Index of the future of television

Entrepreneur, podcaster and blogger Jeff Pulver has announced that his latest venture, PrimeTimeRewind.tv, is now live.

The site is intended to be a sort of TV Guide for Internet television, with a social media twist.

“We would like to put you one-click away from watching your show,” according to Pulver.

“Prime Time Rewind also allows you to present you personalized Facet. It can consist of existing prime time TV shows, Internet only shows or any RSS feed of videos you would like to include.”

The site presents links to current TV show episodes on the faces of a cube.

When I checked out the site earlier in the year, I said that Prime Time Rewind set Web design back 10 years, and that the site “takes you on a hyperlinked virtual reality journey into cyberspace, the likes we haven’t seen since around 1998.”

Maybe that sounds a bit harsh, but a text-based interface would be dramatically easier to use than the site’s current Flash-based one.

Pulver says they are working on a variety of updates to the site:

A couple of words on what we are working on next (other than fixing bugs, improving usability, etc. )

1) Twitter Integration (ability to send out twits when new episodes are available etc.)
2) RSS feeds (various feeds, for users, for shows, etc.)
3) more social features
4) better recommendations

Pulver’s concept for the site is great, and it sounds like they have great ideas for the future of the site. The site is dead in the water, though, until they address the site’s usability issues.

Update: TechCrunch has a more favorable take on the site, calling it a step in the right direction.
via Chris Brogan

Based on the latest stats from M:Metrics, the iPhone is delivering on its hype, radically changing what people are doing with the mobile Web.

Check out some of these figures:

• The iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web, with 85 percent of iPhone users accessing news and information in the month of January.
• 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users.
• 30.4 percent of iPhone owners accessed YouTube, compared to 1 percent of all mobile phone users.
• 36 percent used Google Maps, compared to 2.6 percent of all mobile users.
• Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average.
• Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.

The iPhone offers a taste of the future; iPhone users are using the devices in all sorts of leading edge ways. It also shows how mobile users will use Internet media when they get capable devices and unlimited data plans.
“The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video.”

“While the demographics of iPhone users are very similar to all smartphone owners, the iPhone is outpacing other smartphones in driving mobile content consumption by a significant margin,” said Donovan. “In addition to the attributes of the device itself, another important factor to consider is the fact that all iPhones on AT&T are attached to an unlimited data plan. Our data shows that once the fear of surprise data charges is eliminated, mobile content consumption increases dramatically, regardless of device.”

Internet video site Hulu launches today, offering full-length episodes of more than 250 TV series, including Lost and The Simpsons, along with older hits like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In addition, Hulu will feature content from the Warner Bros Television Group, Lionsgate and from sports leagues.

According to the company, it has already attracted over five million viewers interested in catching up with long-form video online. With its library of older content, the site provides viewers a way for digging into the “long-tail” of television programming.

Even more important to the site’s long-term success is the fact that it launches with a mature advertising platform in place, and advertisers lined up to use it.

I’m still skeptical about Hulu’s ad implementation and navigation. The site’s top level navigation doesn’t give you any idea of the range of content hidden on the site, and browsing is equally clunky, with relies too much on Flash.

Hulu’s ad implementation is equally clunky - showing you long, poorly targeted ads and forcing you to grab a mouse and click to continue watching the show.

The site does a great job delivering the shows, though. I caught up with much of season 3 of Lost via the site, and the video has the best I’ve seen for streaming HD. This, along with the fact that it’s lined up an impressive range of content, should give the site a chance at taking on YouTube.

More at NewTeeVee, NYT

Prime Time Rewind TV is a new video site that promises to make it easy to find and watch the primetime network television shows online.

“We would like to put you one-click away from watching your show,” claims the site.

If that’s their goal, you have to wonder: Why do they present your viewing options on the faces of a rotating cube built in Flash?

Yep - Prime Time Rewind TV takes you on a hyperlinked virtual reality journey into cyberspace, the likes we haven’t seen since around 1998.

Use your mouse to rotate a virtual cube to choose a network. Then click on the show that you want to watch!

Sounds easy, huh?

But…

• There’s no way to know what side of the cube ABC or any other network is on. Is it on the back of the cube? Or is it on the bottom? #@#$! Just give me ABC!
• Each face of the cube only displays 16 shows. Aren’t there 21 hours of prime time? (8-11, 7 days a week) Were do the rest of the shows go?
• The cube has ten sides! Rotate it left to right, and you’ll see six sides for six networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, USA, and TNT. Rotate it up and down, though, and you get four category sides: Reality, Comedy, Drama and Action. Aren’t cubes supposed to have six sides? Normally, you’d have to use a pentagonal trapezohedron to get an object with 10 faces. Prime Time Rewind put 10 sides on a cube through the magic of cyberspace!
• Many of the show names don’t fit in the space allowed on the cube. Check out the screen capture, above, and you’ll find these shows: Late Night C, Lipstick Jun, My Name is E & Victoria Bec.

Now - let’s say that you figure out which side of the cube ABC is on and you click on the icon for Lost. What do you get?

You get ABC’s site, displayed in a frame:

You know what that means - your user experience is different for every network.

You can get an account on Prime Time Rewind TV and set up your own custom “facet” on the cube, but there’s really no reason that you’d want to.

Prime Time Rewind TV is a stinking mess. It collects everything that wrong with the current state of Internet television and adds a layer of garbage over the top. There’s nothing to redeem this site.

The site is currently in alpha. It should not go to beta. It should go back to the drawing board, to avoid wasting any more effort on this ill-conceived venture.

Pitchfork Media, a Chicago-based site that offers independent music news, reviews and other content, announced on Tuesday that it plans to launch Pitchformk.tv, a Web-based music video channel next month that will offer “mini-documentaries, secret rooftop and basement sessions, full concerts, exclusive interviews, and the most carefully curated selection of music videos online.”

The channel, which will launch in beta on April 7, also plans to feature a different feature-length film each week, to include “LoudQuietLoud,” which documents the 2004 Pixies reunion tour, and “Ultimate Reality,” a visual art project by Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche.

Pitchfork.tv also plans to add features like personal playlists, and will later this year be integrated with its parent site at Pitchforkmedia.com.

NBC’s Quarterlife - a heavily-hyped serialized drama from the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life - was supposed to be a bold new direction for television. The show was hyped as “the first television-quality production for the Web.”

Unfortunately, it was a pretty awful television-quality production for the Web.

In December, we told you that Quarterlife was a bomb, getting beat out on YouTube by the likes of sleeping kitties, graffiti videos and even a video of Sims in labor.

Online views for the show plummeted from its debut, going from nearly 800,000 YouTube views for the first episode to just a few thousand for recent episodes.

Now NBC is finding out the hard way that a show that tanks on the Internet probably isn’t going to work on TV either. In its network debut, Quarterlife was last in its timeslot, losing out to Jericho and an news magazine Primetime: What Would You Do Now?

What Would You Do Now? 

What we would do now is put Quarterlife out to pasture, tell NBC to stop thinking of the Web as “TV lite” and start taking a long, hard look at shows that have proven to be successful online.

Update: NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports that Quarterlife creator Marshall Herskovitz has admitted that the show was a bomb.

“I watched it last night,” said Herskovitz. “When you saw it on TV it didn’t look like TV, and when you saw it on the Internet it didn’t look like the Internet.”

Kent Nichols - one of the viral video gurus behind Ask A Ninja - has an interesting new post at his site. He looks at the state of Internet video, calling it the golden age:

“The Indie TV movement is on the rise. The club of show runners is now open to anyone with a dream and the entrepreneurial skills.This is the golden age. Sundance in the 80s and 90s. A time when you can create something new and fresh, get seen by millions and have the chance to retain ownership over that property as it enters the big media system.

Yesterday I tested out the iTunes rental feature by renting “Once” — the film that won the best song at the Oscars. It’s a sweet, sentimental and sad at the end. Something you don’t get in the Hollywood system.

Put aside the fact that the dude is 37 and is dating her (she’s only 19 and they’ve known each other for five years — creepy).

$160k was the budget for 86 minutes of content or about $2k/finished minute. Not bad and definitely in the range of where webseries are right now. It also shows you what you can accomplish at that budget range.”

Kent goes on to say:

“We are still looking at the seeds of an indie driven TV movement like the American cinema saw in the 60s and 70s.”

A no-budget exposé on the meat industry can result in the largest meat recall ever. A low-budget movie can win an Oscar. A well-placed video camera can capture the next “macaca” incident and end a political career.

It’s an amazing time. Making a television show, a documentary or maybe even a movie is within your reach, right now.

People now spend twice as much time surfing the Web as they do watching TV, according to new research from IDC.

IDC surveyed nearly one thousand Internet users for the survey. They found that:

• The Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours).
• People spend twice as much time on the Internet as they spend watching television (16.4 hours).
• People spend eight times as much time on the Internet as they spentd reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

“The time spent using the Internet will continue to increase at the expense of television and, to a lesser extent, print media,” said Karsten Weide, program director, Digital Media and Entertainment at IDC. “This suggests that advertising budgets will continue to be shifted out of television, newspapers, and magazines into Internet advertising.”

The data also show that consumers tend to use the media they grew up with. The older the respondents, the more they consume TV, newspapers, and magazines; the younger they are, the more the Internet displaces usage of traditional media.

Using search engines (84% of respondents), mapping and navigation services (83%), personal research (77%), and using email (76%) are the most frequent online activities.

Back in June of last year, we suggested that in the fight between Blu-Ray and HD DVD, Internet TV would be the winner:

Internet TV is plagued by the same problems as Blu-Ray and HD DVD, though: limited content, complex setup and high cost for hardware. Nevertheless, Internet TV is already good enough to make users realize that high definition video discs are a tangent to the real future of video delivery - Internet TV.

When Steve Jobs made his MacWorld announcements earlier this year, we said that his one more thing was that Apple was killing of the DVD:

Don’t expect Apple to kill off the DVD overnight. It took Apple a few years to get rid of the floppy drive, and there are still some PCs that come with floppy drives.

Nevertheless, Apple is looking ahead, not back, and the future Steve Jobs envisions doesn’t included DVDs.

Now mainstream coverage is picking up this idea.

Blu-Ray Death Watch

With the death of HD DVD, the Apple TV update and various new Internet TV services, the idea of a Blu-Ray death watch doesn’t sound so far-fetched anymore.

Here’s CNet’s take:

With the fall of HD DVD, Blu-ray has assumed the throne as the next format of choice, but its reign will be short-lived.

The studios backing Blu-ray already know this. At an HDTV confab last fall, Warner Bros.’ vice president of high-definition media development likened HD packaged media to a set of training wheels for digital downloads.

“We can use HD discs to train consumers to move into digital, but it’s a transition,” said Warner Bros.’ Dan Silverberg. “Downloaded content will come, but the consumer will get quicker tutorial into video-on-demand, etc., by owning a Blu-ray player or HD DVD.”

It’ll happen sooner than they think. With a growing number of alternatives to packaged media, combined with the relatively high prices of Blu-ray players and discs vs. inexpensive, so-called upconverting DVD players, Blu-ray will likely be the last major disc format you’ll ever buy.

What do you think? Are you going to invest in Blu-Ray?

CBS Interactive has announced that it will begin offering classic shows from its archive as on-demand Internet television.

The initial lineup includes full-length episodes of Star Trek, The Twighlight Zone, MacGyver, Hawaii Five-0 and Melrose Place. All content is ad-supported, free to the consumer, and available immediately.

While we can’t say that CBS is boldly going where no network has gone before, at least they are getting this content online and available in a lot of ways.

The more than 300 Web sites currently partner with CBS to deliver this content, including AOL, Microsoft, CNET Networks, Comcast, Joost, Bebo, Netvibes, Sling Media and Veoh and social application partners including Automattic, Brightcove, Clearspring, DAVE Networks, Goowy Media, meebo, MeeVee, Musestorm, Ning, RockYou!, Slide, VideoEgg, Voxant and vSocial as well as Web sites from CBS’s owned television, radio, and affiliated stations.