Category: .

YouTube Biz Blog: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, and CNN Clips Coming to YouTube

The flexibility we provide partners in monetizing their content was a key factor in Time Warner’s decision to come to YouTube. You’ll see a variety of ad formats (like overlays or in-stream ads) on their content, depending on the kind of video you’re watching, and both Turner and Warner Bros. will be able to leverage the strength of their sales forces to sell their own ads on the site. We will also be integrating the Time Warner player into YouTube.com.

So Google is getting deeper into Hulu’s territory of licensing tv shows, but doing it in a way that’s more self-serve. Where Hulu controls the ads, YouTube empowers the company that owns the show to sell the ads for itself. This is typical of Google’s identity, in the sense that they always prefer to be doing code rather than content. I imagine that content providers are also taking on the risk of unsold ad inventory, which means Turner and WB are committed to the business rather than dabbling.

The Wayback Machine snapshot of the Geocities homepage on Oct 22, 1996:

Dan Frommer: Music Startups: What A Crappy Investment

If MySpace does end up buying music service iLike for anything near the $20 million reported by TechCrunch, it’ll be just the latest disappointing return for VCs — who have poured millions into the digital music startup industry with little to show for it. Venrock’s David Pakman, who was previously CEO of eMusic, says on Twitter that iLike actually raised more than $35 million, not the $16 million reported elsewhere. “Ouch!” he adds. “Music startups aren’t great investments.”

It’s not like investors don’t know this already. I think there’s a bullet point in the first-day handout for new VCs: the copy paper is by the receptionist, the boss’s wife’s name is Dolores, and _no music startups_.

See also: Kite-Eating Tree.

Yahoo!’s Picks of the Week (12-9-96)

If June can’t have a silent night, at least December can — and in several languages to boot. What we mean is, just in time for Christmas, Jako Olivier has gathered together the lyrics of the carol Silent Night, Holy Night, as translated into a number of languages. According to Jako, “it’s been said that [the song] has been translated and rewritten in 230 different languages.” At this site yule find a variety of vernacular versions, including Afrikaans, Halaka, Irish-Gaelic, Norwegian and Sesotho. So, no reason to feel left out this season when you hear a group of carolers gently crooning, “Bosiu bo kgutsitseng, Tsohle di phomotse.” Submit any lyrics you might know if you don’t see them posted here.

And as it happens, the Silent Night home page is still there, 13 years later. It’s thousands of years old in internet time, like the stonehenge of the web.

It’s an incredibly robust piece of work.

The Wax MP3 player is now free software with source code on github.

Unless or until I write something to explain the design choices, it will remain a featureless sealed black obelisk in a dusty back room. But people with time on their hands may find that it’s rewarding to explore.

How is a portable cloud different than a package containing multiple files?

“Portable clouds” is a name for the idea that the “cloud” of the Internet is / can be made portable by copying portions of it onto your local networks, desktops and portable devices. Another way to say this is: really great replication and caching of the web.

On the one hand you have web pages that can easily move from host to host and URL to URL, like single page applications. Apps that use local storage (a feature of HTML5) rather than databases, for example.

On the other hand you have containers with multiple files in them, like the epub format for ebooks. Epub is a zip file whose contents are structured according to an industry standard. The contents are mainly HTML.

They’re evolving into the same place, or maybe they’re two different technology lineages competing for the same niche.

See also CMX.

Here is a shortcut for starting apps from the console in OS X.

1. Create a shell script named “o”, as in a lowercase letter ‘o’.
2. Chmod 755.
3. Put it in your path.
4. Put this in it:

   #!/bin/sh
   open /Applications/$1*

So then you can start Emacs with the command o Aq instead of open /Applications/Aquamacs Emacs.app/ and Firefox with o Fire rather than open /Applications/Firefox.app/.

Pampelmoose is a music blog by Dave Allen of Gang of Four. It’s good and it gets a lot of traffic.

It has a rare quality: Dave has permission to post the MP3s.

My guess about how it works is that he personally emails the musicians, one rock star to another, and then they say ok in a half-assed way which is more like “Sure, no problem, just pass the bong and shut up” than a signing ceremony.

But still, he gets permission. That’s usually more or less impossible. Usually a blogger would have to do something on the order of getting Madonna on the phone.

The reason it’s usually impossible is that the application design requires permission from every rights holder in the world before a single song can be used. Like, iMeem may sign a deal to use Warner’s catalog, but not have a comparable deal for Sony’s catalog, and in the meantime users aren’t willing to listen to only Warner songs. Given an application where users pick the song, you have to have every song in the world.

But a music blog isn’t that. The songs passing through it are limited. You need ten songs at a time, not a million. It’s doable to find ten songs that you like and can get permission to use.

Usually music blogs don’t get permission, because they’re too low-profile to need it. But for them to keep growing they have to achieve a sustainable legal profile, otherwise they’ll be sued underground as soon as they go above ground. Obviously.

I don’t think this new application flow is enough by itself to make everything ok instead of whacked-out-as-usual. I do think that it’s an exception to the physics of internet music, which makes it worth pointing out.

Billboard has integrated the Lala in-browser player into their site to enable full-track playback of the charts and all the other reference music they need to have. (For example). Because the Lala player is a pixel-for-pixel clone of Yahoo Media Player (aka “Goose”), this is an instance of the work of our team at Yahoo continuing to spread.

A core issue for sites that play music has turned out to be not interrupting playback as you click around. One of the major ways to do that, and probably the best, is to completely abandon the idea of going from page to page. Instead use Ajax for in-page navigation and pop a new window for any page that would interrupt. The telltale sign of this is when you see URLs with an elaborate path after a ‘#’ mark. At Billboard, for example, http://www.billboard.com/#/charts/hot-100 will give you the top 100.

So Billboard completely reengineered to support this goal. You can’t use this technique without going all the way, and they went all in.

An interesting advance on the state of the art is a module they call “The Visualizer.” This uses the same kind of widget as the player itself: there a strip docked in a fixed position in the viewport; it has an expanded view and a minimized view; the minimized view is a tab with an arrow on it to expand; etc. If you know YMP/goose or the derivatives then you recognize the style. But Billboard’s “Visualizer” isn’t a player, it’s a data porn navigator for charts like “Mariah Carey vs Debbie Gibson, 1987-2009.” It’s a very cool little info tool.

Thanks to @jherskowitz on Twitter for the tip. Congrats to the visual and interaction designers on our team who invented this widget — especially Lino Wiehen, Douglas Kim, and Jeff Hurlow. (Did I forget anybody? Let me know).

The way we think about music has been profoundly influenced by the needs of corporations. A lot of what we conceive as “best” is distinguished by ability to survive in a corporate environment.

Radio-friendly songs are ones that sound good between ads. Writing new songs may not provide material as compelling as using public domain songs, but it creates publishing income and copyright assets. Attractive singers may not be as good at singing as unattractive ones, but they can get better endorsement deals. And so on.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Exclusive – Backstage With Douglas Rushkoff
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford