The post was both effective — it showed up high on Google searches, which is the reason Huffpo created it — and symbolic of Huffpo’s traffic strategy — which was either craven or clear-minded, depending on your perspective.

Now that kind of Google-baiting is old hat. Even for august newspapers with 41 Pulitzers. Here’s what the same query for today’s Oscars looks like today:

Say this for the Los Angeles Times piece — it delivers the goods, for both humans and Google’s robots. Here’s the keyword-filled top:

The 85th Academy Award nominees and winners have been chosen, the red carpet has been rolled out and the gilded Oscar statues have been polished. But what time is the show again?

The 2013 Oscars ceremony honoring the films of 2012 is set to take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The pre-show broadcast will begin on ABC with red carpet arrivals at 4 p.m. PST (7 p.m. EST) and will be hosted by Lara Spencer, Jess Cagle, Kristin Chenoweth and Kelly Rowland.

The awards show will start at 5:30 p.m. PST (8:30 p.m. EST) and is scheduled to last three hours. It will be hosted by “Family Guy” and “Ted” star Seth MacFarlane and televised live in more than 225 countries.

And Google is presumably extra pleased that the story’s author, reporter/Web producer Nardine Saad, is a diligent Google+ contributor who has posted more than 30 LAT links so far this month.*

What’s that? You still find this sort of thing disheartening, even if it gives readers what they want and delivers some clicks to a newspaper that can use them? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a gut reaction from New York Times editor Patrick LaForge:

Sad. RT @harrisj: LA Times starts the SEO battle for tomorrow bit.ly/15Fnmh4

— Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) February 24, 2013

But you’re probably going to be in an ever-shrinking minority, says Raju Narisetti, who heads up The Wall Street Journal digital network (the Dow Jones digital umbrella which includes this Web site).

A (good) lasting lesson @huffingtonpost taught big newsrooms MT @harrisj: @latimes starts SEO battle for tomorrow twitter.com/harrisj/status…”

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) February 24, 2013

And yes, even people like yours truly try to engage Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and anyone that will increase the number of eyeballs on my stuff). AllThingsD’s publishing system, for instance, allows us to create “SEO heds” — headlines created with Google’s automatons in mind.

And if you know how to find the one I’ve created for this post, you’ll be able to figure out what time to watch the Oscars tonight. Enjoy!

* Conventional wisdom among Google-watchers is that even if no one reads anything you post on Google+, the search engine will reward active users with Google juice in search results. So get posting!

But not a lot more obvious.

After months of discussion with the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Facebook is going to start incorporating a small triangular “AdChoices” logo on some of the ads where it uses “retargeting” — the common Web practice of serving ads to surfers based on the sites they’ve already visited.

If you have a sharp eye, you may have seen the triangle on lots of other Web sites, including those run by Yahoo and Google. That’s the result of a self-policing move Web publishers made a couple years ago, in an attempt to keep privacy watchdogs and Federal regulators off their backs.

Here’s what it looks like, for instance, on an ad running on Yahoo’s home page today.

In theory, when you see one of the triangles, you can click on it and learn more about a given Web publisher’s targeting practices. And then you can opt out of them if you want (here’s what happens if you click on Yahoo’s triangle).

In practice, I find it hard to believe most consumers notice the icons at all (that text looks a whole lot smaller when it’s side by side with everything else competing for your attention on a Web page). Or that they’ll understand the language they’ll encounter if they do click on them (“The Web sites you visit work with online advertising companies to provide you with advertising that is as relevant and useful as possible,” etc.)

In any case, Facebook is going to start using the same icons for some of the ads it serves up on the right side of its home page, where it has begun selling retargeted ads through its Facebook Exchange program.

Except you won’t see them unless you look for them, by hovering your mouse over the ad and clicking on the grey “x” that appears when you do. And Facebook doesn’t plan on using them on all of its retargeted ads — a Facebook rep says the company will only do so when its advertisers or ad tech partners choose to use them.

If that doesn’t sound like a lot, it’s at least an improvement over the current set-up. Right now, the only way you can learn that you’re seeing a retargeted ad is if you mouse over the ad, click the grey “x” and then click on the “About this ad” option.

If it turns out you’re seeing a retargeted ad, you’ll see a page that may or may not explain what you’re looking at. Here’s one I found today, from retargeter Chango, after clicking on a Dish Network ad.

If you care and know about this stuff, you’ll understand what you’re looking at. If not …

Which brings us back to the eternal “who does care about this stuff” question.

As The Wall Street Journal has documented via its excellent “What They Know” reports, the Web ad guys know a ton about you (so do the offline ad guys). And if you tell a normal person about it, they’ll get a little creeped out. They’ll also tell you that they think privacy is really, really important to them.

But in practice, this doesn’t seem to be an issue that galvanizes regular folks. And it has yet to find a powerful political ally — you didn’t see anyone running on the “I took on the cookie people” platform last fall.

Maybe that will change, and Facebook and its peers will have to be a lot more obvious about this stuff — or even ask consumers for permission before they go about doing it.

But for now, this seems like it will be enough.

In other words, HBO will port its popular HBO Go app to Apple TV, just like it has already done with Roku and Microsoft’s Xbox.

For the record, no comment from Apple. And here’s a non-comment comment from HBO: “We’ve said we would like HBO GO accessible on all preferred platforms so we are always having discussions with a variety of companies.”

Anyway, when it does come, it will be a nice extra for HBO subscribers. Because HBO Go has a much deeper catalog than you can get from the HBO on-demand service you get via cable and satellite.

But that’s about it.*

And if you want to start imagining that this is a precursor to HBO actually selling itself over the Web on an a la carte basis, well, I can’t stop you. But you’re wrong: HBO isn’t ditching the pay-TV bundle anytime soon, because it thinks that bundle works really well. And so does HBO’s owner, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes.

You can have a lot of fun arguing with the HBO guys about why they think that, when so many of us Internet geniuses are convinced they’re wrong. And that’s certainly going to come up when we talk to HBO president Eric Kessler next month at our Dive Into Media conference.

But here’s another question:  Why isn’t everyone on Apple TV right now? Or more precisely, why doesn’t Apple open its box to outside developers, the same way Roku has?

Opening up the platform to the rest of the world sure seemed to work well for the iPhone (recall that the App Store didn’t show up until the iPhone had been in the market for a year). But, right now, Apple TV has a grand total of nine outside apps (one of which comes from The Wall Street Journal, which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

Why hasn’t Apple let a thousand TV apps bloom? Dunno. I get the sense that Tim Cook and company are very particular about the way Apple TV apps look and work, down to the pixel. But you can be very serious about quality control and still manage to get more than nine apps on your box, if you want to.

So there has to be another reason. But maybe not a permanent one. If I had to bet, I’d say we’ll see Apple open up its TV box a whole lot sooner than HBO goes a la carte.

*Apple TV is pretty portable, so, depending on the way that HBO and the pay-TV guys handle their login/passwords, I can imagine a scenario where you bring your box to someone’s house who doesn’t have HBO, and set it up so you can watch “Girls” on their big screen. That would be nice, too.**

**It will be interesting to compare and contrast the video quality that HBO Go/Apple TV/broadband delivers versus an HD cable picture. On the cheapo set + Time Warner Cable set-up that I’ve got at home, I’ve noticed that “The Daily Show” on Hulu/Apple TV is good, but notably a bit more “computery” than the picture I get via Comedy Central’s HD feed.

The same way lots of other online publications are handling the balancing act: A freemium/pay wall model.

Hughes’ publication, which relaunched yesterday with a redesigned website, iPad app and print magazine, will also use a new pay wall, which will allow nonsubscribers to read up to eight online articles per month, per device. That is: You could read eight articles on your MacBook, and another eight on your Kindle, etc.

Hughes doesn’t reference the pay wall in his letter introducing his redesign, and there doesn’t seem to be any direct reference to it anywhere else on the site. But a registration page does note that paying subscribers will get “unlimited online access;” a rep for Hughes confirmed the pay wall this morning.

“Free up to a point” is an increasingly common strategy for online publications: The New York Times, for instance, launched its pay wall in the spring of 2011, but allowed nonsubscribers to read up to 20 stories a month; a year later, it made the wall harder to jump by lowering the limit to 10 stories a month.

And our News Corp. colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have had a much stricter pay wall in place for years, and only allow nonsubscribers to read a handful of stories. (But AllThingsD is 110 percent free, free, free! No plans to change that, as far as I know.)

Hughes, who got his start and made his fortune when he helped Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg build Facebook, looks like he wants to position the New Republic as a not-super-exclusive club. In addition to the print and iPad magazine, subscribers will also get access to other goodies, like live events.

Will that pitch, plus a dollop of advertising, be enough to ensure that the 98-year-old publication turns a profit? We’ll ask Hughes himself at our own live event next month: You can see him at our D: Dive Into Media conference Feb. 11-12 in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

That one isn’t free, but it is going to be an excellent show, says this very conflicted reporter. Head here if you want to join us.

Other details, such as senior executive appointments, board members, and the name of the publishing company may also be announced but a final decision hasn’t been made, these people said.

Gerard Baker, currently Mr. Thomson’s deputy, is expected to succeed him as managing editor of the Journal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Where did that billion dollars go?

The most obvious answer is that all sorts of private market valuations for Web companies have come down in recent months. That’s because of the beatings that Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have taken since they’ve gone public.

Note the publication date on the New York Times’ report about Spotify’s supposed $4 billion round: May 17 — a day before Facebook’s troubled IPO.

But for Spotify, you can get a bit more specific if you want a reason to pass at $4 billion: Investors already know what a digital subscription business looks like at scale.

That would be Netflix, which has some 27 million subscribers at around $8 a month. Today, after Carl Icahn goosed it a bit, Netflix has a market cap of $4.3 billion.

Spotify says it has 4 million paying subscribers at around $10 a month. Bear in mind that if you value Spotify at $4 billion today, you’re really saying it will be worth three times that — $12 billion — in a few years, when it would presumably go public.

The two companies aren’t exactly analogous — Spotify, for instance, also has a nascent advertising business — but they sure look similar from a distance. They’re both international, they’re both dependent on rights deals for their content and they both face the perpetual threat of competition from the likes of Amazon, Apple, etc.

So even at $3 billion, Spotify backers will need to work hard to explain why their digital subscription business is worth so much more than Netflix when it comes time to IPO.

Of course, investors used to place a much higher value on Netflix, too. And the market has a short memory, so perhaps it will be an easier story to tell in a couple years. But right now it’s a tough sale.

Then Pandora bounced back a bit. But it’s still down 12 percent.

Time to buy, says J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth. He figures Pandora is worth $17 a share. It’s currently trading at $8.20.

I’m not terribly interested in stock prices, but I do think Anmuth’s logic is worth following. My translation of his most recent note here:

If the thought of watching Pandora go head to head with Apple freaks you out, then you should have sold two months ago. Bloomberg’s report advances the story, as we news types like to say. But it doesn’t change it: The market knew Apple was headed in this direction back in early September, when The Wall Street Journal first told us about it.

And, as I explained back then, it’s relatively simple for Apple to launch a streaming music service, using whatever model they want. Unlike the TV industry, the music guys are happy to do business with Apple, and are quite amenable to playing around with different business models. Because their existing business is awful.

So, whether Apple’s iRadio, or whatever they’re calling it, launches in January of next year, or March, or whenever, it doesn’t matter. Pandora is likely to face Tim Cook head-on here, and acting surprised about that doesn’t make sense.

Which brings us to the second point …

Apple can launch a Pandora-killer, but Pandora can do just fine, anyway. Apple makes awesome hardware, and does a great job of integrating that hardware with software. But that doesn’t mean it will do a great job of making a streaming music service people will love.

For starters, this is supposed to be an ad-supported service, and selling Internet ads turns out to be a difficult, labor-intensive process — maybe even more so for Internet radio ads, which require lots of face time with local buyers. Pandora has been plodding away at this for years, with some success. But it seems hard to imagine Apple expending the same kind of effort.

And, while Apple revolutionized the digital music business with its iTunes store back in 2003, that doesn’t mean it succeeds at digital services every time it tries.

The obvious examples here are MobileMe and Ping (R.I.P.). But notice that Cook didn’t mention iTunes Match, Apple’s most recent digital music gambit, even once during his last keynote.

Maybe he’s saving that for a future pitch. Or maybe that one didn’t go anywhere.

Finally, remember that while Apple owned the music player market, and it owns the iPad market, it doesn’t own the phone market. So, even if Apple comes out with a killer streaming music service, it’s unlikely that it’s going to make that one available for Android users. Which means Pandora will still have plenty of room to play.

P.S.: By the way? Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy will join us onstage at our D: Dive into Mobile conference in New York next week. Pretty good bet we will talk about this then. We’re sold out, but if you want to get on the wait list, head over here.

And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet.

That won’t happen anytime soon, though. Death-defying jumps from outer space aside, there are only a few live events that millions of people want to watch at the same time. Basically, a handful of award shows like the Oscars, and big-time sports.

Even if YouTube wanted to pay up to get its hands on that programming, it’s going to have to wait, because the TV guys have the rights locked up for a long time. The next set of NFL deals, for instance, won’t be available for a decade.

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche.

Here’s some of the stuff YouTube has streamed live in the last year or so:

• A concert from Psy, the “Gangnam style” guy
• A concert from AKB48, a Japanese girl group
• A bunch of EDM shows (that’s “DJs playing music for big crowds,” for the rest of us)
• A concert by Jay-Z at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn
• A World of Warcraft launch event, which featured gamers playing Mists of Pandaria around the world
• A bunch of solar and lunar eclipses

None of these shows drew more than a couple-hundred-thousand concurrent viewers, which would make them the equivalent of a poorly rated cable TV show.

And that makes sense: Since the Internet has trained us to watch anything we want, whenever we want to, why do we have to watch when everyone else does? (A semi-secret about the live video streaming that news sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal* and the Huffington Post do, for instance: Almost all the viewing comes after the fact, via on-demand clips.)

On the other hand, as YouTube proved conclusively yesterday, it can now mount this stuff without breaking a sweat. Now it’s basically a plug-and-play option for any grown-up company that wants to do business with Google. And YouTube is going to make it increasingly available to the rest of us, too.

That’s the result of a year of around-the-clock work by a couple-dozen YouTube engineers, to prep the video site for the Olympics in July.

YouTube software engineering director Jason Gaedtke,who oversaw that effort, says the livestreams the company put out during the Olympics were seven times better than the standard video-on-demand stuff YouTube puts out everyday. His team is now applying the lessons it learned from that effort, and using it to upgrade YouTube’s video more broadly.

So, yes. If someone else wants to grab the world’s attention by breaking the sound barrier aided only by gravity, you’ll be able to watch it alongside a global audience of millions.

But the future of live video on YouTube is probably going to look like something else: You and several thousand other people, watching something most of the world doesn’t care about.

And that can be thrilling in its own way.

*The Journal is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

Who won the first Presidential debate last night? According to the cable news pundits, the winner was Republican candidate Gov. Mitt Romney. The other winner, according to Twitter’s peanut gallery, was Sesame Street’s Big Bird, who came up in Romney’s pitch for cutting PBS funding.

But the other other winner was video streaming. This year, you definitely didn’t need an old-fangled television to watch the debates, with online offerings ranging from simple videos to live fact-checking and commentary.

YouTube’s politics channel carried videos from multiple sources, including the New York Times and Univision. And a YouTube spokesperson said they had “millions of live streamed views of the debates, and one of the highest number of concurrent streams ever for a YouTube live stream.”

(Updated 4:59 p.m. PT): Ustream has added their numbers to the fray, reporting 3.5 million total video streams of the debate and debate-related videos yesterday. However, bear in mind that that number covers both live and recorded video views, not just live streaming.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that their debate videos were at least started nearly five million times, with 1.2 million people watching live worldwide. A network spokesperson added that yesterday was one of CNN’s best for live video this year — second only to Whitney Houston’s funeral, which attracted 700,000 more viewers.

By contrast, Nielsen reported that 67 million people who did have those old-fangled television contraptions tuned in to watch the debates that way.

Other online offerings included video and interactive features on AOL’s network of Patch, AOL.com and the Huffington Post, which brought in 400,000 streaming viewers. And The Wall Street Journal’s various video streams across sites like YouTube, Hulu and UStream, as well as on WSJ.com and TV set-top devices like Roku, brought in more than 100,000 viewers.

Hulu also offered video from ABC News and Fox News, but a site spokesperson declined to share numbers about their performance.

Aereo, which also did not share statistics about their video performance, offered New Yorkers two hours of free access to their online live TV streaming service in order to watch the debate.

You start, apparently, with pros from brand-name media outlets.

That’s what Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer has been doing as he builds up a supposedly stealthy video news service, which has been steadily dripping details about its plans. Here come more:

• The company, which had been using Planet Daily as a placeholder name, now has a real one: NowThisNews.
• It has a general manager: Lerer has hired Eason Jordan, who put in 23 years at CNN and was the cable pioneer’s chief news executive when he left in 2005.
• It has a strategic tie-up with BuzzFeed, the click-generating viral Web site that Lerer also happens to back. BuzzFeed will help distribute the service’s clips, and will help create them, as well.

Lerer and his team are most excited about Jordan, who fills out a management troika of veteran media people. Former ABC News Digital boss Ed O’Keefe is the service’s editor in chief; Katharine Zaleski, who headed up digital news at the Washington Post (and before that worked for Lerer at HuffPo) is managing editor. Implied message: We have Serious News Chops.

Jordan’s hire may also excite corners of the Internet that remember his departure from CNN, after he made remarks at the Davos conference suggesting that U.S. troops had intentionally killed journalists in Iraq. Jordan resigned after the ensuing firestorm, but remains a flashpoint for some conservative bloggers. Ask Michelle Malkin.

That said, if NowThisNews works, I doubt that its target audience will care much about seven-year-old inside-baseball-and-the-Beltway stories.

Meanwhile: How is NowThisNews supposed to work?

Here, Lerer, the former PR pro, has a few more details, as well. The service, backed by $5 million in funding, has a studio in Manhattan and a staff of 16. (One of them is Drake Martinet, who used to be AllThingsD’s social editor.)  Rather than produce hours of streaming content a day, it is supposed to produce a handful of daily news reports, and plans to distribute them via mobile phones and social media.

That’s a different take than the conventional way new media has been tackling video news so far. Most Web news outlets, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), and Lerer’s old colleagues at HuffPo, have been aping cable news by placing reporters near a newsroom and asking them to talk about the day’s events.

There are good reasons to do that. For one, it works for cable TV. For another, it can be done on a small budget.

But Lerer says he wants to do something else: “It makes no sense for me, at all, to produce what’s already on TV,” he says. Instead, “we’re going to produce short video pieces that will hopefully be very viral and very social, one at a time.” Jordan’s take: “There’s an abundance of talk. We intend to report the news.”

Okay. So, still kind of vague. But it’s also difficult to describe video news that doesn’t exist yet. Lerer had originally hoped to be up in time to cover the presidential conventions; he’s now aiming for mid-October, for the last few weeks of the election.

Here’s the story in Team Lerer’s words, including a longer list of hires:

NowThis News (“Formerly Known as Planet Daily”) Announces Executive Team and Strategic Partnership with BuzzFeed

New Mobile, Social Video News Network Names Eason Jordan, Former CNN Chief News Executive, General Manager; Ed O’Keefe,
Former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, Former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, Managing Editor

September 10, 2012, New York – NowThis News, a digital video news network, today announced its executive team and a strategic partnership with BuzzFeed, the popular, fast-growing social news site. NowThis News, code-named Planet Daily during development, will offer video news for mobile and social news consumers.

NowThis News also announced that Eason Jordan, former CNN Chief News Executive, is General Manager; Ed O’Keefe, former ABC News Digital Executive Producer, is Editor-in-Chief; and Katharine Zaleski, former Washington Post Executive Director of Digital News, is Managing Editor.

Kenneth Lerer, Partner of Lerer Ventures, co-founder of NowThis News along with Lerer Ventures Partner Eric Hippeau, said: “We’re creating NowThis News to meet straight on the inevitable and rapid changes happening in news consumption: digital, mobile, social and video – that’s what NowThis News is about. We’re thrilled to have Eason as General Manager, Ed as Editor-in-Chief, and Katharine as Managing Editor, along with the rest of the executive team, as we launch the company.”

NowThis News’s leadership team also includes veterans from a wide range of leading news outlets, including: Head of Production Steven Belser, former Head of Production of VICE Media; Chief Technology Officer Theo Burry, former Technical Director of The Huffington Post; and Social Editor Drake Martinet, former Social/Multimedia Editor of AllThingsD. The NowThis News team also includes veterans of NBC News, The New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, Fox News, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Slate, MTV, and HBO.

Said Eason Jordan: “As more and more people turn to mobile and social outlets for their news, now is the perfect time to launch a video news network built for the digital generation. I’m excited to be working with such a talented, experienced, and impressive team.”

Said Ed O’Keefe: “Our goal is to create a socially relevant, buzzy, and creative approach to news. And BuzzFeed, with its remarkable success and reach, is a dream partner.”

NowThis News will be a video partner of BuzzFeed, with a dedicated vertical within the social news site’s platform. NowThis News will produce content that complements BuzzFeed editorial while producing its own original video news stories.

NowThis News is backed by Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket Media Ventures, and Oak Ventures.

Now the conventional wisdom has shifted again: No TV set, and maybe very little else from Apple on the TV front, in the near future.

The newest version of this thought comes from Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves, who met with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and media boss Eddy Cue on Wednesday. Here’s his takeaway on Apple TV, published in a note yesterday, and first flagged by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

An Apple Television Appears Extremely Unlikely in the Near-term
Relative to the television market, Eddy Cue, Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, reiterated the company’s mantra that it will enter markets where it feels it can create great customer experiences and address key problems. The key problems in the television market are the poor quality of the user interface and the forced bundling of pay TV content, in our view. While Apple could almost certainly create a better user interface, Mr. Cue’s commentary suggested that this would be an incomplete solution from Apple’s perspective unless it could deliver content in a way that is different from the current multichannel pay TV model.

Unfortunately for Apple and for consumers, acquiring rights for traditional broadcast and cable network content outside of the current bundled model is virtually impossible because the content is owned by a relatively small group of companies that have little interest in alternative models for their most valuable content. The differences in regional broadcast content and the lack of scale internationally also create significant hurdles that do not seem possible to cross at this point.

Bear in mind that the above is a mashup of Hargreaves’s analysis and guidance from Apple executives. So you’ll have to do some guesswork to figure out exactly what Apple is saying and not saying.

But it makes perfect sense, because it’s what Apple has been saying consistently when asked about Apple TV or any other new product. And it also reflects the truth that anyone who has tried to tackle a TV Of The Future has figured out: Making the tech work better is (relatively) easy. Making the content work better is really hard.

As Business Insider’s Jay Yarow notes, Hargreaves’s takeaway is a bit different from the newest round of Apple TV prognostication, kicked off by reporting in The Wall Street Journal, which posits that Apple is no longer trying to “disrupt” TV, but wants to work with the existing TV Industrial Complex, by making slight tweaks to the model.

But even that reporting suggests that Apple isn’t anywhere close to getting buy-in from cable programmers or providers. And so it can’t bring out new hardware — box, screen or otherwise — until it makes progress there.

That still doesn’t rule out any advances with Apple TV. It would seem totally reasonable for Apple to open its existing Apple TV box to outside developers, which would increase the utility of that hardware significantly without requiring any buy-in from TV Land. Just as Apple TV competitor Roku has already done.

If you’ve watched the streaming video that other newspapers and Web sites have put out, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect at 10 am ET today: Something that approximates the form of cable news, but with Webbier sensibilities and production values.

But HuffPost Live will stand out from the stuff you’ve seen from the likes of Politico, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.), in a couple ways.

For starters, the site’s interface will look a lot different from its peers. Yes, you’ll still see talking heads, talking. But you’ll also see a lot of bells and whistles designed to highlight and encourage comments from viewers, including a “join this segment” feature that is supposed to let people chime in live via Webcam.

HuffPost Live will also spend a lot of time … live. While many of its competitors spend some time streaming live, HuffPo will be showing 12 hours of live programming a day, and HuffPost Live head Roy Sekoff thinks he can ramp that up to 16 hours next year. Still, most of HuffPost Live’s traffic will likely come from Web surfers who find clips after the fact.

And while lots of other news operations are tackling Web video by hiring a few producers and tech experts, then asking their existing staff to stand in front of a camera, HuffPo has bet big on this launch, with a staff of 100. You’ll see existing HuffPo talent on the screen from time to time, but almost everyone working on the video show has joined the company in recent months.

Here’s an edited version of an interview I conducted with Sekoff last week, as his team was putting its finishing touches on the new channel.

Kafka: There are a lot of news sites trying to do some kind of video programming now. But none of them are throwing 100 people at it. Why go this big?

Sekoff: I felt like I wanted to do something that was disruptive. You can go down the list, of all the people who are doing [web video], and it all looks the same — television not done very well. That wasn’t of interest. I just didn’t think we could be disruptive by doing the same thing — shooting editorial meetings, or shooting the newsroom with a reporter coming in and just chatting.

And you’re stressing the live component, and especially live commenting, much more than anyone else, too.

We want the community to be very involved, front and center. We want them to be an integral part of our programming, not an afterthought. Not “We have this expert, and we have that person Skyped in, and oh, John in Wyoming … sorry, we don’t have time for you, John.”

The only way to do that is if you’re live, in real time. Because you can’t get people to join you [otherwise]. You can’t do call-in radio on tape delay.

But like everyone else who does video, most of the views you’ll get won’t be from people watching live, right?

In order to join us live, we have to be live. [But] the other part of our business is very much on video-on-demand.

People want premium video content. How can you create a tremendous amount of video content at scale? [This] is actually a very cost effective way. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing the 12 hours. We want to be there when things are happening [and] we want to be able to churn out material. Every time we do a live segment, we’re clipping. We’re taking the best things that come up, and we’re embedding them in HuffPost stories.

So on-demand drives views and dollars. And you’ll also have live, which is a nice option.

Exactly.

That’s the short version of Rafat Ali’s story. The slightly longer version: The guy who started paidContent in 2002, sold it to the Guardian in 2008 and took off in 2010, is back with Skift. PaidContent covered the business of digital media; Skift covers the travel business, with an emphasis on that industry’s digital transformation.

Ali has raised a $500,000 round from mediacentric angels like former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer and former Myspace co-CEO Jason Hirschhorn.

The pitch is pretty straightforward: No one does a very good job of covering the travel business, and there’s a wide range of people who want to read smart takes, from industry executives to start-up investors to savvy consumers who want to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes. And Ali has ambitions to build a stockpile of travel data that he figures will be at least as important as the stories he publishes and aggregates.

I’ve admired Ali for a long time — and competed with him for a portion of it —  so I’m not a neutral observer here: I hope Skift* kills it. I’m also interested in the notion of Skift as a second act, and in watching Ali try to apply hard-won lessons from his first go-round.

Here’s a longish interview we conducted last week in the offices of his old company, now owned by GigaOM.

 

*The name is Swedish for “shift,” and Ali picked up the domain during his paidContent days, but never figured out what to do with it. By the time he got around to putting his new business together, every derivation of “travel” had long been snapped up.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120730/rafat-ali-2-0-meet-skift-the-travel-industrys-version-of-paidcontent/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120604/attacked-by-pirates/ http://allthingsd.com/20120604/attacked-by-pirates/#comments Tue, 05 Jun 2012 06:59:04 +0000 Voices http://allthingsd.com/?p=216610

Most Kindle, iPad and Nook owners seem to view piracy as a low-rent and time-consuming experience compared with the sanctioned alternatives. They probably wouldn’t if the publishers had kicked things off with a five-year content boycott.

– Rob Reid, from an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, entitled “What To Do When Attacked by Pirates”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120604/attacked-by-pirates/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120521/apples-cook-tops-the-list-of-highest-paid-ceos/ http://allthingsd.com/20120521/apples-cook-tops-the-list-of-highest-paid-ceos/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 17:23:48 +0000 Scott Thurm http://allthingsd.com/?p=210639 Steve Jobs left big shoes. Apple Inc. is betting $378 million that Tim Cook is the right guy to fill them.

That is the value of the annual pay package Mr. Cook was awarded when he was named Apple chief executive last August, about two months before Mr. Jobs died. Nearly all of the compensation stems from a grant of one million shares of restricted stock, valued at $376.2 million, based on Apple’s stock price at the time.

Mr. Cook’s 2011 compensation is the highest recorded in The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO pay survey since at least 2006, when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed its rules for reporting executive pay.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120521/apples-cook-tops-the-list-of-highest-paid-ceos/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120501/shes-baaaack-carol-bartz-opines-at-wsj-womens-conference/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/shes-baaaack-carol-bartz-opines-at-wsj-womens-conference/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 04:43:45 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=201905 Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz provided plenty of color for writers and bloggers during her tenure at the company, but during an interview session at The Wall Street Journal’s Women in the Economy Conference in Palm Beach this morning, she took a decidedly reflective — albeit still candid — tone.

WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray asked Bartz about the earlier stages of her career, before turning the talk to Yahoo.

A video clip is below, but here are some key quotes:

On her time at Yahoo:

“Turnarounds take a long time, and that kind of turnaround — and when I say that kind, you have an integrated culture and we were trying to change it. And the thing is that anyone that’s running a company that is so attractive to the media — our life was in a glass house.”

On the Yahoo board:

“You have a lot of people helping you with what you should do. That’s what boards get to do. They get to hire and fire CEOs. And now I get to be a big girl and say, ‘I don’t think you should have done that, but …’”

On calling the Yahoo board members “doofuses” after they fired her:

“Do you know what that means? Clueless. That’s all it means, clueless. It’s just a nice word.”

On her penchant for cursing:

Bartz said if she could change things about her experience at Yahoo, she might have cussed less.

“You did say the F-word a lot,” Murray said.

“And Jack Welch didn’t?” Bartz shot back.

“The three things that, every time they said my name, they said, ‘Carol Bartz, 60,’” she added, referencing her age. “‘Carol Bartz, 60’ and ‘salty mouth.’ Somehow, these things just got attached to me …”

On life in the new-media fishbowl:

Bartz said that when she spoke, her employees were tweeting and video-recording her every move.

“The way you manage your company and the way you manage your people has to be totally different,” she noted.

On taking cues from Apple::

“The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they’re the most secretive. Think about that.”

Bartz, of course, wasn’t completely curse-free during the session, saying that part of her motivation in becoming a CEO was that she “could actually impart my values if I was CEO. And I wouldn’t have to work with —holes any more.”

And during an audience Q&A yesterday evening, following the conference’s kick-off interview with General Motors CEO Dan Akerson, Bartz stood up and told Akerson, along with the rest of the crowd, that she didn’t believe enough women supported other women in business.

“There are so few positions for women available that they have to be über-competitive,” Bartz stated.

When I later ask Bartz what her thoughts were on new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s performance so far, she replied: “No comment,” after saying she still “loves” Yahoo.

“I miss it,” Bartz said.

Here’s the video of Bartz being interviewed:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120501/shes-baaaack-carol-bartz-opines-at-wsj-womens-conference/feed/ 13 http://allthingsd.com/20120411/apple-could-face-federal-book-suit-today-reports/ http://allthingsd.com/20120411/apple-could-face-federal-book-suit-today-reports/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:32:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=195227 The Department of Justice may file a suit against Apple today over e-book price-fixing complaints, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg. The DOJ has been probing antitrust complaints regarding Apple’s 2010 pacts with  book publishers; several of the biggest publishers are preparing to settle those charges by “tearing up” those deals, according to The Wall Street Journal.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120411/apple-could-face-federal-book-suit-today-reports/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/allthingsd-reviews-hps-ultrabook-the-envy-spectre-14-on-wsj-digits/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/allthingsd-reviews-hps-ultrabook-the-envy-spectre-14-on-wsj-digits/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:41:50 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=192264 If you’ve been shopping for a laptop in the past six months, you’ve probably heard a lot about Ultrabooks. In this week’s product review on AllThingsD, I took a close look at the HP Envy Spectre 14, an attractive, glass-coated Ultrabook that weighs more — and at $1,400, costs more — than other Ultrabooks, but also comes with some features that laptop lovers might appreciate. Here, I bring the laptop on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show to discuss some of the pros and cons of the Ultrabook.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/allthingsd-reviews-hps-ultrabook-the-envy-spectre-14-on-wsj-digits/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20120319/all-things-reviewed-nike-fuelband-and-bodymedia-armband-on-wsj-digits/ http://allthingsd.com/20120319/all-things-reviewed-nike-fuelband-and-bodymedia-armband-on-wsj-digits/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:57:42 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=187875 In case you missed the latest product review in our new All Things Reviewed section of this site: I joined The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show today to discuss the latest entrant into the data-tracking fitness gear market, the Nike+ FuelBand — and to decide whether it’s worth all the hype. You can check out what the device looks like compared to the BodyMedia Fit Link armband, which I also tested this past week:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120319/all-things-reviewed-nike-fuelband-and-bodymedia-armband-on-wsj-digits/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120221/the-u-s-armys-guide-to-pinterest-really/ http://allthingsd.com/20120221/the-u-s-armys-guide-to-pinterest-really/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:19:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=176336 Maybe you’ve had a very, very long nap and missed the last few weeks. So you haven’t heard of Pinterest. No shortage of ways to catch up, including this nice meta-explainer from our corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal. For the advanced class, check out the site’s attempt to quell growing copyright questions.

But if you’re in a hurry, you might consider this no-nonsense guide from the U.S. Army, which has a couple dozen boards of its own (via the Atlantic).

Social Media Roundup – Introduction to Pinterest

View more presentations from U.S. Army

As I’ve noted before, the first instinct when you see military institutions writing about Pinterest, or Twitter, or offering flowcharts that explain how to comment on blogs might be a giggle. But once you actually look at the stuff they’re writing, it seems much more reasonable.

Unrelated: I have had a weird twinge of nostalgia for the ’80s vintage “Be All That You Can Be” campaign. Maybe some kind of madeleine thing triggered by those Will Ferrell Old Milwaukee ads.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120221/the-u-s-armys-guide-to-pinterest-really/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120216/four-weird-things-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-understanding-of-television/ http://allthingsd.com/20120216/four-weird-things-the-internet-is-doing-to-our-understanding-of-television/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:21:36 +0000 Eric Spiegelman http://allthingsd.com/?p=175090 People seem really intent these days on fusing television with the Internet. On one level this makes no sense. Television technology works just fine and we all understand how to use it. We’re also in the midst of a golden age when it comes to programming; I can’t remember another time when there were this many good shows on. Also, television advertising rates are enormous compared to the Internet. There are people on YouTube who have more subscribers than top network sitcoms have viewers, yet they earn a minuscule fraction of the revenue. Television, as an industry, is strong.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

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