New Media part one
I was listening to the tenthwonder podcast. This is a podcast about the show Heroes. And in this episode the Interviewed David H. Lawrence XVII, The actor playing Eric Doyle “The puppet-master” on of the creepiest characters on the show.
At this point you might ask yourself, If I’m posting about new media Why start with a heroes podcast?? Well the David H. Lawrence XVII is a pioneer in new media. He is one of the first people using a service netcasting with grew out to become podcasting. In the interview they talked about tv-shows being reached using other then traditional media. Heroes is one of the shows that is on top of the downloads. Which means that more people watch the show then the traditional rating system can detect. In the Interview he talked about networks not embracing this new media. They are doing anything to keep there shows on traditional media. Which is a dumb thing. The internet is here to stay. So embrace it or go down because you’re the only one not doing it.
Okey here a little explanation on new media.
Traditional media are radio, Television, telephones, dvd’s etc
New media are internet radio, Podcasts, Streaming audio/video, Im, blogging etc
New media is mostly using the internet as a carrier.
We all are guilty of using this new media to get our shows, movies or music. The power here is the coverage. Everybody with a internet connection can make use of this. For (live) streaming you need a broadband connection. So it will take a while before Suriname can really enjoy that.
Now the problem big networks are having with this medium is that a lot of services provide content without ads and commercials IN the content. A networks primary income is commercials. Every show has 4-5 commercial breaks. and the traditional rating system is used to estimate how many people have seen the commercials.
With the way it is now a lot of download sites etc provide shows without the commercial breaks. But at the moment the quality of the content is not guaranteed. For me personally I would download the shows from the official site WITH the commercials if quality was parented. Okay think of this taking heroes as an example. Heroes airs on Monday and on Tuesday it is available on the site with commercials. Now the traditional rating system will give you a estimate of how many people have watched it and have seen the commercials. Now after that you can see how many people have downloaded the episode with the commercials. The downloads don’t stop on Tuesday. So at the end of the week or month or even season you can show the clients just how many people have downloaded what episodes and how many times the commercial was shows to them.
For example episode “company man” from season one had 16 million estimated viewers on Monday and it has been downloaded 50 million times within one month.
These number are just example. But that would mean the rating system is missing the 30 million viewers. Now if you embrace the new media and make those download official you can make commercials especially for the international viewers. The clients and the commercials will reach across borders. A good download server can log where the download clients are geographically. Or at least what country/state/city they are in. So if NBC knows that heroes is downloaded the most by people in Australia, they can customize the commercials for that region. Come to think of it you can have multiple versions of the show with commercials aimed at the clients from a certain region. Technically it is possible to force you to download the version with the commercials aimed at your region based on your IP address.
Now doing this would be using the internet in a smart way. If a guy in Suriname with not a lot of money can think of this and knows how to use the technology to do this, What can a billion dollar television network do??
I think the main hurdle the network have is the fact that anybody can put anything on the internet. With television you need permits, expensive equipment etc to put something on the air. So the networks have no way of controlling what is on this media. But why bother?? If you can guarantee quality entertainment for free or very cheap, people will use your service. Of course there are people that go for the low quality service provided by some internet company. But if you control your quality content online the number of viewers using the low quality “illegal” service is gonna shrink fast.
If you want to hear the interview with David H. Lawrence XVII
http://media.libsyn.com/media/hancocklg/10w_ep73part2.mp3
This is a 1:06:41 long interview. This is the part where he talks about new media The second part he’s talking more about his character on the show etc.
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