Young Americans are watching less TV and more Internet media

According to a new report from Deloitte, millennials, the generation of 14- to 25-year-olds, watch just 10.5 hours of TV a week (older viewers watch twice as much!). They also spend less time watching DVDs than any other age group.

But while they are spending less time with television and DVDs, they are actually spending more time with media than any other age group – watching videos on the Internet, listening to music and playing video games.

This confirms a trend we’ve been watching for several years: the more control that people get over the media they consume, the more time they spend with it.

The take-away: As new media technologies get more powerful and easier to use, people of all ages will be spending a lot more time with Internet media.

via Adweek, image: Crocidillicus

Roku – the maker of the $99 Netflix Player, today announced (pdf) it has released support for streaming high definition (HD) content.

Netflix is the first content provider to deliver HD content to the Roku player. Additional providers of HD content are expected in the first quarter of 2009.

The new software will be automatically delivered to all Roku players free-of-charge over the course of the next few weeks.

Apple has published an article looking at how the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) is using podcasting for communciations and training:

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD), much like any organization with a critical mission, requires lightning-fast communications between senior staff and troops. The department also needs to deliver in-depth training, especially for situations that involve a high risk of exposure to injury or liability. The need for fast, easily accessed communications is more important than ever, particularly for staff members who’ve grown up in the Internet age.

To more effectively reach its far-flung workforce, OCSD is using Apple Podcast Producer, an integral part of Mac OS X Leopard Server, to create podcasts in-house. The media services made possible by Podcast Producer rival the quality of a professional broadcast facility—all at a fraction of the cost.

The article is obviously Mac-centric, but it has some good info on the technologies that the OCSD is using, including the OCSD’s workflow:

Staff can capture podcast content on MacBook Pro computers using the Capture desktop application in Mac OS X. They can then submit content to Podcast Producer for automatic processing. This enables OCSD to create, encode, publish, and distribute high-quality podcasts on a large scale that are available to staff via iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and other means.

Link

Google got some more bad news today about YouTube. 

Not only is Warner Music Group pulling all its videos off YouTube – it’s in talks to create an alternate to YouTube for music videos. 

According to a report at Silicon Alley Insider:

A source familiar with the negotiations tells us that Warner and the three other majors  — Sony BMG, EMI, and Universal Music Group — all think they could do better creating their own music video Web destinations and are in early talks about forming a joint venture similar in concept to Hulu, the increasingly popular TV-on-the-Web joint venture from News Corp and NBC Unviersal.

A joint venture is just one possiblity each label is considering. Our source said there have been many brain-storming sessions. If we were to contribute to those, we’d say that if the labels do create a joint venture, we think it’ll probably be popular like Hulu, but frought with similar problems. Namely, it’ll be stuck with hosting bills and not allowed to keep most its ad revenue, which we’re not sure there will be that much of, if YouTube’s $25,000 checks are any indication.

This is bad news for YouTube, because it’s likely to have another competitor, like Hulu, offering professionally produced content that’s advertiser friendly. 

It’s also bad news for YouTube users, because it increases the likelihood that videos will get yanked from the site because of the music they contain. 

If this trend continues, the pressure will only increase for Google to find a way to either move towards mainstream content or find a way to make money on user-generated videos.

The Associated Press has picked Hulu as its Website of the Year:

In the Wild West that is online video, Hulu.com has proven to be a trailblazing answer to how professional content can thrive on the Web.

“This is period of great experimentation in regard to media, in regard to online video,” said Hulu chief executive officer Jason Kilar in a recent interview. “You’ve seen a lot, you’re probably going to see even more in terms of various business models, various interface designs. I personally love to operate in moments of time like that.”

While a lot of bloggers panned Hulu when it launched, based on its funny name or the fact that it was facing up against YouTube, we were impressed by Hulu’s concept:

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 skeptical about Hulu’s ad implementation and navigation…..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 is 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.

Hulu has turned out to be a challenger to YouTube, rapidly becoming one of the top video destinations, and featuring advertiser-friendly content. 

2009 is shaping up to be an epic Internet video battle between user generated content and mainstream video.

Australian podcast company The Podcast Network crashed over the weekend as a hard drive failure and lack of redundancy, taking its podcasts offline and destroying show archives. 

According to The Podcast Network, “On Saturday Dec 20, the hard drive on TPN’s server suddenly died. We are in the process of restoring and re-building all of our sites and will have all of the shows back online asap.”

Since the crash, TPN’s put new hardware in place is trying to get things back online:

We recently outgrew the service we were using to backup the architecture and media files (we have over 500Gb of media files) and this crash happened before I managed to get a bigger backup drive configured. It’s always the way. As a result we’ve lost the old media files, so we’ll be getting the hosts to re-upload as many as possible. In addition, we’ll be providing an FTP drop box for the audience to send us any files they have that we don’t. And I’m also hoping we’ll be able to find a data forensic service that can pull stuff from our old dead drive. So I think we’ll be okay. It’ll probably take us a week to get all of the current shows back up and running.

The year has been a hard one for TPN and its podcasters. Besides ending the year with a crash, the network’s site was hacked earlier in the year.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=11FB595FB47EF47E

Video Production Basics is a series of videos, via Expert Village, that offers short tips on making indie video. 

Episodes discuss how to choose a camcorder, make an independent film and how to apply to film school with this series on video production basics.

I’ve embedded the series above, or you an view it on YouTube.

Wizag’s Twitter Trend (App Store link) is a free iPhone app designed to do one thing – make it easy to see what people are talking about on Twitter. 

The app lets you discover Hot, Rising and Emerging topics from thousands of tweets, so you can see what’s happening in one glance:

• Hot: Most popular topics in the last 24 hours
• Rising: Fastest rising topics in the last few hours
• Emerging: New topics just appearing in the last few hours.

According to Wizag, more analysis and discovery features are in the works. They’re looking at offering Personalized Twitter Trend Discovery Accounts (PTTDA).

The personalized view is expected to let you discover Hot, Rising and Emerging topics from just the people you follow.

Rise and Shine.tv is in the midst of a daily holiday songwriting project, and everyone is invited to help create the songs, via the Internet. The exercise in spontaneity and creativity is the brainchild of Dean Whitbread, co-founder of the UK Podcasters’ Association (and a talented songwriter and musician in his own right).

Rise and Shine is a live show, in which songwriters face the daily challenge of writing a song based on news and current events. The product of the day’s songwriting is later mixed and mastered, and syndicated as a podcast.

As I write this (Saturday, Dec. 20, 2008), I am watching Mike Turtle, a songwriter in Switzerland work via streaming video alongside a coffee-roaster in Minnesota, Dean in England, Christophe in Belgium, and nearly a dozen others via chat. They are writing a song (loosely) about Santa Claus and the broken undersea Internet cables.

Rise and Shine Yuletide Songwriting Festivities began several days ago, and run through Christmas Eve (24 December). Paraticipants gather at Rise and Shine TV/livestream or on the Mogulus streaming video site daily from 7pm to 10pm GMT (1pm – 4pm, Central US time).

The audience can pitch in via chat (on Mogulus), Twitter, Seesmic videos, Skype and email, with ideas or just encouragement. Encouragement of the songwriters is, um, encouraged, as writing an original topical song from scratch in under three hours is a sizeable project.

Rules and processes are explained on the Rise and Shine site here (at the bottom of the page).

In the holiday spirit, revenue from Yuletide songs will be donated to charity. According to the organizers, “as much as you give us, we’ll give that away, along with as much festive musical originality as we possibly can come up with.”

Viewers (and prospective songwriters) can watch the process daily between 7pm and 10pm GMT. There will be no show December 22, however, as some of the Rise and Shine folks will be celebrating the Winter Solstice.

Later in the day, after the song is mixed and remastered, listeners can download the finished song as a podcast.

Geek News Central’s Todd Cochrane has announced the tentative schedule for the 24 Hour Podcast, a marathon celebration of indie media scheduled for December 20-21st.

Here’s what Todd has to say about the event:

I kick off the event at 6am HST / 8am PST / 11am EST and go for 24 hours straight. We will be talking with some very cool people during the event.

This event will be streamed live on Ustream and everyone patched in via Talkshoe. I hope that you will join me. If you are guest on the 24hr Podcast an you have a time conflict email me immediately and we will get you scheduled in a new slot.

Here’s the 24 Hour Podcast schedule: