Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Increasingly iconic online video-rental firm Netflix has announced that it has crossed the 2-billion-delivery mark. The company, founded in 1999, has more than 10 million subscribers and ships about 2 million discs every day. Reuters (4/2)

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is defensive of the company’s “TV Everywhere” premise. The industry “can’t just blow up the revenue structure” that cable operators and programmers have come to rely upon by continuing to stream shows free online to people who don’t pay. (Iwantmedia 4/3, http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/time-warner-ceo-you-cant/story.aspx?guid=%7B5D0E3B69-73D0-408D-AA5E-2DA7BE4EB96B%7D 4/2)

(Below)  It’s a VERY interesting discussion.  In fact, I think this discussion regarding the online subscription model without commercials vs. the free ad-supported model is the most interesting discussion in the digital distribution world these days.  Here’s the thing.  I think that most people won’t pay for content unless that content is connected to a television screen.  If content is provided on a monthly basis for online, that content needs to be easily connected to a television environment which these days is still narrowed to the tech elite.  As the connections from online to the television increase in simplicity and allowance, I think this model will make a whole lot more sense.  But unfortunately, the revenue structure can blow up.  In fact, it already has.  Now, it’s a question of what that revenue structure will become as the pieces come back together.  The race to making money is one of that I find most interesting and the most critical to content providers.

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman says that there is unlikely to be a negative consumer backlash against the Time Warner-led “TV Everywhere” plan. “People are used to paying for video subscriptions. They’re used to paying for broadband service, so there’s nothing new there.” (Iwantmedia 4/3, http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Viacom-CEO-sees-no-backlash/story.aspx?guid=%7B52C63A77%2D6EED%2D45EB%2D85D6%2D5A39F02B4139%7D 4/2)

Disney CEO Bob Iger has reservations about walling off online content on a subscription basis, particularly content from broadcasters like ABC, which he notes is free over the air and depends on advertising. Such a move “could be viewed as anti-consumer.” (Iwantmedia 4/3, http://www.smartmoney.com/news/ON/?story=ON-20090402-000767-1047 4/2)

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone appeared on The Colbert Report last night. In case you haven’t seen it already, the video is embedded above. Stone describes Twitter as “The messaging system that we didn’t know we needed until we had it.” To which Colbert responds: “That sounds like the answer to a problem we didn’t have until I invented the answer.” (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/03/biz-stone-plays-it-cool-on-colbert/ 4/3)

Digg may have 19 million unique visitors and nearly 85 million pageviews (Comscore worldwide, Feb ‘09), but one thing it’s never had is a decent search engine. There’s no rhyme or reason to the ordering of results. A lot of stuff just seems to disappear. And the filters are overly complicated.  That’ll change in the near future, the company noted in a blog post today. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/digg-to-finally-fix-search-see-the-screenshot/ 4/2)

The new Digg toolbar product called DiggBar launched yesterday. If you want to try it out immediately, just add “digg.com/” before any URL at all (the image above is using the techcrunch domain).  The toolbar is made for the new Twitter generation, which has a desperate need for very short URLs to fit in the tiny space allotted per message. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/diggs-toolbar-is-here-go-shorten-those-urls/ 4/2)