Content Decoded

On the first day of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sketched out a short-term vision of the future of TV viewing that will (unsurprisingly) have Microsoft at the center of it.

Via Microsoft.com:

Subscription TV services, powered by Microsoft Mediaroom 2.0, will take viewers where they haven’t been before by extending TV experiences across multiple screens, including the PC, TV and mobile phone. The Mediaroom software supports whole-home digital video recording, on-demand capabilities, access to both operator-hosted content and Internet TV, and interactive applications. Mediaroom 2.0 combines client software with cloud-based services to provide viewers with access to a world of great content on the big flat screen in their living room, the PC in their office, and even the smartphone in their pocket.

“Our strategy with Mediaroom is to combine the power of client software and cloud-based services to greatly enhance the way consumers experience digital entertainment,” says Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president for the TV, Video and Music Business at Microsoft. “We want to make it easier for consumers to find and discover great content, to watch, listen and engage in new ways, and to do so anywhere and on any screen. Mediaroom 2.0 is a key milestone in our strategy, providing the software platform to power operators’ service clouds to reach more screens, and more people, with more content than ever before.”

While the original version of Mediaroom enabled services to be viewed on TV set-top boxes and on Xbox 360 game consoles, Mediaroom 2.0 alleviates the need for operators to deploy redundant systems, allowing them to expand the reach of their television service to include Windows 7-based PCs via Windows Media Center, Web browsers on both Macs and Windows-based PCs and, in the future, compatible smartphones. Mediaroom 2.0 also gives TV service operators the ability to reach beyond their managed IPTV networks, extending their television services to their unmanaged broadband networks. As a result, operators have the ability to offer content from a vast number of television and Internet sources, and deliver it to more viewers in more places than ever before.

All of this gives people more freedom in where and how they access their entertainment, while also providing a familiar, consistent experience. For example, subscribers could start watching a show on one screen and finish watching it on another. They could also build a video queue on a smartphone and watch the content later on a TV or PC. While traveling they could watch a recorded TV program on a smartphone and later watch an on-demand feature film in HD on a laptop all via Mediaroom 2.0 enabled TV services.

The future of content is certainly about making it easier for consumers to find and discover great content; to watch, listen and engage with TV in new ways; and to do so anywhere and on all the screens of their lives. The actual device will become less important – we will simply expect a seamless content viewing experience with centralized content, DVR anywhere, on-demand features and interactive applications that can flow from screen to screen on any device. iPTV screen in the living room, smartphone on the subway, laptop in the garden….

This amazing data visualisation has been doing the Internet rounds recently and it’s definitely worth including as an opening 2010 post to highlight just how much content gets created online everday, (that and the fact that I’m a sucker for data visualisation?!).

Fact:

45 million Facebook status updates a day

5 million tweets per day

3 million Flickr photo uploads per day

For more thrilling and mesmerising educational insights I suggest you check out Online Education – the stuff they don’t teach you in college.

The picturesque, if somewhat storm-weathered, town of Dingle in the most south western peninsula of Ireland was the backdrop to Saturday night’s world-first showing of Intune Technologies’ laser-based next-generation network (NGN) technology.

In the front foyer and backrooms of Benners Hotels on Main Street, Dingle, locals and visitors could watch a live, high definition transmission of a rare performance of Snow Patrol and an extended entourage of Irish musicians (16 in total!) from St. James’ Church across the road.* Those with iPhones could also watch the show without any of the usual lags or video outages.

The broadcast was delivered over an optical burst packet switched fibre network, which came through on its promise of uninterrupted, premium quality content – something that has been unachievable before now. The implications are massive for future content delivery.

Just consider the traffic generated by the BBC iPlayer – the iPlayer generates 20-25% of UK (pop 60M) Telecom Traffic after two years from only 1.5m subscribers in 2008.

With Intune Networks Technologies underpinning the next-generation web, humans’ addiction to video will grow exponentially, with digital content multiplying by a factor of 10 over the next five years to take the volume into Zetabytes.

* I was lucky enough to have a seat in pew no.4. in a total audience count of 60 – an amazing Saturday show in The Other Voices Series, due to be shown on RTE from Wednesday Jan 14th 2010.

Ever since I first came  across digital artist Jonathan Harris’ project, We Feel Fine, (flashbacks to gushing blog post praising Harris & buddy Kamvar), I’ve signed up to the Jonathan Harris fanclub.

His recent work, World Building in a Crazy World, is another exquisite addition to the Number27.org portfolio, if only based on the premise that Harris once again causes to stop, ponder and wonder where are we headed, (and even more specifically, where is digital content headed).

After five years of living in Fort Green, Brooklyn, Harris decided to head for the hills of Oregon to take a fresh perspective on the current digital world and what that world’s future could be. The resulting series of vignettes are, as Ed Cotton of Influx Insight put it “a great reminder that it’s often smartest to take the opposite point of view and to value people’s intelligence and ability to engage in things with a deeper meaning.”

Here, here to appealing to the highest common denominator.

In the real-time digital world of 140 Twitter characters, 550 Facebook friends, and a never-ending stream of conversations, tools, “new features” and endless conferences, are we as digital natives loosing sense of what it means to be engaged in deep and meaningful interactions? As marketers, can we really claim to truly engage consumers in experiences that are enriching?

Please read the digital philosophers’ thoughts on ideas (or “city ideas” as he puts them) and consider a little trip to the country side for some real idea generation. Oh, how nice to be still in thought.

I remember watching the TV reports depicting the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago. I wonder how the world would have reacted, had we had the ability to share our thoughts digitally.

On this epic anniversary, traditional media is taking second place to social media, with Twitter successfully capturing a global sentiment.

Twitterwall displays Twitter messages which are using the hashtag #fotw on a virtual East Side Gallery. The aim of the project is to share thoughts on the fall of the wall as well as to focus on “which walls still have to come down to make our wold a better place”. The page was blocked in China after nearly 2,000 web users in the country left messages on the wall.

To prevent spam, users can only post up to five messages a day. Additional camera icons on the wall can be clicked to view some of the 1,000 huge styrofoam dominoes painted with messages of peace by students, celebrities and politicians, which were toppled on Monday’s nights celebrations.

What I love about Twitterwall  is the graphic of the with the overlying images and text, which literally wraps the wall with human sentiment. So much like Berliners wrote messages on the Berlin Wall decades ago, people from all over the world are now getting to write their own messages on this social media Berlin Wall.

Looking to the future, I predict more free-standing web destinations that will mash a live twitter feed with other content forms to tell a story in the format that does it most justice.

eBay Cook Banner Ad

When it comes to grabbing people’s attention online, banner ads have never exactly had the easiest job. But, things are starting to heat up for the skyscraper, leaderboard and rectangle.

San Francisco’s Goodby Silverstein & Partners has put rich media banner ads in the “content spotlight” in its recently launched “Come to think of it, eBay,” campaign.

Tasked to reinvent eBay’s image from the place to go for flea market finds to a destination for everyday purchases, Goodby uses banner ads specifically targeted to areas popular among eBay users, such as cooking, fashion and music, to bring to life eBay finds curated and demonstrated by experts. Rather than simply “broadcasting” the message through text and visuals, the ads, like this in-banner cooking show starring San Francisco chef Mark Sullivan, who makes Moroccan spiced chicken from start to finish, actually demonstrates the benefits of eBay shopping and brings them closer to something they actually care about – cooking. During the cooking lesson, users can click on the items in the ad and be taken directly to an eBay site where they can purchase the items.

Kudos to Goodby for its series of banner branded utilities, which have successfully transformed the boring banner ad into an engaging content-driven eBay interaction.

P.S. As part of its campaign for users to really experience that power of the eBay marketplace, eBay is moving from the virtual to the real world this holiday season, conducting a 12-city tour with a Mobile Boutique, as well as a pop-up retail spot in Manhattan to showcase the breadth and depth of items found at the online site. Check out eBay’s Holiday microsite to learn more.

Businesweek on why Apple’s Tablet is the future of digital publishing. This mythical device is said to flatten content – allowing users to read books, watch news and listen to music all via a single device. Apple has indeed filed a patent for what looks like could be a future evolution or an amalgamation of the iPod, Kindle, Nook and PC. The rumor mill is abuzz with news that Apple will launch this new device next year. Hold on to those APPL stocks, ya?

News of Disney unveiling a new technology codenamed KeyChest elicited mixed opinions by WSJ readers. The technology instantly provides access to content (movies, TV Shows etc) on any participating service (digital download store, mobile-phone provider, or on-demand cable for example) when a purchase is made.

CondeNast launced an E-Reader for the iPhone. Starting with GQ (the magazine has done well this year and has an iPhone-savvy audience) Conde Nast expects to roll out other magazines at a $2.99 pricepoint.

Adobe Air to take a stab at defining the future of digital news by offering news through its AIR apps. If you are interested, watch this 71 minute video.

This week’s POV on the state of content is penned by Rick Liebling, an industry thought-leader I personally admire and look up to.

Rick Liebling is the Global Director of Client Management at  Taylor, a marketing communications agency.In this post he talks about the need for innovation and integration within existing content formats. Read on!

I think a lot of the conversation regarding content today revolves around platforms, distribution channels, digital v. analog and asynchronous v. live. These are all important issues, but at the heart of it they aren’t as important as the actual content. I think this is particularly true when it comes to something like print magazines.

I love magazines for many reasons. Convenient, portable, relatively inexpensive, targeted. And yet magazines are losing out to the web because, well, because it’s easier to read the content online? Hmmm, not sure about that. Pretty tough to read a magazine from your computer on the beach or on the train. Perhaps the challenges the publishing industry is facing are rooted in something else.: quality of the content.

Over the past several months I’ve read cover story feature interviews of Daniel Craig, Clive Owen, Gerard Butler, Eric Bana and Hugh Jackman.  The format for all of them was pretty much identical: Describe the restaurant where the author meets the actor, with a brief mention of the food consumed; a brief backstory on their childhood and then off to do something that shows what regular blokes they are. None of these guys seemed particularly daring, dashing or dangerous – all things they are quite adept at playing on screen. But it’s not just the carefully controlled interview. Out of 12 issues, how many times can Men’s Health trumpet “the ultimate ab blasting workout?” Apparently 10 or 11 times per year.

And while the copy often lacks imagination or style, the art is even less compelling. When was the last time you saw anything even as remotely challenging as what George Lois was doing for Esquire in the 1960s? As the magazines all fight for the same handful of Hollywood stars to grace their covers it gets harder to tell one publication from another.

Are there still good books out there, still talented editors, writers and photographers? Absolutely. But many have fallen into a rut of safety and herd mentality, leaving the daring work to smaller niche pubs like Stop Smiling or Monocle. It’s time to stop running cover shots by focus groups or committees and time to start letting crazy mad men like Hunter Thompson or literary iconoclasts like A. J. Liebling (no relation) go off on flights of fancy.

Uncompromising. Unexpected. Unconventional. Bring these back to magazines and the readers just may come back as well. Or maybe it calls for something even more radical. Perhaps a completely different approach to combining content along with advertising could create an entirely new business model. What if magazines looked to partner with content creators and advertisers to create a completely integrated publication? What might that look like? Let me lay out an example:

Start with a magazine like the previously mentioned Esquire. It appeals to an upscale, sophisticated man who is interested in fashion, women, luxury items, travel, etc. Now, add the content in the form of critically-acclaimed television show, Mad Men. The issue would include interviews with Sterling Cooper’s Don Draper, a Women We Love feature on Joan (neé Holloway) Harris, a look at the summer home of Bert Cooper and original fiction from Ken Cosgrove, just to name a few.

From an advertising standpoint, issue exclusivity could be worked out with the television advertisers of the show, along with broadcaster AMC and regular Esquire advertisers that fit in with the thematic. Could Esquire do this 12 times a year? No, but think of the buzz that would be created once a year as they did this with a hot TV show, or the latest Bond film. I’m sure there are dozens of reasons why something like this wouldn’t work, and the people who are willing to watch publications fold will tell me what those reasons are. The point is, there are opportunities out there for those brave, bold or crazy enough to try them out.

Folio magazine interviews The Economist Publisher Paul Rossi on the  growth  that the magazine has continued to seen. Rossi highlights The Economist’s strict adherence to the core brand mission, premium product value and innovation as key strategies that help The Economist stay ahead of the curve.

Adage reports on Warner Music’s new approach to packaging music for advertisers. In a partnership with Outrigger Media, Warner seeks revenue-sharing deals “in the hope that brands embrace music videos as a high-end advertising vehicle” (via ypulse.com)

Tyler Brule disses Twitter in his op-ed for the Financial Times.  For the brilliance he has shown with Moncole and Wallpaper, it’s a shame that Brule is still wrapped in old-world / old-media thinking.

James Andrews at Fast Company writes about the idea of socially networked content and expounds on why TV and Film need social media to ensure its success.