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YahooTV
SpaceAdmiral writes "The New York Times is running a story on Yahoo TV. The story focuses on Lloyd Braun's plan to expand Yahoo! News into a more TV-like format." From the article: "Mr. Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media - both old and new - are watching carefully, if not nervously. As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like 'Lost,' which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's 'Daily Show' are in the works."
Huh, I thought he was just some guy in Seinfeld...
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
It seems to me like kind of a retrogression to try and implement a TV format on the internet; TV evolved the format it has (i.e. half hour shows with commercial breaks) for reasons that make sense in terms of the medium; And the TV medium is changing as it is, what with TV on demand, Tivo, and so forth. But the internet works on a completely different paradigm. Not to say that it might not be successful; Just kind of sounds like a round peg in a square hole.
Google still rules in terms of places I start at - Incredibly lightweight in terms of "splash" but incredibly heavy in terms of "usability".
Not much else to say otherwise. If I want random examples of what somebody else thinks is important I'll still go to slashdot :-).
http://www.mirrordot.com/find-mirror.html?http://w ww.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/technology/24yahoo.html
This looks to be an interesting concept for Yahoo, and maybe an admission that they've lost the just-plain-search battle with Google (that said, I'm a big fan of http://search.yahoo.com/, Google-like interface with Yahoo's faster-updated index - and they don't seem to index half the link-farm 'blogs', not that I've seen how well the Google Blog Search will filter those out of the mainstream search engine) and are moving into being the web's first site-based multimedia provider - browse the index, click the show you want and watch it, full-screen streaming.
Yahoo has always been the type to move towards multimedia content such as this, with their emphasis on cramming everything into one page versus Google's 'just search, but if you poke around we do other things too' mentality. (not criticising either one, they both clearly work well as both have produced highly profitable companies) The bandwidth for doing something like a site supplying news broadcasts and other traditionally TV-based media - and have it watchable for most normal people - is almost here, and if Yahoo manages to get on the bandwagon early and build up their range between now and the time when Joe Average has the bandwidth to have good-quality full-screen video, they could get the jump on Google to provide, like Braun suggests, things like news broadcasts, and maybe sports shows and other TV shows besides - like the DRM'ed download system the BBC suggested for their site a while back, only with streaming video rather than downloading - a system that, with the proper protections, will be easier to swallow for the content providers - the media conglomerates - too.
This could be very interesting.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
How about they make a show about a bunch of Gen X people in a big house with a history on the coast in California. Each person can represent a "type", and they can even have blog entries combined with the media, talking about the subtext of each episode. It's a soap opera, updated for the web! To make it even cooler, they could have a dog that sort of "comes with the house" as the mascot, and have the dog provide blog entries that give us insights on the characters.
I even have a good name for it. They could call it "The Spot". Does that sound pretty cool and original?
Then, they could follow that monster hit up with a show about a college grad trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The gimmick here can be that she has a camera in every room of her house, that can follow her everywhere and watch her doing everything. And she can blog about her life, too. I think we could call that one "Jennicam" - I think nobody's used that name before!
After all, why re-do "The Daily Show" when there are so many new, original ideas to develop?
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
George's Nemesis on Seinfeld? Serenity now...insanity at Yahoo later!
Lloyd Braun
Just a little information spiel... Here, in Japan, Yahoo is offering a TV package included with their broadband service. For an extra 2,000yen (about US$20) p/month you can select from around 1000 movies to watch, anytime, on your TV. YahooBB also allows free fixed-line telephone calls between YahooBB users and cheap international calls. It's about US$30 p/month for a 12M connection.
You can watch 24 hours worth of flipping through Fox News, CNN, and CNBC to get the same amount of news you'd get from 10 minutes of browsing through slashdot.org and fark.com...
The news nowadays is just sensationalized crap completely edited for a bunch of sheep. If there's an article that may hurt the parent companies of any of the media conglomerates, it's not shown. If there's a motorcycle chase where the motorcyclist gets away, thus showing that the justice isn't 100%, it's edited and ignored. (happened about a month ago while I was watching Fox News)
This Yahoo News is a good thing. Hopefully, they'll make a TV-like format that actually shows some NEWS and not just a bunch of small news made big to get ratings...
Hopefully Yahoo will take a cue from Univision. You can get more news from a 15-minute halftime report in the middle of a soccer game on Univision than you can from a day of any of the American networks... and that's even if you don't speak Spanish!
Oh wait.. Yahoo is already a big conglomerate allied with other big fat conglomerates.. Something tells me this will be more of the same, but with pretty new technology.
--- We need more Ron Paul!