So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

Here’s the two-minute version:

And if you’ve got 10 minutes (remember, if you live in the U.S., you get a bonus hour tonight), here’s the whole interview. And here, via the New York Times, is more on his plan to stream his next concert from his own site, passing over not only pay cable but Netflix and iTunes, too.

Japanese TV broadcasters TBS and TV Asahi shot the 30-second clips at the makeshift shelters now dotting Japan’s northern region. In them, survivors say their name, hometown and sometimes a message reassuring loved ones that they are safe.

“Friends and family, I just wanted to say: Rest easy,” said Keiji Saito, the beginnings of a white beard on his face. In the background, survivors are gathered in a crowded school gymnasium, wrapped in thick layers to ward off the cold.

“I intend to stay here until the very end,” Mr. Saito added.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is working hard to win over heavyweight content distributors, hoping to convince them to link their sites up with Facebook, or to make their existing links deeper. The pitch: Connect your site to ours, and we’ll drive you eyeballs and help you hang on to them. And in return, we’d like to know more about your users.

Facebook has been headed in this direction for a while, and made a big move in April when it rolled out its “Like” button to outside sites. Some two million of them have now integrated the social network in some form.

But Facebook has made a point of wooing big media companies in the past few months. It has hired New York-based ambassadors specifically for the task, and is sending top executives out east for schmoozes. It might be working.

For instance: Facebook and Time Warner are now talking about using the social network’s login system to “authenticate” cable subscribers who want to watch online video from cable channels like TBS and HBO. Sources familiar with the companies’ plans say they are in early stages, but that the two companies are hoping to link up first with Verizon’s FiOS TV  service.

The upside for Time Warner and Verizon: It will be easy for customers to sign into Web video sites, and easy for them to tell their Facebook friends what they’re doing. That can drive more traffic and engagement, and ultimately more ad dollars or more subscribers.

And the upside for Facebook: It gets incredibly valuable data.

If that linkup goes through, it will be a big deal for pay TV operators, who have been wary about letting outsiders act as gatekeepers between their subscribers and their content. That’s why Facebook and Time Warner want to work with Verizon, a newcomer to the TV business, instead of established cable giants like Comcast.

The proposed Time Warner-Facebook linkup is a good example of what Facebook is trying to accomplish across the board. It wants to insert itself between media companies and their consumers–with “Share” buttons, “Like” buttons and Facebook Connect logins–but in a way that makes both groups happy about the arrangement.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Dan Rose, the company’s VP of partnerships, made a version of that pitch to senior Time Warner executives in a meeting last week. The pair also hosted a presentation and dinner for about 20 other big Web publishers, including executives from ESPN, the New York Times, Condé Nast, CBS and at least one media celebrity. “Tina Brown was actually there, which I thought was sort of hilarious,” says one attendee.

Facebook has also hired two New York-based executives tasked specifically with getting big media companies on board: Andy Mitchell, previously a VP of business development at the Daily Beast, and Nick Grudin, who held the same title at Newsweek.

Executives who’ve attended the meetings say media companies seem reasonably receptive to Facebook’s approach. In part, it seems, it’s because the company isn’t Apple or Google, two heavyweights that can make Web publishers wary.

“Facebook doesn’t attest to be perfect about being perfectly transparent about where they’re going. But they’re pretty predictable,” says one meeting participant. “It’s not like Apple, where they’re closed.”

Add another: “It was very friendly. It wasn’t like meetings we’ve had with Google, where everyone’s arms are crossed.”

But publishers are also realistic–they realize by trading user data for traffic and engagement, they’re helping to build up a company that is already competing with them for ad dollars. “In the end, they’re like the other big guys,” says another attendee. “They’re both friend and foe simultaneously.”

Here is the very funny opening video for the premiere of late-night host Conan O’Brien’s new talk show on TBS.

It’s got a “Godfather”/”Mad Men”/Larry King tone.

Exactly.

The first line of O’Brien’s monologue was about his Web popularity: “Thank you and welcome to my second annual first show. Yes, I know what you guys are thinking–’Hey, it’s the guy from Twitter.’”

It is indeed, and BoomTown could not be more thrilled he is back on television:

Also, Conan O’Brien has embraced the Internet.

With that out of the way, we can now enjoy O’Brien’s latest digital foray. This American Express ad isn’t technically a new-media event, since you’ll start seeing the spot on good old-fashioned TV today. But given that Amex has bought out the front page of YouTube, odds are very high that you’re going to encounter the clip on Google’s site, or somewhere else on the Web:

Worth noting: While the ad is timed to run in conjunction with O’Brien’s debut on TBS, note that there’s no explicit tie-in. The WSJ reports that Amex paid O’Brien–and not TBS owner Time Warner–”more than $1 million” for his services.

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.

With only a few weeks to go till the debut of his new late-night talk show on TBS, Conan O’Brien is taking his marketing to the Web.

And it’s very explosive, both personally and in a crazy stunt kind of way, as you will see in the two videos that the television funnyman has released in the windup to his November 8 launch.

The popcorn was a nice touch.

Enjoy:

Jeffrey Bewkes, who oversees a company that includes the TNT, TBS and HBO cable networks, also predicted a “massive amount of competition” for Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and Hulu LLC as more content owners make their TV shows available through operators on demand and online and as cable and satellite companies improve their experiences.

“When all of the content on the big screen works like the content on the little screen what will happen? The programming will trump the interface,” he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Earlier this year, the travails of late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and his epic battle with the inept suits at NBC became a gold mine of Internet-fueled comedy mayhem.

Well, Team Coco is back in November on TBS, and it has a name.

And it’s a good one, as you will see in the video below.

Enjoy:

Mr. O’Brien’s yet-to-be titled show will debut in November, and run four nights a week at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

The new show is a costly gamble for TBS, a comedy network owned by Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX) Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting.

Mr. O’Brien agreed to leave NBC in January after the network decided to abandon its low-rated experiment to put “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno in prime-time.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/a-clicker-to-watch-tv-online/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090709/starz-joins-comcasts-web-tv-youll-pay-to-see-line-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090709/starz-joins-comcasts-web-tv-youll-pay-to-see-line-up/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:02:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9139 Liberty Media’s Starz Entertainment has signed on to Comcast’s “On Demand Online” program, which is the first test of the cable industry’s “authentication” and “entitlement” strategy. Or, as I like to call it, “Web TV You’ll Pay to See.”

Starz, which has the cable and Web rights to much of the Disney catalog, among other assets, says it will make some of those films, including “Wall-E” and “High School Musical 3,” available for Comcast’s (CMCSA) test, which is supposed to launch this month. Also available: TV series like “Crash” and non-Disney movies like Sony’s “Step Brothers.”

The idea is to protect cable subscription revenue by giving pay TV customers–but only pay TV customers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV and hope this keeps them from canceling their subscriptions. Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who has been pushing a parallel effort he calls “TV Everywhere,” signed onto Comcast’s effort last month and offered up a handful of TV shows from his TBS and TNT networks; Comcast also has roped in Scripps, Rainbow and A&E.

I’m told Comcast will have a few more partners before it launches the trial, but the emphasis here is on “trial”: The cable guys appear confident they can handle the technical aspects of the program, but they’ve never tried anything like it before, so this is really a test to see if they can pull it off. And if that works, the real work will be the negotiations between cable programmers and cable providers over who gets what, when.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090709/starz-joins-comcasts-web-tv-youll-pay-to-see-line-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090624/web-tv-youll-need-to-pay-to-see-time-warner-comcast-roll-out-authentication-who-else-is-in/ http://allthingsd.com/20090624/web-tv-youll-need-to-pay-to-see-time-warner-comcast-roll-out-authentication-who-else-is-in/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8549 Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts will announce this morning that their two companies are linking up for a trial of an “authentication” effort. This means a handful of cable subscribers will get online access to Time Warner TV shows that have been previously kept off the Web.

The idea is to protect cable subscription revenues by giving pay TV customers–but only pay TV customers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV, and hoping this keeps them from canceling their subscriptions.

But that’s old news: Comcast (CMCSA) already told Bloomberg earlier this month that the two companies are linking up, and that Time Warner (TWX) would offer programming from some of its networks in the first part of Comcast’s tests.

Presumably Bewkes and Roberts will offer up a few more details, like which Time Warner networks are participating (good bet: TNT and/or TBS), along with a timetable. But I worry that the press conference will be light on details, in large part because many of the details haven’t been hammered out yet.

Still, I’ve been able to glean more from industry executives who’ve been involved in discussions with Time Warner, Comcast and other players in the authentication effort, which Bewkes has been calling “TV Everywhere” and Roberts has been calling “OnDemand Online.” Some of the details:

• The test will start very small–with some 5,000 subscribers–but Comcast is determined to expand it aggressively and wants to have it available throughout its system by the end of the year. Comcast plans to use its Fancast video portal as a hub for its efforts. And it  may use other digital assets it has acquired as well. Online Rolodex Plaxo, for instance, which the company bought last year, could be used to help subscribers sign in to watch their shows.
• The test is separate from Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) own authentication offering, which is essentially the same thing but will launch later than the Comcast test, using different technology, and will likely offer a different mix of programming.
• And those tests are separate from the one that telcos Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) have been working on with satellite operators Echostar (SATS) and DirecTV (DTV). That one also has the same thrust, but will take the longest to roll out.
• Comcast isn’t likely to announce other programming partners for the tests until later this month.
• Hulu is interested in playing along, because its owners–GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC–see authentication as a way to appease riled-up cable providers. The cable guys are upset that Hulu shows (some) cable programs for free while they have to pay for the right to air them. In theory, authentication solves that problem for Hulu because everyone will be on a level playing field: Only cable subscribers will get access to cable programming, whether it’s on Hulu, Fancast or anywhere else. But the cable guys aren’t rushing to let Hulu in just yet.
• Separately, NBC has been talking about offering some cable programming that isn’t already on Hulu for the tests. That could also be seen as an appeasement move, but I’ve heard a more benign suggestion: NBC merely wants to figure out if authentication technology works because it is considering using it for some of its coverage of the Vancouver Olympics next year.
• CBS (CBS), which isn’t a part of Hulu and which doesn’t have any cable assets of its own, would still like to get into the mix. The idea is that the network would offer the cable guys shows that it has kept offline until now (say, “The Mentalist”) while tying the Web programming to “retransmission” fees it would like to extract from the cable companies for all of its shows. Comcast executives seem amenable to the notion.
• Big cable players like Viacom (VIA) and Liberty’s (LINTA) Discovery may participate in some trials but not others. Viacom, for instance, has been talking about working with the telco group but not with Comcast during the trials. It has also discussed offering a “premium product”–like access to the full “Spongebob Squarepants” library or other kids’ shows that have a very limited online profile–to Time Warner Cable subscribers for an additional fee.

Bewkes and Roberts are scheduled to speak at the Time Warner Center at 9:45 am EDT, so we’ll know more shortly.

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