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An article from the TV critic of the Arizona Republic. I like his points about expanding the story beyond the confines of the show, as Lost is doing with their website and books. The bottom line is good television always comes back to simple, good storytelling. It doesn’t matter what the genre is, as long as we’re enjoying a good story around the campfire, television will endure.

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From the makers of Odeo, the podcast hosting service, comes Hellodeo a simple vidcasting service that I have to admit is pretty cool.

You fire up the website, on the front page is a button to let the website access your webcam. You then see yourself on the site with a button to hit record. You can then record yourself, say what you have to say, and then submit it to the site. You then get a piece of code back to embed the recording into your blog post. You don’t need to register, it just works. Very cool, so I had to give it a try, and here are the results.

The latest company to jump into the online video gold rush is Gotuit. Much like YouTube, the videos come up on a flash player with the navigation wrapped around the video window. The difference is Gotuit has licensing deals with the content creators. At this point their offerings include news updates, sports clips (such as video from the NBA Draft), and lots and lots of music videos. The videos are served up fast and the interface is very intuitive.

What we’re seeing her is the structure of the television channel and the schedule is eventually going to be replaced by the search and on-demand structure of the web. These websites are just beginning to explore what the new paradigm is going to be.

From Techcrunch 

Well, why use your bandwidth when you could use someone elses?

NYTimes.com Links to YouTube for World Cup Clip
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In a development that seems to signal the growing acceptance of YouTube.com by mainstream media, the Web site of The New York Times linked to the online file-sharing site as part of the paper’s multimedia coverage of the World Cup final. The link appeared in a sidebar and pointed readers to footage of the game’s most striking moment–the head-butt attack by French captain Zinédine Zidane against Italian defender Marco Materazzi that resulted in Zidane’s ejection from the game. Both the Times and YouTube said the link was not part of an official deal between the two companies, but a simple editorial decision by the Times. The use of YouTube’s video infrastructure by one of the nation’s leading papers, coming shortly after Walt Disney Company ran an ad campaign on the site, and NBC agreed to distribute videos there, seems to indicate that established companies are increasingly embracing the YouTube platform. The clip was posted by a French user on YouTube within an hour of being aired on Television Francaise 1 and quickly became one of the most watched videos on the site, racking up almost 1.2 million views in just 24 hours.
(Eric Sass 7/11/06)

Continuing to look at television over the telephone lines, this article concludes that it’s going to be hard for the telephone companies to make any money at this in the near future. There is a lot of price pressure on the new services as the cable companies are discounting their bundle of services to compete. The high cost of the buildout is pushing the break-even point further and further away. But once you do the buildout and can start collecting that $100 a month, it will all pay off for whoever can initially win the customer.

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