Category — television

So a story about a guy masturbating at the library is ripped and re-encoded for youtube and finds a home on dozens of blogs where thousands (100K+) watch it in a matter of hours.

The next obvious step for such a viral video? A t-shirt.

• Carl Monday is watching you masturbate (Version 1)
• Carl Monday is watching you masturbate (Version 2 — the best one, if you’re going to buy)

And where can the world find out about this T-shirt sale? Why, on the reporter’s blog, of course!

Well, that’s a slight exaggeration.

Moments after the Cavs titanic win over the Pistons Wednesday night, streaming video was unavailable on NBA.com (See the picture above.)

My guess? Cleveland fans, hungry for a series win over the Pistons, swarmed onto the site, bogging down the league’s servers. Just a theory.

Now, why do I care about this? The NBA has done a supurb job of opening up to the internet this season — I for one have been trained to head to nba.com before, during and immediately after a game for video highlights and great stats.

Up until tonight, I hadn’t bothered to see who was powering the video on NBA.com — apparently it’s Nine Systems, whose network is based out of Englewood, Colorado.

Going with an outside provider is a smart short term move for the league — but compare this with the efforts of Major League Baseball, who has built MLBAM into a formidible online content delivery force.

Does owning the backend mean a better product for fans? Am I crazy for thinking about the online philosophical differences between pro basketball and pro baseball just after the Cavs take a 3-2 series lead over the Pistons? Does the average fan care that he can’t get video on demand game highlights within minutes of a game ending? Oh, wait — yes, a professional league should be worrying about that last one.

(Note, I got an archive of the first half of the game to work at 10:13)

And, on another note: Thank goodness the game is on ESPN. Those TNT announcers were horrible.

Stephen Colbert killed at the Bush roast this weekend, speaking truthiness to power.

This is Must see TV

part1, part2 (above), part3

I hope you haven’t eaten anything in the last thirty minutes America, because we are going swimming in the deep end of the truth.

More Colbert Report: wiki, colbert nation

Jump the Shark has yet to decide whether South Park has gotten long in the tooth, but after two episodes this season dissin’ environmentalism, I’m pulling an Issac Hayes and leaving.

Since 1997, I’ve enjoyed their preachy comedic messages … but it’s finally gotten boring.

Cartman: You seem a little irritable, Dan. You got some sand in your vagina?
Me: There’s no sand in my vagina!

Let’s see, Tom Cruise is the subject of ridicule because he has a particularly crazy faith. Ditto for Chef. Streisand is a bitch, so poke fun at her.

This week’s episode attempted to rip Al Gore a new one for being preachy about global warming. I’m cereal.

OK class, settle down, I’ve got some news for you

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that unchecked growth in fossil fuel use throughout the next half-century will produce a global climate catastrophe.

South Park: Boring and wrong.

The original Battlestar Galactica (BSG) was a corny knockoff of the original Star Wars, so it’s fitting that the new BSG is taking a page from George Lucas by developing a new show, Caprica, to tell the back story of the BSG universe.

Similar to Star Wars, Episode I, Caprica will be set 50 years before the current BSG.

According to Cynopsis, the people of this society are dealing with a technology breakthrough that marries artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot, a Cylon.

Thankfully, the BSG team tells better stories than Lucas does — so I’m looking forward to enjoying the new Caprica a bit more than Star Wars I, II, III.

URLFAN is a quick way to see what bloggers and web sites are linking back to your own site.

Much like alexa.com, URLFAN is one way to judge how effective your online presence is. In many ways, having a good number of blogs linking back to your site shows just how the most engaged online users — bloggers — feel about your site.

Here’s a rundown of a few Cleveland-area media sites, ranked by popularity on URLFAN as of April 4, 2006:

1. ohio.com — mentioned in 141 feeds, ranked 561 out of 1,230,303 sites
2. cleveland.com — mentioned in 97 feeds, ranked 839
3. newsnet5.com — mentioned in 45 feeds, ranked 2351
4. wkyc.com — mentioned in 22 feeds, ranked 5627
5. wcpn.com — mentioned in 3 feeds, ranked 29793
6. fox8cleveland.com, woio.com and wtam.com were not ranked.

Here’s a list of their top 100 ranked sites

Unlike technorati.com, URLFAN is a different way of presenting the information on blogs — concerned more with ranking sites rather than showing recent blog activity about a site.

As the power of remixing web sites continues to grow (through blogs, mash-ups and community sites), tracking just how often bloggers refer to your site will become an important metric for sites.

Does anyone else break out laughing at the new Burger King commercial for “bucking chicken?”

Big, bucking chicken
You are big, you are chicken
Big bucking chicken

… the only way to beat it, is to eat it …

bucking chicken

Especially in that last line, there is no distinguishing the “b” in buckin’ with the “f” in #@&^in’

BestBuy surprised me with an offer for MovieBeam in their Sunday circular. It’s a project that’s been in the works for some time.

It’s an interesting use of broadcast TV bandwidth to distribute movies to homes.

A quick list of problems with the service is easy to create, however:

1. Costs ALOT more upfront than Netflix
   Let’s see: $200 for the box, $30 to register and $2-4 per movie.
2. Limited movies to choose from
   Great, there are 100 movies I don’t want to pay $2 each to watch on my TV’s new hard drive. Where’s my computer?
3. Requires a landline phone.
   Ugh. Let’s make something that early adopters, who are already using Vonage or some similar VOIP service, cannot take advantage of.

Now, Netflix can be very expensive. My wife and I typically watch only 5 movies per month — and right now we’re paying Netflix the princely sum of $3.60 per movie to do so.

But one of the biggest reasons we choose to stick with Netflix is the choice of movies — so far, we haven’t felt limited by the thousands of titles Netflix has available. I would feel very limited by only having 100 movies to choose from at any time.

This lack of choice may well mark the ultimate downfall of Moviebeam.

One way to bring choice back into the mix would be to allow the set-top box to access video via the internet. Unfortunately, the only input on the box is for composite video.

But what do I know? With a more agressive pricing structure (let’s say — give the box away), this could be an interesting way for Disney to keep ABC afloat and generate new revenue from renting movies.

Matt Haughey has an interview with a MovieBeam exec.

Thanks for the forward, Dad, and the headline, Baba

For many old school media companies, using sites like MySpace and Flickr seems like a step in the right direction — moving away from one-way communication towards accepting the fact that people demand a conversation.

Umair likes to write about Edge competencies. There isn’t a mainstream media company that has edge competencies (”leverage cheap coordination strategically”), but here are a few creative examples of companies stretching to engage audiences in new ways:

• NBC: Using Google Video for Olympic clips
• Local TV stations, like WZZM using MySpace and Xanga
• The Cleveland Memory Project taps into Flickr’s online photo mindshare by offering several photos that link through to their main site

These companies are reaching for the edge but time will tell if they truly reach out and create user-generated conversations, such as the ones that can be found on newsvine and fark.com.