Andrew Grossman: Daily Content Comment: YouTube

YouTube and Baby Boomers

May 11, 2009

YouTube offers baby boomers exactly what their generation has become best at: nostalgia. If you want to listen to and watch Spandau Ballet sing 'True', you can cue it up on YouTube. You don't have to listen to any of that darned hip hop-rap-whatever the new rage is music, you can listen to whatever makes you feel seventeen again. Baby boomers are big on feeling seventeen again, as have been all past generations, no matter how difficult it might have been for them when they were seventeen.

The same is true for tv shows and movies. Clips or entire episodes of 'Wild Wild West', 'Bat Man' (the original tv show starring Adam West and a host of KA-POW guest stars), 'The Brady Bunch', 'Easy Rider', 'Harold and Maude' and 'Animal House' are watched each day by the tens of thousands. Thanks to YouTube, for baby boomers it is always and forever 1974, and since some of these shows actually had entertainment appeal, the baby boomers get to share their cultural signposts with their children.

Category: YouTube

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Didn't You Used to Be in the Boer War?

-Andrew Grossman

April 30, 2009

YouTube content to this point has been dominated by clips from tv shows, concerts and movies, rather than the entire broadcast. This is because of YouTube’s desire to avoid copyright infringement suits from media companies. Although increasingly the content available on YouTube will be full length broadcasts, the short form has already had a large impact on changing viewer habits: small is better. Better for rapid viewing at your cubicle while the boss is in his office. Better for giving you all of the warm feelings you had at that moment in the movie theatre when you saw the entire movie. Better for providing a concentrated burst to the part of your mind that is satiated by romance or violence or beautiful music.

Unknown supporting actors and backup musicians are being recognized on the street now because something they appeared in twenty or thirty years ago, a show, a concert, that had not been rebroadcast since the time of release, is getting tens of thousands of downloads on YouTube. As with so much else online, a viewer begins looking for one thing-the number of casualties in the Boer War, for instance, by going to Wikipedia--which leads to looking for something else-what was that movie with the woman who was married to the guy in the Boer War movie, by going to IMDB-to finding something altogether unexpected on YouTube-wow, I didn’t know she was in a tv show with this actress whose name I couldn’t remember who used to sing with Air Supply.

The segmenting of creative work that began as an underground way for viewers to upload a few bits of beloved shows has grown into a preferred form for viewers. The preference extends to all long forms. Fiction, especially with the global hypertext features applied by Google for its 10 million book database, will become viewed in small snippets by readers, even with the option to read a book straight through. Novelists who write powerful short scenes will flourish, those who are superb at epic length, but not exciting in bursts, will diminish.

The connection between creator and audience has always been one of surprise, both delightful and dismaying. The meaning of a scene or a character or a line or a drawing is very different in the creator’s mind than is perceived by a majority of readers. In the offline world, this variety of interpretations was ultimately seen as a compliment to the evocative nature of a creator’s imagination. Eventually, the online world, in its far greater capacity to fragment and deconstruct and analyze and disfigure and miraculously expand a creator’s work, will come to be perceived as the same horrible beautiful process that begins when the ‘Publish’ button is pushed.

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Category: Film Industry, Music Industry, Fiction Income, YouTube

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or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net

The Jolly Creative

-Andrew Grossman

April 27, 2009

Katie Vogel is the star of a new reality show to be broadcast on YouTube, called

'Green Eyed World'. Vogel is a previously unknown singer-songwriter from England,

with a bubbling personality and a cute but not threateningly beautiful look. By that,

I mean she has the super-average persona which increasingly appears to be what plays

well with an internet specific viewing audience. The internet is the ultimate leveling

field: small group of dedicated people can build a company on the web to the billion

dollar valuation level; anyone can be the star of their own blog; all opinions are welcome

without accreditation or curse filters usually required.

How will these egalitarian characteristics effect web content? Let me put it another

way: if you were an author who is selling her novel via an internet selling page, would

the photograph of you on the 'bio' page show you smiling or unsmiling? The web may

be an unwelcoming atmosphere for the 'Olympian' persona effected by many authors.

Purchasers of books or other creative content on the web may need to feel the creative

is their buddy/equal/confidant in order to purchase her work. There are no intimidating

brick and mortar temples to the intellect such as Brantano's on the web. Distance does

not play well.

The successfully selling web author will be involved in the purchase process right

up to the moment when the buyer clicks the PayPal button. Questions such as, 'Will

I like this book?' and 'Are there scary parts?' will be routine. After the sale, the author

will be engaged in community boards with readers who are currently reading her title.

Feedback will be instantaneous, constant and possibly overwhelming. The book tour

will be 24/7 in real time. Ultimately, more and more books will be merely supervised

by the 'author', and actually written in conjunction with dozens of collaborators and

fans.

Category: Online Sales, Fiction Income, YouTube

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or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net

The Migration Escalates

-Andrew Grossman

April 7, 2009

A deal was concluded last week between Google, the owner of YouTube, and Walt Disney, which owns ABC and ESPN. This deal marks another step forward in the competition between broadcast media to attract the most viewers to their online content, and thus eventually to draw sufficient ad revenue to offset the lost revenue of tv ad dollars. Here is the deal: Walt Disney agreed to allow short videos of sports highlights and clips from ABC shows and ESPN to be made accessible for download on YouTube. In return, Google agreed to share revenue derived from ad purchases during the YouTube broadcasts.

Yet another step forward in the evolution of content delivery moving from tv to the internet. What does it mean?

1. Other networks who provide online content, such as CBS on CBS.com (they offer two minute to six minute clips of popular shows such as CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, The Mentalist and Survivor), Hulu.com, owned by Fox, TVland.com (owned by Viacom International), now are forced yet again to up the ante of their free content offerings or face a strategic loss in the race for future ad dollars.

2. Another concession by Walt Disney to the revolution: the crumbling of the wall between internet broadcast and tv broadcast.

3. In the 'can you top this' competition between networks, we are coming closer to the inevitable: the availability of full CURRENT episodes of all tv shows and the availability of JUST RELEASED TO THE THEATRE movies for internet broadcast.

4. The rapid switch of Walt Disney's production to 3-D movies such as 'Monsters and Aliens'. Quite soon 3-D will be one of the few value added characteristics of theatre released movies. That is, until online media companies figure out how to broadcast 3-D movies on computer monitors.

As the character in 'No Country for Old Men' said: What's coming is coming. It ain't all waiting on you.

Category: TV/Internet, YouTube

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached

or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Andrew Grossman.

He can be contacted through the All Content Network at: andrew@andrewgrossman.net