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Opinion | Features
Woz not great
In this guest post Tony Prysten argues that the thousand dollar price of seeing out-of-touch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack on his Australian tour was a waste of money.
This week, for the cost of two iPads (yep, two) I went to the Woz Live conference in Melbourne. I was not impressed.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
According to industry experts Encore spoke to, the key elements that define transmedia can be summarised as follows: platform, time, audience, adaptation, and creative collaboration.
Innovation is the remedy for the ailing magazine industry
With magazine circulations plummeting, FHM closing and rumours rife on future ownership of ACP Magazines, Paul Merrill says the only way forward is launching new titles.Eight years ago in the UK, nearly a quarter of all magazine sales came from magazines that were less than four years old. In Australia, the figure was slightly lower, but still significant. Today, the situation is very different. For a start there are so few new magazines. Yes, Masterchef briefly flared, and Top Gear made an initial impact. But Grazia and Alpha fizzled, and now ACP has shelved their plans to launch Elle.
More than a game: broadcasting the Olympics
The 2012 London Olympics will be the biggest televised sporting event of our time. Brooke Hemphill discovers the logistical challenges and technical requirements of producing the event.
From July 27 to August 12, the Australian media will go sport crazy as the Games of the XXX Olympiad, aka the 2012 London Summer Olympics, unfold. The games will be the most televised sporting event of our time as broadcasters look to master every manner of technology at their disposal.
The Voice - Australia's best example yet of social TV
In this guest post, Sputnik’s Rodd Messent has a theory on why audiences have taken to The Voice .I am an addict of Channel Nine’s hit show The Voice. Such is the extent of my addiction I seriously think my housemate might kick me out of our apartment for the semi-frenzied yelling and tweeting that ensues in our lounge room each time the show airs.It’s the first time in almost three years that such disagreement has resulted in less than civil behaviour towards one another, and it’s made me think it might be a microcosm of the large volume of online debate about the show and, correspondingly, an explanation for its success as a social TV experience.Why brands are the US Army - and culture jammers are the Viet Cong
In this guest posting, Dave Burgess, who painted ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, claims that ‘amoral’ advertisers have copied his idea.
Culture jamming is a 28-year-old term coined by the San Francisco-based band Negativland, who declared that the ‘Studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’.
Branded content is dead. Long live branded content
In this guest posting, Anthony Freedman argues why branded content is making a comeback.
A few short years ago, probably concurrent with the advent of the PVR, a new term emerged within the marketing communications industry; branded content. This was really synonymous with advertiser funded TV shows where programming was created by brands and deals struck with networks to broadcast them.
There were varying degrees of success with this model.
Shock advertising: 30 ads that would give Australia's ad watchdog a coronary
Is shock an underused weapon in Australian advertising, asks Robin HicksToday, Sydney agency The Cabana Boys used an image of a mouth sewn together to shock people with the idea that problem gamblers lie to conceal their habit. Is it the most disturbing image ever? No. Will it get banned by the Advertising Standards Bureau? No. But it did make me wonder why shock is not used more often in Australia – and not just by charities and government bodies. (WARNING: NSFW)
The making of ratings blockbuster The Voice
Jason Mountney goes on the set of Channel Nine’s talent search series, The Voice, to see how the format, based on an international franchise, has come together. What ingredients have gone into making this certified hit that’s rated more than two million viewers on three consecutive nights?
Mike Goldman has one of the toughest jobs on the set of the Nine network’s new talent show, The Voice. He not only has to narrate the show, but also keep the audience from losing their enthusiasm as they realise shooting TV programs takes a lot longer than the one-hour bursts they see in their lounge rooms. A lot longer.
Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience
While it’s a shame The Global Mail has failed to make an impact on the media landscape, the signs have been there for some time.I love the concept of a well resourced, philanthropically-funded independent news site. Anywhere in the world, that’s a rare and wonderful thing. In Australia even more so. So I hope that Grame Wood gets to see his investment make a difference.
And I have no inside info on whether Monica Attard’s sudden departure is linked to the site’s failure to find an audience so far.
Regardless, here are nine areas they can easily start to address:
Journalism’s new model?
Does the launch of philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail signal a new era for journalism or is the model destined to be a passing fad, asks Cathie McGinn in this article first published in Encore magazine.With little fanfare, philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail launched in February this year.
The online-only title received a generous five-year funding commitment from businessman Graeme Wood, founder of accommodation website wotif.com, who donated $15million.
Five things that make a great suit
In this guest posting, Gareth Collins argues that the role of a great account manager is to make the work betterI’m surprised at how many suits I meet who don’t know their role in the advertising business. The question ‘what does an advertising account manager or director do?’ is frequently met with answers such as project manager, relationship manager, plate spinner or go between … and those are the nice ones.
Success is judged on the ability to manage a process, be strong administratively and get stuff done. And while a good suit needs to do all of these things brilliantly, if these are the traits that define a great suit, then I’m in the wrong job.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
The top seven...most patronising pieces of communication
Sometimes brands have big ideas. Sometimes marketers get so caught up with a grandiose idea that instead of finding engaging ways to sell breakfast cereal, they start to believe their own rhetoric. And sometimes it’s just lazy marketing. Here are my top seven inadvertently patronising pieces of communication…
1) Last night thousands of women gathered in Sydney’s Centennial Park to take part in She Runs the Night, an event created by Nike.
TV audience measurement – why big isn’t always beautiful
In this guest post, Chris Walton argues that the media industry needs to take a new approach to TV tradingThere has been a significant amount of coverage recently about how successful The Voice has been. Indeed, audience figures of 2.6m+ people are very impressive these days. Based on reports, this is apparently double the size of audience that Nine was hoping for in the lead up to the programme launching.
Fairfax Digital launches online video push
Fairfax Digital today launched a long form TV site in one of the biggest attempts yet by a publisher to monetise online video.
The company has been discreetly signing deals with content owners to feature shows on the site with pre-roll ads.
The archive content at launch includes ABC shows like The Gruen Transfer, Summer heights High, Enough Rope and The Librarians.
The genre of videos available to users are: Animation; celebrities; comedy; documentary; food; interview; lifestyle; military; music; nature; science; sport; true crime.
The video offering is branded across the Fairfax mastheasd sites including smh.tv and theage.tv.
At present several episodes from 65 shows are available.
Pippa Leary, Managing Director, Media at Fairfax Digital said: “This is our first real step into long-form video, and meets a growing demand for access to video content online. The way Australians access content online is evolving, and this move really opens up a new way to engage with content across the Fairfax Digital mastheads.
“A survey of our audiences has helped to guide the early decisions around what will be available across the sites. We’ve been building the sites for the past few months, and sourcing content that matches the interests of our viewers. As always, we’ll continue to listen closely to our community, as they help us shape the nature and content which becomes available online through these sites.”
October 1st, 2010 at 12:45 pm
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Comments
1 Oct 10
1:19 pm
With the NBN on its way, its logical for News/Media organisations to diversity their delivery channels. It will be interesting to see whether this strategy will compete or complement with GoogleTv … which is not far away.
1 Oct 10
1:48 pm
Why would anyone go to SMH to watch an episode of Gruen Transfer or Summer Heights High?
This is all backwards and not even focussed on the end consumer. I bet there’s a sh*t hot media kit that the sales team are pinging out to clients tho.
I personally despise the stupid auto play videos on SMH as it is. Very frustrating, I click do not play EVERY time. Even MySpace turned off autoplay FFS.
1 Oct 10
1:57 pm
Paragraph 4 “There genre of videos…”
Oh come on…
1 Oct 10
2:05 pm
flash-based video player. Don’t expect to watch this on your ipad.
1 Oct 10
2:13 pm
That’s a great achievement. We knew Fairfax Digi has been working on it for a while, but were quite sure when this would come out. Now I guess the next step is, excepting a proper launch and traffic generation, to make it available on several platforms. As a user, I can’t wait to hear Fairfax Digital announcing it will be soon available on PS3. As a digital dude, I can’t wait for an enhancement of behavioural targeting and re-targeting, delivering pre-rolls based on users’ browsing history.
Anyway, good job Fairfax Digital!
1 Oct 10
2:17 pm
Good way for the ABC to make ad revenue – would imagine this is a rev share with the ABC and allows them to have ads run before their content, see revenue from it, and not breach any govt rules.
Not sure news sites are where people want to watch TV shows but wait and see I guess.
1 Oct 10
3:42 pm
I would assume you would go there as Summer Heights High is no longer available on iview. I would prefer that the ABC had a secondary site with ads for older programs if they wanted to make revenue from them online. There’s no reason why they can’t sell ads online. Until this sort of thing is accessible on people’s tv I don’t see it as a big deal. The Iview plug in for Plex is great. Means I can watch iview with a remote.
1 Oct 10
4:13 pm
looks like plus7! watching some stuff now
1 Oct 10
4:15 pm
FABULOUS! More stuff to keep me occupied and procrastinate at work with!
1 Oct 10
4:39 pm
These sites have been out for a month or so…? Not sure why you/they are saying it launched today.
1 Oct 10
4:44 pm
@ChinTan
This would be complemented by Google TV, not compete with it from my understanding. As in, if smh.tv was to be made compatible with the Google TV browser, you’d be able to set up a smh.tv channel on your TV.
I think that’s how it works, anyway.
1 Oct 10
9:48 pm
Why are organisations like Fairfax putting up inferior quality video in the year 2010?
The video quality is very poor, particularly considering Fairfax is a ‘media’ company and particularly that broadcast video has been online now for more than 5 years!
And why is Fairfax (and others) using Flash to present video and not HTML5? HTML5 is device agnostic so you can watch it on any device; PC, MAC, iPhone, iPad etc. Try YouTube’s HTML5 interface on your mobile or Vimeo’s or even Facebook’s.
The User Interface and design is circa 2005. Many companies have learnt many lessons on how best to present video online and much of this knowledge is in the public domain. The user interface should be something at least like http://www.hulu.com or even YouTube or Vimeo. There aren’t even any ‘share’ functions in the media player design which has been a UI standard for at least 4 years.
C’mon Fairfax (and News.com.au) get with the times!
3 Oct 10
12:51 pm
Sheer audacity for Ms Leary to say its a way to engage more content…piffel… its repurposing and adding head end advertising, nothing more. +1 to “DEC”, I always click DONT PLAY on FFX websites, especially the ones that have channel TEN news clips. What a crock of a cop out !
Both papers are clueless about the digital video strategy so they take the easy way out; buy cheap content and rebrand it. News.cum do it with skynews extract clips. They must think we are idiots and we won’t notice.
So why dd FFX recently spend $1M on new studios at Darling Island ? Has anyone actually seen a video news item produced by FFX ? Why do they employ uni grads to do their video “journalism”- because its cheap !!
Since I stopped buying newspapers 10 years ago, I now dont go to their websites for real news. As for the the technicals, the decision to go to flash is an epic fail. Shame Mr McMillan shame. It took them 10 years to work out the difference between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios now they go and choose the LEAST useable player solution.
Side note: my PS3 now recognises the 7 extra service and it is a wonderful promotion tool for them. Not that ill want to use my data to watch promos and Sunrise “extra” content. but I do like the technical strategy they have implemented. Streets ahead of the other commercial FTA stations. Did anyone else notice this ?
So my personal ratings board for digital video strategy would be:
1- ABC online/iview/PS3
2- Seven/ yahoo7/ PS3
3- IINET/ Fetch TV (though limited release)
4- Television Sydney website/live scaleable streaming in quicktime
5- youtube/google channels with customization
6- unallocated
7- nine/MSN
8- SBS- barely existant
9- TEN- feeble
10 FFX /News Ltd- fail !
5 Oct 10
1:28 pm
@Dec “I personally despise the stupid auto play videos on SMH as it is. Very frustrating, I click do not play EVERY time. Even MySpace turned off autoplay FFS.”
I hear your pain. It’s a deceptive and shitty policy designed to inflate their view rate. Here’s a Chrome Plug-in called Fairfax Video Blocker:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/akdhnalfijbhlifpobhanbopfbdlbjfd?hl=en-au
There should be a Firefox add-on too, but you’ll have to search for it.
For Mac, try Click2Flash, it’s a free Safari plug-in that prevents all Flash autoplaying on all websites (including ads) – however you can whitelist sites like YouTube if you want to: http://clicktoflash.com/
5 Oct 10
2:14 pm
@Martin – HTML5 video doesn’t work with Internet Explorer. iPad is only about 2% of the market and not really worth developing for.
5 Oct 10
6:01 pm
@Tom – thanks mate I am aware of the limitations of certain technologies. Opera, Safari, Firefox and Chrome are capable of HTML5 video and IE9 is built on the standard. (And yes I’m aware of browser market shares.)
My main point was the very poor quality of Flash based video used by Fairfax and the very poor user experience and poor overall design. It’s not that hard but look at the output and result from Fairfax.
As an aside, mobile video views have grown 660% in the past 12 months and smartphones like the iPhone happily play HTML5 video. YouTube mobile video views are already up over more than 100m per day.
I’m also acutely aware of iPad’s market share and I was simply arguing that if people are building content for mobile devices such as the iPad or smartphones then unless they are selling their content (aka iTunes or Zune) then they should avoid wasting money building native apps and instead build for HTML5.
The fact that most of the mainstream online and digital video networks already have HTML5 sites or are HTML5 compatible (YouTube, Vimeo, even xBox now!) let alone have had HD quality video for a couple of years, then Fairfax just now putting sub standard video content online pretty much speaks volumes about how much they don’t get it.
6 Oct 10
10:17 am
@ Martin
To begin with, I’m not sure why you’d both praise HTML5 and also dismiss the video quality of Flash – you realise both HTML5 and Flash use the same video codec (H.264) and therefore most likely both will look identical? The compromise for video quality is usually due to a decision on the lowest common denominator of network connection from the site’s users. Fairfax Digital know what they’re doing and I’m sure the quality they’ve provided is a logical one for their audience.
Also, while I agree that it would be fantastic for them to create an HTML5 solution to cater for the mobile audience – which I agree is growing rapidly (although realistically, still far behind the desktop audience, especially when it comes to streaming full-length TV shows) – to include it as a necessary requirement at launch would be seen as a waste of both time and money. To cater for such as small potential market when the core product has not had time to establish itself and prove itself as a success?
I’m sorry, but your arguments are entirely focused on what you yourself want, and not what the Australian digital market as a whole is capable of consuming – and it is this that both the Fairfax Digital team and the Fairfax shareholders are interested in appealing to.
6 Oct 10
11:01 am
@Tom we can have chat over a coffee about online video if you want cause I’ve been doing (live and on demand video) since 1998 across Australia, the USA and Europe and on some of the biggest sites – so I have a fair clue in this space.
We can talk codecs separately but people who use Flash (or anything else) choose to encode their videos using any one of a variety of codecs and H.264 is just one and it appears Fairfax aren’t using it.
The issue with Fairfax is their specific Flash implementation is poor and or the video encoding (and choice of codec) is poor and or their choice of CDN is poor. Just look at the quality of the video and the extensive pixelation. I am on a 30mbps cable download speed on a quad core PC with dual Nvidia video cards, 6gb RAM which is optimised for video production and encoding and the Fairfax quality is circa 2005. All I have tried to say repeatedly is that the Fairfax implementation is so far behind the times for a media organisation it is sad. But, it is not just the video quality and their particular implementation of Flash it is the whole UI without any social sharing capability and other UI basic must haves – all of which have been know about for many years.
Now, just compare the Flash implementation of Hulu and Major League Baseball to Fairfax and iView. There is almost no comparison in the quality of video because they’ve been doing it for years. But, you can also compare http://www.abcnews.com or http://www.cbsnews.com video to Fairfax and iView, again there is no comparison in quality because these sites are using people who know what they are doing and implementing basic best practices. You won’t see any pixelation of the videos on those sites and they are using Flash and the content is being served out of the USA (but they might also be using Akamai).
As I work in this space I can give you any stats and facts you want about video via the browser (live streaming and on demand) and on mobiles and your arguments are focused on your perceptions of the market which isn’t today’s consumer behaviour. Not once did I mentioned that my argument was based on what ‘I want’ so you’re jumping to conclusions.
I also highlighted the use of HTML5 on major sites as a demonstration of how far behind the curve Australian media is and that it is an answer right now for smartphones, iPads and users of Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari which now make up more than 50% market share vs IE.
You will be surprised at how many Australians are watching higher definition video via their browser from non-Australian sites and via their mobiles. Australians are one of the highest consumers of online video in the world (44% of Aussies as at Feb 2010 with an additional 33% saying they’ll do more) and just because Australian media organisations haven’t offered it has not stopped or inhibited Australians from accessing it. iView alone is already getting more than 500k visitors per month and more than 1.7m visits but they also have a sub-par Flash implementation.
I’ll just finish again with the point I was trying to make. It is 2010 and there is no excuse for a sub-standard implementation of online video whether using Flash or Silverlight or raw embedded media players. The knowledge is in the public domain and easily accessible whether its about encoding, Flash implementation, usability, design best practices, CDN’s and on and on – and it doesn’t take large amounts of money. It is simply a real shame that a major Australian media organisation is today implementing a sub-standard video portal and talking it up when most other sites (media and non media) have had great experiences for a number of years and are already innovating / piloting HTML5 and offering high quality experiences.
In the digital space you innovate or die and there is no excuse for offering these sub-standard experiences in Australia particularly when a large majority of online Australian’s are already accessing higher definition and higher quality experiences and expect and deserve better (and so do advertisers).
6 Oct 10
3:10 pm
@ Martin
Happy to meet another online video pundit, feel free to get in touch through my LinkedIn.
6 Oct 10
3:11 pm
Try that again.