and/or syncing podcasts via 3G would be a Cool Thing (I’m never satisfied).

However, as is often the case when a seemingly obvious (and perfectly technically possible) idea remains unimplemented, dig a little deeper and you’ll find a business-side issue:  in this case, it involves AT&T - my guess is we’re just all on the internet with our 3G iPhones a lot more than they had planned on, so they’ve been caught a bit unawares… (take one exceptionally well-designed mobile device, put it on one speedy all-you-can-eat data plan, add water, and stand back…)

But there is at least one alternative:  Podspew, a website that AT&T and Apple can’t be too happy about.  While it won’t sync podcasts onto the iPhone itself, what it wilI do is convert a good selection of popular podcasts to simple MPEG-4 web links that the iPhone can then stream via Safari and Quicktime (totally subverting Apple’s podcast model, come to think of it).  It works well and is worth checking out (until they get that cease-and-desist letter, that is…)

At any rate, it’s probably obvious by now I’m on the internet a lot with my iPod , walking around and taking the subways here in New York City.   Which brings me to the next issue of battery life, but that has to do with chemistry and electrical engineering rather than with 0’s and 1’s (remember Dell’s pickup truck-destroying laptop? - that was at least as much about pushing the physical battery design envelope as it was about any manufacturing defects – but that’s another story).

Did I mention I love my iPhone?

Just read David Pogue’s recent article on the Vudu set-top IPTV box with interest, as I’ve been doing some research writing on just this subject recently.

A good first-hand user-level review of the device - however, he neglects to mention the really unique thing about Vudu, which is the peer to peer data transfer model.  Why is this so important?  Because residential internet connections are heavily optimized for downstream performance at the expense of upstream - and when I say heavily, I mean heavily (downstream speeds can easily be five to six times faster than upstream). The thinking (correct, as it happens, until recently) is that most users are browsing web pages and streaming youtube from centralized servers (downstream traffic) rather than hosting any meaningful amount of data (upstream traffic). Not so with peer to peer technology, wherein each client is also a data host (or mini-server, if you will) visible to all the other clients using the system at the time.

So to the extent Vudu becomes popular, it’s going to impact the residential ISP’s soft white underbelly, their Achilles heel - upstream bandwidth.  As an indication of just how concerned residential ISPs are about this kind of thing, one need only look at Comcast, who was caught inspecting packets and secretly resetting clients’ BitTorrent connections to slow down the upstream traffic (and is currently appealing the resulting FCC fine).

So if Vudu hits big, we ain’t seen nothing yet - the potential success of the device portends quite the Net Neutrality showdown.

…for an important message from some celebrities.