The Future of Advertising and Non-Fiction Television

Anyone making a living in video would do well to read this special report on the future of advertising by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It succinctly explains how television advertising rates continue to rise even as viewership declines dramatically. Even before the writers strike threw an anvil to an industry trying to tread water, the numbers were telling:

For the first 11 weeks of the 2007-08 television season, prior to the effects of the fall 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Nielsen data show viewer declines for the crucial 18-to-49 age group of 19.4% for NBC, 16.7% for CBS, 10.5% for ABC and 28.6% for CW. Only Fox improved, with a 3.4% gain.

The trend is clear. Broadcast television is fading. Audiences are gathering information and getting entertained elsewhere. With broadband penetration now over 50% in the US, web video may be at a long-awaited inflection point.

New Model, Same Content

Quarterlife is a series about those people you couldn’t stand in college and didn’t care what happened to them afterwards. As Friends proved, that can be a successful formula. What makes Quarterlife interesting is that the series, originally rejected by ABC, began its life on the web. What makes it really interesting is that it wasn’t terribly successful—many episodes drew only 100,000 or so viewers.

No - the Format War is Just Beginning

Let’s face it, we all saw the Blu-Ray battle won some time ago.  Perhaps a far more interesting battle is heating up between rivals Microsoft and Adobe on delivering content via a graphical open run-time platform or via a web browser.

Adobe has tremendous distribution in Flash technology as it’s nearly everywhere.  Microsoft’s Silverlight leverages the graphical ability of their browser.  Adobe’s Air, is a distributable runtime platform that’s no longer in beta as of this morning.  You can download it here for Windows and Mac.

*Updated*

While perusing the net this evening I ran across something interesting on Tim Sneath’s blog.  Never been there before but was searching for Silverlight and MTV.  Actually trying to track down a rumor that Microsoft is offering Silverlight around and folks - prominent folks like MTV, are passing in favor of Flash.  So as I read his blog post about Silverlight and MTV I then clicked over to his example, which is Jackass 2.5 the movie supposedly being hosted by Limelight Networks and Microsoft.  Well, interestingly enough, it’s Flash.  Hmmmm.  Looks like I have more digging to do.

We’ll be watching this very closely as you can imagine not only here, but also in our soon to launch WebDevCoalition.  For more info, check out BetaNews.com

As a disclaimer - Adobe is paid advertiser of this site, and Microsoft isn’t…yet.  (maybe never now)

HPA Tech Retreat - Day 3, etc.

Fox Network’s Yves Montane showing one of many display performance plots.

Day 2 Revisited

Larry Thorpe and John Galt argued for a more nuanced view of camera resolution, such as MTF (contrast) readings at 200, 400, 600, and 800 TVl/ph, as well as a subjective description, in addition to the standard measurement of the limiting resolution and report on aliasing (see Day 2 pictures). I will be modifying my review methodology accordingly.

HPA Tech Retreat - Day 1

On this, the first “real” day of the HPA Tech Retreat, we were treated to 3D cinema demos and discussions, a CES review, a phased-array mic for sports recording, and more.

Web Video Viewership Revelations

I’ve been mulling over the “VideoCensus” released last month by Nielsen Online (you can view the PDF here). Among its goals was to compare the way video was watched over the web from network-backed sites to “consumer generated media” (CGM) sites such as YouTube. Here are some of the results, along with some speculation about what’s behind them, and how it may impact the work we do:

Favorite Technical References

The video industry has saddled us users with some truly ugly numbers to deal with (such as 720x480, 29.97, and so forth) when working with digital video. Making matters worse, these numbers are often misquoted or misunderstood.

Thankfully, there are a few web sites out there with some truly valuable, correct information on digital video standards. Here are the sites we refer to most often when we need to know the inside scoop:

The Second Revolution in Desktop Video

If you’re reading this blog hoping to learn - with post-humus apologies to Douglas Adams - The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything (view on Amazon), I’m afraid we may disappoint you from time to time: We don’t know all of the answers. But sometimes just asking questions is important, because it starts the discussions which eventually lead to the answers.

One question that’s floating around these days is “How the heck do I make money creating video content for the web, such as podcasts?” Indeed, it seems there is more money in teaching podcasting than in podcasting itself!

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