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Posted 1:19 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Happy New Year/Millennium!
I'll return to writing items for E-Media Tidbits once we've passed through to the new millennium (next week). Meanwhile, allow me to wish you a happy new year and much Internet-related success in 2001. And thanks for your support of Content-Exchange.com and our publishing efforts, including this weblog. If you like what we produce, please make it a new year's resolution to tell your friends and colleagues about us. Thanks! —Steve
Posted 12:57 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
For Radio, Try Command Audio
After reading my Tivo item (below this), Michael Fioritto of azcentral.com wrote to suggest that I check out Command Audio, a service that provides on-demand audio to users of a portable, walkie-talkie-size wireless device. It's a start, but it's not quite what I'd call a radio equivalent to Tivo for television. With Tivo (or its competitor, Replay TV) you can auto-record any program on any channel. With Command Audio, you're limited to radio content that the company has available — so not everything.
Perhaps we'll get closer to on-demand radio (like Tivo offers for TV) when Internet radios are commonplace. Add a central directory of Internet radio station programming and the capability to automatically record (digitally) user-selected stations and programs, and radio becomes a killer medium. —Steve
Posted 11:09 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
I've Joined the Tivolution
No, I'm not getting paid by Tivo for writing this item. For Christmas this year, I bought my family a Tivo personal network recorder. And so far, I love it. What Tivo does is automatically record television shows that you tell it that you like, so they're always available to watch. I told my Tivo what programs my kids like best, and it records them. I ordered a "season pass" to my favorite TV dramas (The Practice and The Sopranos), so I'll never miss them again. And the best thing: I can fast-forward through commercials, and when watching the news I can skip boring stories and go to the next.
Now, the Internet is an interactive medium — and that's part of the reason I'm so enamored with it. TV has always been one-way; if I want to watch, I had to follow the networks' schedules or deal with the hassles of taping shows on my VCR. What Tivo does is put TV on my schedule, giving me complete control of my TV. I don't spend much time watching TV, but Tivo is likely to be the technology that shifts more of my media-viewing time from the Internet back to television. The lesson here is simply that giving consumers control of how they interact with any medium is powerful. (Now what I really want is a Tivo-like device for radio!) —Steve
Posted 10:51 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Online Sports Content: The View in 2001
Wall Street Journal sports columnist David Sweet this week offered up a bunch of predictions from sports notables about sports media trends in 2001. Among the more interesting comments:
1) Dallas Mavericks owner and Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban said: "We all will realize that the Internet is just another part of our business that we use as a communications and entertainment tool. Like the telephone, mail, electricity, and other industrial changes, if you don't use it, you lose. If you treat it like a separate, differentiated business, you lose as well." That, obviously, applies well beyond sports, to all media.
2) Hank Adams, president of Ignite Sports Media, said: "The biggest change on team sites will be the impact of leagues thinking and acting like true media companies. As they will treat teams more and more like a media asset — rather than a sports property — leagues will use the capabilities of the Internet to integrate concepts, like video-on-demand and highlight packages, on team sites." And that's a profound trend that will negatively affect sports news organizations, and make it more difficult to cover the teams and gain access. The teams will treat media as competitors. —Steve
Posted 12:51 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Meow: Catty Comments About the :CueCat
Quite a few major publishers have signed on to use the :CueCat personal scanner, which you attach to your PC and it scans printed bar codes on ads to take you directly to an advertiser's Web page. I've been among those who've suggested that the concept is lame and likely to fail. Slate's Rob Walker asks, "What Was the Most Useless Innovation in 2000?," and comes up with the much-maligned :CueCat as the clear choice. He writes: "While the :CueCat may well be the least useful innovation of the year (I'm open to countersuggestions), my point is not so much to keep kicking it around as to hold it up as a classic example of an elaborate solution to a nonexistent problem."
What do publishers like Forbes, Wired, and several major U.S. newspapers see in :CueCat? I don't have a clue! —Steve
Posted 11:31 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Book Industry to Amazon: We Hate Used Book Sales!
The book publishing industry and authors don't much like Amazon.com's latest innovation. The e-commerce giant has started offering used books for sale on its site, alongside new ones. While it's a great way to save consumers money and get smaller book sellers in on the e-commerce action, publishers' and writers' groups are angry at Amazon.com for taking money from their pockets. The Industry Standard reports.
While I'm sympathetic to the cries of authors and publishers on this issue, I'm not sure that pressuring Amazon.com is going to do much good in the long run. The Internet is an ideal medium for this type of commerce, so others will no doubt come along later and create a marketplace for consumers to trade in used books. Amazon.com might be persuaded to emphasize selling new books over used ones, but the future will make it more convenient for consumers to save money by buying used books via digital used-book marketplaces. That's the way it is, so we'll all have to learn to live with it. (After all, there's no prohibition from anyone selling used print books.) —Steve
Posted 11:19 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
DRM Vendors Feed Book Publishing Paranoia
The book industry is fearful of experiencing dreadful pirating of books on the Internet — fearful that a Napster for digital books will soon emerge and cost billions of dollars in lost sales as consumers trade e-books back and forth freely. But as this Inside.com article suggests, it's largely paranoia — and a wrong-headed way to look at the trend toward peer-to-peer computing services (like Napster, which has the music industry so spooked). Part of this dsyfunctional thinking on the part of book executives can be blamed on the many digital rights management (DRM) companies that are trying to convince the book industry to buy their wares. (As Jupiter Research's Robert Hertzberg says in the article, "'This is how companies sell. If someone tries to sell you an alarm system, they're going to show you a bunch of news clippings about break-ins and shootings.")
A more rational approach is called for. As the Inside.com writers suggest, "Of course, no one is saying that DRM systems should be completely forsaken. Rather, cooler heads suggest that publishing executives learn to resist Napster hysteria and exercise judgment in evaluating when encryption is appropriate. Publishers don't need to build Fort Knox." Exactly right. Building a "Fort Knox" DRM solution to protect books will only serve to annoy users and discourage the growth of e-books. The book industry need only look to the history of copy protection on software to see that approach to be a certain failure. —Steve
Posted 11:07 PM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Charging for Links: Is It Legal?
According to this report in Wired News, some sites that charge money to others for granting permission to place links on their Web content might be on shaky legal ground if they try to halt unauthorized or free linking by others. Several news and content sites use iCopyright for handling digital reprints and charging other Web sites for including links to the news sites' articles.
Charging for links generally should be voluntary. For Web content sites, it's a nice extra revenue stream. But you can't force others to pay for links when they can simply create a link to your content for free. Trying to enforce payment for links to your content is silly and there's no legal ground for you to stand on. However, and this is what the Wired writer missed, it can make sense to charge for links and other Web sites will pay if there's added value to the link. Many news sites keep articles live on the Web for a few days, then move the stories into paid archives. A content site can charge for links if it provides a link to an article that is guaranteed to be there even after the site has moved the article to an archive. That's an excellent revenue stream for a content site, and a valuable service that other sites will pay for. —Steve
Posted 11:58 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Quote of the Day
Jupiter Research's Robert Hertzberg, quoted in today's Washington Post story, "Internet Companies Shift Strategies to Survive": "I think for most stand-alone Internet content companies there simply isn't a bright future. The best thing most can do is find a traditional media company to get hitched up with." —Steve
Posted 11:21 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Old Media Companies Starting to Think New
Here's good news from E.W. Scripps, the 122-year-old media firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its new CEO, Ken Lowe, is the first non-print leader the company has ever had, according to this report from Inside.com. Scripps has a variety of media properties (Web, TV, cable, newspapers), but newspapers have always been the core. Lowe's new mantra: "Cash from the old media to fund the new media." Yes! He gets it! —Steve
Posted 11:06 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
M.J. Rose: The Year in E-books
Writing for Wired News, e-books expert M.J. Rose takes a look at the year in e-books. She asked 100 of her closest friends and colleagues to comment on the most significant news about e-books from the last year, and make some predictions. I'll recommend you read Rose's article, even though she left out my comment to her. What I said was that "e-book readers" need to be re-christened as "e-readers," and more attention be paid in the coming year to using the new portable digital tablets as reading devices for periodicals, not just books. —Steve
Posted 10:56 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
Some Advice for Online News Execs in 2001
My Editor & Publisher Online column this week offers online news executives some advice on what they should focus on in 2001. I chose this approach rather than the more predictable predictions for the first year of the (real) new millennium. Coincidentally, one of my suggestions is the same as what Jakob Nielsen recommends in his most recent column — see item below this one — for Web sites to start focusing on charging for some content. I swear I read Nielsen's column after I wrote my column. He just beat me on publication date.
—Steve
Posted 2:22 AM US Eastern Time | perma-link to item below
2001: The Year Web Sites Start to Charge
Jakob Nielsen released a Christmas Eve Alertbox column in which he predicts that 2001 will be the year that Web sites start to charge for content — distancing themselves from the free model that has marked the first years of the Web. This mirrors what I've been writing recently. It's not that Web publishers will suddenly stop making content free, but many will work hard in the coming year to figure out how to get their users to pay for some content.
Nielsen writes: "2001 will be the year that website operators come to their collective senses and start charging customers for service. Given that this will be a difficult change (users have become quite accustomed to getting services for free), I do not predict that most websites will be charging by the end of 2001. What I do envision is the revival of the paying-customer concept as a Web business model." Yep. I couldn't agree more. —Steve
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