echovar

Was the valuation of YouTube with or without the good stuff? Once you subtract clips from Comedy Central and other copyright holders who aren’t getting compensated for their work, what exactly is the value? Jason Calacanis has made this point in several forums. It’s much easier to build a popular Web property by using copyrighted material without compensating the holders of those copyrights. The economics are excellent. Quality content is free, you aggregate the audience around the content and attach ads to it. Big traffic means big advertising dollars. Once YouTube isn’t an omniscient TIVO and a dependable reference point for anything amusing distributed through broadcast television, what exactly is its value? Is it still $1.6 billion?

Traffic comes and traffic goes. Napster’s traffic dried up. YouTube’s may as well.

Steve Gillmor writes that “TV is Dead.” Clearly the concept of broadcast television as an event-based, time-anchored schedule is dead. The VCR, DVD Player and the DVR took care of that. YouTube ends up being a TiVo that just records everything and you find your programs through search. But I’d contend that Television is a social activity, many people to one viewport. The computer tends to be one person to one viewport.

Television isn’t dead, centralized broadcast schedule programming is dead. The user now decides today’s line up of shows, and does it fresh everyday. The business of televsion is aggregating audiences around popular shows and attaching advertising for a fee. When a clip becomes a big hit on YouTube, it’s potentially a powerful advertising vehicle. But will an advertiser want to attach its message to the 2 million viewers of LonelyGirl15?

As the number of content modules explodes, the individual’s capacity to consume such content remains the same. There are still 24 hours in the day, we can talk multi-tasking all we want, but we aren’t going to be watching 10 Web videos at once. With the cost of production going down, it’s possible for niche audiences to support the creation and distribution of digital media products.

The interesting economics emerging out of this have to do with scale. Spending tens of millions of dollars to produce a media product and then selling it to the masses has been a fine business model. But it requires the product be sold to large audiences, preferably audiences that will buy more than one viewing and the attendant merchandise. It’s a business with normal margins. But what happens when a cheaply produced digital media product becomes a hit with a mass audience? If it has the business model and monitization schema in place it becomes an incredibly high margin business.

Oddly enough, that’s the way the software business works. Once the software has been produced — if you can get everyone to use it, the margins are incredible. See Microsoft.

No one wants to give up my identity. Everyone wants to own a piece of me. My bank, my brokerage, Google, Yahoo, my Blog, Amazon, Microsoft, IT Conversations, Podshow, Crazy Egg, and many others too numerous to mention all want to own a little piece. But ask any of them if the “me” they own is that same “me” that the others own and you’ll draw a blank stare. Am I all those different me’s? Or am I a single me splintered and inscribed in a thousands closed systems?

Technorati accepts Open ID. Why can’t I log in to my bank with user asserted credentials?

The television remote and the metaphor of “surfing” to find desirable broadcast streams will undergo a change. With the exception of live news, sports and performance — recorded content will become untethered from specific time slots. Time shifting will become the norm. (A revolution started by Bing Crosby). Replacing the tv remote will be a scheduling tool to create a river of content modules. Organizing, finding, discovering, berry-gathering — and then booking into a serial stream, that’s the new interaction. In some ways, we’re already used to it: it’s the Netflix Queue. The ambient findability of content becomes critical.

The economics of this interaction have yet to emerge. At the moment, it seems to resemble simple gluttony. It’s as though a hungry person is sitting in front of a free smorgasbord — what will be eaten and in what order?

Apple’s operating system may be the triumph of the Baroque. It appeals to us as the total aesthetic elaboration of a desktop centered universe. Should Google decide to create an operating system, it will be modern in the sense that it removes all detail from the desktop computer. The desktop migrates to the Webtop, and the computer will become a closed system.

The method by which you eliminate providing customer service for the desktop is by limiting the ecosystem to two elements: the OS and the browser. Everything else migrates to the network. As with Google’s server farms, when it’s broken, replace it.

The Cluetrain posited that markets are conversations. And this is coming true through the emergence of the two-way Web. Of course, the Web was designed as read/write from the beginning, but for many years the Web was a one-way street. Commercial interests modeled user interaction on the one-to-many broadcast model.

Now that “user-created content” is all the rage, the “write” part of the Web is suddenly in vogue. The economic model is still the same. Regardless of who creates the content, if an audience forms around it, sell access to that audience to advertisers. More accruately defined audiences create a better targeting opportunities for advertisers.

The User Interface (UI) has been like having a conversation through a translator. You tell it something, it goes away, decodes your input, and then returns an answer or another question. There’s no fluidity, no real conversation. With the emergence of XMLhttpRequest (AJAX) and some other UI technologies — there’s a chance that the UI could become a conversation, a fluid back and forth. To create that fluidity will require new interaction models that are easy for the user to learn. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an intuitive user interface. Generally that’s what people say when they mean to say “good.”

In the current design and production process for Web applications, who looks after the conversation? Who acts as the host?

I’ve switched to Google Reader. On Windows I’d used Sharpreader and on Mac NetNewsWire. As I’ve become less attached to particular computers, I’m more interested in getting the same set of tools and data from whatever my access point. I actually hate carrying around a laptop. I’d much prefer to have a Network Access point available from where ever I go. I suppose one does get used to keyboards. It might be nice if I could point a personal keyboard and mouse at any CPU and get my Web desktop.

The recent purchase of YouTube by Google brings up an interesting point about “place.” Robert Scoble talks about it in terms of brand and community. From an engineering perspective Web applications can be duplicated. It’s entirely possible to build a Web site that does something like YouTube or Facebook. This is where the idea of “place” come in. Cyberspace, or the Network, has places — Places where people gather, places where some history has occured. Saying that you could build your own YouTube is like saying you can build your own New York City in the mid-West (because land and labor are cheaper).

Happy birthday Thelonious.