January 29, 2005
a billion infomercials
I liked what Seth Godin said so much I’m posting the whole damn thing:
BitTorrent part 2
So, the interesting part of the near future re to BitTorrent is this:
When everyone can watch high resolution DVD quality video on their screen without breaking your server, what will you do about that?
Is Volvo ready with a thirty minute test drive I can watch when I’m ready to buy a new car?
Is Toshiba ready with a how-to manual for their new music server? A fifteen minute well-made video that actually explains what I should do to hook it up?
How about publishers? Are they ready to do a video news release with complete interviews with all their important authors?
This, folks, is the real 500 channel universe. It will probably turn out to be more boring than Seinfeld, but way more specific. A billion infomercials, all the time.
The winners will be people who have the guts to make the interesting ones.
I often get asked by my readers, “If Advertising is dead, what will replace it?”
Short answer: Stuff like this.
Not that advertising is dead. Just the more comfy bits.
Seinfeld, boring? That may have been worth cutting out.
We still need a way to give semantic value to all of that information within these video clips, that is as of yet, inaccessible. Typing transcripts for all these videos is going to be too much work. A voice-recognition parser, maybe? That still wouldn’t take care of all of the on-screen information. Maybe in conjunction with OCR.
Here is a bit of the future, more or less related to advertising and self publication.…
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
History repeats itself. Bozell + Jacobs created Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” to sell insurance. Just as many other advertisers at the time formed daytime dramas to sell soap.
Enter Land of OpportuniTV, a startup comedy about making America the Silicon Valley of customized lifelong learning and career services, the global market that Peter Drucker says will be the biggest over the next 30 years.
Details coming online at http://www.opportuniTV.com
but the power of this is in the hands of all! commercialization could be limited to a neighboor girlscout cookie sale… or just better communications between you and your soccer team. in hdtv.
Web : Future TV
In 2002 I set up a company called Set Loose Movies to take advantage of the, apparent, demand for viral marketing in Europe. Established mainly to deliver emailable mpeg videos (viral ads) we soon realised that there should be a great opportunity to us…
parole sante
(disegno di hugh macleod @ gapingvoid.com)
hugh pointing to seth
Link: gapingvoid: a billion infomercials. saw this brilliant post (yesterday — needed to snowboard today) from hugh linking to seth regarding the paradigm shift technologies like bt will bring — especially how information is produced, distributed and c…
I understand what Seth is saying, but I guess BitTorrent will not be the enabler of this future since it only works very well when downloading files that many want at the same time. Right? This won’t be the case with a Volvo commercial or a video tutorial. So we need another instrument to facilitatie the long tail of video content…