Content-ment

My compulsive viewing of MTV does have a benefit, even if it is only keeping tabs on media phenomenon.

Universal Music Group [UMG] has done a smart thing in collaboration with YouTube. The popular emo-rock band Fall Out Boy have released another album, and off it, another hit single with an accompanying music video. Since I can’t wait for it to show up on any of the ten video channels my cable provider, uh, provides, I sought it out on teh internets.

There are any number of versions of almost any music video you might like to see on YouTube. Fans will upload a copy and it will stay there unless someone [usually the record label] asks that it be removed. Recently, the labels have gotten hip to this and have started profiles of their own on ye olde ‘Tube. Universal Music Group is one of these enterprising entities.

They have uploaded an official version of the Fall Out Boy video. Smart! 1.6 million hits and counting!

But that is not all.

There are at least two product placements in the video. One of the product placements is reinforced by smallish commercial bookends at the video’s start and finish. The product is used by the band’s heartthrob bass player, very clearly showing the logo.

But even that is not all.

UMG’s version of the video posted to YouTube is of pretty poor quality. The video is full of compression artifacts [those blocky things best seen where there is a lot of dark image on the video] and the audio suffers from audio compression artifacts in the form of an overall watery sound.

Why upload such a poor-quality version?

Simple — because you are selling the high-quality version of the same video for $1.99 on iTunes, without the commercial bookends. You can see that screenshot of that at right.

What is the lesson here?

Content will be consumed in different ways by different consumers with different priorities. Know those ways, and do your damnedest to monetize each one of them. UMG, in all of its big business glory, has done so in this case in a pretty painless and low-key way.

When the musicians in the earlier days of jazz went into the recording studio, they could only solo as long at the format of the 78rpm record would allow, which was under four minutes, for the most part. Within those constraints, artists like Charlie Parker created brilliance.

The tables have since turned. Artists have gone on to create works of considerable length in film, television and music. Now the challenge is not in the limitation of the format, but rather in the limitation of the new generation of content consumers’ attention span. Wired Magazine highlights the phenomenon of re-formatting in their March issue under the apt banner of “Snack Culture.”

Much has been written about how writing for the web is an entirely different beast than writing for published books, magazines and newspapers. We are only now seeing the same happen in the world of online audio and video. As technology allows for consumption in places other than where a television or radio are present, ideas about the format are being called into question.

The 90 minutes that NBC still allows for Saturday Night Live serves as a fine example. They are dicing small bits of that now seemingly enormous chunk of broadcast time and placing the best parts on YouTube. One infamous clip [NSFW] was placed there by NBC in its uncensored form, and has since received over 17 million views.

Next New Networks is extrapolating this concept; two former content CEOs [of MTV and Nickelodeon pedigree] created a new venture to cater specifically to the changing format, boundaries and constraints of content. From their website:

We’re looking to be available everywhere, from phones to iPods and gaming devices, to whatever the next platform is. Each of our micro-networks consists of 3-11 minutes of content refreshed on a schedule, daily, weekly, or bi-weekly (depending on the network), and offers one or more regular shows.

We are witnessing the truncation of what used to be standard format-imposed content lengths, not only for time’s sake, but for the sake of the ever-shortening attention span.

Perhaps we will see a distillation of the idea, without the need to pad it to meet the guidelines of a 74-minute CD, thirty-minute sitcom or 100-minute film. For those that have been creating content like this, perhaps ventures like Next New Networks will provide a viable outlet.

Old-school public radio has been producing to this length for some time, but length isn’t everything. New approaches including relevant video and still images would be welcome augmentations in many instances.

Not since Current.TV have we seen formatics tossed out like this.

The BBC reports that UK television viewing on televisions has decreased due to folks watching television on their computers and mobile devices. This flies in the face of what is, by all accounts, a global stampede on the large, widescreen LCD televisions.

Once again we are witness to the importance people place upon getting the content they desire at their command.

When the mp3 audio format rose to popularity, audiophiles decried it as a regression in the heirarchy of high-fidelity. They were correct. However, the consumers of mp3s saw the sacrifice in quality a fair trade for portability and by extension, convenience. This occurred in an environment where not one but two separate formats were developed to supercede the ubiquitous CDs’ audio quality.

The same situation exists right now in the video realm. As companies are jockeying to put their high-fidelity successors to DVD [Blu-Ray and HD DVD] in consumers’ hands, the younger generation is more and more satisfied to view things on a two-inch screen of a mobile phone or iPod.

The market has revealed that there is room for both. The chasm between the viewing experiences widens. On one hand, there is better-than-cinema promises of widescreen HDTV, Blu-Ray, & HD DVD, and on the other, 2″ and smaller mobile phones and iPods & the low-fidelity of video sharing sites like YouTube.

Know your audience.

While everyone is g0ing on about the Clear Channel buyout, I shall give you a respite — today you can read about 3-D animation.

In the past year, Disney has gone to lengths to get the next generation into the 3-D movie mindset. About one year ago the BBC posted a story about Disney’s new push. A key line in that story points to the fact that these movies are playable only in theaters equipped with the new $80-100k systems. I would imagine that the cinemas that dropped thousands upgrading projectors to the ear-splitting Dolby Digital sound systems are not pleased that new equipment will be required to play the bigger-grossing versions of films.

This has relevance today, or yesterday, as I drove about 30 minutes to see the 3-D version of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was a delight. The effect was quite remarkable, as viewed through the crazy glasses they hand out, as pictured above. It was playing in Coon Rapids and Oakdale only. These are likely the only two theaters in the Twin Cities that have completed the upgrade. [Calling Coon Rapids a part of the Twin Cities is a bit of a stretch…]

What does this have to do with anything? I drove 30 minutes to a theater at 9:20pm on a Thursday to see a movie. I could have watched the DVD at home. We actually did, around Halloween. This 3-D version of a film I have seen several times offered an experience compelling enough to go out of my way to take it in.

The content was king here, but even more important was its exclusivity.

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Mediaweek reports that XM Radio will be trying a new form of product placement within some prime-time television shows. The messages will tell viewers to go to a certain XM Radio channel to dig more of the music heard in the show. This is an outgrowth of the phenomenon in the past few years of featuring real musical acts in the background as well as in performance as part of dramas and sitcoms. While not an unheard of concept, the commodification of it via program-themed compilation CDs and now satellite radio channels is new And novel. Miami Vice did it many years ago, but the examples were few and far between after that.

It points to the ever-pervasive method of selling a concept rather than a product.

A fine example of this is in the new video by pop-star Stacey Fergeson, a.k.a. Fergie. While the star dances and sings like any other music video perfomance, things change when the product placement comes in about 2:50, as seen in the clip below. A shot of her holding the new Samsung mp3 player, seen above, shows off the biggest feature of this new player — built-in speakers. She dances with it, has fun, and so do the people around her. This portion of the video could be a commecial for Samsung; just add a logo. Repurposing!

Now that you have seen how much fun life can be, go here with your $188. You’ll be more cool than you already are. Totally.

While touring the CNN Center last week in Atlanta, I was handed a tag that I was instructed to wear at all times. On the reverse of this tag was a handy space for CNN to do a bit of focused advertising. The advert on mine was for the CNN Pipeline service. As the tag reads, you can try it free for two weeks.

I visited the site upon my return to find that the service is available for only $2.95 per month. That seems reasonable even to my painfully thrifty eyes. What do you get for $2.95? Access to live, unfiltered video feeds, four in total. Access to over 2,000 hours of video archives of CNN.com. Breaking news alerts on your desktop.

To me, it seems that CNN has the right idea here. They have the content. They have made the content easy to access. They have established a reasonable monthly fee for the service. They are leveraging their live content in parallel with their archive, fitting in with the Long Tail concept.

Bravo, CNN.