Conan O’Brien has been all over the South by Southwest festival this week, hawking a new documentary about his time wandering in the late-night talk television wilderness after he left “The Tonight Show” last year.

That included a lively live interview with Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on Saturday, as well as a series of appearances related to “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.”

His hysterical journey, of course, was deftly played out by O’Brien all over the Internet, which was definitely on “Team Coco.”

The documentary, which will be distributed in the U.S. in a multi-platform deal with AT&T, follows O’Brien on his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour.

Here’s a clip from the film:

Here’s the company’s official statement: “The individual in question violated the company’s standards of conduct by repeatedly copying and distributing a variety of materials without permission.”

Not that it needs much unpacking, but just to be clear: NBC is saying, without actually saying so, that its position is that it canned the leaker for behavior beyond posting that single clip.

And not to be too square and get-off-my-lawn about it, but there are lots and lots of companies–including, for instance, Google, which owns YouTube–that fire people for distributing things on the Internet that aren’t supposed to be distributed on the Internet.

As PaidContent’s Andrew Wallenstein argues, the fact that the clip is funny and interesting and had already been on TV 17 years ago–and on NBC’s own Web site today–doesn’t mean the NBC guy had the go-ahead to do it. (It also points out the complexity that YouTube has in policing authorized and unauthorized clips, but that’s a different story.)

But, as noted: The clip is funny and interesting! And reminds us of what Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric used to look like. Let’s watch it again!

What he can successfully do is go on “Saturday Night Live” and be a good sport, appearing alongside two men who have played and parodied him: “The Social Network” actor Jesse Eisenberg and SNL’s Andy Samberg. Here’s the clip from tonight’s show:

Without Aaron Sorkin writing his dialogue, the real Zuckerberg is lacking in zingers. His review of “The Social Network”: “It was… interesting.”

“That guy’s like my evil twin and that’s just Andy Samberg,” Zuckerberg tells SNL creator Lorne Michaels while being mock-sequestered backstage. “Those guys are such nerds….C’mon, I invented poking.”

Meanwhile, Eisenberg admits, for all the sticklers in the room (and one of them in particular), “I wasn’t really ‘doing’ Mark Zuckerberg; I was interpreting a fictional character in a movie script.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

One of the more interesting movies at the 11th Sundance Film Festival, which opens today in Park City, Utah, will be “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.”

The documentary is by Andrew Rossi, who spent a year following reporters and editors at the famed newspaper, even as the media landscape shifted dramatically due to the impact of digital technologies.

Here’s the program description from Sundance:

With the Internet surpassing print as our main news source, newspapers going bankrupt, and outlets focusing on content they claim audiences (or is it advertisers?) want, PAGE ONE chronicles the media industry’s transformation and assesses the high stakes for democracy if in-depth investigative reporting becomes extinct.

The film deftly makes a beeline for the eye of the storm or, depending on how you look at it, the inner sanctum of the media, gaining unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom for a year. At the media desk, a dialectical play-within-a-play transpires as writers like salty David Carr track print journalism’s metamorphosis even as their own paper struggles to stay vital and solvent. Meanwhile, rigorous journalism–including vibrant cross-cubicle debate and collaboration, tenacious jockeying for on-record quotes, and skillful page-one pitching–is alive and well. The resources, intellectual capital, stamina, and self-awareness mobilized when it counts attest there are no shortcuts when analyzing and reporting complex truths.

What is probably most interesting is that many of the stories covered by the Times in the film are about the technological forces that have put it and other traditional media organizations through the digital ringer in recent years.

And, as someone who made the move away from a big mainstream newspaper to an online-only publication, I experienced some significant déjà vu watching clips in this interview with Rossi below, especially of the editor-centric tone of the newsroom and the franticness of reporters to get a story on the front page.

Which these days feels like such an odd and ancient way to think of journalism and which I also don’t miss for a second. (By the way, you can do “rigorous” journalism online too and without all the endless meetings.)

Check out Rossi (and that’s the very funny NYT media columnist David Carr in the photo below):

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in the midst of a media bonanza.

Aside from all the heat over its recent investment whatever with Goldman Sachs, the young entrepreneur has been touted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and been selected Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Oh, yes, and that movie–”The Social Network”–which you just know is going to win some Oscars on February 27.

Now CNBC has just aired a documentary on the huge social networking site, titled–appropriately–“The Facebook Obsession.”

There is no new interview with Zuckerberg, and it’s essentially the same story about the Silicon Valley wunderkind, told yet again. But all the old video clips and photos collected all together on another television show are nice.

Also, I always enjoy the Winklevii spouting off hambone arguments about why they are owed more than $65 million for Zuckerberg’s kneecapping of them back at Harvard University.

And, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-me appearance, I also make a showing, apparently as the grumpy one.

But I did not see it, as CNBC did not deign to post the entire report online, as “60 Minutes” so kindly did.

CNBC did do a preview and provide some clips, which are embedded below, as well the the much funnier Jon Stewart take on it all on “The Daily Show,” titled “The Anti-Social Network”:

The money, doled out via 500 $1,000 credits to photography mecca B&H Photo, is meant to reward some of YouTube’s most popular content providers. And it’s supposed to remind people how fruitful it can be to provide YouTube with good content.

Google’s video site usually does that by other means. For instance, it is happy to point out that members of its “Partner” program can now make real money–in some cases, a full-time living or even more–by supplying YouTube with popular clips.

But YouTube’s most public embrace of its partners will happen if the video site ends up acquiring Next New Networks, a Web video producer/distributor dedicated to putting out low-cost, high-view videos, like the ones featuring Obama Girl or the Bed Intruder. That is, exactly the kind of videos that YouTube is rewarding with today’s handouts.

News of the sale talks were first reported in the New York Times last week. And at the time, I’d assumed that YouTube was going to be able to buy Next New at a bargain basement price, in large part because the start-up is on its third CEO in three years.

But people familiar with the company tell me that if it does sell to Google, investors who have put in $26 million will get at least a decent return on their investment. So we’re looking at something in the $50 million range at a minimum, perhaps much more.

YouTube is Next New Networks’ primary distribution partner, which makes the proposed deal a bit of a head-scratcher for some: Why pay for stuff you’re already getting?

But YouTube apparently thinks it is worth its while to lock in that content pipeline. And it’s willing to spend a whole lot more than $500,000 to get it done.

Here’s one of the YouTube partners getting $1,000 worth of new equipment: “MysteryGuitarMan,” in a clip he put out last month that has since garnered almost 1.5 million views.

In it, he shows off another redo of the profiles on the Silicon Valley social networking site, which puts photos front and center.

(Also, for those in the know, that’s outgoing PR poo-bah Brandee Barker rolling down the hall on the Ripstik.)

Veteran CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asks Zuckerberg in the clip below of the interview if he wants to own the Internet–which, as usual, Zuckerberg does not exactly answer.

But Stahl–God bless her!–keeps at it!

BoomTown also makes an appearance on the television show, so let me know how you like my smart-lady glasses.

Enjoy the video:

Sorry, couldn’t shave down the eight-minute running time, but it’s worth it (boy do I miss the Hulu clip-editing feature). Also, this is NSFW if your workplace isn’t cool with the word “penis.”

If you’re looking for a more sober take on WikiLeaks, check out Andy Greenberg’s excellent Forbes cover story and interview with Julian Assange.

Should you? Depends: If you’re into iPad magazine apps, you’ll want to, because it’s a pretty good iPad magazine app, with some interesting deployment of art, video and live Web links. On the other hand, it’s pretty similar to most of the other iPad magazine apps you’ve seen so far.

Except more confusing–the navigation on all of these things changes from app to app, but this one seems even more random. Hence this one-page instruction manual (note to the guy who was confused – yes, this is an actual screenshot):

That said, if you do monkey around with this thing, you’ll find some cool stuff. My favorite so far is an ohmygodlookitathat photo of some nutjob kayaking off a waterfall. This image:

Expands into this image:

And then a link gets you to this astonishing Vimeo clip:

tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State from Vagueo on Vimeo.

No one seems to spend much time talking about it anymore. For good reason: In large part because Steve Jobs insisted on it, “online video” increasingly means “HTML5-compatible.” There’s not much to debate anymore.

Video search engine MeFeedia, for instance, says that 54 percent of Web video is now compatible with HTML5. That’s more than double the tally the company had back in May–less than six months ago. And because MeFeedia’s numbers include old archival stuff that most people don’t watch, as well as big troves of Chinese video you’re unlikely to see, the practical number for most Web surfers is much higher.

Then again, it isn’t hard to find Web video that isn’t compatible with your iPad or iPhone–or your Android handset from Google, either. And once you do, the fact that the clip is in the statistical minority won’t make you feel any better. Even some sites that Apple says are “iPad-ready,” like the New York Times, have plenty of video that won’t work on Apple’s device or any other HMTL5 player.

MeFeedia highlights these HTML5 holdouts:

• Full episodes from the major TV Networks (including Hulu)
• Most cable network content, particularly long-form video
• Metacafe, MySpace Video, 5min
• Live video sites such as Ustream and Justin.tv
• International sites such as Tu.tv, Youku, and Sevenload

But as the Hulu example shows us quite clearly, the HTML5 gaps that exist today are usually there because of business reasons, not technical ones: Hulu is quite happy to provide you with HTML5 video on your iPad–if you’re willing to pay (something) for a Hulu Plus subscription.

So, sorry iPad users (and yes, international visitors on good old-fashioned PCs)–you won’t be able to see this clip:

You don’t need to watch the whole clip to see it–the joke is over by the 40-second mark. You will have to sit through a pre-roll, though. And, as always, you can’t see it outside the U.S.:

The newest venture–a 24-hour live “behind the scenes” Webcast, produced in conjunction with Google’s YouTube (another recent Conan ally).

It kicks off at 1 pm ET today on O’Brien’s YouTube channel, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. But if you want to read about it, you can check out this YouTube blog post, or just watch this clip.

If you’re in a hurry, though, you can get a good sense of Denton, at least in present tense, via this clip. It’s an abridged version of my onstage chat with the Gawker Media founder at an Interactive Advertising Bureau event last month, and the editors have done a nice job of distilling it down to seven minutes. Bonus for you guys: This thing is so well-edited that I don’t appear in a single frame.

And if you’re in a real hurry, here’s the money quote, which I extracted from Denton by asking him if he thinks what Gawker does is “journalism”:

In the U.S., traditional media has killed itself. And it’s provided a great opportunity for organizations like us, because they have cared too much about the journalism, about the Pulitzers, about the respect of their peers–and too little about the entertainment of their readers.”

If you’re looking for more detail from our talk, which included Denton lavishing praise on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs but refusing to shed any light on the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 case, check out David Kaplan’s summary at PaidContent.

Here’s one very kooky political performance, by a Republican nominee for Stark County, Ohio, treasurer named Phil Davison.

Davison did not win, but he does manage to finally top former Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in the intensely crazy and deeply awkward speech department.

Enjoy, with the infamous Dean clip below it for comparison:

Wish granted! Temporarily.

Turns out, Levitan’s show has been off the free Web–Hulu, ABC.com and ABC’s free iPad app–for the past month or so. Hulu, which is co-owned by News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, Disney’s (DIS) ABC, and GE’s (GE) NBC, explains that its streaming rights for the show expired on July 27. And that the show will be back this fall.

That seems a little weird, because you can still watch online episodes of most other big network shows that aired last year. But I’m told that while some ABC executives were actually in favor of taking Levitan at his word, “Modern’s Family”‘s temporary absence isn’t a punishment, but has to do with the release of the show’s first DVD set, due out later this month.

Which makes sense. Because even in 2010, Hollywood–in this case News Corp.’s Fox, which produces the show–still values analog dollars more than anything the Web can produce. So if the TV guys think there’s a chance that free Web shows cut into DVD sales….

And while these windows/channel conflicts aren’t going away anytime soon, they remain confusing.

For instance, you can still watch the last episode of “Lost” on Hulu, even though the DVDs of the last season went on sale a couple of weeks ago. But Hulu says the series finale  will disappear from its site on September 20. And that it won’t be showing seasons 1 to 5 after the end of 2010. Go figure.

But! You can still watch “Modern Family” on the Web, without breaking the law. All you need to do is wrangle a Hulu Plus invite, and you can watch it on your Web browser, or on your Apple (APPL) iPad or iPhone, for that matter. Is that worth $10 a month to you?

In the meantime, cheapskates will have to get by on free Web clips like this one:

And here’s a clip of Levitan explaining his beef with Web video, at our D8 conference in June:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100903/steve-levitan-gets-his-wish-modern-family-leaves-hulu-briefly/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100810/web-meme-boomtown-and-the-internet-is-on-teamslater-and-his-inflatable-slide-rage/ http://allthingsd.com/20100810/web-meme-boomtown-and-the-internet-is-on-teamslater-and-his-inflatable-slide-rage/#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:15:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=31764

The story of JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater–who, after being abused by a passenger, did a full “Norma Rae” and huffed off the airplane via an inflatable slide–spread like wildfire across the Internet yesterday, almost immediately after the incident occurred.

It’s too much to hope that someone on the JetBlue (JBLU) flight had a Flip camera and is uploading the incident on YouTube right now, but video is unnecessary after the tale of flight rage got out and details piled upon details.

This is just the kind of silly, but true-to-life, story that everyone loves to share, and share it they did, with #teamslater quickly gaining ground on Twitter, and online comments and news stories exploding.

And why not? Everyone has encountered the entitled jerk who gets up before the plane has stopped, grabs his bag from the overhead compartment and then shoves his way to the front. Slater was simply doing his job by asking this passenger to sit down, and then decided he had had it when the bag struck him and he was cursed at.

We’ve also had our share of surly service from airline personnel, but this incident shed light on exactly why they might be a little more tetchy than we expect at times.

Maybe the cursing back on the intercom system and the dramatic beer-drinking exit was a bit over the top, but so what?

Slater is now, for better or worse, a Web hero.

Just like Norma Rae, seen in the video clip from the movie’s big scene below:

(The image is from Slater’s MySpace page here.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100810/web-meme-boomtown-and-the-internet-is-on-teamslater-and-his-inflatable-slide-rage/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/ http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:53:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30477

It’s worth checking out an article in the New York Times today that points to a very questionable, but–as it turned out–politically savvy angel investment made by former eBay CEO and now Republican candidate for California governor Meg Whitman.

The piece, by Michael Luo, alleges that Whitman’s $1 million investment in late 2008 in a Hollywood entertainment company called Tools Down! Productions was made to ease a prominent Republican strategist away from working for her rival for the GOP nod.

That would be Steve Poizner, who lost to Whitman in the recent primary and who was close to working with Mike Murphy. Instead, with a little help from the piles of cash Whitman made from eBay (EBAY) stock, Murphy never took the job.

Well, not the Poizner job, at least. After telling people he was sick of politics and then getting the Whitman money days later for his still credit-free movie production company, Murphy became an adviser to Whitman a year later.

The bigger story the Times is touting, but does not quite deliver, is the advent of super-rich candidates in races this round, including another tech exec, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. She won the California GOP Senate primary.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course.

But what’s interesting is to see Silicon Valley’s digitally enabled moneybags step up to the very stained political table and jump right into the game.

What’s next? Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin buying everyone in San Francisco lattes for life to become mayor? Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bid for president of the United States, via the leveraging of embarrassing photos from the social networking site?

And thank goodness Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) never wanted to run for office.

The Whitman campaign told the Times that the investment was disclosed and justified in that she had ample entertainment interest from her days as a strategic planning exec at Disney (DIS) and also as a board member of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA).

Which is exactly what they would say, of course.

Thus, perhaps it is time to take a moment with Jimmy Stewart in a video clip from the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” of his most potent “Lost Causes” scene:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/ http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:25:49 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21133 So you’d like to start advertising on YouTube but aren’t sure how to do it? Google’s (GOOG) video site has some advice: Make awesome clips that people want to watch!

Easier said than done, of course. But that’s the gist of the presentation that Hunter Walk, director of YouTube’s consumer products team, gave to ad executives at the big industry schmooze-fest in Cannes, France, last week.

You can see the slides from Walk’s presentation below, but since you can’t actually hear his presentation, I asked him to summarize the pitch in text form. He was kind enough to oblige:

Presented at Cannes Interactive last Friday to the Young Lions (top digital creatives under 30). Goal was to share a perspective on how brands/creative agencies should approach YouTube in order to develop content that resonates with our audience. Given the advertiser enthusiasm of the past year (eg 10x increase in display advertisers on YouTube) we’re now able to shift from basic education about our platform (2007-2008) to one of creating the future together (cue hymnals :) ). So we reviewed some great examples of ads which worked as content AND commercial messaging, and discussed the YouTube design language and creativity from our community. When brands “make content, not commercials” they find a multiplicative effect in their ad spending where promotion leads to organic views–it’s sorta our version of the social gaming viral coefficient–how many people will the viewer pass the video on to….

Note: Many of the clips in the slides below are “playable.” And if you don’t want to squint, click the box in the middle of the menu bar at the bottom of the slide.

And here are three of the examples Walk calls out as excellent content, which also happens to double as excellent commercials. Note that you have probably seen at least a couple of these on TV as well. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Kia’s Soul Hamster (featuring excellent 90s hip-hop from Black Sheep):

Electronic Arts’ (ERTS) ad for “Tiger Woods ’09,” which has its origins in an amateur YouTube clip:

And an ad from Google itself, promoting its Chrome browser:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100629/youtubes-sales-pitch-please-buy-ads-and-please-make-them-like-this/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100621/viral-video-voyage-of-the-cgi/ http://allthingsd.com/20100621/viral-video-voyage-of-the-cgi/#comments Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:03:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29523

Is there any Hollywood movie coming out anymore that is not chock full of computer-generated imagery?

Apparently not, from the look of this new trailer for the latest film based on the series of classic books by C.S. Lewis, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”

It’s due at Christmas and seems packed full–even in this short clip–with more techie eye candy than usual, including a painting of the sea on the wall that floods a room.

Check it out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100621/viral-video-voyage-of-the-cgi/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100526/wireds-flash-free-app-makes-on-to-the-ipad-after-all/ http://allthingsd.com/20100526/wireds-flash-free-app-makes-on-to-the-ipad-after-all/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 12:00:36 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19957 That Wired magazine app Condé Nast and Adobe have been trying so hard to get into Apple’s App Store? It costs five bucks and is available at iTunes now.

I had a brief chance to play with the app yesterday, and it seems silly to describe something you can view for yourself. If you don’t want to pay up for a full look, you can get a free peek via a slick promotional clip, as well as an interview I conducted with Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, below.

Still reading? Okay. Some thoughts:

• Like every other app we’ve seen so far, Wired’s entry delivers on a basic promise: It gives you everything in the print edition, plus some digital media goodies. In this case the goodies are pretty cool. ln addition to a “Toy Story 3” excerpt and an Industrial Light & Magic greatest hits reel, there are some neat animations designed specifically for the app. I asked Dadich if we could expect to see videos with behind-the-scenes footage of magazine photo shoots, a staple for print publishers looking for easy video. He snorted with derision. So that’s promising.
• If you’re one of those who insist that publishers’ apps work like Web sites, you’re going to be disappointed. This one comes with almost no links to the Internet or social sharing tools. Those will come down the line, Condé says.
• The app is as big as we heard it would be: A whopping half a gigabyte. Condé says that’s because 1) It’s a complicated app, and 2) It’s packed full of media like those clips I just mentioned. Which means you won’t have to connect to the Web to get to any of that stuff, as other apps require. Still, the size of the download needs to come down–entry-level iPads boast just 16 gigabytes of memory–and Condé promises it will.

And while we’re at it, some business issues:

• Condé won’t say how much it invested into this thing, but it will start seeing some immediate dividends. Every ad that runs in Wired’s print issue also shows up in the app, but Condé has convinced nine advertisers to pay a premium to add bells and whistles to their ads–videos, links to Web sites, etc. Expect more of that going forward.
• When Condé Nast first began talking about the app, the publisher thought it would be launching with both Apple’s (AAPL) tablet and one from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). But given HP’s deal with Palm (PALM), those plans have been tabled for while. Maybe when HP’s tablet running Palm’s webOS comes out in the fall.
• Meanwhile, Condé Nast says that the real point of the exercise–to build a platform that allows the publisher to create a digital version of the magazine with the same tools it uses to build the print edition–has been a success. Adobe’s (ADBE) idea was to create a single version that would run on all platforms, but Apple’s anti-Flash stance has made that a no-go. Instead, Condé will build an iPad-specific app and one that works everywhere else–assuming people want to read it anywhere else. I asked the Condé folks what they thought about Google’s (GOOG) demo of a mag app for the Chrome browser and they didn’t rush to praise it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100526/wireds-flash-free-app-makes-on-to-the-ipad-after-all/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100512/another-google-gift-to-publishers-slide-show-ready-stats/ http://allthingsd.com/20100512/another-google-gift-to-publishers-slide-show-ready-stats/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 13:49:33 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=19337 See, Google really does want to help publishers!

Here’s the latest evidence, via Search Engine Land: An “Internet stats” page, distributed via the search giant’s U.K. arm.

What’s the point? Google (GOOG) says it will help those looking for “killer stats for a presentation or maybe just looking to keep abreast of key trends in the digital space.”

But it’s easy to tell what Google is really up to: This is perfect fodder for content farmers, or “content object makers,” casting about for data points to fill up slideshows. And if those slideshows are stuffed with AdSense units, everyone makes (some) money. A virtuous cycle!

True, many of the stats are U.K.-specific, and it’s hard to establish the truthiness level for any given data point. But whatever. People love stats. And many of them are sort of useful, in a hard-to-define way. For instance: Did you know the average Android user who watches YouTube sees 10 clips a day?

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