Dylan Hunter

A cute look @ Kevin Rose promoing Digg 1.0 on The Screen Savers, located by Michael Arrington, (Mike, do you ever sleep? - and, like Philip, I totally concur - was a huge fan of the show before G4 took it over and got rid of Leo, Patrick and anyone else over 12).

Now, granted, Digg in ‘06 doesn’t really look all that different from how it looked in ‘04, (I mean, amazingly not different! ) but is definitely a good reminder for all of us to turn the cameras on right now, pop on YouTube, (and hence back to your own blog) to both help us see how far we’ve come, as well as to inspire the next generation of builders by how rough all of us once were.

Think how cool it’d be to see Woz and Steve Jobs demoing the first Apple, Ed Roberts the first Altair, Dan Bricklin the first version of Visicalc, Tim Paterson the first version of DOS, Jerry Yang the first Yahoo, or Larry & Sergei the first version of Backrub / Google!

Actually, what I find most interesting here is why MLB’s streams / streamer are so low in comparison to the others. Is it a format issue, (length of stream)? Integration / focus? Too tight a concentration on a single content type? Can’t be that it’s avail on TV, as that would affect Time Warner, as well. Well, since I’ve never gone to the MLB site, s’pose I’ll have to go check it out…

Have been a big fan of the EFF for sometime, and am very impressed with them using the popularity of YouTube, etc. to help get one of their recent campaigns across. Excellent concept, appealing strongly to tech-savvy parents, who I presume is one of their largest demographic groups; excellent distribution planning. It’s this kind of thinking about how to talk to real people in the ways that we all enjoy that makes all the difference!

Ok, was in the mood for a good chuckle, so decided to poke around on YouTube a bit, came across the AskaNinja videos, and couldn’t stop laughing!

Ask A Ninja Question 18 "Minjas"

Then go check out AskaNinja.com for more - they’re awesome!

BTW - putting back on the marketing hat - I can’t stress enough how valuable it is to make some part of your product portable away from your site as YouTube’s done above.*1* Give folks the ability to modify / color / flavor / select just what they like, so that they have ownership of some portion of what you’ve done, and they’ll be more than thrilled to take and pass along to friends, family, etc., as I’ve done above, (and loved to do! ).

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*1* Unfortunately, the bit of code that YouTube put out to embed the above screws up the stock Wordpress XHTML Transitional validation, (which could screw up search engines). Luckily, in the case of embedding Flash, since there really isn’t a good way to do without breaking validation or inserting javascript, I’m sure the SE’s simply ignore anything in <object> tags, so think you should still be good.

Mobile TV and video usage is growing slowly, but is attracting a higher proportion of the young adult and male demographic, reports Telephia, the leading provider of performance measurement information to the mobile industry. According to Telephia, 1.5 percent or roughly three million wireless subscribers in the U.S. streamed TV or played video content on their mobile devices in Q4 2005 (see Table 1). Historical data from early 2005 show penetration of 1.4 percent.

Younger mobile subscribers, age 18-24 have the highest penetration for mobile TV and video usage, securing a 3.3 percent rate, doubling since the beginning of 2005. Overall, men are more likely to stream TV and play video content on their wireless devices than women, showing a penetration rate of 1.8 percent or more than 3.5 million wireless subscribers during Q4 2005. Female mobile subscribers who accessed mobile TV and video content over their handsets had a rate of 1.2 percent in Q4 2005, equaling 2.5 million consumers, according to Telephia.

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U.S. consumer spending for online entertainment, including on-demand gaming, music, and video services, will grow by 260% in the next five years, according to Digital Lifestyles: 2006 Outlook, a new study from Parks Associates. Driven by broadband usage and innovations in digital entertainment platforms and content services, revenues will grow from $2.4 billion in 2006 to nearly $9 billion in 2010.

* The number of worldwide consumer broadband subscribers will grow from 184 million in 2005 to more than 360 million in 2010;
* The number of households worldwide using data networking equipment will grow from approximately 82 million in 2005 to more than 135 million in 2010; and
* Worldwide subscribers to IP multichannel video services (IPTV) will grow from approximately five million in 2005 to nearly 70 million in 2010.

More.

About 21 million, or 87% of kids ages 12-17, use the Internet. According to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the Internet have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. The study considers them "Content Creators."

The results highlight that this is a generation of teens eager to share their thoughts, experiences, and creations with the wider Internet population.

Some key findings of the study include:

* 33% of online teens share their own creative content online, such as artwork, photos, stories or videos
* 32% say that they have created or worked on web pages or blogs for others, including friends or school assignments
* 22% report keeping their own personal webpage
* 19% of online teens keep a blog, and 38% of online teens read blogs
* 19% of internet-using teens say they remix content they find online into their own artistic creations.

Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. "For American teens, blogs are about self-expression, building relationships, and carving out a presence online," said Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the report entitled, "Teen Content Creators and Consumers."

51% of online teens report downloading music, compared to just 18% of adults who report similar behavior. Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Project and co-author of the report, said "At a time when social norms around digital content don’t always appear to conform with the letter of the law, many teens are aware of the restrictions on copyrighted material, but believe it’s still permissible to share some content for free." 75% agree with the statement that, "Music downloading and file-sharing is so easy to do, it’s unrealistic to expect people not to do it."

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Got a ping from Matt Brown, one of the co-founders of an interesting IPTV company, NubaTV, a few days ago looking for some feedback.

First, strong kudos to Matt for doing his homework, picking some folks based on profiles from MediaPost, and then contacting to see about building up both some early interest, as well as getting some good early feedback before going broader - very well done.

Some snippits from for any other IPTV folks who might come across:

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“Image quality was definitely nice - certainly no degredation in signal, etc. during the stream, (you’ll, of course, know more about whether the bandwidth expenses to enable make it at all practical). Am presuming that the inability for me to navigate the stream, (i.e. to skip forward or go back) is a limitation of your thing being in beta, rather than a structural choice, (if the latter, would suggest you re-think as am pretty sure that kind of functionality will be considered “minimum required,” unless you’re trying to use this lack of control to try to fit into some of the broadcasting exceptions to the ridiculous world of content licensing, akin to Mercora for audio, in which case, check in with your lawyers - there _must_ be some way of enabling at least partial control).

“Since you’re obviously low on content, why not open it up to folks to upload their own creations, (akin to Atomfilms / Flickr for video, etc.)? Should give you a nice method of getting some viral distro, garnering some free press, etc., all of which should put you in a much more powerful negotiating position if you still want to approach the more classic content holders, (i.e. King World, etc.).

“Once you get at least a decent amount of content on, you’ll hopefully at least get folks to keep your player on their computer as a curiousity for at least a little bit, (for me, I uninstalled - I don’t keep anything on my computer that I don’t have a compelling reason for, especially something that I have to pop a hole into my firewall for - call it the ‘I have no idea what info this thing is sending back without my knowledge’ fear - and without the content, I yanked).”