Last night I was watching Euro2008 semi-final Germany-Turkey together with a group of Germans. And for a Dutch guy that might be a bit strange, but it was for a good cause and it was only virtual

I was test-driving a new site called Telewebber.de, as they state themselves “watching together makes TV better” (this is a very rough translation of “gemeinsam besser Fernsehen“). The idea behind the site is that you tune in to a program on television and you chat with other users in a chat-box dedicated to the program.

That does not sound to revolutionary, but the smart thing is that they index all programs on the main commercial and national channels, and you literally tune in to your program and you will automatically find other people watching the program and chatting about it.

Here’s a screenshot of the site:

So I watched the football match last night and it takes some practice to follow the match on the TV screen while keeping an eye on the chat. But once you get the hang of it, it really enhances your TV viewing experience. Especially with a live football match and I guess most live programs like Eurovision song contest, Idols, and so on. And…you can do the good old game of guessing commercials (who knows first whose commercial it is that’s on the screen).

The service is fast enough to have a real time chat. It was amazing to see that when there was a goal or nearly a goal scored, the people in the chat went crazy in real-time. I guess that is possible now because of the limited amount of users (they’re still in beta). I wonder how that develops when they launch the service.

How sustainable is this? Well, untill we have this functionality on digital TV this is a promising new service. And I guess it will take some time since you need a return signal on your TV and not many providers have that incorporated into their systems. My only advice to the guys would be: make a mobile version as soon as possible, roll out internationally and be quick because the window of opportunity is limited.

My RSS feeds contain mainly digital media news and blogs. It’s a good way to keep up with what’s happening and to spot new ideas early on.

But what bothers me about Digital Media bloggers, journalists and evangelists is the biased reporting on developments in the online or mobile domain. And it especially bothers me when it’s done in a “old versus new media” style.

This week I came across this post on TechCrunch which looks at some statistics gathered by AdAge. The title of the blog is already totally biased: Top 100 AdvertisersShifted $ 1 Billion to the Web Last Year At The Expense Of  TV And Newspapers.

…overall media spending in “measured” categories (TV, print, radio, Web) by the top 100 advertisers was flat in 2007, with 0.3 percent growth to $61.3 billion. But spending on Web display ads rose 33 percent to $4.2 billion. This is yet one more piece of evidence that dollars are flowing from traditional media to the Web.

If you (1) take a look at the original article on AdAge and (2) look at the numbers below, you will see that there is no evidence whatsoever that the ad budget shifts are from old to new media. What’s happening is that certain media have lost budgets and since there is slight growth in the overall budget, this money has gone to other media that has grown. It is even more likely that for instance part of the TV ad spend has been shifted from Network TV and Spot TV to syndicated and cable TV. Same for loss in newspapers, which might have gone to magazines for a great part.

  These kind of messages by TechCrunch and other digital media evangelists frightens people at so-called old media companies since they only hear doomsday scenarios while, when you look at the facts, old media still rules (take a look at the numbers below) and even grows; be it not at the pace of digital media.

The best way to see Euro 2008 is live in the stadium, the second best option is to see it with friends on a big screen, but Dutch broadcaster NOS also brings us a great online experience. You can watch two matches at the same time while you have all relevant information at hand.

While I was reading this and this article about website design and usability, I found two valuable lessons for publishers:

The web is more about applications than publications

In print, a design flaw is unlikely to cause a reader to abandon a newspaper or magazine entirely — they are a largely captive audience. But it will cause them to abandon a website.

It reminds me of the number one and two news sites we have in Holland, nu.nl and telegraaf.nl. You guess which one does better.

At TechCrunch an excellent question: why isn’t Google monetizing it’s dominant position in online video?

If you look at YouTube’s numbers, one thing is clear: It completely dominates online video. YouTube accounts for 37 percent of all videos watched on the Internet and attracts about half of the audience, according to comScore. (And if you add in Google Video, that brings the total to 38 percent of videos watched). The No. 2 player, Fox Interactive Media (i.e., MySpace), accounts for only 4.2 percent of videos watched.

Yet when it comes to turning that market dominance into dollars, YouTube is holding back. Forbes estimates that YouTube will make $200 million in revenues this year, and $350 million next year.

But if you believe eMarketer’s estimate that online video advertising will reach $1.35 billion this year, that would mean that YouTube’s share of video advertising dollars will only be 15 percent (less than half of its share of videos watched).

I think there are 3 main reasons that YouTube’s share of video ad spend does not reflect its dominant position:

1. first of all most of the videos on YouTube are absolutely crap and no advertiser wants to be associated with crap
2. secondly, their CPM on video advertising is probably quite low.
3. And thirdly, YouTube’s fill rate is low as you can check for yourself, actually I watched 20 videos and not one video-ad (but plenty of search ads and banners/buttons)

Then what is Google betting on with YouTube? They haven’t paid 1.6 billion just for market-dominance in online video, there must be some trick up their sleeve we haven’t seen or figured out yet…

Facebook, Hyves, LinkedIn all ask me constantly what I am doing right now. Sometimes I twitter what I am doing and more often I post a picture to Flickr to keep a kind of a log of where I am and interesting things I see.

What’s keeping me busy in my working life, you can read in an interview I had for our own internal magazine. So here’s a piece of shameless self-promotion (and some explanation while I haven’t posted anything since January):

Are you one of those people zapping mindlessly from one boring TV channel to another, complaining that there’s nothing on? Do you find yourself online more and more because you are becoming addicted to online video? Then the Sanoma Magazines project ‘Television 2.0’ might just be right up your sleeve! Currently we are exploring our opportunities in ‘moving images’.

Continue here.

The hottest players in online video today (in terms of new start-ups and funding) seem to be the “live video/video twitter/video as conversation”-players.

First of all there is Seesmic, the much debated startup of Loïc LeMeur, a French serial entrepreneur and organizer of the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. Seesmic is video-twitter, which means that people can post on seesmic and others can react with video. As said it is much-debated and one of the reasons is because the whole starting up of the service is described in detail by Loïc on his blog. Although I have not been able to use Seesmic, the result of the video-twittering can be seen in daily “best of” videos on Loïc’s blog and on YouTube. Below is an example:

According to Loïc this is the best Seesmix and I suppose the best example of the “conversations” people are having on Seesmic. Well judge for yourself, but I think that Loren Feldman has a point when he states the following: 

If Seesmic turns out to be what Loren thinks it is, at least the start-up of Seesmic has made a great story.

Kyte.tv is another start-up in the category “live video/video twitter/video as conversation”. Backed by a.o. Nokia it is clear the goal is to drive the use of mainly mobile videocamera’s. It is interesting because it is instant, so you can follow someone (semi-)live, unedited and very upclose and personal. The problem today however is that the quality of the content and the quality of mobile video is still quite low. Here’s a random example:

Other examples in this category are Qik and Mogulus.

 Although I do understand that instant uploading and instant reaction could be interesting, the entertainment-factor is quite low. So as a communication tool it could be interesting, but to be honest I’d rather use a videophone, a webcam and Skype. And how will they make money? Which advertiser wants to be associated with low quality video in a live and uncontrollable environment?

Oh and one last thing: Video is about entertainment or in the best case about communication but stop this nonsense about video as conversation.

The last couple of days I watched ”real” online video, that is to say: audiovisual content made for the Web. Most of it is (semi-)professionally produced and most of it is really really funny.  Let’s start with the vloggers and “one man shows”.

First up is a golden oldie: The Show with ZeFrank. To me below is the best episode since I take an Austrian Arrows flight regularly:

Another vlogger, Loren Feldman, is a very angry but oh so funny guy. See what he has to say about Ze Frank:

I will get back to Loren Feldman when I will talk about Seesmic, the video start-up by Loïc le Meur.

In a different league is VBS.tv, from the people behind Vice magazine. VBS.tv is a videosite with only original and exclusive material. They produce high quality content, but with Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) as creative director this can be expected. The guys behing the channel are also the people behind the magazine and the tone of voice is exactly the same: underground, global, cultural, edgy and young. in Europe we have Arte on television, this is Arte online for a younger audience. One of their best productions, Heavy Metal in Bagdad, was turned into a “real” film and premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Check it out:

Okay, back to the funny stuff. Current TV is also one of my favorites, although I liked the old lay-out of the site better. Since I work for a magazine publishing company, I sure liked InfoMania’s “we’ve got you covered”. The model behind Current is still brilliant: get (semi-)professional content in through the site, share revenues and broadcast the best watched online content on TV. They’ve expanded to the UK and Ireland. How about the rest of Europe?

That’s it for today. Next post will be about recent start-ups like Hulu, Seesmic and Kyte.

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.

Since I am working on a project about online video, I decided to really test-drive online video this Christmas break. So I abandoned broadcast TV and turned on the TV on the web. I will post my findings here regularly.

My little experiment coincides with the testing of the Dell Latitude D430, an ultra-portable laptop (12.1 inch screen, weighs around 1.5 kg). The reason I mention this is because one of the arguments often used against online video in favor of the old TV is the “lean back-lean forward” user experience. Television is watched sitting on the couch leaning back, i.e. relaxing; online video is watched leaning forward, i.e. being quite active. While I do think that as a metaphor the distinction is very valid, when you take this literally the gap between the two becomes smaller with an ultra-protable notebook like the one I am testing these days. I have watched online video sitting at the table, lounging on my couch, lying in my bed.

 Enough about the ergonomics. Let’s turn to the real stuff: what have I seen until now? Well, I started out with some catch-up TV, series, documentaries and talkshows I missed on regular TV lately. In The Netherlands the public broadcasters have a fantastic portal for this on which they publish their own proprietary content untill one month after the original broadcast on TV. 

I also took a more serious look at Joost and Babelgum. Both are P2P, legal, videoportals/-players/-broadcasters/-enablers. Well any way, you can watch professionaly produced content in a dedicated player which you have to download and install first. Everyone has their eyes especially on Joost since the guys behind this new venture are the founders of Skype, Niklas Zenstrom and Janus Friis, and they were able to get some serious money behind them (last investment round US$45 million). What’s more they struck some remarkable content-deals with CBS, Viacom, NBA, National Geographic, Warner Bros. TV, and many more. But… most of these channels are only available in the US. That leaves me with Ministry of Sound TV (Ibiza clubbing, dance music videos, intervies with DJ’s), Stuff TV (gadgets, gadgets, gadgets), Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run), Comedy Central, Ripe TV (not even going to explain this one).

All in all I am stuck with British lads TV with some music and clay puppets. Not exactly my cup of tea, but what does it say about the chances for Joost?  

First of all the player is fantastic, although it requires you to have a fast processor, state-of-the art videocard and enough free memory (here are all the requirements). Secondly, the Joost guys managed to recruit some of the best people out there and they are well-funded. Thirdly, P2P is a  solution to server-based video and partly solves the bandwidth problem. And lastly, they did strike some good content-deals, but not in Europe. And I can totally understand this: they first try to build a success in the US which is much easier since you do no not need to deal with localization, translations, and the best content providers are at hand. So I would bet on Joost becoming an important online video provider, at least in the US. Europe is a different story and that’s where Babelgum might come in.

More about Babelgum, but also about Hulu.com, Seesmic, Kyte, and many more on the next episode