by Andy Brudtkuhl on October 16, 2009
If you read this blog you know I’m a fan of a la carte TV. As it should – the web has facilitated this desire through piracy and the realization from the powers that be that the market is pushing this direction. Regardless – distribution of tv and media via the web is the future. And Clicker is here to organize all that chaos.
You see each network (much like newspapers, etc) refuse to distribute their content outside their realm of control so we now have a system of content silos. You can watch TV on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, NBC.com, South Park Studios, etc, etc. This is a problem for consumers because we are used flipping on the TV and drilling through hundreds of channels with all the content in one place.
Clicker aims to solve that problem.
Clicker is the complete guide to Internet Television. Our mission is to make it simple for you to find the right show, right now.
As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Great! Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed among billions of random clips and videos.
Clicker catalogs all broadcast programming online, along with TV-quality Web originals, from these silos and delivers them in one seamless, organized experience so you can easily discover what’s available to watch (and what isn’t) online, where to watch it, and what’s worth watching.
Do you think Clicker will solve the problem? Want to try it out? We’re giving invites to the first five people that comment on this post!
by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 4, 2009
We all know that the newspaper industry doesn’t get the web. They don’t get the economics of the link economy – and likely never will. Further more they are completely ignoring the power of the long tail – and specifically the long tail of content.
Raise your hand if your local paper purges their archives online! *raises hand*
From The Gazette
The Des Moines Register
I reached both of these today (obviously prompting this post) after trying to get back to articles I had saved on Diigo to read later. I cannot think of a strategic reason for this – it’s not like they are charging money to access the archived content. It’s simply not there. They are missing out on huge amounts of search traffic and wasting a plethora of inbound links.
Wake Up.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on June 5, 2009
Following on the success of the Wall Street Meltdown parodies, I wrote Mad Avenue Blues. Like Wall Street Meltdown and WSM Redux (both on YouTube), the new video takes a popular song and substitute…
by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 26, 2009
by Andy Brudtkuhl on December 11, 2008
Thanks Andy, for giving me this opportunity to voice an opinion on “The Future of Journalism” and you’re right. It is a passion of mine.
Much of what is wrong with “Journalism” today is the corporate takeover of the media. No longer are writers, photographers, editors and copy experts dedicated partners in disseminating “the news” they are simply pawns in the hands of corporate accountants. “Sales” runs the operation…not journalism. If you want proof just open any “news media” website. If, indeed, you can download it in decent time you’ll see that it is blazing with more ads than the classifieds. Monetizing news to this extent is simply making it a commodity and the public suffers.
The result of this bunker mentality is falling circulation/viewer-ship yet increased advertising costs to business. It is a recipe designed for failure.
So, what do we do?
- Look to independently owned media that is responsible to their local area. Perfect examples are small town newspapers and radio stations. Here the media professionals are tied to the community and not the corporate culture. They mix with the citizens and are responsible for what they write and read.
- Question existing media. Example: Last night on ABC-5 here in Des Moines they had an entire segment on “fluff news”. Four minutes of mindless drivel that belonged on Entertainment Tonight or C.O.P.S. Sorry but with all the activity in DSM they had to stoop to that junk?
- Push the envelope and get creative on our own. The technology available today allows us to do “Indy” news and get a readership/viewer ratio much larger than existing media. And, that’s not hard. Consider that there are 425,000 households in the DSM DMA. The Des Moines Register daily edition subs are 144,000 and falling. We can do better.
- Finally, do away with the political agenda. I don’t need local writers to “take a stand”. Give the data and the facts unless your agenda is an “agenda”.
Thanks for reading…
