www.wired.com

         

It's happening so quickly, the transfer from videos-on-TV to videos-on-Internet-demand (to DVD!). How fast will record labels (and Netflix et al) cop to this? When can I finally get a master copy of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" printed to my own DVD? (Not just joking there, I really do like that vid.)

The trick with on-demand though is you lose the 'mass audience' feel of watching something like MTV, or the community vibe that RES has, unless you have a family who'd rather watch mv's than movies.

Antville, Digg, and YouTube are still the only place where there is any semblance of an mv community online. DVD-quality downloaded vids will provide a very strong, potentially seismic push towards developing more mv-love, as Fimoculous suggested.

MTV, the potentially lucrative player here, still has its brand name, which is a very large draw, but its ability to be on-demand and community-driven is hampered by its clunky, annoying, processor-draining Overdrive interface, and its supremely annoying flv's. (When will Macromedia learn to publish a freaking quality flv player?)

         

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about here.

The technology upgrade is great, but Das Tube became popular because it worked on EVERY computer, using EVERY browser, EVERY time. That is where this, or any, new video service needs to be. Most technology changes happen when (and only when) they make sense to users. If people send their co-workers clips of Jessica Simpson botching a performance, and it won’t play on the other person’s computer, the HD-ness of the image that wouldn’t load is a non-issue.

I think that this is the kind of tech that Google will buy up for YouTube. Like Blockbuster buying up the pay-per-view arm of DirecTV so they won’t get left behind by new technology – YouToogle is the market leader with the big bucks. They will (or already do) have this or similar in the works.

Also, I posted a new Mystery Artist story on the blog.

         

Ack! The analysis is coming too fast.

YouTube can send it into orbit on a mass scale, for sure. They need to make it profitable though, which they probably will with the geniuses at Google. Lesser orgs (well, coms) will probably spring up to fill in the many voids YouToogle (lol) leaves behind, because of its sheer massiveness.

Where this is all leaving MTV, I'm not sure. They're quickly taking a backseat, aren't they? But they still have the caché, in my opinion, to do something special.

Meanwhile, perhaps we'll finally get the mv version of Pitchfork someday (except with legal downloads, as SRO offered.)

And where the hell this leaves wannabe columnists like 30f, myself, and others, I'm not sure. Perhaps with these gals.

         

erm... looks to me zudeo's nothing to do with youtube, and will never gather a community : you can't watch the stuff! it's a place where you can download (big) videos. it's like emule with (big) thumbnails. is there something i'm missing?

         

Zudeo's small potatoes. The big story is that another company will fill in the holes Zudeo's leaving behind (er, Google? Read above^^), and the downloads will eventually come. 2007 will be an important year for music video.

Meanwhile, Democracy is still going nowhere fast.

         

"Meanwhile, Democracy is still going nowhere fast." exactly. quality ain't king.

zudeo is bittorrent (under the hood) and nobody ever gets bittorrent. i tried zudeo like your average joe will - it started downloading some weird shit and then said it wouldn't work cos i had to manually update my JRE. the fuck i did - i was outta there!

kev, you ran the coolest mv show this side of poughkeepsie - why you wax so nostalgic for viacom's ho?

also: who needs the pitchfork of mv's? what do you think antville is? (re: sro - i wouldn't be so sure them download's is always squeaky clean...)

         

MTV is my 3rd parent, how dare you dis it? It seems sad, I know, but that's just the way it is.

Zudeo's not going to work, we get it. But the idea of high-quality vids will come to fruition in 2007. (These are all the formulations behind a very solid column, happening in front of our eyes here.)

Antville's great, but there's money to be made, as 2007 will probably show. There are also people who want to pay their bills with this stuff (ahem).

         

Kev - do I HAVE to choose one of those girls? I guess I'd rather take the pregnant one (who I always assumed was a tranny cause Eddie Murphy liked her, but she must be a girl because she got knocked up) than the space alien married to the former soccer star.

There will be many, many announcements of the NEW high quality YouToogle replacements - but the announcements will mean nothing. Like a Katamari snowball, one of the new sites will eventually start picking up actual steam. The number of users and links will skyrocket and the other HD web video sites will drift off like Podigy links to Friendster pages. One of these services will "win" (and it may not even be the one with the best tech), but it won't be the press releases that decide it.

         

Ah, 30f, you had me at hello.

         

30frames nails it. flv encoding worked so well because it worked on everything. MTV Overdrive had to go and switch because windows media will never, ever in its broken state become accessible to the public. I don't think I've ever watched anything in that crappy format that didn't have to pause and buffer. Quicktime is bulletproof as long as the user had installed it correctly and for my money does the best compression job there is.

But a lot of new media depts just aren't as technically inclined as they need to be, in my opinion, to deal with all of this. Directions going live online was nowhere near as smooth as it should've been. If the day you launch with a bunch of press half your viewers can't get the videos to work, you're screwed. Cause they will not come back.

I haven't used zudeo and can't thusly speak for it. But I will say that back when the Decemberists were on KRS and nowhere a near a major label deal we made that video and realized we couldn't afford to host it high quality anywhere on that label for bandwidth costs. So we legitimately distributed the piece to torrent. I haven't checked it in over a year but before then we had cracked 200k completed downloads of the video.

And ultimately given that youtube cost google dearly and hasn't exactly figured out its profit structure here's what I predict: a subscription service youtube that for a small monthly fee offers hidef of their clips, targeting the devoted user. It'll remain free with it's current standard. flv encoding sucks cause it's designed to be low bandwidth but that's why it loads so fast.

But the reasons 30f states it's why youtube will be king for now - it's bulletproof, no matter the connection or os or browser. And even though it's a cinch for those inclined, most people can't figure out how to save the stream.

         

Yeah I couldn't get it to work. Im betting on the iTV from Apple as a new platform for on-demand HD videos. Fingers crossed...

         

Progosk, I resent your statement! 60% of the time our videos are sqeaky clean 100% of the time!

I responded to some comments about my YouTube article here.

Some of the commentary here is eerily related to my latest rant...

         

while you're here: have you and your partners in crime posted your nominations...?

         

I repeat myself some more here 30frames.blogspot.com.