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Librarians Versus The Search Giants

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You want a hot discussion? Put librarians, Microsoft, Google, and Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book on a SXSW panel to talk about issues surrounding book digitization (and call the panel “Revenge of the Librarians”). An hour wasn’t nearly long enough for the conversation – and the diverse audience proved that the issues surrounding digitization aren’t limited to a small segment of the population.

Starting with the ideas of what happens after books are digitized and what the impact of a shrinking pool of knowledge might be, the panel started by discussing the elephant in the room (let me say that it was refreshing to see open back-and-forth dialogue between the panelists, unlike the normal nicey-nice stuff you see): Google’s book-related programs — Microsoft’s project isn’t online yet, so escaped detailed scrutiny. Dan Clancy, of Google, explained the various components of the initiative.

The goal for Google and Microsoft (other than making money, and that’s what corporations do) is to build indexes of authoritative works that will provide resources during search. To do this effectively, they need to have a lot of books digitized. This is an expensive and time-consuming process.

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What Really Keeps Studio Executives Awake At Night

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I’m going to tell you a little secret: Hollywood is in a state of panic (it’s also in California, but that’s another issue). Those of you who have been paying attention have surely noted that the new media is moving at warp speed. Now you could say, in the studios’ defense, that this rapid turn of events has been, well, rapid, but the Dawn of the New Media has been predicted since Amazon.com sold its first book.

Hollywood has been actively digitizing product for years now. Every studio has been scrubbing and remastering and relicensing music in anticipation of a digital windfall. Maybe it’s that DVD has been so dominant, so profitable for so long, but the studios remain unprepared for the future. Item Number Ten on the Absolute Value analysis of Google’s Analyst Slide Show asks the question that has Hollywood biting its nails:

Do you know exactly how many assets you have? By assets, I mean all the content you’ve ever owned or created. Do you know exactly? Do you have the count? (Remember, I’m a computer scientist. I have to ask these things.)

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Origami “Debuts” – Exclusive Video On Google

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The blogosphere is buzzing today about Microsoft’s delayed announcement of the “mysterious” Origami product. The Origami Project website has been updated with a March 9 launch date. Apparently today was never intended to be a launch date — or was it?

A lengthy video of the product has turned up on Google. I’m assuming that today’s date was intended to be the official “leak date” of this new product video. How clever of Microsoft to use Google to promote their latest product.

Based on a PC World report, it’s now not clear whether or not the product will be released anytime soon. Apparently Microsoft is new at this viral marketing thing and isn’t quite clear on the part where it’s also important to manage expectations.

A few observations after watching the video:

  • As anticipated the product is a portable tablet-like device that does just about everything.
  • It’s clear from the action scenarios that Bluetooth and WiFi will play a big part in all of Origami’s magic.
  • This is clearly not an iPod killer.
  • Man this thing is big. They call that a portable?

This, apparently, concludes Microsoft’s first attempts at product secrecy and viral marketing

Watch the video:

CBS Considers iTunes – Another Win For Apple’s FairPlay DRM

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Earlier this week Jim beat me to a rant about the many things CBS is doing wrong with its video storefront. Charging $1.99 for an episode of Survivor that expire in 24 hours is ludicrous. It’s such a bad idea that there’s a special room reserved for CBS in the Medialoper Hall of Shame.

Who in their right mind would actually pay to download a video file with those restrictions? Now that CBS is talking to Apple about selling programming on iTunes we’ll probably never know.

It would be tempting to assume that CBS just couldn’t get it’s act together while NBC and ABC saw the opportunity to score big with iTunes. However, on further investigation this is more than just a story about a major network making some obvious screw-ups while trying to figure out how best to sell its programming in the new media-everywhere era.

This is really about CBS attempting to resist Apples FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) while maintaining maximum control over the network’s content. It’s also about a major network realizing it was fighting a loosing battle by resisting iTunes.

Some major aspects of CBS’s recent video download experiments have been glossed over by media analysts. For one, “the experts” have failed to note that Survivor episodes have the same 24 expiration on Google Video (look closely and you’ll see it’s $1.99 for “a day pass”). The content expiration is undoubtedly enforced through Microsoft DRM, which means that CBS’s downloads will not play on iPods (or Mac’s, for that matter).

When you get right down to it, content creators have a choice. Maintain maximum control over their content by using Microsoft DRM, or give up some of that control and sell their content in a format that plays on the most popular portable media device on the planet.

Alternately, content providers could sell content that has absolutely no DRM protection through other venues, but it’s unlikely that we’ll see major media companies doing that any time soon.

To recap for those who seem to be missing the big picture:

  • Google: DRM = Windows only – no iPod support
  • CBS Store: DRM = Windows only – no iPod support
  • iTunes: DRM = Windows/Mac – iPod only (but there are way more iPods than anything else)

Is Google Music Next?

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Forbes is reporting that Wall Street analysts apparently have reason to believe that Google is developing a music service in an attempt to take on iTunes. As a result, these same analysts are maintaining an “outperform” rating and a target stock price of $550.

It sorta makes you wonder if these analysts have actually used the Google Video service – or iTunes for that matter.

As Jim just noted in his most recent post (see below) even Google has realized they’ve botched the beta launch of their video product. They’re nowhere near having the user experience or seamless end-to-end content delivery that iTunes offers it’s users. One can only imagine that a Google music service would be even more of a mess (after all, they’re likely to have more content).

On the other hand, a Google music service that allows musicians around the world to easily add their music to a global marketplace, set their own pricing, and deliver music in a DRM-free format might just work. It wouldn’t necessarily be an iTunes killer, but it could be a profitable service that competes in a parallel universe that iTunes isn’t necessarily interested in (ie, music by unsigned bands).

GoogVid Admits Mistakes, Takes Baby Steps . . . Still Sucks

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In an interesting mea culpa, Google Video Vice President Marissa Mayer admitted this week that “We made a big mistake” with the rollout of their video download service, which was graciously described by the New York Times as “appallingly half-baked.”  More like not even kneaded.  Clearly, it was a last-second idea, rushed out in order to meet the totally artificial deadline of making a “hey, we can do video too!!” announcement at CES.

Let’s just say that, right now, Google Video is Bridges to Babylon as compared to Google Earth’s Exile on Main Street. (iTunes is Bringing it All Back Home.)

However, it seems that Google seems to think that the mistake centered more on not putting the pay content front and center as opposed to the “slap up some thumbnails” design and the maddening lack of any kind of categorization, consistency or context for the videos they offer on their home page.

“We made a big mistake,” Mayer, who oversees all of Google’s search products, said Tuesday. “You can’t come out and launch a product like Google Video and say ‘CSI’ and ‘Survivor’ are there if they’re not on the home page.”

The solution: cram the “for sale” videos into smaller thumbnails at the top of the page, but it still only takes a couple of clicks until you are once again stuck in a giant page of 15 videos with your only navigation choice being the utterly maddening “Another 15 videos from the store” clicking away over and over and over and over and never knowing what you are going to get on the next page, but you know whatever it is, there are only going to be 15 of them just randomly picked and slapped on the page so you continue clicking away over and over and over world without end amen . . .

Or you know, you just go over to iTunes.

The Google Bazaar

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The Los Angeles Times has an interesting profile of the head of Google Video Store, Jennifer Feiken (though we could have done without the tidbit about her height increasing when she wears high-heeled boots — seriously, it’s 2006, people). While I found myself mildly interested in Feiken’s journey from the cutting room floor (an aborted role in Hairspray) to Silicon Valley, I was more interested in how Google will work its way into the brave new world of the new media.

Google has made a lot of bold moves in the media world, most notably with its Google Book Search/Print/Publish initiative (what is it, anyway?). And it’s not an overstatement to say they own the search engine world right now. Aggregating and cataloguing data is what they do best — it remains to be seen if they’re up to the task of selling content to the user. Our initial analysis indicates that Google has a long way to go — hiring an entertainment industry insider is a good first step, but this may be the time that Google needs to leverage other skills even more. First up: make it usable.

LAT describes Google’s initiative as an “online bazaar” and indicates that established media companies are facing the project with skepticism.

The service got a rocky start last week. It was launched three days late because of technical problems, and some users complained about glitches and a shortage of popular TV programming. For example, there were only one episode of CBS’ popular show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and fewer than a dozen music videos from Sony BMG Music Entertainment — two of Google’s major media partners.

Google also faces challenges from existing partnerships established by its competition, not to mention the fact that iTunes has set the bar very high:

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