News, Entertainment, Digital Life Coming Together
Media companies continue to cling tightly to their copyrights, but ever so slowly, users are being invited to play.
With television ratings stagnating, news organizations are
searching for new ways to nab viewers–particularly younger viewers who turn to
the Web for their information. The Big Three–ABC, NBC, and CBS–are making a
concerted effort to develop a Web presence. ABC, though, is by far the most
forward thinking. It’s creating a 15-minute
Web-only broadcast, according to this Hollywood
Reporter piece.
What makes this interesting is the fact that ABC has
eschewed traditional thinking. The organization doesn’t simply place its
television broadcasts online. Instead, it’s working to engage the digital
audience.
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Now, not to get all Cluetrain
Manifesto-y on you, but ABC is going about this the right way. It sees the
Web as simply a platform for conversation. One-to-many broadcasts, such as
television, are good for one medium, but they’re not good for developing a
large-scale audience online. From the Hollywood
Reporter:
Some of the pieces have a decidedly new-media feel to
them. A correspondent recently shot a piece walking on the streets of Baghdad
to explain what it was like to wait in line for gasoline and pay more than
Iraqis are accustomed to paying. It was closer to a video blog entry than a
traditional report.
Of course, it’s not all fun and entertainment on the Web.
Viacom has requested that Google’s YouTube remove
all copyrighted materials–including clips from The Daily Show and The
Colbert Report–from its site, ostensibly to make way for a licensing
agreement that will allow the media giants to build solid business models
around Web video. And MySpace, the market leader in social networking, which
has partnered with various entertainment groups, announced that it would use
“audio fingerprinting” technology to block
the use of unauthorized music by its users.
Despite the restrictions, it’s become clear that media
companies are trying to walk a fine line between building and engaging their
audiences, and also protecting their copyrighted material.
Nowhere are these two issues coming to a head more starkly than
in the grand
experiment in Second Life, a virtual world that has seen a dramatic rise in
its user base and a dramatic rise in the number of corporations rushing to set
up virtual shops.
