Last week, I quipped about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

The more I think about this though, the new presidential over-the-top social viral video strategy brings up some interesting questions:

For starters, as the new administration is keen to leverage the benefits of ubiquitous online video distribution, what keeps the public from possible Obama video fatigue? 

As of today, we are in week five of the elect-president’s weekly video address and already audiences are dropping off faster than a second rate soap opera could on broadcast TV.

As of writing this post, the new administration’s first video address posted to YouTube on November 15 generated 247,600 average weekly video streams.

However, for Mr. Obama’s more recent weekly messages, viewer attention declined noticeably.

Videos published to YouTube in week three and two generated only 174,805 and 115,106 streams respectively - that’s as much as 46% fewer streams delivered compared to Mr. Obama’s first weekly video address.

But then again, last week’s video addressed the nation’s pressing issue of steadily raising job losses, as a result garnering a record 445,613 streams in only seven days. 

Clearly, subject matter matters as audiences have an acute understanding of what they deem important enough to log on, view, and listen repeatedly. 

The other thought I had, the idea of a regular viral presidential video address will capture eyeballs and minds not just among US audiences, but also around the rest of the connected globe.

By design in and outside of YouTube, Web video by nature is shared freely and abundantly. Mr. Obama’s taped messages make no exception.

Thus, from East to West, North and South, the first of these weekly video messages are likely spreading globally and virally as we speak.

Does that mean Germany’s Chancelor Angela Merkel will soon start her own weekly video campaign?

Are any regular video posts forthcoming from the heads of state in France, the UK, Iran, or Iraq?; prepared to deal with the resulting online feedback of citizens everywhere chiming in?

Interestingly, as little as ten years ago all of this would have been unimaginable.

YouTube and its ample offspring of amateur video snack sites simply didnt exist. Neither did the prerequisite broadband lines, nor PCs with processors fast enough to make Web video fun.

Fast forward, in one swoop the US presidential web video address legitimizes how far we have come in democratizing media in the past years.  

This one’s for the history books.

Rather than trying to avoid (undesireable) discourse and debate, the new White House resident seems to signal honest interest in point-to-point dialogue versus the age-old hub-and-spoke system of commercial journalism. 

The question remains whether the idea of open viral dialog can help jointly create something better down the road. 

Or is the Web’s innate capability of cheap and ubiquitous distribution to and by all merely a zero-sum game?

Well, history books might tell.

This doesn’t happen every day.

Rene Obermann, the Deutsche Telekom CEO himself, just pinged me, inviting me to connect to his LinkedIn profile. 

Now, two things came to mind instantly: Who else at DT got pinged? And why so late at night?

As to the former, it seems fair to assume the same invite went out to 200,000 or so of my other Deutsche Telekom colleagues around the globe.  (Because, although a Deutsche Telekom employee, I am certainly not close enough to Mr. Obermann to qualify for a personal one-on-one invite to his social network. More about this later).

As to why so late at night, myself in New York right now, my Blackberry took notice of the invite to connect to Mr. Obermann at a surprisingly late 10:43 PM EST.

Which means someone in Germany - where DT’s HQ resides - got up rather bright and early (4:43 AM to be exact), to get this out to me.

So what does this all mean?

A)  No doubt, when the top executive of a multi-national company pings you via LinkedIn, you know Web-based social networking has hit mainstream.

That’s a good thing I suppose. (Even when you know, it is his PR team that drives the initiative).

B) Driving traffic worth 200,000 individuals (at least potentially) towards a single social network doesn’t happen every day. Not even at such a popular site as LinkedIn has become.

On balance though, I don’t think they’ll mind.

C) My guess is more messages will be forthcoming from my CEO; presumably all via internal PR, all DT-related I suppose, and designed to induce informal dialog, outside corporate walls and a T-branded environment.

Whether this is going to work, let’s see. But I am certainly smitten by this new openness permeating not just inside DT’s CEO office, but in many other places these days.

Then I got really curious.

What if all the CEO’s of other leading European telecom giants have long been on LinkedIn, and I just didn’t know.

Could Rene be late in this, merely following and not leading his peers into the nebula of Web 2.0 ?

Well, turns out, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard himself is currently not on LinkedIn. But the company maintains a corporate profile, so far with 556 FT employees auto-grouped by LinkedIn under the corporate umbrella.

Telecom Italia Franco Bernabe is indeed on LinkedIn, but so far with zero connections. What went wrong there?

Then there is BT CEO Ben Verwaayen. Yes, Ben does maintain his personal LinkedIn profile. Even better (little did I know), we are only two degrees removed. 

Tuns out, his profile page only shows a single connection so far. And the one connection separating Ben and I is someone with 500+ connections. Hardly a quality contact, I suppose.

And how about closer to (my) home, the US? Are the leading US telco CEOs populating LinkedIn?

As of my writing these lines, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is curently not present with a profile.

Neither is Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. 

Either they (and their PR team) haven’t gotten to it, I am thinking, or they (and their PR team) found it simply not worth their while. Who knows?

Backt to Rene Obermann, unlike his LinkedIn telco CEO peers, he publicly distributes a Gmail address, and has set his profile to allow insight into who else is connecting to him at any time.

This seems to signal a level of engagement interests way above and beyond his telco CEO peers.

But upon my last check (12:03 AM EST), his public LinkedIn profile shows a mere eight connections.

While not overly impressive, heed the time difference, folks. I suppose most of my colleagues haven’t had a chance to accept the invite as they have literally yet to wake up to their CEO’s surprisingly early morning ping.

OK. I admit. I am pretty psyched about president-elect Barack Obama’s recent commitment to video-taping the weekly Democratic radio address.

Psyched because it seems much more than a simple “move-over-radio” battle cry; more than just postulating the World Wide Web as the latest of many presidential (one-way) bullhorns available.

For one, the “YouTube”-ization of the weekly Democratic radio address means that a rather arcane political messaging system is coming of age.

In other words, the good old weekly radio address (finally) preps to going (legitimately) video and viral and social, in the same way as anyone’s video blog out there could.

In a way (unknowingly) echoing this season’s ABC and NBC marketing slogans, Barack Obama and team invite us to “start here” and “chime in” - but this time outside the very TV broadcasting system that for so long determined what we would see, when, and for how long.

It is certainly nothing new that a publicly elected official is unafraid to engage in a form of political messaging that - once out the door - is no longer in his control.

That’s how traditional TV (or radio and print media for that matter), works. In this the Web is no different.

But it is major that aforementioned politician whole-heartedly embraces the collaborative Web and the truly conversational two-way nature of online video given that this is past his election campaign, and that he is none less than the next President of the United States going social on his entire constituency. 

Recently asked by CNN’s Sunday talk show host Fareed Zakaria about what advice if any he would give the incoming president, Al Gore’s response was simple: “Make more expository speeches. … [the] people are downloading”.

The presidential radio address as a viral video message for all to engage with plays right into that, ups the ante for you and me, the White House versus traditional media.

Let’s see if and how this will pan out.

Have you pinged the president-elect lately?

One of the most daunting technological challenges we face is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the bourgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming media, telecommuting, and cloud computing - and as internet video demand moves from short-form/long-tail/low quality content to long-form/short-tail/high quality content (i.e. from YouTube to Hulu to movies), internet video only becomes a larger and larger part of this equation.

Just a heads up: as of now, the public internet will cease to be able to meet bandwidth demand by 2012, according to an excellent study by research firm Nemertes (if you read just one of the external sources linked to from this blog, make it this one).  Citing independent research from the University of Calgary, the study finds that the three largest US content providers (Microsoft, Google and Yahoo) have already “built out dedicated infrastructures” in advance of just such as scenario - in Google’s case, as evidenced by their recent pursuit of ‘dark’ (unused) transcontinental fiber.

In short, a trend towards content providers “investing in technologies to accelerate traffic to their sites ahead of that on the regular Internet” over higher-performing paid or private “overlay” networks.  Put another way, the egalitarian net-neutral internet we of today will become just the lowest rung of a multi-tiered system composed of competing proprietary networks – nothing less than the commercialization albeit by technical necessity) of the internet.  “The oligarchy, in other words, is devolving into individual city-states” is how the Nemertes study puts it.

So that’s what’s up on the content provider side – what about the service provider?

It turns out ISP industry recognizes the trend as well, and moves are well underway.  Because they lack the resources of a Google or Microsoft to implement their own parallel physical internet backbone data links, proprietary  CDNs (content delivery networks) are the direction they’re going in instead.  What’s a CDN? Through both network optimization/caching software and the brute-force deployment of multiple content-caching servers placed at strategically positioned and geographically diverse locations along the edge of the internet, CDNs are networks designed to circumvent the increasingly messy core of the publicly routed internet to provide the higher bandwidth, lower latency and increased scalability required to meet the challenges of the future.  The third-party wholesale CDN market is relatively mature (industry leader Akamai now maintains over 34,000 servers located in 70 countries), but several large ISPs have recently opted to ‘roll their own’: in June 2008, AT&T announced it was building out a CDN of its own using  software licensed by several smaller firms (ExtendMedia, Qumu and Stratacache), and just last week at a conference, I was handed a press release from Verizon announcing a CDN partnership with UK CDN firm Velocix.

Why have two of the largest US carriers now decided to buck the outsourcing trend and create their own CDNs, especially during such challenging economic times?  There are several reasons:

• While most residential ISP customers are on (ostensibly) all-you-can-eat plans, CDN usage is metered – so while the ISP’s per-user revenue has remained largely static, their costs from the 3rd party CDNs they’re currently contracting with have been steadily going up.  This makes the prospect of cutting out the middleman increasingly attractive.
• On a technical level, the synergy of an integrated CDN/last mile solution offers potential performance advantages an external wholesaled CDN would have difficulty matching – and as the last mile becomes faster due to increased presence of fiber (i.e. FIOS) and/or Docsis3.0, the integration of the CDN with the last mile makes even more sense.
• To the extent an ISP is able to build a demonstrably better mousetrap on their own, the quality of that company’s proprietary CDN could well become a primary competitive differentiator driving subscription growth – especially if, as expected, long-form internet video usage continues to grow.
• Unlike AT&T, Verizon is planning to leverage the price/performance advantages of their new proprietary CDN on the content owner side as well, and has already contracted directly with Starz Entertainment to offer Starz content to Verizon customers (in this way, the in-house CDN could very well resuscitate the largely failed ‘walled-garden’ model).

Are 3rd party CDN wholesalers Akamai and Limelight losing sleep?  Probably not – deploying an effective CDN is an incredibly huge undertaking, and as such will be a realistic option only for the AT&Ts, and Verizons of the world.  But for the combined residential CDN/ISP, does being in both businesses concurrently present some interesting antitrust/conflict of interest issues?

Regardless of how it plays out between content providers’ pivate backbones and service providers’ private CDNs, what is clear is that the landscape will likely look profoundly different in five years – the internet as we know it could well become the equivalent of the public post office - while the equivalent of a parrallel  higher-performing ‘Fedex’ internet emerges, for the sole purpose of getting you that HD internet video stream or workplace desktop session you require.

On a purely technical level, it remains an exciting future – but will the incorporation of the internet (and the de facto end of net neutrality) happen at the expense of innovation?

I’ve long been of the opinion that longer-form (professionally produced) internet video will happen on a truly widespread scale only when the problem of getting that content over to the television is solved – and that current discussion of internet video (and how to how to best monetize it) is often based on two false premises:

1. The personal computer will continue to be the primary internet video delivery device.
2. Internet video is about short- and mid-form content.

Such discussions often completely fail to adequately recognize how profoundly game-changing direct access to the internet from the next generation of TVs and set-top boxes will be.  In other words, while short form internet video (user-generated or otherwise) will always be a workplace diversion, the main event has not happened yet - we’re still in merely a transitional, evolutionary phase of the process - a process which will end at the couch, not the desk.

Where are we now?   Several major CE manufacturers are currently offering their first generation of standalone internet-enabled devices (each partnered with one or more internet video services):

Hardware:                                Service:

• Sony Bravia, PS3               Sony Playstation Network, Amazon on Demand
• Roku                                   Netflix, more to come…
• LG                                      Netflix, more to come…
• AppleTV                             iTunes
• TiVo                                   Amazon, Netflix
• HP MediaSmart                  CinemaNow, including others
• Microsoft xBox360            xBox Live Marketplace, Netflix

The problem with the above scenario is that no computer means no web browser, which means no Flash – so each OEM wishing to offer multiple services directly via their network interface-enabled hardware (TV, DVD, PCR or set-top box) has had to implement the interface to each service partner individually – a tremendously inefficient reinventing of the wheel.

Therefore, I’ve long felt that what’s needed is a standardized technical protocol for CE hardware to interface with these multiple video services.  Last week, Reed Hastings of Neflix expressed a similar view, noting that in the absence of standardization, “Everyone’s going to have to do customer interfaces for each device”, and further, that it’s “slowing down the market tremendously.”

While the web standards we now take for granted were developed in the shelter of academic and government agency environments, there’s a huge amount of money (and an equal amount of competing agendas) at stake in the internet video space – so the development of a new standard from the ground up at this point seems highly unlikely.  Instead, an embedded web browser running Flash (and/or Microsoft’s Silverlight) sounds like the better idea (Sony has already moved in this direction, embedding the highly-regarded Opera browser into its Bravia line of network-enabled TVs).

Admittedly, though, web on the TV leaves a bad taste in the mouth – previous attempts suffered from three major issues:

• Bandwidth
• Screen resolution
• User interface

Of these three, two are already solved: most broadband connections are now capable of streaming at least SD video, and increased resolution of HD TV makes web text quite readable. The third issue alone remains: the user interface.  Recognizing this, Hastings predicts a new generation of Nintendo Wii-like pointer/motion remotes to replace the primitive up/down/left/right arrows (and four dozen other never-used buttons) on today’s remotes (interestingly, Apple has recently filed for a patent on some technology for just such a device).

Look for this to be the big story at the CES show this January…

As nice as the device is (and the more I use it, the more I like it), I’ve again found myself once again with a few thoughts on what could make the iPhone even better…

a (ahem) better network In a previous life, I wrote a fair amount of music for television commercials.  Once I was called back to do some alterations on a spot for an aerosol carpet deodorizer because of changes required by legal at the ad agency - in the commercial, the effectiveness of the product was illustrated using a (somewhat silly) ‘odor-smelling wand’ prop.  However, it was discovered that the number of (entirely fake) beeps coming from the prop didn’t accurately match the (entirely real) numbers coming from the focus group, so the spot needed to be reedited – such is the attention paid to truth in advertising and potential litigation.    How then does Apple get away with showing 3G web pages loading this quickly in their iPhone 3G ads?  (I mean, whose little blue Safari browser bar moves across that quickly?)

Good old-fashioned voice coverage is even more of an issue, though - I (along with an informal sampling of my fellow NYC iPhone users) are still occasionally suffering from the AT&T dropped call syndrome, and what’s worse is that despite having all the latest firmware upgrades, I still have to stand in the far corner of my living room to get enough bars to make a phone call from my apartment - and this is a 7 minute subway ride from Manhattan (i.e. not exactly the boondocks).   Even in the middle of New York City, coverage can be spotty:  I recently stood on the corner of 14th St. and University Place (Union Sq.) and had no voice service whatsoever (incredibly, I had to walk west along 14th St. past 5th Ave. before I had any bars).  The AT&T cell network needs some work, at least in the New York City area.

system-wide ‘undo’ It’s a little surprising the iPhone is missing a global ‘undo’ command at the operating system level, but I’m guessing it’s the result of a conscious design decision to keep the iPhone OS as lean and mean as possible (in computer science terms, a global undo requires a certain degree of ’statefulness’, but the iPhone is largely a stateless device).   However, as iPhone Apps get more interesting and powerful, the lack of an ‘undo’ command is only going to become more of an issue (and meanwhile, what if you delete an SMS conversation by mistake?)
One cute idea would be to leverage the iPhone’s onboard accelerometer (which makes how the device itself is held a user input for flipping the display axis and for certain games) - because a rapid physical shaking of the iPhone would make a neat ‘undo’ command, wouldn’t it?  (reminding us all of our childhood Etch-a-Sketch…)

system-wide text ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ Again, a pretty basic function, but one the iPhone doesn’t support.  Here’s a great mockup of how this could work – from vimeo, a video sharing site I like a lot.

axis flipping for the mail app Again, back to the accelerometer – I get a fair amount of HTML emails. While the iPhone does a good job displaying them, it would be nice to be able to hold the device lengthwise and view what are essential web pages with the wider horizontal aspect ratio - as I’m already able to do with the browser, camera roll, and video player apps (and since the functionality is already in place for those apps, it would be very easy to implement).

In general, though, while the AT&T network is a disappointment, the device itself certainly is not – and recent sales figures reflect just how popular the iPhone has become: during the last quarter, Apple sold 6.9 million units, more than were sold during all previous quarters combined. In fact, over the last quarter, the iPhone sold more than any other mobile device (smart phone or not), beating out both the (often free) Motorola Razr in the consumer space and the RIM Blackberry line in the enterprise space.  Further evidence of the iPhone’s success can be found reading between the lines of a recent blog post from a Microsoft blogger concerning the new Office 2008 web apps and cross-platform cloud computing – iPhone compatibility is given top billing, over even Mac OS compatibility.

So the iPhone is a hit - as a believer in the importance of good product design, I’m glad to see it.

The AT&T network, though, remains a work in progress - at least in our neck of the woods.

On Wednesday morning last week, a few more people than usual were probably interested in picking up the morning paper.  However, the New York Times was nowhere to be found at many new stands here in Manhattan.   The new parallel online economy was making itself felt - papers were bought in bulk throughout the city long before rush hour, and now that historic front page can be yours, suitable for framing - Buy It Now for only $99.99.

Similarly, a CNN story this morning aired regarding the online sale of Obama inauguration tickets ,  which are intended to be distributed free of charge through members of the incoming congress (currently, VIP tickets are going for the low five figures).

These two end-runs around the intended distribution mechanism put me in mind of the situation my wife faced earlier this summer when attempting to surprise me with birthday tickets to the much in-demand iMax showing of The Dark Knight during the first week of its release (I know: best. wife. ever.)  It turns out she had been trying to buy them for days via AOL’s Moviefone service , but strangely the tickets (released in maximum lots of 5) were constantly sold out: regardless of how often (or when) she checked, there were just never any tickets available - for that particular movie, the AOL site was essentially broken.  She then checked craigslist and found out where all those tickets went: a thriving business in (drastically marked-up) iMax Batman tickets.  ‘Entrepreneurs’ were grabbing all tickets within seconds of release and were reselling them on craigslist for 3 to 4 times the original price - depending on your point of view, either a complete hijacking of the system by a unnecessary additional layer of middleman, or a shining example of capitalism at its finest.

To someone who’s just paid $80 for two tickets to a movie, it seems more the former - although of course, with the power and convenience of the internet comes the occasional disruptive gaming of the system - so chances are, this kind of thing will be with us for a while.

I still like my internet.

While we’re on the subject of record long tail voter aggregation and its impact on democracy, the unprecedented accumulation of small-size incremental financial contributions during the current US presidential campaign marks another success story for the long tail of citizen ingenuity.

According to OpenSecrets.org, over 90% of an impressive $640 million raised by the Barack Obama campaign came from individuals rather than corporations or entrenched interest groups.

And the bulk of that was contributions under $200.

Amazing what a lot of a little can accomplish in its aggreate value - to the benefit of all.

On that note, for all you digital media marketers out there (opportunistically speaking, of course), the current long tail campaign donation phenomenon clearly demonstrates the significant power of consumers’ take on ”motive and opportunity”.

From digital video and online books to for-pay widgets and Twitter posts, monetizing the long tail of any of these things depends on whether they truly matter to people and their lifes.

Meaning, if “the cause” is right, wallets open up.

It clearly worked during the recent Presidential campaign. What does that mean to future branded product campaign designs?

To be sure, way way before Chris Anderson’s pointed Wired article (re)discovered the right side of the curve for us, something as old, tried and proven as democracy knew to utilize the long tail phenomenon all along; to ensure that all, not just a select few partake in shaping government at large.

So, in many ways, we’re only coming full circle here.

Who knew? Democracy as an ingenious grass-root marketing campaign.

Glad it worked so well this time.

As it stands, this country is about to (re)discover the power of long tail voting.

Not since the 60s has the United States seen this kind of voter turnout. Individuals previously ignorant to the democratic process are expected to come out and vote in what clearly is a historic election.

We, members of the digital technology and media industry, have used the long tail idea gladly and often, at least since Chris Anderson’s highly recognized Wired magazine article about “the few that dominate”.

We have since flocked to the long tail concept to describe how the aggregate number of individuals previously ignored by commercial systems can populate and popularize anything from micro blogs to amateur-produced snack-size videos, or en-gross selling of long forgotten books on amazon.com.

The same “saftey in numbers” phenomenon may now be just what it took to change the direction of an entire country.

While the latter remains a promise until proven, no matter who you vote for tomorrow morning, the former is happening as we speak.

Already a record number of those previously discouraged or put off by politics have returned from their voting duties; young, first-time voters, african-americans, hispanics, immigrants, all joined by millions of others in a common believe that its worth standing in line for hours on end, convinced that the time and cause is right.

Of course our industry’s arsenal of lingo would be incomplete if we couldn’t add to the long tail moniker all sorts of related terms.

Think discovery, collaboration, and sharing. Add hyper-targeting and monetization to understand how much the past 21 months of presidential campaigning have benefited from their first dabble with Web 2.0.

Not to mention the unprecedented number of supporting broadband connections that helped to fuel the national debate.

Still, it is not entirely clear whether any side has gained on the other in its particular ability to leverage the long-tail power of the Internet.

It just might simply be a zero-sum game.

But hey. Who’s counting?

For now, let’s go and vote!

PS: For those of you eager to combine your long tail capabilities until the very last second of the democratic process, go to Current TV and fire up your Twitter and your Digg account.

PS II: To be sure, while both campaigns leveraged the long tail power of the Internet, they also knew that a linear TV feed was still a medium key enough to agree to last minute Saturday Night Live appearances or to buy millions of dollars worth of traditional broadcasting airtime to get the message out. Shelly Palmer’s recent post makes several salient points on the deliberate old-school-ness of those decisions. Be sure to check it out.

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.