Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

NBC is on an online roll today. Not only is the broadcast network unveiling its Hulu.com premium Web video offering, NBC Sports is gearing up for its own debut on Saturday: First ever, live streaming coverage of a U.S. Olympics Trials, in partnership with online sports broadcaster MediaZone.

As MediaZone entered its final preparation zone for its online Olympic debut, I spoke with Chris Ott, Sports Director, about MediaZone’s work with the Olympics and New York City’s marathon:

Last year’s first-ever live Internet broadcast of the ING New York City Marathon was a groundbreaking event, and this year’s Marathon weekend coverage should build on this success, offering expanded coverage and features that can’t be found anywhere else.

At a cost of $4.99, MediaZone subscribers are entitled to watch the marathon live online and relive the experience on-demand for 90 days.

MediaZone garnered 8000 paying subscribers for last year’s marathon, Ott told me. Marathon buffs and friends and family of participants are fans of MediaZone’s unique interactive features, Ott indicated:

Multiple camera views for the most comprehensive coverage,
Live chat with other users for real-time interaction as the race onfolds,
Video comments option during on-demand viewing,
Hot-off-the-press race news via RSS feed.

On the eve of Sunday’s New York City marathon, the 2008 Olympic Team Trials for the Men’s Marathon will be held in NYC as well, on Saturday; MediaZone will also have it, online and free:

Watch free live streaming coverage and stay in step with these elite athletes as they make their way from Rockefeller Plaza to Tavern on the Green.

Just as the runners hope to best their previous records, Ott and his team also aim to build off MediaZone’s 2006 inaugural marathon coverage, setting up for an online performance of “olympic” proportions!

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CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

The knives are out for Hulu.com, the NBC Universal-News Corp. anti-YouTube intitiative?

“I think there’s a snarky desire to say this is big dumb media and this is a big dumb joint venture,” said Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation.

Not here at Insider Chatter! Since June, I have chronicled and anlayzed the impending debut of Hulu.com (NewCo) following first-hand presentations and Q & A with top NBC Universal execs at diverse media and tech conferences in Manhattan. ( NBC: Millions in Upfront Video Ad Sales and Who Needs YouTube: Good NBC, ABC Stuff Free AND Legal! )

In NBC on Why Hulu.com IS a YouTube Killer: OMMA Report last month I cited a confident George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s Chief Digitlal Officer, in laying out an intelligent Hulu.com business model strategy based on the premise that “quality” always wins out.

Hulu.com unveils its private beta today and its quality wins vision is out of the online video gate:

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection of premium programming across all genres and formats – television shows, feature films, clips, and more. Additionally, we want to give you more choices of when and where you can enjoy your favorite programming, while creating innovative experiences that let you watch and participate in online video in new and exciting ways.

Hulu.com aims to ofer its premium content via a premium viewing experience:

Hulu is designed with a singular focus on providing an exceptional, online video viewing experience. You can customize the experience to fit your viewing preferences - watch videos in full screen, or pop out the video player and place it anywhere on your computer screen and re-size it if you’re multi-tasking. You can even dim the lights and mute the rest of the browser window so nothing distracts you from the video you’re watching.

Hulu.com “gets” Web 2.0, “sharing is caring”:

Hulu lets you easily share your favorite videos via email or embed them on your own website. You can even choose to share the entire video or just one scene. By selecting the share or embed feature, you have the option of selecting your own start and stop point in a video to create your own fun video clips.

Hulu lets you enjoy your favorite videos at websites where you are already spending your time online. Visit our partner sites: AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo, to view the same selection of premium programming available at Hulu.com. Each partner features content in its own customized video player to provide a seamless viewing experience on their sites.

While Hulu.com is still in private beta, a sneak preview of the “fun” video time in store is offered by Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu:

I’m embedding a full episode of The Office (it gets my vote for funniest show on television). In addition to watching it from this page, you can easily grab and embed the full episode - or a clip that you determine - at your own blog or on other web pages that you manage. Just mouse over the below screen, go to the menu, and click on embed. We hope you enjoy this and other functionality that we’re offering to make it easy to share your favorites from Hulu with others.

While Hulu.com will soon be off to the races, NBC Universal itself still has YouTube to contend with, YouTube’s copyright infringement that is. SEE:  Google To World: Give YouTube Your Videos, NOW! and NBC’s Defense Against YouTube IP Abuse? Carrot, NOT Stick: OMMA Report  and NBC Still Booming on YouTube: Google Lawsuit Next?

PLUS: NBC, MediaZone Olympic Marathon First: Free, Live Streaming of Trials

ALSO: Business Plans Help the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid Go Down

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

The blogosphere delights in dissing NBC Universal because giving away copyright content for free is not part of its business model!

Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee/GigaOm, labels the entertainment conglomerate “hot-tempered,” Mike Masnick, TechDirt, lobs the “hate” word, knowingly declaring that NBC will “piss off more (non-paying) fans,” and Om Malik asserts that when “big media” ignores YouTube in favor of their own profitable (and legal) business models, they not only reveal themselves as retrograde “inward looking” old media, but are “lining up against YouTube and Google” to boot!

Malik is on the eve of his first real-world conference, which he hails as “helping the online video industry’s evolution,” but GigaOm has been rooting for NBC Universal, and subsequently News Corp, to fail in their own (rather than on behalf of Google’s YouTube) joint try at “the Web video revolution.”

Before Malik’s conference date neared, the GigaOm homepage gleefully counted down to a Malik assumed NewCo (now Hulu.com) “wreck,” as the bright red graphic illustrates. NBC Universal is NOT scheduled to speak at the Malik conference.

Malik, et al, are off the mark.

Since June, I have reported and anlayzed the impending NBC-Universal/News Corp. joint venture following first-hand presentations and Q & A with top NBC Universal execs at diverse media and tech conferences in Manhattan. SEE: NBC: Millions in Upfront Video Ad Sales andWho Needs YouTube: Good NBC, ABC Stuff Free AND Legal!

In NBC on Why Hulu.com IS a YouTube Killer: OMMA Report last month I cited a confident George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s Chief Digitlal Officer, in laying out an intelligent Hulu.com business model strategy based on the premise that “quality” always wins out.

I also asked Kliavkoff point blank about NBC’s intentions with YouTube (see NBC’s Defense Against YouTube IP Abuse? Carrot, NOT Stick: OMMA Report). Here is the exchange:

BOGATIN: “You seem to have twice indicated NBC’s unhappiness with Google’s DMCA business model. Isn’t it time for NBC to give Viacom some real support by also suing YouTube for copyright infringement?”

KLIAVKOFF responded that NBC belives in IP “carrots, not sticks,” without seizing the opportunity to point out to his Google Media co-panelist, Eileen Naughton, what it is that NBC wants YouTube to do! 

NBC had been stradling the YouTube copyright infringement fence for more than a year, playing a good cop, bad cop routine designed at maximizing “free” YouTube promotion for NBC content while at the same time publicly needling Google with pointed anti-YouTube business model commentary and serving as a supportive “friend” in YouTube copyright lawsuits brought by others.

To date, NBC can not bring itself to go all out against YouTube, as Viacom has. Perhaps that day is nearing though, as the NBC YouTube “channel” is now history.

The NBC YouTube problem lives on, of course, due to the Google DMCA fueled copyright content should be free for the taking, as long as Google can profit from it, “business model.”

In Google To World: Give YouTube Your Videos, NOW! I point out Google’s latest “anti-copyright infringement” YouTube charade.

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CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

No wonder Google needs to build-out more and more “massively scalable” data centers across the planet: How else could it house all the world’s videos!

Once again, it is the Google way or the highway: This time, Google unveils “YouTube Video Identification,” a Google-centric run around claims of a copyright infringement facilitating YouTube.

Google has a conflicted message for the multi-billion dollar mainstream media companies that do not want their copyright content uploaded to YouTube: Upload it all to YouTube!

David King, YouTube product manager: “copyright owners will be required to give Google a copy of their content.”

YouTube hails its new “video matching” scheme as “unique” to Google. Not surprisingly, it presents as opaquely as the impenetrable AdSense blind acuction black Google-centric box: Engineers attempting to describe the system created a slide show with 50 pages of “differential equations.”

But will anything really be so differential about the multi-billion dollar copyyright infringement quagmire that is YouTube?

Google, as usual, is strengthening its own hand, not the position of copyright holders, who Google wants to be even more beholden to the mightly Google machine. Google claims “it is the best it can do,” and it is: The best for Google!

ALSO EXCLUSIVE: NBC’s Defense Against YouTube IP Abuse? Carrot, NOT Stick: OMMA Report and AP Sues VeriSign: News Aggregation ‘Business Model’ at Risk

PLUS: Local Ad Sales War: Why Google is a Guaranteed Winner

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Discovery Communications is acquiring HowStuffWorks.com to bolster online assets and strengthen its “global position as the number one non-fiction media company.”

AND, to one-up YouTube, to boot!

While Discovery’s official press release waxes poetic on how the $250 million deal will unleash synergies between the video assets of its cable channels and the digital text assets of HowStuffWorks to yield a new “video wikipedia,” HowStuffWorks cuts to the video chase, the who needs YouTube chase that is:

Right now, millions of users are creating low-budget YouTube videos. Is there a way to learn from and improve on this model? What about building hundreds of new short-form shows on the Internet? Backed by the traffic and sales forces of a major media company and a major Web property, these shows could actually attract audiences and make money, with the most popular shows graduating to long-form at the network level with a core audience already in place. End result? It could hugely expand the number of shows available to all of us.

Really? Discovery touts HowStuffWorks is the “leading online source of high-quality, unbiased explanations of how the world actually works.” In explaining how its buyout by Discovery will work, however, HowStuffWorks shows its new corporate parent biases.

ALSO: The Real Reason Google Has the Midas Touch and Google Safe From Facebook: Zuckerberg Can’t Handle Whales

PLUS: Google To World: Give YouTube Your Videos, NOW! and Local Ad Sales War: Why Google is a Guaranteed Winner

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

CBS creates EyeLab to woo Web surfers, AWAY FROM YOUTUBE!

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? CBS is flattering YouTube, big time!

CBS has long been Google’s greatest broadcast network supporter of its YouTube no need to pay for the use of copyright video content of others. Just seven days after acquiring YouTube, Google released a joint announcement with CBS asserting their “belief” that “YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to CBS shows,” on CBS.

Quincy Smith, President CBS Interactive, underscored how “established media players” must “build bridges rather than construct walls”:

YouTube users are clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they’re watching as evidenced by the sheer number of video views. Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue with a new set of viewers. We believe this inflection point is the precursor to many exciting developments.

For its part, YouTube took credit for “bringing new viewers to CBS broadcasts,” even though acknowledging “the success of CBS shows on YouTube is not the sole cause of the rise in CBS television ratings.”

Now, CBS has its own YouTube competing “EyeLab”:

An editing studio for creating CBS-based promotional content across CBS interactive platforms.

This next generation studio will be dedicated to creating thousands of original short-form clips that will enable users to easily engage with and sample video tied to CBS’ wide range of content.

George Schweitzer, president of CBS Marketing:

Clips about CSI or something from how a director shoots a scene in the show NUMB3RS, these are all things that link back to our shows.

For example, an EyeLab clip-culture, snack-sized montage of high-five scenes from “How I Met Your Mother” set to Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” waltz.

The ultimate YouTube-CBS irony? Former Google ad sales exec Patrick Keane is pushing the new CBS YouTube inspired promos, in his new role as Chief Marketing Officer, CBS Interactive. EyeLab can’t feed the CBS platform “too much content” Keane enthuses.

While on the Google team, though, Keane preached the value of the YouTube platform in building a TV network business.

Et tu, Keane?

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CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN