The Original Couchable Media

A new study is out, from the Nielsen-funded Council for Research Excellence, and it dispels some of what we think we know about new media:

…younger baby boomers (age 45-54) consume the most video media while confirming that traditional “live” television remains the proverbial “800-pound gorilla” in the video media arena.

In addition to the revelation that consumers in the 45-54 age group average the most daily screen time (just over 9 1/2 hours), the VCM study found the average for all other age groups to be “strikingly similar” at roughly 8 1/2 hours — although the composition and duration of devices used by the respective groups throughout the day varied.

The research also found that:

- Contrary to some recent popular media coverage suggesting that more Americans are rediscovering “free TV” via the Internet, computer video tends to be quite small with an average time of just two minutes (a little more than 0.5 percent) a day.

- Despite the proliferation of computers, video-capable mobile phones and similar devices, TV in the home still commands the greatest amount of viewing, even among those ages 18-24. Thus, in the eyes of the researchers, this appears to dispute a common belief that Internet video and mobile phone video exposure among that group (and the next one up, age 25-34) were significant in 2008.

For those of us steeped in the virtual world of the web, it’s easy to forget just how important television is to our culture. But that said, I think studies like this miss an important point about what “television” actually means today.

I’ve been writing a lot about Boxee, and in my last post called it “couchable media,” and this study only makes me like that term even more. It’s true that users/audiences want is media that is easily consumable, that they can enjoy while kicking back on the couch. On one hand, there is an element of escapism; on the other, I think there is a very social element at work. Far from the bowling alone metaphor, television is quite a social thing. It’s true that we view television programming from within our homes, but it’s not always that we’re sitting alone. We often watch together, and we then talk about what we watch with other people.

And increasingly, new media, such as blogs and Twitter, allow us to liveblog and livetweet, making the experience of television even more overtly social. And sites such as YouTube allow us to share what we’re watching on television with others, in smaller, bite-sized chunks. Today, couchable media doesn’t have to mean bowling alone. When I watch BSG with Boxee, my friends there get alerted to the fact that I like that show. And with my iPhone handy, I’m hardly ever watching TV without twittering what I’m watching.

Framing these types of studies, then, in terms of “800-pound gorillas” is really the wrong approach — media is never used in isolation. The world is increasingly participatory, and net-based media such as blogs and twitter don’t replace other media, but simply add to them.

Boxee’s Big Night Out

Last night, I attending Boxee’s NYC meetup. Over 600 people attended, hundreds more than attended the previous meeting, held in San Fran. A statement both to the growing popularity of the product, as well as the enthusiasm of the NY tech crowd.

I’m a big fan of Boxee, and have previously written about why I think it’s a real revolution in terms of both the user interface as well as being a potentially disruptive force in the media industry. More on the latter in a bit.

First, the product. You can read about the details over on the boxee blog, but, in short, last night they added support for Pandora, RadioTime (a service I’ve never heard of before last night…). They upped the ante in the Hulu debacle by creating the “boxee brower” — based on mozilla code, it essentially connects to Hulu (or any Internet site) as a web browser, so if Hulu wants to shut out Boxee, it will shut out everyone using, say, Firefox.

Information wants to be free and all…

Perhaps more significantly, the folks at BoxeeHQ, which seems to be a sort of incubator for boxee plug-ins, added PBS support. So now there is a ton of PBS video available for viewing through boxee. The BoxeeHQ work is one piece of a real push by Boxee to build a development community around its product. Avner Ronen, Boxee’s CEO, last night announced a new, easier to use API set, and encouraged developers to help bring content to boxee’s platform.

In fact, this actually key to Boxee’s business plan. To his credit, and unlike services like Twitter, whose Exec team either seems reluctant to speak in detail about their plans for monetization, or simply don’t know, Ronen was quite candid about the plan for his company. And it’s simple: Encourage enough people to use Boxee so that content providers (television execs, Internet media companies, Internet radio, etc, etc) take note, and then ask for a cut.

Ronen was adamant about never charging users for Boxee. His plan is to become a game-changer, and essentially force the hand of Big and Small Media by delivering an audience. Ronen also said he has no interest in selling user behavior data.

Do I believe him in all this?

I think it’s smart to remain a skeptic. The debate Ronen has been involved in with Mark Cuban, CEO of HDNet, illustrates the fact that Big Media won’t just acquiesce. Cable providers and television networks have their idea of how media works, and that picture doesn’t involve Internet techies cutting them out.

I also have no idea how lucrative Boxee’s proposition really is — it seems like there are two problems. The companies that are more than willing to work with Boxee (blip.tv, nextnewnetworks) are upstarts themselves and don’t really pull in the big bucks; the companies that have the big bucks aren’t interested in Boxee taking a cut.

Faced with that problem, the easy thing for Ronen to do with Boxee is exactly what he said he won’t — charge subscriptions, and sell user data.

So it will be quite a challenge, and time will tell how this plays out.

All that said, Boxee has plenty of things going for it. First and foremost, they have a rabid user base that loves the product, and loves the content this product facilitates. And as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, Boxee really is a huge step forward in user interface, taking all the complexity out of the web experience, and making it “couch-able.”

Couchable media. I like that.

…

Update: Whitney Hess, a design consultant working with Boxee, has updated her blog with more detail around the upcoming beta version, which will include some much needed usability features, like putting favorites on the home screen. Her post is here.

Bloggers, Journalists, and The Downside of Transparency

One of the latest developments happening in both the political blogosphere and journalism today is the newfound attraction to the microblogging service Twitter.

Twitter is simply a service that allows people to send 140-character “tweets” to their followers, and exactly because it is just that simple, users have been able to make Twitter their own, and turn it into many different things. So, for some, like Zappos, it’s a marketing and business tool. For Twitter’s investors, it’s a business plan waiting-to-happen. For celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Lily Allen, it’s a way to reach out to fans. For technologist Dave Winer, it’s a launching point for starting “a billion Twitters,” just as in the beginning, few blogs started a billion more. Similarly, Trebor Scholz wonders if, like the early days of link blogs, Twitter is a “revival of mutual pointing from more than a decade ago“?

Because Twitter is so simple, it can be all of those things, and more. And because on Twitter, you “tune” the list of people you follow, you carve out your own little world there. So whether there are 100, or, as reported recently by Nielsen, 7 million users, it doesn’t matter — Twitter can feel as intimate or as breathlessly overcrowded as you want it.

Most interesting to me, though, is the way in which journalists and bloggers have taken to the form. On a recent post on Daily Kos, blogger Scout Finch outlined why the kos community should be joining Twitter:

What I discovered is a fascinating social experiment. Journalists, pundits, politicians, celebrities, and the everyday Joe are chattering away. Suddenly, the Joe Scarborough’s of the world are interacting with the public in a way they never have before…..directly and without a filter. Whether responding to questions about Morning Joe segments or his favorite soccer teams, Joe is tweeting like mad. And he’s not alone. @GStephanopoulos, @jaketapper, @Shuster1600, @tamronhall, and so on. The list of twittering pundits is growing by the minute. But, what is the appeal for them? Why have they gone so utterly crazy for Twitter? Reading through their tweets, I was struck by how engaged they are with their “followers.” Twitter allows them to interact like they might in the comments section of a blog. In short, Twitter has allowed them to become bloggers…albeit in a micro-form…

…I may still be a n00b in Twitterville, but I’ve seen enough to know that Twitter is crashing the old communication gates. The most surprising thing about that is how relieved the pundits, celebs, and politicians seem to be about the old barriers coming down. Turns out they weren’t being protected by those old barriers as much as they were being constrained by them. So, it is easy to see why the pundits are developing into a Twittering class of their own.

Surprisingly to me, many of the bloggers on Daily Kos either didn’t get, or didn’t want to get, the explanation. So you find comments in the post like, “Twitter is bullshit” and the reply, “I agree it is total bullshit. The best I have seen it described is it seems to be an unusually ‘high noise to signal ratio.’ All updates, no substance.”

Now, perhaps this is a case of the old guard (although calling bloggers at Daily Kos that seems odd…) being wary of the new. Perhaps there is a threat to what bloggers do, and in this respect, their reaction can be seen as similar to the defensive posture we saw journalists take in the early days of blogging.

But the political blogosphere has been largely built through maintaining an antithetical position to the field of journalism — rather than blogs being a parasitic medium (which is often how they are portrayed), bloggers have really come into whatever political clout and power they have today because they’ve taken on the media. Bloggers aren’t repackaging the news; they’re taking it apart and asking why it works the way it does.

Which is why avoiding Twitter seems like the last thing political bloggers would want to do, because Twitter brings with it an amazing level of transparency — it’s groundbreaking, really. As Scout Finch remarks, journalists and TV pundits are interacting both with their audience, and with many politicians. Where in the past, the why and how of journalism were always hidden, today, on Twitter, it’s increasingly out in the open.

And for journalists, that’s also becoming the downside.

Take ABC’s Jake Tapper. As pointed out on TPM earlier today, Tapper began pushing a story on Twitter about Obama (cracking a Special Olympics joke on Leno, which was, obviously, a dumb thing to do…), and then later “sighing” at the “hypocrisy” of people talking about this story.

As David Kurtz at TPM notes, this is the “disease” of the bubble in which journalists live. This is exactly how they operate, pushing a non-story story that will likely get ratings and website hits, rather than doing investigative journalism. And that model is exactly what bloggers have used as a rallying cry for the last 8 years.

Even more interestingly, a few bloggers have noticed Tapper is now “blocking” them on Twitter, whenever someone apparently asks the wrong questions. Or something?

Talk about hypocrisy — here is a journalist whose profession is made possible by the First Amendment, keeping people from reading his public statements on Twitter. It would be stunning, if it wasn’t part of the same critique bloggers have offered about the news media for years.

Scout Finch is right — there is a huge social experiment going on right on Twitter. Fascinating to watch.

Even more fun to take part in.

Update: ThinkProgress

Update Two: From TPM blogger David Kurtz: Tapper, in what I guess is a Twitter equivalent of a peace offering, started following my Twitter feed this afternoon, and I am now able to follow his again. He twittered: “tpm is unblocked. My bad”

Brave new world…

[Note: This has been cross-posted on my blog at MediaCommons, a new "digital scholarly network." Really good stuff over there -- please check it out!]

Intimacy Without Communication

Ezra Klein today makes a good observation about Congress’s newfound love for Twitter:

…this is the problem with the public sphere’s quick embrace of Twitter. It’s intimacy without communication. McCaskill doesn’t actually say anything in 140 characters or less. The illusion of transparency comes because in everyday life, we only hear about the dinner plans of people we actually have a relationship with. What’s useful about intimacy, however, isn’t the exchange of trivia but the access to different perspectives. And I’d really like to hear her perspective! It would be rather nice if senators and congressmen routinely wrote posts explaining their thinking on major issues. A public service, even. Instead, they’ve all embraced Twitter.

This is a fairly nuanced point, and in certain respects it’s true. Twitter affords a level of intimacy rarely found, historically speaking, in public media spaces. The rise of networked publics and social media, though, has ushered in a ratcheting-up of public intimacy, turning upside down our previously held notions of public and private. In fact, even before Web 2.0 became a buzzword, theorist Pierre Levy, in his 1998 text Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, spoke of a “moebius effect,” the “transition from interior to exterior and from exterior to interior” when our world is virtualized through the mediation of computer technology.

Social media certainly has this effect, and Twitter may be the moebius effect par excellence. There is something about the medium that is very personal; it does feel transparent, and McCaskill’s deft use of twitter — mixing her professional life as a Senator with her personal life as a Mom and college basketball fan — seems like the “right” way to use Twitter.

But it’s not as simple as Klein makes it, because he seems to be generalizing something about the practice of using Twitter and a de facto incompatibility with “communication” — I don’t think that’s true.

What is true is that Twitter can be as communicative a medium as you want it to be. In other words, McCaskill’s tweets don’t say anything because she’s not saying anything in them.

Furthermore, the 140 character limitation Klein points to — the idea that just because a tweet has 140 characters you cannot saying anything with it — is a sort-of red herring, for two reasons. First, there is no rule that says you cannot use more than one tweet to say something — I’ve had plenty of good discussions on twitter, but they required multiple tweets. In this case, Twitter becomes more like a public chat room, than a series of people answering the question, “What are you doing?” Second, and related, is a point that’s been made elsewhere: what’s said on twitter is often just a part of a larger conversation, with users linking to, and commenting on, blog posts and newspaper articles, or “live-tweeting” events as they happen. (And to be sure, McCaskill, along with many other public/celebrity types on Twitter, does not use it in these ways…)

There is no doubt that Twitter creates a feeling of intimacy between users, but there is no reason why that must preclude a medium where communication — the exchange and debate of viewpoints and ideas — cannot happen.

Future of Newspapers…

Both Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson have recently written must-reads about the future of newspapers and journalism.

Making Sure Popular Twitterers Stay Popular

WeFollow is a new site, that is supposed to be a user-generated Twitter directory. The idea is you send it three hash tags that describe you, and you get placed in their directory with others with the same.

Looking at the front page, though, WeFollow simply serves to highlight the most popular people using twitter — it’s a list of the same people we always hear about, like Ashton Kutcher and Shaq and Kevin Rose (hmmm….he started the site.)

Not sure what the purpose is, though. Seems redundant.

Socialist Looter President Cuts Down Corporatist Banker

Today, at a Business Roundtable conference:

MR. PARSONS: So take it down to our industry, the banking business. At its core, it’s a very simple business: It takes funds from depositors and other providers of funding, and then it makes those funds available in the credit markets. And that’s how businesses grow, when people buy homes, and send their kids to college, buy cars, and all that sort of stuff.

THE PRESIDENT: Can I just say, Dick, it hasn’t been that simple lately. (Laughter.) But I get your theory, though.

Ka-POW!

The chains of the proletarians are slipping away!

On The Internet, No One Knows You’re Boxee

Boxee has Hulu back, sort of, through Hulu’s RSS feeds. The key point, from Boxee’s blog:

while we don’t come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. it is a complex business. our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point. the fact that it’s becoming easy to consume Internet video on a TV brings into question many of the industry’s business models that developed before the web. that’s part of the reason why Hulu asked to be removed from boxee. our meetings over the past week weren’t able to change that. but the people in the industry “get it”. they are users. they read the blogs. they talk with users. they are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time.

users on the other hand, won’t wait. as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, users will take matters into their own hands to get the content they want. [Emphasis mine.]

Information wants to be free. Or, maybe: On The Internet, No One Knows You’re Boxee.

In other words, it’s ridiculous to think Hulu could prevent an application like Boxee from getting at content, because if a web browser can get to the content, than anything else can.

And since Hulu publishes their content in feeds, Boxee’s solution was to build in an RSS reader that’s optimized for video. Not as elegant as the straight Boxee interface, but it will work. Hulu has RSS feeds not only for things like “all new videos,” but for individual programs, too, making it easy to follow the programs you like.

Can’t wait to download it and give it a run.

The End of Twitter: Barbara Walters Edition

Gawker, today: Did Barbara Walters Kill Twitter?

Twitter, a message-blasting site rendered infamous by its downtime, is out of service once more. Who killed it? We’re blaming Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg.

According to Tweetscan, an independent website which indexes and searches “tweets,” the 140-character updates sent by Twitter devotees, the two were discussing Twitter on their ABC talk show, The View…

Surely the end of twitter.

Journalism

Newsweek tackling the important issues this week.