Online Video – Day 2: Babelgum, the other P2P videoplayer

Today a short post about Babelgum. It is “the other P2P videoprovider”. In my belief it was supposed to be a European alternative to Joost with all its great content only available to US residents. But it is not. What it is, is a Joost copy concentrating more on independent (smaller) producers rather than on premium content. It has a catalogue of matches of the Italian series A football (soccer), but somehow I was unable to watch any matches (maybe it is restricted to Italian IP adressess). Then there are the short films for a British Film Festival, to a certain group of viewers definitely interesting. The rest of the content is Ministry of Sound TV (again), some travel documentaries, cooking programs, nothing really great. So will Babelgum make it? If they think they can be a real competitor to Joost, maybe on the European market they do need premium (Hollywood, British) international content. In Europe they need another thing: local content and although they succeeded to get the Ialian football on board this could prove to be quite difficult.

Maybe the best would be that Babelgum keeps building its database with European content and then would be bought by Joost. Who knows…

In the next episode more on vlogs, mobile video platforms and the YouTubes of the world.

It’s about the story, not the medium

This post by Jeff Jarvis got me thinking about how to break through the barriers in a formerly single-medium company when talking about New Media:

It depends on the story and how you want to tell it and how your public can best use and interact with it.

So the medium or media you are using depends on the story you want to tell. That’s the real added value of being a journalist or editor in a multi-, cross-media environment. And that’s why I strongly believe in not organizing a multi-media company into separate divisions around one single medium.

 

How interactive is content on the Web anyway?

The Internet has always been hailed for being interactive. A post on NewTeevee today “how interactive is online video?” triggered me to think about how interactive the web in fact is. Of course the Web is interactive on the level of communication (but so is your phone). And the Web is also interactive on the level of information (think Wikipedia and the likes). But how interactive is the Web when it comes to entertainment? What I mean is interactivity by which entertaining content is being altered, preferably enhanced, by interaction between producer and consumer (or prosumer and coduser). So my question is: How Interactive is the Web anyway?

First of all when we look at sites with user generated content only a small percentage of the users of these sites actually contribute. The rest merely watches, reads, laughs and leaves. (only 2% of YouTube’s user base uploads content, according to Jeben Berg of Youtube)

The same phenomenon can be seen in blogs. In most cases someone writes a post, readers react and that’s it. The reactions are in general not taken into a version 2.0 of the post, so there is nothing like a conversation going on.

And then there is the point made in the earlier mentioned post on online video. How interactive is online video? You watch it, you might share it, leave a small comment but is that interactive? Even the sharing part is not new because in TV people also tell each other what’s on what they should watch.  

Does it matter? Of course not but let’s stop fooling ourselves and talking about interactivity like it’s the holy grail. Let’s stop trying to activate communities to engage in a conversation (huh?). Entertainment content on the Web is good, bad, professionaly made or user generated, but it is not really interactive.

p.s. as pointed in the post on NewTeevee there are some handsome initiatives on creating interactive content like this one, this one and this.