Showtime/Yahoo Join The Shift

Showtime has announced that they will be streaming the season premiere of "Fat Actress" on Yahoo.

Yet another content network sees the future for what it is -- The Shift. Not only are they streaming it on demand, thereby meeting the definition of "Time Shifted Media", they are also distributing it over the Web/IP.

Who knows, but maybe the BitTorrent push of late (shutting down Loki, etc) has really opened some eyes?

jPodder/i18n

I signed on a few weeks back as Committer on the jPodder project. Specifically, I volunteered to help Christophe take the awesome jPodder and make it i18n aware.

Currently, we are working on externalizing all text in English. Once we have completed the task, we'll be looking for a few volunteers to help with language translation.

If you are interested, please contact the Dev list at jpodder-develop at lists.sourceforge.net

Look Out Yahoo!

Marty Schwimmer wants Bloglines to stop indexing his content.

In Mr. Schwimmer's view

"Bloglines' reproduction of my site is a commercial derivative work."

Russell brings up a great point, as have quite a few others. Instead of adding my thoughts, I figured I'd expand on one of Russell's points and use this opportunity to warn Yahoo (and Southwest Airlines!) Based on the screen shot below, Marty might be sending you a cease-and-desist letter at any moment. (Google, sorry didn't have time to make a screen shot for you guys)

A&E/National Geographic Join the Shift

Announced at CES: A&E and National Geographic are joining the Shift and working with Akimbo to distribute their content over the Net. This one has to have the cable/broadcast folks worried. (Although maybe the cable guys are ok w/it, as a lot of consumers of the service will get their bandwidth via cable)

How much longer until I can get the Amazing Race this way Mr. Moonves?

Jeff Jarvis has some interesting comments here

Bit Torrent/Time-shift media commentary

Jeremy has some interesting thoughts about the future of "Television 2.0" and BitTorrent

Reminds me of the guy from Australia. Hard drives are going to be able to store more and more content (and they are going to get smaller and smaller)

This stuff reminds me of all the Harvard Business Cases I read (ad nauseum) in grad school. Sea-change occurs in an industry. Current industry leaders are unable/unwilling to change, for fear of canabalizing existing products/channels. Companies unburdened by the suddenly "old" way of thinking move into the lead. Most of the new "dinosaurs" fade away and die.

In the end, that is how this one is going to go also. Time-shifted media will come to the fore. It is simply a more convenient mechanism for consumers.

The Apprentice: Time Shifted Media in Australia

I ran across a very interesting post by Nick Lothian the other day.

He lives in Australia and does not get CBS. Apparently he usually has to wait months for American shows to be shown Down Under. Instead of waiting, he grabs a torrent and watches it at (nearly) the same time we do in America.

This caught my attention on so many levels, but mostly, it is a great example of a revenue opportunity for the networks that they are missing out on today. I suppose we'll have to enlist Steve Jobs to get folks to a time-shifted media state of mind....

Ring Tone Market Size

Here's an interesting posting about the marketing going on for the Incredibles movie. Apparently the studio has

  • two dozen wallpaper graphics
  • two new video games
  • three dozen custom-made ring tones.

The incredible part of this piece is that

"Kids pay around $1.99 a pop for downloadable ring tones of their favorite songs--a market that could hit $1 billion in U.S. sales by 2008"

Who knew? That is a large market segment by almost any measure. However, the thing that smells funny about it all is this part:

"The kids are snapping up these ring tones," says Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for market research provider NPD Techworld. "They'll spend $2 for a ring tone when they would rather comb the file-sharing networks for hours rather than pay for a 99-cent single."

My take on it is a bit different - if all the kids are into ringtones, how long is it until the popular ringtones are on all the P2P networks? $2 for a jingle seems incredibly expensive, doesn't it?

IM Roundup

Russell has a write-up about features of the "Big 3", AOL, MSFT and YHOO IM clients. Like all of us, he sees pros and cons in each of the apps.

<shameless plug>
One thing he doesn't mention is how to use his IM client to receive syndicated content, whether it be from a blog or Fox Sports
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