I’ve received legal letters from my previous employers trying to gag me. These seem to especially concern my view of the management team that took over in November 2006. However, this is a graph that is publically available to anyone:

The top of this graph is when David McCourt (or Run DMC as he is now called by a fellow shareholder, employee and sufferer) took over as ‘Interim’ CEO and Chairman, the bottom is where he sold out, and then even re-negotiated a poorer deal for shareholders just a week ago. Due to this guy I have lost well over $6m dollars whilst he issued himself more and more shares in the company for free.

The US is a difficult place to go public, but it still provides scandalous levels of protection to people who destroy shareholder value. I hope ome of the company’s shareholders will sue him

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Devil Days

Modern day business can be a hellishly complex experience and there are businesses such as construction or logistics that I do not, and probably will never, understand (how the heck to you build a skyscraper ?).

But most online businesses are, at their core, simple affairs. And the most successful ones often live off existing businesses (think eBay and Google).

So, let’s deconstruct Google:

- Index information (web pages, maps, books)
- Make the index searchable
- Make it available to an audience
- Build the audience
- Monetize the audience

Or Microsoft, which is a somewhat more traditional company:

- Build tools
- Sell tools

Or Microsoft in the future:

- Build tools
- Make them available online
- Build an audience
- Monetize the audience

Hmm, a theme seems to be appearing. It’s making money from that pesky audience. What Google have is a very simple business plan linked to an engine for delivering audiences. A bit like TV used to be. But now there’s a long tail involved.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere….

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The Parasite Tree

One of the beauties of online video are the things that you can do with it – you can overlay, link text and graphics to the timeline, create hotspots, provide interactive narratives; I could go on and on.

So, why is no one doing this ? And why does video lack the kind of social commentary you might find on text articles ? Is it because video is a didactic medium, or is it simply because this is an immature proposition ? Or is it because TV has not yet become a lean forward medium ?

To perorate and somewhat distort an idea, I suspect that McLuhan‘s cool medium is fast becoming a hot medium. Viewers are leaning forward and, despite its paucity, internet TV is a powerful and proven way to sell.

But the question remains – are you better off building a community site around video or a TV experience online ?

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Is Video Enough ?

I’m receiving a lot of correspondence on how to broadcast live events on the web.

I did my first live event back in the mid 90s and, surprisingly, things haven’t changed that much.

Watching the Olympics on the BBC reminds me of sand filled days on remote beaches off the African coast attempting to get live pictures from the PWA World Windsurfing Tour out live over the internet.

However you handle a live webcast the components are the same:

Pictures – you will need on or more cameras; the better the quality, the better the output, so HD is always preferable even for webcasting. Lightweight is the way to go to save on excess duty on airplanes if you’re going abroad, or hire locally (unless, of course, you’re filming windsurfing in 30 knot winds – then heavyweight equipment becomes a plus!). If you’re using multiple cameras I’d always suggest a pro dedicated mixing desk such as Sony’s Anycast. Cables are a pain, and the emerging wireless solutions are worth looking at if the budget allows.

Presenter – watching the red button coverage of the Olympics with the commentary appearing and disappearing is disconcerting – having someone to interpret the pictures and ask questions is a long held TV tradition; in an ideal world if you’re running commentary having two people improves the banter. The problem with this is that you then need monitors for them to watch the video output and special mics for noisy situations. Alternatively you can cheat by having them watch and commentate from a studio – or even your office.

Connectivity – ah, the biggest issue of all is making sure that you’re able to get pictures from the location.. ah, I could tell you some stories about how we managed to get pictures live…. The best, but most expensive way, is to send a broadcast signal, but this involves getting a satellite dish and technician on location, booking a satellite, having a downlink with an encoder, etc.. (There are service providers who can do all of this for you). An alternative, which I always favour if possible, is to encode on site. You will need a reliable upstream link of 1Mbps for this and an encoder with a dedicated encoding card such as those from Viewcast. I’ve used everything from microwaves to hacked together lengths of CAT5 to get an image from the mixing desk to the encoder and to a point where there’s sensible bandwidth – and always make sure that you have Plan B for when some muppet decides to service the local telephone exchange just as you’re about to go live.

Network – a typical Internet TV service only makes modest calls on a network – a single server can easily cope with 200 simultaneous connections, and with each person watching 15 mins, this would equate to (200 x 4 x 24) nearly 20,000 viewers a day; but if all of those viewers arrive at the same time you’ll need 100 servers; that’s when content delivery networks (CDNs) come into play. On top of this, you will need someone managing and optimising the network, providing support in the same way that TV playout facilities do.

Technicians – more than anything you’ll need a bunch of talented, committed people who are resourceful and adaptable; remember, if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong and the first major lesson I learnt in TV was that there are no excuses.

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Going Live

As predicted in this blog some time ago, the joint BBC/Channel 4/ITV internet TV joint venture, Kangaroo, has fallen foul of regulators and is unlikely to appear until later in 2009, if at all.

I think that it is fair an right that this has been referred. It will, without doubt, be the pre-eminent internet TV service in the UK and will therefore have leverage with advertisers, but more than anything will have ‘discover’ tied up. To gain any kind of audience channel operators will need to be on this service, which will in turn add to the influence of Kangaroo.

The overall landscape of television in the UK is up in the air with OFCOM clearly about to take some of the BBC’s tax money and use it to fund other public service broadcasting initiatives, although this, at the moment, largely seems to mean subsidising the channel that broadcasts Big Brother.

The problem, and the opportunity, with this impasse is that it allows others to make a move and take a part of the marketplace. But who is in a position to take the opportunity. Perhaps Blinkx‘ purchase of online ad engine Miva is an indication. And in all of this, the long tail is being neglected.

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Bounced