At least that’s the arc their employers at Discovery Communications have planned for them.

The cable heavyweight has watched the pair progress from bloggers on its “How Stuff Works” site to a duo whose twice-weekly “Stuff You Should Know” audio shows generate more than a million downloads a week.

Now it’s trying to transform them into on-camera talent, by giving them their own series on its Science Channel. And if that works, it wants to repeat the process with other digital natives.

“I think it’s a template,” says Conal Byrne, who oversees editorial operations for Discovery’s digital properties. “We can do more of this.”

Discovery isn’t the only cable network trying to mount TV shows on the backs of popular podcasts. Next month, IFC will start airing “Comedy Bang Bang,” a sketch series based on the (great) weekly improv show of the same name, hosted by writer and actor Scott Aukerman. Next year, the network will do the same thing with Marc Maron, a veteran comedian who revived his career by  interviewing other comedians in his garage.

Those shows revolve around professional entertainers who have been at it for a long time. Clark and Bryant, meanwhile, are writers who can carry on an entertaining conversation. Their podcasts work — the show makes consistent appearances on iTunes’ Top 10 podcast rankings — because they’ve got a gift for turning arcana into an hour of laconic banter. (Recent topics: What Interpol actually does; why your body odor is so unpleasant.)

But they’ve only spent a few minutes in front of the camera, mostly for a couple dozen short clips they shot for Science in the last year or so.

“We started out being terrified by TV,” says Clark. “If you go back and watch our first cable appearance, it’s hilarious. I hadn’t been that scared before in my entire life, and you can see it. I was looking off camera all the time. Chuck was rocking back and forth.”

Adds Bryant: “We’re both really comfortable in that podcast booth, with no windows and no one watching.”

Discovery isn’t rushing them. It has only committed to making 10 30-minute episodes, which are in preproduction now and slated to run early in 2013.

The network won’t talk about the money it’s spending on the project, but based on the pilot it created earlier this year, they won’t be drowning it in cash. The concept is pretty straightforward — the two guys tape a podcast, just like they always do, and the camera goes behind the scenes to illustrate its “fictional life.”

The risk is that what makes podcasts work in general — that sense of conversational intimacy  – will go away. But everyone involved seems aware of that pitfall, and insist they’ll avoid it by making a new show, not a video version of the old one.

“I think one of the mistakes that people do is that they try a television show out of something that exists online, and we never wanted to do that with Chuck and Josh,” says Debbie Myers, Science Channel’s general manager. Discovery wouldn’t provide an embeddable clip of the pilot, but you can get a sense of what they’re up to with some of the interstitials they’ve already shown on Science (see below).

The notion of taking someone who’s popular on the Web and trying to turn them into “real” media stars isn’t new. But while we’ve been talking about the idea since the mid 90s, we still don’t have that many examples. And it’s even rarer for big media conglomerates to harvest their own digital talent — usually because they don’t have much on hand to begin with.

But Discovery plans to keep Clark and Bryant generating podcasts twice a week, even as they start producing TV. For starters, Discovery is hoping that they’re able to bring some of the 500,000-plus fans who listen to the podcasts over to the new shows. Even adding 20 percent of that fan base would be a big deal for Science.

And finding talent that can work on multiple platforms is part of the reason Discovery plunked down some $30 million for Revision 3, the Web network/studio.

I’m not sure the gut-busting dudes from “Epic Meal Time” are going to be on a Discovery channel anytime soon. But if they do, they’ll already be working for the network.

The funding is particularly notable because Topsy is part of the much-maligned Twitter ecosystem. The San Francisco-based company’s search index consists of more than eight billion tweets.

Perhaps the only other Twitter ecosystem start-up of Topsy’s magnitude is UberMedia, which has raised some $21 million in VC funding and gobbled up various Twitter clients. Twitter blocked some of the company’s apps for three days last month, saying they violated multiple
policies.

Twitter competes with both start-ups, offering its own search site and software clients for various platforms.

Besides running its search site, Topsy also provides analytics tools for marketers and widgets for publishers including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. The company brags that its search is super speedy (capable of processing over 1 million documents per second) and smart (ranking results based on social graph analysis, which Google and Bing are only starting to do).

Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, announced this morning that it has brought on Andrew Siegel, who spent the past year trying to get deals done for Yahoo, to run strategy and corporate development.

And Advance has rounded up $500 million for Siegel, by selling a chunk of preferred stock it owns in cable network Discovery Communications.

When the deal is done, Advance will still own about 31 percent of Discovery, but says it wants the money to “diversify into new acquisitions and investments that will hopefully turn out to be as meaningful.”

Okay. Like what? The logical assumption is that Advance/Condé wants to put Siegel to work snapping up digital assets. And like most publishers, Condé has watched as upstarts like Gilt Groupe (private market sales) and Groupon (daily deals) have more or less created new markets it should have been in from the start. Time to catch up there?

Not necessarily, says Advance exec Steve Newhouse, whose family owns the publisher and who is helping to steer M&A efforts; he’s also head of Advance.net, the company’s digital arm. “Andrew will be looking at opportunities across the board,” he says. “We don’t have a short list.”

Still, he said, it would make sense for Siegel to be attuned to digital deals. “I think we see opportunities to take advantage of the audience we’ve created through our strong digital brands,” Newhouse says.

Newhouse also says that Siegel/Advance’s M&A efforts won’t be capped at $500 million. But if I had to guess, I’d wager that the company is most interested in acquiring or investing in companies in earlier stages of their lives, and not in megadeals.

The marketing of the Oprah Winfrey Network, set to debut January 1, 2011, is definitely ratcheting up.

OWN is being backed by Discovery Communications.

But what will be interesting to see is how much of a digital element there is on OWN, which is obviously heavy on the television shows for the new cable network.

Robert Tercek, who headed digital media for Winfrey-related online properties, left the company earlier this year. Under Tercek, there were several big live events for Oprah.com, as well as one of the biggest book downloads.

But, so far–besides the requisite Facebook and Twitter links–the digital parts on OWN seems to be limited to a lot of promotions for its content, asking the audience for its input about those various shows, casting calls and “Your OWN Channel.”

That would be “a destination to tell your stories and express your passion through video.” Apparently, according to one of the OWN videos, about 10,000 videos have been uploaded using its tools.

One video was titled, “Auntie Bernie’s Cinnamon Stick Fried Chicken,” while another posited, “There Is An Answer To Every Question, You Just Have To Find It.”

Indeed, although BoomTown thinks all answers are in cinnamon stick fried chicken.

Here is a sizzle reel for OWN, as well as another promotion for the cable channel.

Multicolored balloons and a whole lot of hope seem to be the big themes.

As well as a whole lot of Oprah, natch.

Even though they are two of the Internet’s largest advertising businesses, both Yahoo and Microsoft are without top execs to lead those units.

Worse, both are just entering a complex online ad sales and search partnership together, which will require a lot of management firepower.

Last week, BoomTown reported the departure of Yahoo’s head for the key North American market, Joanne Bradford, for a new job at social media start-up Demand Media. She starts there Monday.

It was a move that sent reverberations throughout the online ad market.

Less known, though, is that Microsoft (MSFT) has also been looking for almost a year for someone to head up its online ad sales force globally.

Yahoo (YHOO) is just starting its search to replace Bradford–with her boss, U.S. head Hilary Schneider, taking over on an interim basis.

In fact, even Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is pitching in, giving Bradford’s staff a talking to earlier this week about the need to press on.

Both Yahoo execs said the company will be looking at both internal and external candidates.

Until then, said a Yahoo spokeswoman, in the boringest quote ever uttered: “Yahoo! has leadership bench strength and we continue to be committed in delivering wow experiences to both users and advertisers.”

Not to worry about obfuscation, as BoomTown has the scoop!

Internally, the key execs being eyeballed include 11-year Yahoo veteran Mitch Spolan, VP of North American sales, and Seth Dallaire, a former Microsoft exec whom Bradford brought to the company last fall as VP of mid-market sales, a newly-created role responsible for all mid-market sales efforts across search and display advertising.

Another former Microsoft exec, Erika Nardini, VP of brand packaging, is also mentioned a lot as a possibility and is well-liked by the sales force at Yahoo.

Still, many feel that with the exodus of such a high-profile exec as Bradford, Yahoo has to attract another big name to replace her.

But externally, the pickings are much slimmer, with only two key names popping up as top choices.

One is a former Yahoo, Jacki Kelley, a longtime online ad exec who is now North American president of Universal McCann, a unit of the Interpublic Group (IPG) agency. Besides Yahoo, Kelley has worked at Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO).

The second is Kathy Kayse, a well-regarded former AOL (AOL) ad exec, who now is in charge of digital ad sales at Discovery Communications (DISCA). Kayse also had a long career at Time Warner (TWX).

(Both are pictured here, Kelley at left and Kayse on the right.)

Microsoft is a dicier proposition, with exactly zero internal candidates considered qualified to lead the online ad sales effort, a job that would report directly into Corporate VP for Consumer & Online Darren Huston.

Microsoft has been searching for a long time now, with feelers all over the industry. A variety of names pops up, from new MySpace ad head Nada Stirratt to Bradford–also a former Microsoftie–herself.

In fact, the paucity of experienced execs to handle these complex jobs–which include the need to understand premium, network and search ad sales, as well as highly technical systems–is clear.

“Neither of these jobs are easy and, in many ways, a giant nightmare,” joked one online ad sales exec.

The Sun notes that Discovery, which owns Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and other cable properties, filed a patent for the device in February; but the Sun notes that the patent filing was not made public until last Thursday.

The story reports that “diagrams included with Discovery’s patent application…depict a rectangular device with physical controls for user navigation.” The device would be for reading e-books and “providing for e-commerce.” As the Sun notes, Discovery already holds a patent on some security and copy protection features, and earlier this year sued Amazon.com (AMZN) for alleged infringement by the Kindle.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Satellite-TV operator British Sky Broadcasting PLC is preparing to debut a 3-D television channel in the U.K. next year that will require specially-equipped TV sets. The venture may be the most ambitious yet toward a large-scale 3-D television rollout, which remains absent from most big markets outside of Japan.

In the U.S., satellite-TV provider DirecTV Group Inc. and cable network owner Discovery Communications Inc., among others, are working on or exploring 3-D offerings, spokesmen said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Discovery joins other big names like CBS (CBS) and Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Turner, in Comcast’s (CMCSA) “On Demand Online,” which launched last month in a few thousand homes. The program is designed to convince Comcast subscribers to stay on as subscribers, since only subscribers will get Web access to the programming. It’s an answer to Hulu’s offering, which makes shows from News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and soon, Disney’s (DIS) ABC available to anyone with Internet access.

It’s a variation of the “TV Everywhere” program Time Warner has been touting, and similar to ones that other cable providers, like Time Warner Cable (TWC), and telcos like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) are pursuing.

Like most of the other networks that have linked up with Comcast for the On Demand test, Discovery isn’t handing over its top-tier stuff. You can’t see “Deadliest Catch,” the network’s show about grumpy Alaskan fishermen, for instance.

Meanwhile, some of the stuff you can get will be “windowed”–the industry’s term for holding shows back from viewers to maximize TV eyeballs. Episodes of something called “Verminators,” for instance, won’t be available until a week after they air on TV. But! Comcast subscribers will be able to watch episodes of “Man Vs. Wild” and “Swords,” which will be available the day after they air.

And any full-length programming that Discovery puts on the Web is a change for the cable network, which has held off from doing so precisely because it didn’t want to upset Comcast, which pays it a hefty fee for its programming.

Related note: I hate the “On Demand Online” tag Comcast uses to describe this strategy. And the Comcast people hate it when I call this “Web TV you’ll pay to see.” Their point is that you’re not paying any additional fees in order to get this stuff on the Web; my point is that only paying Comcast subs can see this stuff, as opposed to Hulu’s free-for-all (for now) offering.

So, can anyone suggest a different name? Give me a good one and I’ll use it.

Meanwhile, here’s a “Man Vs. Wild” clip featuring a pesky porcupine:

Does that sound like progress to you? It should.

That’s because Carolla’s old gig, which ended in late February when CBS Radio (CBS) pulled the plug on his show, made him just another guy trying unsuccessfully to fill Howard Stern’s shoes.

But the comedian’s podcasts are something else, and they don’t sound like anything else on the radio: Unedited, rambling conversations with a single guest that often sound more like monologues than an actual interview. They’re profane, they run an hour or more, and they make me laugh out loud. (You can get a small taste of what they’re like via the video clip at the bottom of this post. Be warned: There is a smattering of R-rated language in that one).

I’m not the only one. Carolla has been podcasting every weekday for the past month and a half, and an average show finds an audience of about 400,000 people. His most successful ones have nearly doubled that total.

That’s nothing compared to his last radio job, which was broadcast out of Los Angeles and syndicated in a dozen other markets. But in the world of podcasting, that qualifies as an instant hit, and it’s enough to keep his show at or near the top of Apple’s (AAPL) most popular podcast list at its iTunes store.

The other top podcasts, by the way, are all spinoffs or repackagings of shows made by big media companies–NPR, Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Discovery Communications (DISCA). But Carolla’s show is created from scratch: It’s just him and a handful of assistants who help him record the show and upload it to the Web. He started off taping the shows in his house in the Hollywood Hills; now he’s moved it to a garage he rents in an unlovely industrial stretch in the San Fernando Valley.

All in all, Carolla estimates he’s spending about $3,000 a month to produce the show, primarily on bandwidth bills. Revenue: Zero.

That’s primarily because Carolla can’t make any money from his show until the end of the year. He’s still getting paid–very well–by CBS, and his contract has a noncompete. But it’s also because it’s unclear how Carolla could actually go about making money from his podcast even if he wanted to.

The basic options: Try to charge his listeners or try to sell advertising. The former hasn’t been done before, and the latter hasn’t made other podcasters much money so far.

“I think that he’s going to have a tough time,” says Marc Horine, VP at ESPN Digital Media, who oversees a stable of podcasts that were downloaded about eight million times a month last year. Even at that volume, Horine says, ESPN has only been able to turn that into a “7-figure-plus” business–and that’s with a large sales staff and the ESPN brand name.

The problem is that podcasts are still considered “experimental” buys for advertisers. And until podcasts can aggregate bigger audiences–and provide marketers with better ways of tracking their ads’ performance–they are probably going to stay that way.

But I’m going to be slightly more optimistic than I usually am on this one: I think that Carolla’s profile, combined with a dedicated audience, could convince a handful of advertisers to take a flyer and sponsor the show. That still won’t come close to replicating his radio money or the money he’ll make if CBS decides to pick up the sitcom he’s working on for the network.

But as Carolla notes in the interview below, entertainers don’t have any choice but to be on the Web. And figuring out how to make good stuff people like is much harder than figuring out how to make money from it.

Apologies for my stammering and stumbling midway through this interview, by the way: Sounding cogent while you ask questions is a lot harder than it looks.

And here’s a sampling of what a Carolla podcast is like: A snippet of his recent podcast with writer Dana Gould. Again, be warned that there’s a light dusting of cursing here.

BoomTown posted from various spots in Europe this week, yet managed to follow the geek-tastic goodness of Silicon Valley’s own contender, Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, who competed while injured this week on “Dancing With the Stars”–and escaped elimination via the love of viewers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Another founder made the headlines this week–BoomTown noted that Steve Case appeared at a huge pep rally at Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. Case and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis gave their support (and a lucky green tie) to new CEO Tim Armstrong. Elsewhere, Pure Digital, the maker of BoomTown’s favorite gadget–the ever-present Flip digital video camera–sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock, and BoomTown urged Silicon Valley to remember it’s not immune to the recession, to put its nose to the grindstone and to avoid party-hearty inanity.

Guess no one’s taking heed of the warning, though: MediaMemo reports that no one’s getting anything done at work–CBS (CBS) says its March Madness Web traffic is up 57 percent compared to last year. On top of that, television viewership rose various percentages throughout the week. MM wasn’t watching much basketball this week, though–there was plenty to blog about: The New York Times (NYT) cracked down on unauthorized use of its photos; Discovery Communications (DISCA) announced a patent infringement suit against Amazon and its Kindle Reader; Palm (PALM) delivered dismal third quarter results, putting even greater pressure on the success of the Pre; and in a Q&A with BusinessWeek editor Stephen Adler, Steve Ballmer said he’s open to a phone call from Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz whenever she’s ready to talk. Oh, and in case you were wondering what happened at SXSW, MediaMemo got a Google (GOOG) guy to explain it.

Digital Daily’s March Madness started with a liveblog of Apple’s St. Patrick’s Day press event to unveil version 3.0 of its iPhone OS, a chronicle of the myriad features displayed onstage and a live photoblog to back it up. DD noted that sales of the iPod touch and iPhone have outstripped RIM’s (RIMM) combined BlackBerry sales by a factor of… well, by a LOT. Kind of supports the data that say mobile Web use doubled over the last year. Which is good, because Mac sales were no good in February.

In Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg reviewed the latest release of Microsoft IE8 (MSFT), its most comprehensive release in many years. His verdict? Mixed, of course. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt talked to readers about the many models of BlackBerry phones and how they differ from one another, the new iPod shuffle and its earphone compatibility and upgrading Vista to Windows 7. In the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret reviewed the Ee Top, Asus’s first foray into the all-in-one PC market.

More next week. Go Woz!

Discovery is arguing that Amazon violated a patent it received in November 2007 for an “electronic book security and copyright protection system [which] provides for secure distribution of electronic text and graphics to subscribers and secure storage.” Discovery founder John S. Hendricks is listed as one of the patent’s inventors.

That is, Discovery says Amazon ripped off its digital rights management scheme — the lock and key system Amazon uses to protect the books and other other publications it sells via its online store. It doesn’t want the court to stop Amazon from selling the Kindle (or its books), but it wants royalties, damages, etc.

One puzzler here is that Amazon introduced the Kindle, along with its e-book store, in November 2007. — the same month Discovery received its patent, which it applied for in September 1999. Another: Has Discovery gone after anyone else who’s sold a digital copy of a book using an encryption system — like, say, Sony (SNE), whose e-book reader and electronic bookstore predated Amazon’s?

Amazon declined to comment. Discovery declined to comment beyond the press release it sent out this afternoon announcing the suit:

SILVER SPRING, Md., March 17, 2009 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ — Discovery Communications, Inc. (DISCA)(DISCB)(DISCK) today filed a patent infringement suit against Amazon.com, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging infringement of a patent issued to Discovery Communications for electronic book technology.
Discovery Communications alleges that Amazon’s sale of the Kindle and Kindle 2 products and its electronic book delivery system infringe U.S. Patent Number 7,298,851, “Electronic Book Security and Copyright Protection System.” A copy of the filing can be found on Discovery’s web site: .
Discovery Communications and John S. Hendricks were significant players in the development of digital content and delivery services in the 1990′s. Hendricks’ work included inventions of a secure, encrypted system for the selection, transmission, and sale of electronic books.
Joseph A. LaSala, Jr., General Counsel of Discovery Communications, said: “The Kindle and Kindle 2 are important and popular content delivery systems. We believe they infringe our intellectual property rights, and that we are entitled to fair compensation. Legal action is not something Discovery takes lightly. Our tradition as an inventive company has produced considerable intellectual property assets for our shareholders, and today’s infringement litigation is part of our effort to protect and defend those assets.”

And here’s Discovery’s complaint, which includes the patent it says Amazon violated. Click the button on the top right to make the document full-screen.

discovery-communications-complaint – Free Legal Forms

And finally, here’s one of the many schematics included in Discovery’s complaint, which does sort of help illustrate why Discovery was thinking about e-book distribution years ago — it imagines a future where e-book consumption and a TV guide are intertwined.

That’s the thinking behind plans some of the big cable TV operators and cable networks are drawing up. But while it’s tempting to describe these offerings-to-be as Hulu 2.0, it’s not nearly that simple.

Both Comcast (CMCSA) and Timer Warner Cable (TWC) want to give their subscribers Web access to more shows than they can currently get–at least legally. But the two companies have competing plans, based on different technologies and philosophies. Here’s the latest info I have on the offerings-to-be, which The Wall Street Journal first wrote about last night:

• Comcast, which is referring internally to its plan as “Authentication” (ugh), wants to beef up its Fancast Web site, which is currently an also-ran behind Hulu in the video portal competition. But Time Warner Cable, in conjunction with Cox, is offering a different take, powered by the same technology it used when it offered HBO to some broadband customers in a Wisconsin test last year. The cable provider’s plan, which it has dubbed “Entitlement” (double ugh), doesn’t call for a single portal. Instead, each cable programmer that signs on would distribute its programming via its own site.
• Comcast would eventually like to syndicate its Fancast-on-steroids site to other cable providers. But don’t expect to use the souped-up Fancast if you’re a Time Warner Cable customer–the company has no interest in letting someone else control its subscribers’ Web video experience.
• Most of the major cable networks have been talking to cable providers about both plans, and most have offered up some degree of enthusiasm, including GE’s (GE) NBC, Viacom (VIA), Time Warner (TWX) Discovery Communications (DISCA) and Scripps Networks Interactive (SNI).
• Notable player not involved in discussions, at least so far: Disney (DIS). Which means you shouldn’t expect to get full access to Disney channel or ESPN programming on your laptop for some time to come.
• Comcast plans on a trial run of its service this summer; Time Warner Cable had originally planned to launch its trial in the first quarter of 2009, but has pushed back its launch to the much-vaguer “sometime this year.”

But while the strategies and specifics of the plans are different, the underlying philosophies are the same. Both plans are meant to keep customers from defecting to TV services offered by the satellite companies and telcos. (And Time Warner Cable has been specifically warning its programmers of the danger of “cable cutters” by touting a test in Texas where up to three percent of its cable subs have dropped the service in favor of free TV from the Web.) And both plans are meant to impress upon customers that someone, somewhere has to pay for the TV they watch.

Will any of this work? It’s easy to assume that it won’t, since it involves slow-moving cable providers linking up with protective cable programmers to produce compelling Web services. But that’s the sort of thing that all of us geniuses said about Hulu, and that JV between NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox has worked out great, at least from a technology and user perspective. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

And regardless, the tension between broadband providers, content providers, and consumers who don’t care who pays for their programming as long as they can watch “Heroes” whenever they want wherever they want, is going to make for interesting stories for a long time to come. We’ll be revisiting this one frequently.

Meanwhile here’s a clip reel from HBO’s excellent new “Eastbound & Down” series, which literally kept me from canceling the pay service this week. But as soon as it’s done, so is my subscription. There’s just too much good stuff out there on the Web for me to justify the extra cost. NOTE: This clip has a lot of swearing. If you want even more swearing and a little bit of nudity, there’s a much better clip here.