That’s right, it’s the end of the year which means it’s time to start generating lists of things. Top 10 this, top 5 that, yada, yada. I thought I’d get a jump on the end of the year lists by doing a Thanksgiving list. As we pass the potatoes around the table tomorrow, let us all remember to be thankful that:
1) Hulu for the Holidays has us covered. Sure, Hulu.com is great because it helps us keep up with such heartwarming and touching family favorites as Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but it has gone far beyond that with its new Hulu for the Holidays campaign that introduces us to [actually] heartwarming movies we may have forgotten. Last week it was Rudy, A League of Their Own, and Call of the Wild, today’s featured movie is A River Runs Through It (in which one-time heartthrob Robert Redford simultaneously directs and passes down the mantle of screen idol to Brad Pitt). I would embed the clip for your immediate enjoyment, but, alas, due to rights issues this one is not viewable outside of Hulu.com.
2) Netflix went off the matrix. When I say matrix, I don’t mean the movie, I just mean the PC-based Internet. With Netflix off the matrix and on my $99 Roku box, my family actually enjoys watching Netflix streaming movies. It used to be I had to lead the kids to the PC and say, “look what you can do with Netflix!” They would blink once or twice and then say, “Dad, if I wanted to use the PC, I would watch YouTube or play Webkins.” Not anymore. We now have a queue of about 50 movies ready to play in the living room at any time. All of them family friendly, except, whoa, hey, who put Risky Business in there? I’ll have to check with my wife on that one. What does Tom Cruise have that I don’t? [Don’t answer that…]
3) Tina Fey is alive. As I reported yesterday, Nielsen says we watched 4.5 hours of TV a day in Q3 of this year. While that was attributable to the Olympics and the election, I think about 10 minutes of every day was probably spent watching Tina Fey. If she wasn’t doing her dead-on Sarah Palin impression she was talking about it with David Letterman; if she wasn’t being delightfully nerdy on 30 Rock, she was joking about it with Rachel Ray (btw, Tina Fey and Rachael Ray makes for a great rhyme, try it). And notice that all of her shenanigans, including CNN’s coverage of said shenanigans, are online for us to see on demand, over and over again. Do you ever get enough of her Palin-Clinton skit? Too funny.
4) You didn’t have to go to YouTube Live. What? a YouTube event that is live? You mean you have to sit there and experience it linearly? You can’t just jump to the next related video as soon as you’re bored with the current performance? Hmmm. Why was this a good idea? The best headline on this one goes to the San Francisco Chronicle, “YouTube Has Real Party for Self-Made Stars.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of YouTube. It’s enormous — it delivers 25% of all the online video minutes American experience each day. But the whole point of YouTube is that it’s a massive filter. You don’t have to watch what you don’t want to watch. YouTube Live was not that. Luckily, I was able to catch up later by watching the highlights on, you guessed it, YouTube.
5) We’re not this guy. By “this guy,” I’m referring to my friend, marketer and social web practitioner, John Johansen (pictured here in his Halloween costume), who accepted a challenge from me to live an entire week without any video at all. None. Zip. Nada. And he opted to take this challenge during Thanksgiving week. That means no movies, no catching up on episodes of shows while visiting family. No football on Thanksgiving Day! Could you do it? Bet you couldn’t. Be thankful I didn’t challenge YOU!
When you can watch what you want, when you want, where you want, certainly addiction will be easier to feed. But will it actually be worse? If the pitfalls of addiction include sitting numbly in front of the TV letting it wash over you, does it actually get worse or better when you can take a more active role?
So expect more from me in the coming weeks, including some notes with an interview with an academic who studies TV addiction. In the meantime, I hit up a friend of mine, Marketer and Social Media practitioner John Johansen of Austin, Texas, to see if he was up for an experiment: could he live for a week without a stitch of video? His answer: I can give it a try.
I was imagining he’d wait until after Thanksgiving, but not John, he jumped right in and started on Sunday. He has already blogged about it and it twittering using the Twitter hash tag #novideo. His early conclusion:
Could you do this? Feel free to add to the conversation on his blog Original Comment, on my blog, or with your own twitter posts. I’ll summarize John’s experience and share with you my “how to tell if you’re an addict” quick quiz at the end of the week.
After a brief announcement a few weeks ago that was light on details, Blockbuster today announced it would sell what is calls the MediaPoint, a $99 video-on-demand set top box.
As you can see from the graphic, the slim box is made by 2Wire, a company that typically provides products and platforms like broadband home gateways to help TV service providers deliver media experiences to the home.
The attractive pricing is required, of course, as the Netflix Player by Roku came in at $99 earlier this year and has made a splash, reaching what I estimate to be nearly 100,000 unit sales (not yet, but probably by year-end).
Blockbuster is obligated to do the same. But they’ve gone one step further than Netflix in that you don’t actually buy the box. You pre-pay 25 movie rentals and they give you the box for “free.” This counters the claim by any Netflix fans that the $99 box doesn’t come with free content like the Netflix box appears to.
We spoke to Jim Keyes, CEO of Blockbuster back in October and he indicated the box wouldn’t be out in time for the holidays, but apparently he changed his mind. You would, too, if you had to endure announcement after announcement about how Netflix content was available through more and more devices, including PCs, Macs, LG Blu-ray players, Samsung Blu-ray players, the Xbox 360, TiVo, the Roku player, and eventually, your mother’s toenail clipper.
Some quick analysis: this is a good move, it is the right time, and the solution is deftly simple. In fact, I don’t know what would stop people from buying this box and placing it right next to the Neflix/Roku box. From one you get classic movies and TV shows, hours of fun for the whole family (including my kids who watch it nearly daily). From the other you get first-run titles, 25 of which you have pre-paid. Remember: if you wanted to rent 25 DVDs at Blockbuster, you would pay the same amount. This saves you the regular trips to the local store.
Some reporters are making a big deal out of how this competes with Blockbuster’s retail locations. I disagree. Anything that brings you closer to a brand is good news for that brand. It might change the way retail appeals to you — they might sell more products, including Blu-ray players and gaming systems — but it doesn’t mean the store goes away.
One last note: The one risk in Blockbuster’s approach is that it’s device-specific, whereas one of the geniuses of the Netflix strategy is that it’s multiplatform. Can BBuster do a deal with the Sony PS3? That device also has a hard drive, so maybe. But Blockbuster direct to the Net-connected TV would require a streaming model, which this isn’t. So some settling of business models is likely to occur as they contemplate streaming, portable video player integration, and adding HD content. All in all, this is a good move for Blockbuster, as long as it is just the first of many advances.
Interesting little fight brewing in the obscure world of online movie streaming. It seems that when Netflix agreed to send its streaming movies to the Xbox 360, at least one of Sony’s movie studios (Columbia Pictures, according to this Engadget report) took issue with that.
Whether this was malicious on the part of Columbia Pictures is open for debate. If this were a Sony strategy, it would be likely that all Sony Pictures Home Entertainment content would drop out as well, but it hasn’t. Official word from Netflix suggests that this is normal in the course of licensing content — the original licenses probably didn’t include specification of all the possible outputs for Netflix. It’s reasonable to assume that there’s some renegotiation likely to occur.
Whether this was something Sony did on purpose or whether it was a coincidence (the timing is suspect because today was the launch of the new user interface for the Xbox 360, including prominent display of the Netflix streaming option), I don’t think this will stick. For two reasons.
The public sentiment is already turning sour against Sony. Without evidence that Sony was acting out of malice, the gamer/movie viewer community is already moaning and complaining loudly. Just read any blog comments on this topic to find plenty of Sony vitriol to go around. It’s almost as bad as the political season we just went through.
Sony doesn’t really work like that. It would be very unusual for Sony’s video game unit to be able to exert such specific pressure of a subsidiary of the Sony Picutres side of the house. I won’t offer specifics here, but suffice it to say that Sony is not ruled by one point of view. It’s a house of many different views and I find it unlikely that this would be part of a master conspiracy to punish people for having an Xbox 360. Think of it this way: Sony doesn’t prevent you from watching Sony DVDs on Samsung DVD players, right?
Maybe I’m just a nice guy. Do you think I’m wrong? Is this a nefarious plot? Or just awful timing for a rights negotiation to come up?
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