Pretty funny. Nothing spectacular. Verizon’s “Can You Hear Me Now” Guy and The Network stalk a real person. I got bored after the first half, but credit where credit is due. Good idea. Executed pretty well. Is this a full blown campaign or just a one-off stunt?

Verizon Wireless Surprises Customer - Watch more free videos

Thanks to Bill Irvine from The Above Network for pointing it out to us.

The declining value of social network ads, particularly on Facebook are in strong opposition to the level of engagement these sites generate. Facebook users spent 527 minutes on the site in the second quarter of this year, MySpace users spent 677 minutes.

The launch of targeted ads by way of Beacon was a failure, but if Facebook opened up a reasonably priced subscription service tomorrow, I would pay for it and so would many other uses.

One of the distinctions that needs to be made regarding personal information sharing, really a better term for the vast majority of what is today termed UGC is that the information being shared is only valuable to a small number of family and friends. In this sense, it’s not content in the sense of mass media and shouldn’t be described or distributed as such.

This is what I mean when I say UGC is dead. There is no market for it except to a user’s personal network and because it’s personal, a user is more likely to pay for a subscription in exchange for a secure, private environment in which to share their personal information with friends.

Unless the person is uniquely desirable for advertisers to reach (think someone really rich like Bill Gates) you’re not going to be able to get a high CPM for that small network without excessively intrusive targeting.

If it’s Bill Gates you may get a million dollar CPM because there are a substantial number of luxury brands that would like to reach him, but the few in his demographic would far rather pay to protect their privacy.

And he’s not alone. A substantial number of existing social network site users already prefer to pay a nominal fee for premium services, preferred privacy settings and the assurance that their private information will not be shared with advertisers.

While social networks are still in a period of heavy competition and can’t avoid alienating users by charging everyone right away, they could certainly begin charging those who place a value on the privacy of the information they share and premium features that are offered.

Director of Marketing and Communications at Visible World.

Please take a look at the complete information and application here - http://jobs.accolo.com/14585.

Naftali Olivestone
Hiring Consultant
Accolo, Inc. / Visible World
nolivestone@accolo.com
212.904.1970 ext. 247

NBC has soft launched their Silverlight powered Olympics portal and it’s pretty cool. There should be more to play with as we get closer to the games so it’s not entirely fair to judge it at this point but overall the interface is clean and user friendly, and for the moment at least it seems to work well.

Noticably missing is a full-screen mode, varying quality options, and the picture-in-picture and three small video windows in the 4-screen live video control room are so small that they don’t add much.

Some screenshots are below, check it out for yourself at NBCOlympics.com.

Above: Opening Video Page

Above: Live Video Control Room

Above: Large Screen w/ PIP

The question is whether it will scale, the video quality in the player leaves something to be desired, and it doesn’t appear at least from what I’ve seen that the player is using the adaptive bitrate streaming capability of the Silverlight 2.0 plugin. When there are thousands of concurrent viewers, there may be a completely different viewing experience.

If you haven’t yet seen Joss Whedon’s self described web-ministeries Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and still want to you’re going to have to pay for it. After being streamed last week exclusively on DrHorrible.com delivered by Hulu, the three part series is now available as an i-Tunes download for $3.99 or $1.99 per act.

And buy it soon, the series is only available on i-Tunes until July 29th after which, “sometime later”, a DVD will be released with extra features. Some are already speculating that a sequel is in the works, more details  will be announced Comic-Con later this week in what should be a publicity shit show.

In his “Master Plan” Whedon writes that he is seeking to change the traditional distribution business:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

And based on buzz alone it’s been pretty successful. AdRants puts it well: “Whedon knows damn well how to build a cult following…the ‘net may just prove his biggest cash cow yet.”

Well, I’m calling it - user-generated content is officially dead. Hulu is here, ABC is raking in the views with their player, the studios are still adapting but beginning to develop business models, and semi-professional content creators now have the tools to compete with mainstream content.

The line is clear, people want to watch professional content, it holds value. Anything else has no value, economically at least.

So there. Now that professional content has reasserted its supreme value over everything else we can sit back and watch as the rest is weeded off of video sharing sites in an effort to cut down on costs.

Brightcove and VideoEgg already ditched their UGC businesses, Revver was done in by paying for it, and the studios are picking their fights with the rest of them - most of the remaining players can’t survive on their own - there is a major shakeout coming.

The market for UGC will be controlled by companies that build communities for people and charge them for service - YouTube can’t subsidize everyone’s cats on pianos forever, well maybe they could but they won’t, or they’ll sell better quality and relegate the rest to a landfill of grainy 300k - the next generation’s black and white.

That said, there is a lot more that can be considered professional these days. The content universe is larger than ever before, and while UGC is worthless there’s plenty of time for those with passion to become successful professional producers. It doesn’t cost all that much to create professional content these days. All that’s needed is creativity, talent, and the persistence required to build an audience from the ground up.

Jimmy Fallon will begin his Late Night run on the web this Fall before to taking over for Conan O’Brien who will move to the Tonight Show next year, reports The Times.

5-10 minute shows will be posted nightly, likely on Hulu and its distribution partners giving Fallon time to “find his show.” The web offers new hosts like Fallon the luxury of time allowing them the freedom to experiment and find what works.

Perhaps if this online buffer period had been possible in the past, we would have avoided some other huge embarrassing talk show failures.

The Google blog today has a post on their goal of making Google products available in the 40 languages used by 98% of internet users.

And while this isn’t necessarily video specific, it seems particularly relevant because I have recently spoken to a number of online video producers who have been surprised by the size of the international audience their shows are now reaching.

International distribution is one area independent new media producers have a significant advantage over mainstream media because of their freedom to universally distribute content without complex rights issues, as well as due to their ability to interact with the community that develops around their contet.

No surprise that the folks at AdAge get it. Online ads are a reasonable value exchange for good content. Not so much for UGC. Just look what happens when you stop asking people if they like advertising, and instead ask them if they are giving and getting something of fair value in the exchange.

Remember The Covenant…..kinda sounds like it to me……

CNET Reports that Gutuit Media has filed suit against Microsoft claiming that Silverlight infringes on several of Gotuit’s patents. Woburn MA based Gotuit provides metadata management and video mashup services for a number of mid and large size companies. (See our previous coverage here)

Specifically, in a complaint filed in California Northern District Court on July 2, Gotuit claims that Microsoft is infringing by:

Using, Silverlight , metadata markers will be added to Olympic video, which will be re-broadcast with anindex, so that the viewing experience can be customized in order to match individual viewing preferences.

Due to the overall vagueness of the complaint, the complexity of the technology involved, and the ambiguity of digital media patents this will doubtless lead to many hours of litigation. Gotuit may not really expect to win, if they had a clear cut case they would have been more specific in their filing.

They’re simply looking for their share of the Olympics pie. Which makes the case a win-win, if you’re a technology lawyer.