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AT&T has launched their new television service called U-Verse, which is basically a television service that runs over Internet-type high-speed IP networks. AT&T plans to spend $4.6 billion through 2008 in order to roll out this service across the US.

I can’t see if this is actually fibre to the doorstep, or something that runs over the regular twisted-pair telephone wire. But more competition is always a better thing.

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Sports leagues and teams have begun to take back ownership of their media coverage over the past number of years. This is usually done in a combination with selling game rights to traditional broadcasters and cable interests. The NBA with NBA TV, the NFL Network, and the New York Yankees YES network are all examples. In the past, this was only possible with powerful, high-revenue leagues that could offset the huge expense of having their own cable channel. With these costs becoming more affordable, smaller teams and leagues are now cutting their own carriage deals.

Case in point, the Big 10 conference (with 11 teams, go figure) is about to start their own cable network. Quoting the story…

Big Ten Channel to Launch ’07
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The Big Ten Conference will launch its own nationally distributed sports network in August 2007 that will spotlight the conference’s schools and sports. The Big Ten Channel, which is being started with
the help of Fox Cable Networks, has already snagged a huge distributor: DirecTV. The satellite provider will offer the channel on its Total Choice package to about 15 million subscribers. Games aired will be independent of the ones that will appear on ABC/ESPN, its national TV partner that also renewed for another 10 years Wednesday. The Big Ten Channel will annually have at least 35 football games, 100-plus men’s basketball and 55 women’s basketball games during the regular season as well as the other sporting events.

(Paul J. Gough  6/22/06)

So the opportunites in the world of sports production are changing. In the past, it was the large networks that would hire a whole whack of people to run very specific weekend time slot events. With all the leagues and teams going into production for themselves, the future will be in running television events that are cost-effective for their local advertising base. If you can do more of them and create economies of scale, the future in private sports production could be very bright indeed.

YouTube has reached another milestone, as viewers are now watching 100 million videos every day on the site. It works out to 20 million unique viewers every month. YouTube accounts for 60% of all videos watched online. It’s a staggering number for a company that has only been around since 2005. They still haven’t quite figured out how to make any money off this, but they had better come up with something fast, as apparently their bandwidth costs alone are getting up to a million dollars a month. That’s a whole lot of $9.95 web hosting accounts.

Some of the individual videos are getting an amazing number of viewers for stuff that people make with their camcorders. This video, called Evolution of Dance, has hit almost 29 million views. Pretty incredible.
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I listened to a fascinating podcast today, an episode of Inside the Net with the guys behind the highly successful Ask A Ninja video podcast.

Ask a Ninja is a series of video shorts done by a couple of guys in a crappy apartment in L.A. The gimmick is a Ninja answering viewer questions. Most of the time the Ninja is flat-out hilarious, and the shows are around 5 minutes or so, which seems to be the sweet spot with online video content.

In the podcast, they talk about how exciting it was the moment they realized that the distribution problem, which had kept media tightly controlled by the big studios and media companies, now has a solution. The web allows anyone with good content and some tenacity to find an audience. Their marketing budget was zero, so much of the marketing was done through social networking sites such as the now gargantuan myspace and bebo. They’ve been doing the show for about 6 months, and now have 350,000 viewers per episode. Zero budget, zero marketing money, online distribution, and tons of talent. Today’s episode has a small ad for a new movie on the backend, so it looks like they’re starting to monetize that audience.

The tools to create video content are now accessable to anyone. The bandwidth to send a video podcast to millions can be had for as little as $30 a month. What are we waiting for?

Watch Ask A Ninja Here

Listen to the Ask a Ninja episode of Inside the Net here

Update: Here’s an interesting article about the social-network marketing of Ask A Ninja. Check it out here 

HBO has entered an agreement with Cingular, the US-based cell phone providor, to carry a special “mobile mini-series” based on the program Entourage. Apparently it will be an extension of the storyline, with the episodes being around 4 minutes each. The price is a little steep at the moment, but it’s another great example of how video content is moving beyond the television into non-traditional forms of media.

Like everything else, it’s going to take awhile before we end up with a final set of conventions for video content on the cell phone, but it’s a step in the right direction. Who needs to be bored in the grocery store lineup anymore, or heaven forbid actually have to talk to someone else in public! Oh well, there’s a ying and a yang to everything.

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