SeeSaw Saw You Wanting TV

News comes in that yet another online TV aggregator has launched.

SeeSaw aims to provide a vast array of TV back catalogues to British viewers, thus filling gaps that the big players like YouTube and Hulu either don't fill, or in the case of the latter, don't yet provide, as Hulu has still not launched in the UK.

The service is free for now, but intends to make some charge, probably for American imports, later in the year, according to a report in the Guardian. By focusing in its PR on shows like Skins, it's doubtless hoping to suck in a younger demographic. Admittedly, YouTube has started to offer full length shows too, so it will be interesting to see how the minnow fares with the shark.

The service is coming out of Beta in the week that YouTube celebrates its fifth birthday.

I was lucky enough to be working in Web TV back in 2000. Looking back, maybe I should have hung around and made my first million, instead of turning my back on it all and becoming a school teacher? On second thought, hell no, I love what I do. But it's certainly true that back in the day we had to encode video into a variety of formats (Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Real Player) at multiple bit rates, manually, for every video. Tedious as a definition couldn't even begin to describe how dull and time consuming that process was!

YouTube's trick was to jump on the Adobe Flash bandwagon, right at the time when Flash become capable of embedding video into its framework, making it a lot easier to embed video across the Web.

It's interesting also to notice the spat that's emerged this week surrounding Adobe's alleged attempts to block the development of HTML5, the new web browser standard which, inter alia, will allow video streaming and 2D graphics within the frame itself. For Adobe, purveyors of Flash, this is a potential disaster; not least because it means all those iPhone users around the world will no longer be barred from watching funky animations as part of their web experience.

What does this mean in the bigger picture? Basically, the delivery mechanisms are moving towards becoming truly platform agnostic, and this might force us back to the concept that content is indeed King, and it will be those who can create narratives for interactive platforms who will succeed.

To see evidence that this where we're heading take a look at the American Beta Google have been running with Living Stories, in which its partnered with The New York Times and Washington Post. Longer running stories are contextualized and re-presented for readers. From Google's viewpoint this enhancement of the user experience might provide more revenue opportunities, in terms of users staying on pages longer (good for advertisers) and content deals with publishers (they acquire an audience online that they're losing in print).

In other words, what we want is meaningful information, and what media institutions need are new ways to connect to us. The landscape in which the two sides meet and interact is evolving rapidly, and those who put up barriers to that process happening any place, any time, on any platform, are deluding themselves that the process can be stopped.

News International - the biggest media audience database?

The Guardian reports that Rupert Murdoch's News International holds information on its database about a third of the UK population.

This information has been provided willingly, when consumers sign up for Sky TV, or subscriptions to the Times, Sun, Sunday Times, and News of the World.

In a period of recession it was quite amazing to read that around 200,000 users are rated as 'high value', meaning that they were potentially worth as much as £600 a year each to News International.

When we talk in Media Studies about the relationships between institutions and audiences, it's useful to remember that often these relationships are predicated on financial transactions - the consumer pays, the institution delivers content, and increasingly, enhanced services.

However, the newspaper industry itself seems to be in terminal decline, with readership figures falling and ad revenues getting hammered by the move of advertisers to online sources. It should come as no surprise, then, that News International and the Guardian Media Group have been making noises recently about Google's dominant position. Not only does Google reap advertising revenue from visitors, but, say its detractors, it's 'stealing' revenue via its Google News aggregation service. This provides access to a range of news headlines, but also enables Google to make cash from associated on-screen advertising. This, claim NI et al, is not fair, because Google is in effect recycling someone else's news and making cash from it.

It's an interesting debate, since Google is driving more users to respective news providers, and evidence shows that online browsers are more likely to click on ads if they're using a search engine, and indeed, are more likely to make a purchase. There's a great article here that explains this in more detail.

And, as an end-note, it's worth observing that the Office of Fair Trading has ruled recently that it won't be referring Google to the Monopolies Commission, as it is a major driver for innovation, change and consumer satisfaction.

For the newspapers, they're going to need new business models. For those of us passionate about the media and the future of newspapers, it's going to be fascinating to see if the news print industry can respond to changing market dynamics faster and more effectively than the music industry managed, when faced with threats from online, MP3, and Apple.

Google makes news visual and pictures contextual

Two interesting releases yesterday from search engine giant Google, both of which may be useful in educational settings.

The first is the Google News Timeline. Essentially, type in a search term, decide how you want to see the content displayed (by decade, year, month or week) and hey presto, a timelines of related news stories appears on screen. This will be of great use to History teachers, but it's application should be widespread across different curricula areas.

The second tool is called Similar Images. It allows users to search for pictures based on analysis of the image itself, rather than the tags associated with them. It's rather a neat demonstration of how we're moving to a visual rather than a text based culture. It works well, and should be useful not just to Art/Design students, but anyone seeking images for presentations and the like. 

Another Google Labs utility that may useful is called Audio Indexing. This piece of software enables users to search within the audio of YouTube videos for specific text references. It then takes the user to that point in the video. It's quite remarkable to see/hear in action, and has all sorts of possible uses in education, not least for those teaching students with visual impairments, for whom YouTube has now become a massive searchable audio library of content.