Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: No - The Peacock Can't Sell, The PC Stops?, A History Of Newspaper Folly

Dropping The Internet Baton. As I speculated, NBC's revenue from online video advertising during the Olympics was pitiful. eMarketer reports the take as only $5.75 million. Via TechCrunch, which notes that Yahoo had more Olympics related page views than NBC. Ouch, that's gotta hurt!

The Good Enough Point? Ole Eichhorn notes the deceleration of improvement in laptop specs in the last few years. We're seeing a confluence of reasons: Limitations imposed by energy budgets and battery life, performance already good enough for most uses, and a lack of inspiring new applications to drive platform specs. The bleeding edge of development has shifted towards low power, more specialized mobile devices on one hand, and server-based applications on the other. As laptop technology commoditizes, one might expect a shift from specsmanship towards packaging and design, which may partly explain Apple's rising market share.

Who else remembers videotext? Valleywag is not my usual cup of tea, but in this case they've done a service with a history of the newspaper industry's misadventures online. It's not as if the papers haven't tried through the years - the article includes a screen shot from a Viewtron NAPLPS interface circa 1983. But it seemed that they walked away from that and other experiments with the same lessons that proved fatal to CompuServe: Online was a slow-growth market, not ready for real consumers, and too much or too early investment was the way to lose your money. All of which was true, until it wasn't. Unlike the online services, the newspapers thought they could deal with the change in their own time, since after all "Content is king". Except it's not, It's easily trumped by communications and community, and the industry is still in a flat spin from which it's unlikely to recover.

Didn't you always suspect this? A fake restaurant wins an award from Wine Spectator. The spoof menu and wine list contained a number of vintages that the magazine had previously trashed. Wine Spectator claims it did its diligence by making phone calls and checking online - everything except actually eating at the place. One hopes they are actually tasting the wine they review. Snark aside, I've little use for this kind of review content. Going to the wineries and checking things out personally is one of the pleasure of California that partially justifies the price tag of living here.

Two Cheers For NBC and The Olympics - or - Why Can't The Peacock Sell Internet Ads?

Four years ago I savaged the IOC and the Athens Olympics for culpable cluelessness in dealing with the Internet. Fair is fair, so I'm here to acknowledge that the IOC and their US mainstream media channel, NBC, have surpassed that weak performance and turned in a new Olympic record for Internet clues. In many other ways, however, they continue to display retrograde notions about distribution control and the potential of the medium. And NBC appears to be deliberately not selling the advertising inventory from its Internet video feeds. 

The Good 

NBC has done a good job integrating its television and Internet offerings into one master schedule and site. Could use some interface help, here and there, but it generally works.

Viewing NBC's online video clips or feeds requires installing the Microsoft Silverlight player. Hmmmm. Microsoft. Beta software. Trepidation. Macintosh. Safari. More trepidation. But I must say that it so far it looks decent, and has been remarkably stable. It's gotten befuddled when coming back from sleep mode, or in a few cases of a lost feed, but it's never crashed itself or taken down the browser. And so far as I can tell at this point it hasn't done anything evil or unwanted to any of my system settings.

And as a result I've gotten a good down payment on something that should have been done back in 2004: The ability to get live feeds and archives from the lesser known events, and those where the US doesn't necessarily have competitors or a chance. So far I've watched all of the shooting finals, including a men's air rifle event that came down to one shot. I've seen a world record set in the women's team archery, caught a couple of the sailing races, and part of the cross-country portion of the equestrian event. And I dipped into a few other events and decided they weren't for me.

The net is just the place for this kind of event and coverage. Let's face it, unless you're into the particular sport, some of these events are about as exciting as watching paint dry. And they don't necessarily feature the sort of male and female hard bodies, more or less covered, that make for good television ratings. So give NBC some credit for sorting out their big audience attractions and the 'long tail' events, and dealing with both effectively.

The Bad

NBC is still grossly afflicted with some combination of channel conflict between the old video media and the new, and clue shortages by its management The attempts to paper over its MSM instincts are obviously strained. One almost suspects rival channel groups parsing out terms of a treaty, watched over by phalanxes of copyright attorneys and affiliate relationship managers.

It started from the top, with the opening ceremonies. NBC ran the program on tape delay, and sent out that phalanx of attorneys to try to plug Americans' access to any live feed. When it posted Internet views of the ceremonies, they were deliberately shuffled in order so that the American teams entry wouldn't appear on the net before it did on the tape delay. The commentators spent so much time pointing out that 'Chinese has no alphabetical order' that one had to wonder if they were hoping someone watching the Internet version (I did) wouldn't happen to notice how the stadium in-field magically became less full after commercial breaks. File this one under "Do they think we are idiots?" In this case, they're the idiots. A good chunk of their audience was TiVoing anyway, and the number who would stay up to see it live is small. The ability to reassemble the mass audience, at one time for one event, is on its way out. Get over it, NBC, and learn to deal.

Ditto the decision to censor the live feeds of the 'big events' from the Internet. Anything with those aforementioned hard bodies, from gymnastics to swimming to beach volleyball, is not to appear on the net until well after the tape delay, let alone the real event. Of course, anyone with a vestigial brain can figure out how to get the results from myriad outlets around the world long before NBC deigns to show us. Get a clue. Learn to use the two channels side by side, meeting people where and when they want to be.

Of course, the mainstream video coverage is as lame as ever. The MSM tendency to reduce everything to people 'journalism' is on full display. Even the hard bodies can't save an event if the US gets knocked out, and suddenly those sports down in the remainder bin become important should we happen to medal. I'm not really expecting improvement here, it's what the medium has become, but at least a little futile whinging seems in order. I'm dealing by using the TV as background, with the audio off, while running the net.

And speaking of those lesser sports - and even some of the big events - what happened to all the prelims and elimination rounds? Somehow 64+ competitors get whittled down to a few finalists, and we see nothing of it. If you've ever wondered what happened to all those who march in from smaller nations, never to be seen again, you're not going to find out from NBC. And what would it take? One camera pointed at whatever field of play, and one at the official scoreboard, and an open mike. No commentary, no 'added value', but let's face it, you're not going to be watching prelims in a lesser known sport if you don't know what you're looking at. The IOC should just do this itself next time, or mandate it from its MSM partners.

The Ugly

NBC is apparently deriving no revenue at all from its Internet based video coverage. The video interstitials that show up when changing event 'channels' are all from GE, as well as many of the banners on the main site. If you missed it, NBC belongs to GE, at least for now, so those are all 'house ads'. As in, no revenue.

There's got to be a story here. Are they expecting me to believe that not one supplier of shooting or archery equipment had any interest in those spots, at any price? Or that those catering to the horsey or sailing crowds wouldn't be interested in reaching those upscale consumers while they're watching their favorite activity? Give me a break.

The only possible conclusion is that NBC didn't try to sell the video inventory. One has to wonder why. Was that the price extracted by the affiliates to let any coverage to escape onto the net? Is this how senior management will try to justify complaints about revenue cannibalization by the net, since they've guaranteed they won't have any income on that side of the house? Maybe some enterprising new media reporter can chase this one down.

The Roving Eye: Oren's Corollary, Media Passing On The Stairs, Polemica Academica

The Snail! My post on Burke's Law provoked some interesting responses, including two that hit the funny bone. Ben Hyde links to a report on ossification at the Beeb: The snail! The snail! How can we possibly escape!. Hilarious, and right on point. Because the corollary of Burke's Law that really does the damage is this: 

"Organizations dump excess wealth in the form of structure." 

It's true from small non-profits to corporations to governments. Non-profit donors will eventually rebel at the overhead, and shrinking net margins and the business cycle will clear out the clutter at a for-profit. But the accumulation at a governmental entity seems to have little limit. Making this coinage also humorously on point: Who is John Gall?. (And if you don't know, you should, so I'll repeat my previous link.)

One on the way up, the other on the way down. 'Paper Cuts' indeed!. Using the new media to document the demise of the old: A Google Maps interface to layoffs in the newspaper biz. Add 125 more at the SF Chron today. Meanwhile, Google itself contemplates entering the corporate venture capital world. I tend to share Fred Wilson's caution about corporates: Their strategic goals are often unclear, their needs for exit may not coincide with those of professional investors, and they tend to abandon the market in downturns. My best advice to Google would be to emulate (of all folks) In-Q-Tel and the CIA who never place an investment unless there's also a project underway with the target company. Google-money = distraction. Google-money + Google-deal = company making potential.

That's gonna leave a mark. Never mind the Nobel, or the money on the table, we'll be shunned at cocktail parties! A University of Chicago economics prof lays a smack down on leftist colleagues kvetching about the establishment of a Milton Friedman Institute in memory of the great man. What ever would we say to our friends? (But, we'd like to get our hands on some of the funds lined up to support it.) Never let it be said that economists can't write polemic - too bad this one is necessary. Via Megan McArdle, who contributes her own a propos summation:

"Why aren't there hordes of economists studying meaningful alternatives to market capitalism? Because we've been experimenting with various other systems--both localism and extreme centralization--for over a century, and the experiment produces the same damn result every single time: human lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. "

Indeed.

Burke's Law of Metadynamics

About twenty years ago I was privileged to have a 1-1 airport conversation with James "Connections" Burke. (I'd escorted him there from a speaking gig.) At the time he was interested in ecosystems, and as I'd done a graduate degree in systems science and worked on environmental monitoring projects, that became the topic of conversation.

In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:

"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."

It may not sound like much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.

I doubt the meat of the statement was original with Burke, but given his gift for a turn of phrase, the formulation may have been. At any rate, I've never seen it elsewhere. It keeps coming up in my own thinking and writing, so I've decided to memorialize it as "Burke's Law of Metadynamics" for reference by myself and anyone else who cares. The 'Burke' is obvious, the 'metadynamic' sets it aside from rules that operate within dynamic systems of fixed structure; it is a statement instead about the malleability of structure.

It's been long since I've done ecosystems work, so that's not the reason it keeps coming up. Experience has show me that the statement applies equally to human organizations and systems, particularly if you substitute 'wealth' by analogy to 'energy'. In that form it's a more succinct statement of several of John Gall's Laws of Systemantics.

I've used or partially quoted Burke's Law in a number of posts here and comments elsewhere, enough so that a single linkable explanation seems in order. Since I feel another such post coming on, here it is.