More DoTube

This clip comes from NBC's NBBC service which is apparently going to be part of the News Corp/NBC thing that was announced last week. At least that's what I read somewhere.

I think this is a big deal. We've got NBC making SNL clips available to be put on my blog.

But NBBC has a ways to go. First and foremost, not anyone can do this. You have to be invited into the beta to be able to put NBC video on your blog. When the service launches this summer, everyone can do it.

Also, the process of searching, finding, creating a playlist, and then publishing is way to structured for my taste. I think it should work like most of the web video services where you simply find the video you are looking for, watch it, and if you like it, do something with it. I think these web video services have to be really simple to be successful.

Another issue is the NBBC player has no viral elements to it. Look at the Motherload player in the prior post and you can see they have URL and embed links right on the player (like all the major web video players have). Web video is about doing stuff with the content and the best place to make that functionality available is right on the player itself.

Comments

[scotty]

Have you checked out Super Deluxe? I have not checked it out in any detail, but I know many of the peeps behind it, and it seems to be pretty cool. The premise is that they are a channel for the internet. All of their clips seem to be sharable, bloggable and they have a huge queue of original content by some of the best names in comedy coming. It seems to have stuck w/ a certain segment (1 million, but for some reason, I keep bouncing off). But still, the numbers seem to indicate something is up.

Anyway, I hope to see more of these types of segmented plays from the Big Ones (this is a Turner effort). This, to me, is the future of broadcasting and why I'll never buy cable again. Soon, I won't need it.

[hello]

Fred,

Good to see you're still hanging there as a card-carrying member of the early adoption crowd :).

As for extending the display life of the embedded video of your site (the licensing stuff+technical stuff) , there are a couple of issues:

1) Licensing issues: As noted licensing will be a factor, though provisional licensing could be arranged (possibly) on a per show/production company basis -- if the demand is there. Creating a "blanket" license for unlimited display life may be impractical for now -- for any number of reasons. This could also be an opportunity for some sort of membership/subscriber model. If there's a sizeable community of end-users that would like an extended/indefinite embed display life for licensed content, would that same community be willing to pay for it?

2) Technical issues: Retaining display of embedded video on many blog or web site infrastructures has slowed many sites to a *crawl*; try scrolling a page on a site with numerous video embeds. This appears to be a limitation of the ever so ubiquitous Flash player(s). It may not be a limitation of Adobe Flash itself, but how Flash was/is implemented by the video source site (where the embed originates). YouTube is most egregious in this regard, they're simply sloppy on the implementation side.

Apollo appears to be a significant advance in many technical aspects, I'll be digging into the Adobe SDK in earnest over the next few days/weeks... should be quite fun.

[Grand Egress]

SuperDeluxe is a TimeWarner product, thru the Turner subsidiary

[alex]

embed doesn't work on my pc. as expected....

[EthanB]

Fred, what about the 30 second pre roll commercial?

Are they maybe blowing a chance at getting some real better traction with that interruption?

On the other hand, even though a lot of the time you can find the same content on another page in the time it takes the commercial to run, so many people are soooooo lazy.

Trying to think outside the digerati box...

Any thoughts?

[Andy Swan]

When the service launches this summer and "everyone can do it", then and only then would it make sense to add the viral "embed this on your blog" elements....and I'm sure they will.

Adding those elements before they are functional would be nothing more than a frustrating tease.

Anyone else think that the video quality on this is about 20x better than GooTube?

[Shannon Clark]

Fred,

Just an FYI - both in my feedreader (Google Reader) and when I loaded this page directly (Firefox latest version on Mas OS X) it took a good 10-15 seconds for all the components to the embeded video player to load.

Long enough that I had scrolled down, read the comments and was ready to go on to another page BEFORE I was able to see even what the clip might be.

And after I write this, I'll go back up and view the clip - but looking at the UI, I'm not 100% certain what to click to play it (i.e. the apparent > button for play, or the clip itself? either? we'll see).

Shannon

[Shannon Clark]

Okay - I tried to watch the clip.

Gave up.

(still hasn't loaded in Google Reader btw via the feed)

A bunch of complaints.

1. 30 second pre-roll is way, way too long, especially when the ad is 30 seconds and the delay between the ad and loading the clip is another 10-15 seconds, I nearly gave up there.

2. The quality is nice, much much higher than YouTube - BUT - that visual quality doesn't give me much when the clip pauses every few seconds, halts entirely spins waiting for the next few seconds to load. Not a pleasant way to watch a 2 1/2 minute clip (which the full way through would likely take 4+ minutes to watch)

Instead I gave up, paused it and left this second comment.

Shannon

[William]

I am disappointed to say the least. Looks like this project was accurately name Clown Co. Firstly the player wouldn't load at all in my google reader. When I finally got bored of waiting and clicked through to Fred's site it took me a good 20 seconds to load the player (I am on a 2meg connection).

Why doesn't the thing buffer before you press play? I find this so frustrating and I don't think it buffers if you push pause either.

A 30 second commercial for a 150 seconds of movie is way to long.

Even if they fix all that, expiration dates are going to kill this thing. There is no way that i'd ever put something on my site which I know is going to not work for my users in a months time.

Whats the bet that as soon as they launch this thing, somebody makes a player that can just rip all this data and use it properly?

I am going to go buy some more google shares, because they are clearly the only people in big business who actually understand what the consumer wants.

Big business needs to stop blowing their own horn and get some advisers that actually know a thing or two about how the internet works.

[Bill Erickson]

As said above, the load-time on this clip is terrible. Took forever to load the interface, then once I could click play it took even longer to load the actual content. Get a simpler interface, drop the quality a bit to bring the loadtime closer to youtube, and drop the ads.

For something like SNL, they need to take every segment of the show, break them up into individual pieces, then put them on NBBC the minute after the show ends. And most importantly, no ads. These clips shouldn't be trying to bring in revenue, they should be trying to get people like me who stopped watching the show a long time ago to start again (and then see the commercials on TV).

If there was a good segment last week, it will get passed around - make it easier. On the actual live showing say "Go to nbbc.com to watch all the segments from tonights show and share them with friends." If every Sunday the video section of digg is full of good SNL clips, after a few weeks I'll start watching it on TV.

This works great for shows like SNL or Adult Swim's "Tim and Eric" (adult swim is actually uploading the best segments from that show every week to youtube, which is awesome).

For actual TV shows, build something like ABC's online show site (or ABC should open it up and let other networks put their shows in it). Their current offering is actually really good, just needs a little more social/sharing stuff (I don't think you'd need to embed full TV shows, just give users the code to put a nice image that links back to the show).

ABC has the best offering I've seen so far. Can't wait to see what the others do to compete

[Phil]

im taking the other side of this trade and predict this will be a huge hit. i include the skepticism of the "in" crowd in my analysis guessing that views such as Fred's and many of the commenters here are biased to be anti almost anything proposed by old media. a year from now, people will be flocking to these sites and bloggers will be embedding like mad.. and the beauty of it is, they wont be stealing content in the process..

[NICCAI]

Is there any notion of this being international? I can see the video on this blog in Canada, but will I be able to use the full service as a Canadian? Beyond the viral aspect, I think one of the big boons of YouTube was that it was international (or rather it was simply online) - there are no borders. iTunes, ABC.com, and Amazon Unbox are all US only. It is so limiting and as silly as DRM (and yes, I know there may be other laws that are a factor). Web video, and the potential win fall that could come with economies of scale will never come to the the NBC's of the world until they get this right. As it stands, I can't even pay someone (unbox) to let me download a tv show to my TiVo(which I had sent to a US address, because they don't ship internationally). Who knew living in Vancouver, Canada would be so limiting. I hope they're able to put Olympic coverage online in 2010.

I'm exaggerating now, but the rest of the world is a big market. Robert Nyman feels the same.

[NICCAI]

I wanted to second a point that Bill Erickson made. Viral video is about marketing - not revenue (at least as a primary). I think they CAN generate revenue, but it should be secondary to the marketing benefits. Networks need to figure out to monetize the marketing. Afterall, the word of mouth will bring more people to watch the real show, buy the dvds, attend concerts, etc. Unobstrusice product placements should bring in revenue too.

[AZ]

Hi Fred,

I was going to ask you what vidninja.com was, but I did a little digging and found that:

"Introduction: This web site located at www.vidninja.com (the "Site") is operated by >NBBC, LLC, ("NBBC" or “we” or “our” or “us”), an affiliate of NBC Universal, Inc. (“NBCU”)."

Is this just a front for beta testing?