Social Media Now: What Porn Can Teach NewTube

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors to fail–from competing corporate interests to anti-trust question that may arise (since the consent decree in the 1940s that first tried to separate movie making from movie exhibiting there’s always been a tension that arises when the makers of entertainment content collude to control distribution).

But I don’t see any inherent reason why YouTube and NewTube can’t succeed side-by-side. After all, new media technologies rarely entirely obsolete old ones. Yeah, talkies made silent movies obsolete and color consigned black-and-white movie-making to an arty niche. But books, magazines, movies, radio and television are all still with us 15 years into the commercial Internet era. And the
filmed entertainment business has a pretty successful track record in adapting to changes in signal distribution technology. When VCRs first hit the market in the 1980s the filmed entertainment business resisted, pricing pre-recorded movies at nearly $100 to try to damp consumer demand and protect old business models. Today the so-called secondary markets–television licensing and DVD sales and rentals–are worth twice as much money annually to a company like Time Warner compared with movies in theatrical release.

The dollar volume of the online advertising business today dwarfs the dollar volume of other sectors of the entertainment business (recorded music sales, for example). If NewTube does nothing more than capture a fraction of that for the producers of Heroes, Family Guy or 24, it will be a smashing success. And that success will have no impact on the growth of social media properties like
YouTube.

It seemed yesterday like people were mostly talking past each other with NewTube skeptics wondering out loud about the venture’s functionality, and NewTube believers wondering out loud about YouTube’s ability to compete for ad dollars.

But given what has been announced so far it seems to me that YouTube and NewTube are designed to scratch different itches.
NewTube is all about distribution. YouTube is all about participation. NewTube is Internet media. YouTube is social media. The difference is a question of focus. The entertainment value of TV, however it is distributed, comes from the content itself. People enjoy the leisure activity of watching well-written, slickly produced stuff.  The entertainment value of social media comes from a sense of community involvement. The people enjoy the leisure activity of making, contributing and tagging.

Yesterday I raised Fred Wilson’s question about social media authenticity. Slapping social-enabled functionality onto traditional media won’t in itself transform traditional media into authentic social media. But it may help open new, hybrid distribution platforms for traditional media. The presence on the Internet of traditional media with social functionality won’t undermine the appeal of authentic social media which focuses not on content but on people.

In an otherwise excellent analysis on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote:

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

Arrington would be right if NewTube was all about creating an authentic social media property. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention.

In the discussion of how user-generated content and user-generated distribution will transform traditional media the Net is full of parties with dogs in the fight and the discussion perpetually devolves into absolutes: “We Get It!” shouts one side. “No you don’t,” shouts the other. But for the truly fearless I offer the recent history of the pornography business as proof that professional product, social re-distribution, and user-generated content can live happily side-by-side.

From the days when papyrus was the cutting edge “signal distribution technology,” pornography has been at the forefront of media innovation. In the earliest days of the home video boom, it was the porn business that led the way with semi-pro and amateur content (Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes series of videotapes remains a landmark in the development of prosumer media).  In the earliest days of the commercial Internet, it was the porn business that did pioneering work in online payment systems. Today the pornography industry is larger in dollar volume than the so-called legitimate filmed entertainment business despite the fact that its leading corporate commercial producers face a volume of online file sharing that embarrasses the volume confronting the music business (try a Morpheus search for Jenna Jameson). And an entire economy exists to support user-generated content–from the personal
websites of amateurs to properties like Homeclips which aggregate amateur content.

If only News Corp and NBC can come up with content as compelling as MILF Money or Baby Doll Naughty Confessions, NewTube would really be on to something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media Now: YouTube v. NewTube–Can Big Media Keep it Real?

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?

It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.

But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community that inspires the viral growth of companies like del.icio.us, Digg, craigslist, and, yes, YouTube, be intentionally replicated through corporate planning?

Well, it looks like we’re about to get a text-book test case with impending announcement  that NBC Universal and News Corp’s Fox will launch a YouTube competitor this summer.

The effort is hardly a surprise. For months Big Media’s war on YouTube has been shadowed by talk of looming corporate competitors. Staci Kramer at paidContent had the latest chapter nailed on Tuesday — that the JV was coming together, and that Fox and NBC were soliciting Google’s online and tech competitors like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo with Viacom an on-again, off-again possible collaborator.

PaidContent reports that Fox and NBC video, including material from shows like Heroes and Family Guy, will be distributed on MySpace, Yahoo and MSN.

Also, Terry Semel told an AdAge conference that the new service will be chock-a-block with YouTube-like sharing tools.

Pre-announcement commentary abounds on the Net this morning following the publication an LA Times piece which included this locker room bulletin board fodder:

Google executives’ disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co.

24/7 Wall Street picks up on the LAT’s comment that big media JVs have a checkered history:

The plan is cumbersome and complex making it unlikely to work. Sites like Yahoo! already have a large store of video content and a huge number of other channels, so making content from major media companies stand out will be very difficult. The same holds true for the other large web portals that the venture will target for distribution.

Mike at Techdirt hedges obliquely:

There are plenty of ways the networks can (and probably will) screw this up, but at least they’re doing something.

Whether or not the JV succeeds will, of course, depend on how cooperative the big media powers can be. It may also depend on legal matters–if the big media companies collaborate on exclusive online distribution, it that illegal, anti-competitive collusion? I also suspect that companies in the traditional distribution channels for TV content–MSOs, TV station owners–will offer some push back.

But most of all the success or failure of the JV will depend on the answer to Fred’s question about authenticity. There’s no doubt that users will show up wherever popular content is posted, especially if it is posted at sites with big traffic like Yahoo and MySpace. But will users confer on this new effort the vibe of Internet authenticity? Will users think NBC and Fox are keeping it real?

That will depend on how much Fox and NBC give to users. Success in social media depends on following the Beatles’ dictum: the love you take is equal to the love you make. Will sharing be limited to the friendly confines of approved destination sites? How intrusive will advertising be? Will users be able to make mash-ups even across ownership (say a Heroes/24 hybrid)? If so there’s a good chance that NewTube will be the feel good hit of the summer.

Social Media Now: Widget World

Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.

We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also a producer and often a piecemeal distributor, but now let’s assume a universe where everyone is an MSO, everyone is a Clear Channel, everyone is a Cineplex Odeon; a universe where new channels for distribution spring up quickly, spread fast, and, possibly, disappear just as suddenly.

You can see where this might be scary for big media companies which are heavily invested in distribution channels, companies like News Corp which has big money invested in satellite TV, or Time Warner which operates the nation’s biggest cable TV operator.

In this light it’s easy to understand MySpace’s attempt to cut off widgets it can’t control (which broke into the mainstream press yesterday). Sure, News Corp wants to have its hands around all revenues coming into MySpace. But maybe the company is also concerned about how widgets stand to unwind traditional media distribution channels. After all, the widget they pulled the plug on yesterday was a music player.

News Corp of course is hedging its bets, promoting it’s platform for user created widgets, Spring Widgets. But Fred Wilson followed up all the discussion about widgets yesterday with post about how many Spring
Widgets are incompatible with MySpace. Intentional? Who knows.

One new, potentially disruptive widget launched yesterday in a public beta (public beta is the new official launch). Jaxtr is an IP telephony widget that allows users to connect with other phone callers without revealing
their phone numbers. The company also offers web to phone and phone to web voice mail and text messaging as well as a service which allows widget subscribers to phone in to their widgets loading voice messages.

Sounds pretty complex to me although CEO Konstantin Guericke (co-founder of LinkedIn) showed up yesterday on Techcrunch to try to illuminate.

Jaxtr has raised an undisclosed amount of money from a passel of Silicon Valley heavy hitters led by Mayfield Fund’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP/GM of AOL’s Instant Messenger division and David Ladd, former Octel CTO and early pioneer of voicemail.