ThePlatform, a subsidiary of the cable giant, plans this week to launch a program that will allow workers whose job it is to post video content to use their iPhone to manage certain functions.

Workers will still have to use a PC or Mac to do the main work, but the iPhone app will allow basic tasks such as publishing a previously hidden piece of content (or taking down a piece that got published inadvertently).

“With the iPhone being a fairly ubiquitous device for media consumption, we felt it was also the perfect platform for media management,” said Ian Blaine, the CEO of thePlatform, which Comcast acquired in 2006. “It’s usually along with people wherever they are.”

Though clearly a niche product, it is the kind of application that many expect to see more of as businesses find ways of incorporating mobile devices into their office worfklow.

“I think what we are doing is a harbinger for others if they are not doing it already,” Blaine said.

Mpx, the main program developed by thePlatform, is used by Comcast itself and also sold to other cable providers such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Cox, as well as by individual content producers such as NBC, PBS and Canada’s CBC. Mpx is used to edit and prepare video for sending to various devices, including phones, computers and set-top boxes.

“We’ve always been in the game of publishing to mobile devices, but being able to take advantage of the platform for actually publishing is pretty great and we are excited about it,” Blaine said.

The company has been testing the product with a few of its customers. Among those excited about the new mobile version of mpx are the folks at Time Warner Cable who use thePlatform to publish their content.

“We have been working with thePlatform to create a solution that supports our producers or editors responsible for ensuring that shows or clips are ready for publication, 24 hours a day,” said Eric Manchester, a member of Time Warner Cable’s technical staff. “Having a solution we can carry on us at all times allows us to solve many time sensitive issues without being tied to our desks.”

For now, those using the iPhone app will see only thumbnails of the videos in question, but Blaine said adding full-video previews is tops on the company’s list of features to add. It will also see if there is a way to achieve similar capabilities on the BlackBerry, given that many companies also use those devices.

With Android, Blaine said the company may not even need to do a separate app because the desktop version of mpx runs using Flash, which Android supports.

All chief editors and managers:

Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market. This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens’ discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period:

A. News section:

1. Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not use content from other sources.
2. Reposting must not change title.
3. News recommendations should refer to Central government main media websites.
4. Do not produce relevant topic pages; do not set discussion sessions; do not conduct related investigative reporting.
5. Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden.
6. Carefully manage the commentary posts under news items.

B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections:

1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.
2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top.
3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.
4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.
5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions.
6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents, please report it in a timely manner.
We ask the Monitoring and Control Group to immediately follow up monitoring and control actions along the above directions; once any problems are discovered, please communicate with respected sessions in a timely manner.

Additional guidelines:

– Do not participate in and report Google’s information/press releases.
– Do not report about Google exerting pressure on our country via people or events.
– Related reports need to put [our story/perspective/information] in the center, do not provide materials for Google to attack relevant policies of our country.
– Use talking points about Google withdrawing from China published by relevant departments.

[Image credit: Rich Anderson/Flickr]

And Google (GOOG) appears to have lost a tussle in Italian court today.

Mediaset, a commercial broadcaster controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has won a copyright-infringement ruling, and a Rome court has ordered YouTube to remove all of Mediaset’s content from the site.

Variety:

The broadcaster began legal action in July 2008 following a trawl through the YouTube site revealed 4,643 clips and 325 hours of unauthorized Mediaset material, the company claimed.

In his written report, judge Tommaso Marvasi referred in particular to the prevalence on YouTube of Mediaset’s Italo version of “Big Brother,” which he described as the most important reality show on Italian television. It is also the Mediaset program most viewed on the Internet.

In a statement, Mediaset said that the ruling was historic because for the first time the rights of the broadcasters and program editors to their exclusive products had been fully recognized.

Mediaset is reportedly looking for more than $730 million in damages, but no word on how that phase of the trial will proceed.

YouTube’s response, via a spokesman:

We are considering our next steps, including a possible appeal. Under European and Italian law, service providers such as YouTube are not responsible for screening the content people upload. But we actually go beyond the law by offering copyright holders effective tools which allow them to manage how and whether their content is made available. It’s a programme called Content ID. More than 1,000 broadcast partners including Rai and Fox Channels Italy have chosen to use it. Mediaset could simply join these other partners and use the tools as well. Alternatively, it would be enough for them to provide us the URLs of the videos and we would remove them.

Win some, lose some. Earlier this year, YouTube–along with most other Web companies that rely on user-generated and/or uploaded content–was celebrating Veoh’s U.S. court victory against Universal Music.

If that ruling stands, it appears to put almost all of the onus on content owners to keep their stuff off of video sites. Which could pose a problem for Viacom (VIA) and its billion-dollar lawsuit against Google.

Note to readers and/or Engadget editors: This liveblog is not an official transcript. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one. Cool? Cool.

Q: Why leave Google, which is awesome, for AOL, which is not?

A: The Internet is still at an early stage. AOL is a global brand, and that’s hard to build. We have a unique set of assets. AOL can be core and central to where the next $50, $100 billion are going. And we have unique talent to make a run at it.

Q: Please explain your strategy.

A: “Content, ads and communication.”

Q: Why is this turnaround different than other AOL turnarounds?

A: I can tell you whatever, but you need to see metrics move to believe me. But we have a good strategy. “You have to maniacal about the piping,” and in the past AOL wasn’t. We had terrible integration of acquisitions, systems. You want to be able to take $25, $40 million ad deals and run them through the piping and we haven’t been able to do that.

Q: Please explain AOL’s content strategy.

A: We launched our content platform last night. A single platform. It uses data, helps scale to content producers and will work with thousands of partners. It differs from Demand Media et al in that we already have scale for production and scale for advertising. We can snap those two platforms together. [Note: No mention of robots yet.]

Q: Is AOL interested in video or other self-produced stuff?

A: Sure. Video’s important to us. We’re also interested in what we would call “niche at scale.” As a collective whole, we have 70 or 80 properties and will go up to 100. We want to aggregate uniques that will be attractive to advertisers. We want to own the equivalent of the top 80 or 90 cable channels on the Internet. We’re also very interested in local, via Patch [which Armstrong invested in before AOL bought it].

Q: How do you market all this content?

A: By the way, everyone thinks our traffic comes from the access business. That’s not true. It’s a minority of our traffic. Also, when you produce your own content, you can distribute it and get traffic back. You also need to make this stuff shareable on the Web. We’re getting mass scale distribution from platforms like Twitter and, of course, search.

Q: There’s a big gap between your monetization and Yahoo’s (YHOO). How do you change that?

A: I can’t tell you! It’s how I got my job. Ho ho ho. Okay: AOL went to a network-based strategy a couple of years ago, which cut into the pricing yield, and that is now changing. We addressed this in the summer and fall. Also, AOL, shockingly, had under 1,000 customers on ad platforms when I showed up–700, actually. At Google (GOOG), we had millions. So we had a clear dialogue about what had happened. Also, the salesforce needed to be restructured, different tiers of the salesforce. And we also needed a self-service option you can use with a credit card. “Look, this is why they hired me….If we can’t make that business work, I think we have big issues.”

Q: What’s up with search?

A: We like Google and are still talking to them. We’re also talking to “other partners.” Last time, the deal was done “purely for money,” and that had benefits and some downside. This time, the pricing may be different, but it’s not the only thing that determines value.

Q: Please be more specific.

A: Okay. We’re really big on music. But if you go to AOL search for music, you get a subpar version of Google’s search for music. There are too many ads on the page. So why don’t we set up a onebox-like search box and send people to AOL music? For example, let’s think about trading search dollars for display dollars. We want to make money on ads in a much more natural and healthy way.

Q: What about investments in content?

A: Sure. We’re making nominal investments in content and a putting a lot of money in technology and infrastructure. In terms of M&A, we will sell off stuff that doesn’t make sense and do tuck-in buys.

Q: How does your local strategy differ from others?

A: We do real local, not quasi-local. We put editors in communities to actually get the stuff and monitor and update platforms. “It’s a risk, it’s a bet,” but early results are promising.

Q: Your ad business is much less profitable than that of your peers. What up?

A: Our hamburger stand says “really cheap burgers at really cheap prices,” but we’re actually serving sea bass, and we should be charging for that. We told customers, via Platform A, etc., that they could buy us really cheap. Also, cost structure: We’re taking out a third of the business. Access was making money, and things “kind of got loose” at the rest of company. But advertising can be nicely profitable with content and we can do that.

Q: Okay, but when do ad biz profits become self-sustaining?

A: Not in 2010, but sooner than five years. I own two percent of the company, and I want it to work. Morale is already better than when I got here.

Q: Are you removing all premium inventory from Ad.com?

A: Don’t believe what you read! Internet! Bad! An analyst said we might do it. What we’re going to do is “sell Superbowl product at Superbowl pricing.” [i.e., a nonanswer]

Q: What’s up with the access business and the traffic it generates?

A: We have 100 million users. Five million people get “paid services” from us. Half of those are dial-up users. But people think that 70, 80, 90 percent of traffic comes from access. That’s not the case.

Q: What’s up with mobile?

A: We want to increase consumer mobile traffic. We have lots of Apple Store downloads. We’ll do more consumer downloads/traffic. And we’ll build our mobile ad business after that, probably in 2011.

Q: What do Federal broadband access plans mean for your business?

A: All of us believe that there will be some “tail” of dial-up access for some time. But it’s not going away, and the decline is actually moderating [which makes sense--if you're still on dial-up now, what are you waiting for?]

Q: Please reiterate profitability plans for display/content/ads.

A: In reality, we’re “marginally” profitable now, but that’s not good enough.

Q: If you reprice ad business profitability, what does that mean for you?

A: I don’t want to set goals, but we’re not off by single digits. It’s significant.

Q: Talk about your communications business, please.

A: We have AIM, ICQ, email–all big opportunities. We need to clean up current products and services. Communications products “were recipient of problems” in the past. AOL tried to jam Bebo and AIM together, which didn’t work. We also slammed our stuff with way too many emails. I tried AOL email when I started and got 15 to 20 ads. Not a great user experience. It’s “project hygiene.” We also believe people want a unified platform across devices and we’re working on that.

Q: Talk about compensation.

A: I had the money options at Google, which got moved into AOL options at market value. Plus salary blah blah. I didn’t take a bonus this year “because I don’t think I should have gotten paid for laying off a third of our employees.” [All of this is discussed in the proxy, no?]

Q: Here’s a softball about your management team. How awesome is it?

A: Totally awesome. We’ll add more over time. On the engineering side, I was surprised that we weren’t chasing good engineers when we got here. “We have spent a lot of time and energy on the subject matter.” Culturally, our “internal mojo turned around,” and now the engineering community gets that we “have a big-hair problem” but that we have tons of use so things they do here have a big impact.

Q: Brand strategy: How do you extract brands people don’t know about while promoting the main site and vice versa?

A: We think about this like Disney (DIS), I think. By the way, there are two brands. The financial media brand is battered–worst merger in history, etc. But consumers like the AOL brand. Tomorrow, we’re giving AOL users a a 50 percent promotion via Target (TGT) on “very good toys.” So in the Disney way, there’s the brand people like, and we have other brands people like, just as Disney has ESPN. So we’ll have non-AOL brands launching, and we’ll refurbish the AOL brand itself.

Q: Whither MapQuest?

A: MapQuest is still Top 20 search term. It has a large market share. The technology has not been focused on in a number of years. We’re changing that. Partners are inquiring about MapQuest, and I think what we’ll do is an operational partnership with them. We feel like its a “very, very valuable property.”

Q: What are best metrics to evaluate AOL’s turnaround/growth?

A: Unique visitors [which is what everyone says now]. We need a turnaround in domestic display, which you should see in 2010. And then we need to generate cash, because that’s what healthy companies do. In terms of that cash: No more “hail Marys” where we take cash from access and make big bets on things that we don’t know about [i.e., Bebo]. We will want to fund the Web services business with cash from the Web services business.

My message is just the opposite. The future of journalism is more promising than ever–limited only by editors and producers unwilling to fight for their readers and viewers, or government using its heavy hand either to overregulate or subsidize us.

From the beginning, newspapers have prospered for one reason: the trust that comes from representing their readers’ interests and giving them the news that’s important to them. That means covering the communities where they live, exposing government or business corruption, and standing up to the rich and powerful.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

CEO Tim Armstrong tells The Wall Street Journal about plans he has previously hinted about–“a new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers.”

The idea is that even a brain-dead editor knows that people want to read about Tiger Woods–and AOL’s coverage includes a 500-slide (!) slide show. But there are plenty of other stories that will go unassigned without a computer’s help. For example:

AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was “crib recalls,” following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.

This is the flip side to AOL’s hiring binge of the past year, where it scooped up a small army of veteran writers and editors. And it has a certain logic to it. Why wouldn’t a publisher want to publish things that readers want to read and advertisers want to sponsor?

Of course, this also creeps the heck out of people with traditional notions of journalism, or even “content production.” Including some of those recent hires. The company has been trying to soothe employees’ fears, but given that AOL is letting lots of people go, you’re not going to hear many writers and editors carping about this openly.

Investors who are going to own AOL after it spins off from Time Warner (TWX) next month are supposed to be cheered by the plan. It has a hint of Google (GOOG) to it, which makes sense given Armstrong’s long tenure there. And it sounds very similar to Demand Media, the much buzzed about content-creation factory.

AOL’s plan also sounds very similar to Associated Content, a search-driven content mill run by Armstrong’s former co-worker, Patrick Keane. Armstrong also happens to be an investor in the site, which raised a $6 million B round last spring that valued the company at $43 million. And earlier this year, AOL explored a purchase, sources say.

But while Armstrong ended up buying Patch Media, another start-up where he was an investor, he never pulled the trigger on Associated Content. Question: Does his new platform make a future deal more or less likely?

“Our goal is to make Wikipedia as high-quality as possible. Britannica or better quality is the goal,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the ad:tech conference in New York.

One of the site’s strengths, however, is that contested entries–ones whose neutrality has been disputed, or that are lacking citations–are identified as such, Mr. Wales said. He wished that controversial New York Times (NYT) articles, for example, noted when they had prompted arguments among editors, he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“In the end, in attempting to ‘do no evil,’ Google has done exactly that. I say this not just as someone running a content site but also as an end user. If this inequity of support continues along these lines, we will see a continuing destruction of our journalistic enterprises–enterprises that are one of the core building blocks of our democracy. Last year, while addressing the magazine publishers and editors of the MPA at the Google Campus, Eric Schmidt suggested that the Web was a ‘cesspool’ and that it was up to the major journalistic brands to clean it up. Well, Eric, in a great many ways, Google has helped to create that cesspool, and as such I would hope that it can be part of the solution.”

– Forbes CEO Jim Spanfeller