• Bionic Woman. Loved it, even with Michelle with a US accent. Set up the premise well (conspiracy theories aside) and well put together. Something I’m going to watch.
• Chuck. This was surprisingly fun. Great characters, fun story. (even if similar to Jake2.0) Interested to see if it keeps up.
• Journeyman. Premise has been done before as well – time jumping to fix things, but enjoyed the acting on this. Need a few more to make up my mind
• Life. Damian Lewis is good, but this is just another cop show for me at the moment. Probably not.
• K-Ville. Another cop show, but far different background to others. Got potential
• The Big Bang. Comedy in the style of the IT Crowd with one of the characters strongly reminding me of Cory Doctorow for some reason. Nerds meet the ‘real’ world. Funny, but jokes could be a little one dimensional
• Back to You. OK. Comedy. well put together but not my cup of tea

The odds are I’m going to end up watching one or at most 2 of these shows. I know I’ll be watching Heroes and Stargate. As I’m unlikely to be watching most of them on ‘TV’ which ones that continue for me will depend in the ease of getting them online from the ‘official’ distributor. One of the reasons I watch little House is that it is no available through normal methods and I’m not passionate enough to download. I feel the same about CSI – but I watched a lot more of it last year as CBS had a great online policy. When I felt like watching something, I could just go grab it. I don’t mind the streaming nor the minimal ads they have on them whilst streaming, but just make it easy for me to watch. As I watch all my telly on the telly (I rarely port it to another device), even if through the PC connected to it, that restriction does not phase me like it does many others.

VeohTV is an application that you download to your PC. It lets you watch any video, not just on Veoh, but anywhere on the Web—whether it’s on NBC.com, CNN.com, YouTube, or AskANinja.com (but not Joost, which does not show videos on its Website). It turns the hodgepodge of video on the Web into something that looks remarkably like TV by gathering all of it into a remote-controllable experience you can watch from ten feet away

Phil Butler looks at the features and contemplates the revenue drivers

Joost content is obviously excellent and the quality of broadcasts there is very stable, which illuminates one of VeohTV’s only real weaknesses – the system is dependent on the quality of sometimes less than excellent online video. This is not problematic with content from NBC or other major networks, but the user’s “hands on” filtering will determine a quality library. The ads were a major concern of mine and I found Joost to be an early leader in upscale and unobtrusive advertising. Dmitry reflected a rather perfect logic in response to this concern, in that VeohTV will be able to target ads that will be relevant to individual users and therefore inherently less obtrusive.

and Mike Arrington has a business round up.

Will it work? It certainly might. I’ll have to wait and try out the software first. But the vision is solid. This avoids the time and cost of doing licensing deals with content owners. Like Real’s new player that allows users to basically bookmark and locally store video, it assumes that video will continue to be widely distributed across the Internet. Whoever creates the best interface for the content will win users, and liquidity events.

What did I like about it?

• The interface was intuitive, smooth to use and very close to the Tivo model. I liked it better than the Joost model.
• Loved the way you can pull everything together into your own channels
• From an advertisers perspective, the channels and what you can do around them offer some great opportunities, better targetting and , hopefully, a way of advertising that is not too intrusive but could be useful.
• The search function. Cool. Very, very cool. Pulls stuff from all over and let’s you line it all up to watch.

Look out for a lot more online buzz around this once the beta starts rolling out.

Over the course of the evening, there around 120 people in the chat, on average (I think). Many of these had come from various forums and sites or from the front page of ustream and were asking the questions about why this was being done, why people were watching it etc. I know why I was watching it – I read the blogs of Chris and Eric and I know Kosso and Ben in person. I was also trying to get my head round the service and see how if it could be used at work. By making it easy to set up and stream, from a mobile situation, it opens up the possibilities to allow direct connection with users of a brand. So far, these are what immediately spring to mind.

• Straightforward sponsorship. For someone with a following in the right demographic, sponsoring their costs is a good way of connecting with that demo, in an unobtrusive way.
• Adding it onto an event. If a brand is running some kind of event, then it can be extended out to the web to increase the audience. Live streaming and feedback to the people on camera through the chat. Even if only a couple of hundred (there are scaling issues at the moment) they are likely to be early adopters and ‘sneezers’, spreading the word. Capturing the live feed and posting it later also increases the spread.
• You could take this slightly further and add the feed into banner ads. More disruptive but able to spread to a wider interested audience but may be prevented by the scaling issues
• Supplementing a chat. One of the brand I work on already runs chats a few times a year; adding video to this would increase the value and the engagement as the attendees get to see the hosts.

There’s bound to be more once I get my head around it more. This is not currently mass media, but for offering a direct and immediate connection between a brand and its fans, it could be perfect.

“This is a game changer for Internet video,” said Peter Chernin, President
and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation. “We’ll have access to just
about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time,
consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered
on the sites where they live. We’re excited about the potential for this
alliance and we’re looking forward to working with any content provider or
distributor who wants to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity.”

“Anyone who believes in the value of ubiquitous distribution will find this
announcement incredibly exciting,” said Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of
NBC Universal. “This venture supercharges our distribution of protected,
quality content to fans everywhere. Consumers get a hugely attractive
aggregation of a wide range of content, and marketers get a novel way to
connect with a large and highly engaged audience.”

I love that they think that they are providing what the user wants, as if they are the only ones, as if the web goes to YouTube for their health and not to watch great content. The release is full of PR speak – do these guys really talk like that? And if they do, please let me never meet them, with their borgified market speak they sound quite boring. Would I use the service – yes, if it gives me the content I want at the place and time I want and is not over encumbered my advertising as they try and squeeze every single drop of money from everywhere they can.

This is not about the consumer getting what they want; this is about dinosaur media companies being dragged licking and screaming into an web reality. The consumer is already taking your programmes, you are only just know getting onto the bandwagon. No doubt the content will be good, they will get viewers – there is a tendency for most people to do what is ‘right’. But be real with your vain announcements – remember, we’re all talking about you, how about answering back in a human voice occasionally.

• BBC – showing added value programming, ie the behind the scenes stuff that goes on the websites. This is advertising free
• BBC Worldwide – clips from programmes, carrying advertising in which the BBC will have a revenue share. This is the same model for the rest of the BBC worldwide programmes, which are not funded from the licence fee and carry ads. However, in this case, the channel also appears to be open to the UK
• BBC News – news clips, also advertising funded but this time not accessible to the UK

I’m glad they are stepping up and doing this and think the BBC Worldwide decision, allowing access from the UK, is a pragmatic one. Especially if they show the clips on the BBC sites as well – the US networks have seen some uplift in viewers after putting clips on the service.. But I found the comment from Ashley Highfield ingenious, given the zealousness with which they have been acting to take down the recent Top Gear clips I’ve linked to.

Mr Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members – although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people’s copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC’s brand.

“We don’t want to be overzealous, a lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us,” he said.

I did some back of envelope calculations about the worth of the BBC. Let’s say that I watch 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. In the US, programme are around 42 minutes long, so 18 minutes of commercials (but let’s say 15 for promos etc). That means I’d watch around 182 hours of ads with that viewing habit. At UK minimum wage, that’s around 1000 GBP worth of my time. I see getting that time back as entertainment, on a non-commercial channel by paying my licence fee of 126GBP, as a bargain, never mind when you add the rest of the stuff they provide.

And yes, I’m in the US now, but I’m paid up for the year and there’s still Tivo and Slingbox, the online radio, the online news and info and all the other stuff to give me my fix.