SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

Most companies pay homage to customer engagement and empowerment by offering places online for feedback, comments, complaints and other types of interaction. But it’s mostly just lip service, as Adweek reported in a story about a survey by the CMO Council. Less than a fifth (16%) even bother to track company message boards. Meanwhile, 31% give a good score to their commitment to listening to consumers. Assuming all CMOs who track message boards give themselves a good listening score, that leaves 15% who somehow genuinely believe they’re listening to their customers yet who don’t bother reading what their customers have to say online. What are they doing instead, one wonders rhetorically. (Title lyric by Elvis Costello. Creative Commons photo by Mr.Tea / Stephen Train)

Here’s another example of why there needs to be a major rethink about copyright laws and how such laws are applied in the digital world. Stephen Colbert has been expressing mock outrage that his Colbert Report audience are remixing and then sharing interview clips from his show, and then expressing his faux horror that they might do the same thing with excerpts from his audio book. This subversive marketing campaign, which went viral within minutes, is possibly but not definitely legal under the fair use provisions as things now stand. (Title lyric by Scott English/Larry Weiss, courtesy of the American Breed or Amen Corner among others.)

So Craig Barrett is retiring as the chair of Intel. The last time I interviewed Mr. Barrett was in 2005, just after he stepped down from being CEO. The part that I put into print was mainly about WiMax and how Intel was working with Robert Redford to use the Sundance Film Festival as the scene of the first movie ever to be delivered to an audience using that technology.

But I also remember that Mr. Barrett gave me a delightfully personal description of the server room he has at the heart of his Montana home. I expressed my jealousy of every aspect except his electricity bill, at which he joked that the room gives off enough heat to keep the house warm throughout the Montana winter. (Title lyric by Kid Rock.)

I’m pleased to see that Andy Baio at Waxy.org posted his findings on Tracking the Piracy of 2008 Oscar-Nominated Films, in which he analyzes the online presence of potential Academy Award-winning movies. This year’s 26 nominees have been added to the database he has been maintaining for seven years, so he now has tracking information on 211 titles.

Andy and his annual research project first came to my attention when I led digital media coverage for the Hollywood Reporter. One of my favorite factoids gets its spotlight moment again: the average time from the time screeners are received by Academy members to its leak online is six days.

This year, the only movie not leaked online in some form is Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Clint Eastwood’s Changeling was available only as a low-quality telecine transfer. The remaining 24 are downloadable in DVD quality (with Baz Luhrman’s Australia the last to turn up.)

Charts and more information are here. (Title lyric by David Byrne, toy pirate by Playmobil.)

More young people have watched television via the Internet than have used any type of DVR, according to a new study from Solutions Research Group called Prime Time Is Anytime. It found that among 18-34 year olds, 70% have watched TV online while 36% have viewed a show on a DVR.

When asked where one could watch “videos, TV shows and movies” online, most respondents thought of YouTube. The sites they thought of unprompted include ABC, Yahoo!, NBC, Hulu, MySpace and CBS. The study also found that 15% of online Americans have visited one of the major networks’ websites in the last month specifically to watch a TV show online.

It’s a little unclear whether the 70% of online TV viewers are including YouTube. That distinction may not matter, however, now that YouTube is ramping up its partnership offerings. It’s also unclear whether these viewers include stuff they’ve acquired without official sanctions. SRG has promised to share further details of its study in the near future, so hopefully it will clear up some of those points. (Title lyric courtesy of The Cramps.)

Millions of people watched President Obama’s inauguration online, with CNN taking the honors as top online destination. That’s according to Nielsen Online, which reported that CNN had more than 11 million unique viewers. (MSNBC Digital came in second with 10 million, followed by Yahoo News with 9.1 million, then Fox News Digital and AOL News, in that order.)

What the mainstream media didn’t mention, however, was that this remarkable event and achievement was aided by the much maligned peer-to-peer technology. TorrentFreak explained that CNN was able to provide video to this many simultaneous viewers by using P2P file sharing technology from the Denmark-based company Octoshape. Every viewer who chose the default Flash player first had to download an Octoshape plug-in, and that made it possible to share each stream with other viewers.

That’s a considerable savings in bandwidth costs for CNN, an improved viewing experience for the audience, and another reason to support net neutrality – is yours one of the ISPs that blocks P2P traffic or caps bandwidth usage? (Apologies to Blackie & the Rodeo Kings for the title lyric pun.)

Sometimes the most eloquent form of communication is silence. Ten years after President Clinton’s administration introduced the Child Online Protection Act, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Bush administration’s final attempt to establish the Act in law. This case has changed names several times – you can follow the paper trail via the Electronic Frontiers Foundation’s overview. Alternatively, Ars Technica is a good source for a more spirited version of the saga.

Basically, COPA was supposed to protect children from seeing anything online that might violate “contemporary community standards” or appeal to “prurient interest” under penalty of up to $50,000 in fines and six months in prison. (These are the same vague concepts that led Facebook to ban photos of breastfeeding infants if the areola was visible.) The Supreme Court determined that it violated the First and Fifth Amendments (that’s the free speech one and the due process one).

There are many important observations and statements in this whole truckload of legal briefs, but a particular favorite of mine comes from U.S. District Lowell A. Reed Jr.: “Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.”

(Thanks for the title/lyrics go to Barry Manilow, Bruce Sussman, and J. Feldman. Creative Commons photo by Seabamirum/Tim.)

A piece for Business Week analyzes something that web denizens already know but that many traditional entertainment executives need to understand: content is and always will be king, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Author Douglas MacMillan points out that the top online content providers all have pretty much the same stuff, so a successful online presence must have something uniquely appealing about it. He generally takes the position that what these sites need is community, social network tools, whatever you want to call it, suggesting that the comments and rating system on Google’s YouTube are what boosted the site to prominence.

I believe YouTube’s popularity is due more to the ease of sending links and the fact that YouTube pays for the bandwidth. The piece kind of agrees with that after a while, noting that Hulu’s growth is because of the site’s design and its growing ability to integrate with existing communities, while CBS Interactive’s TV.com is struggling despite lots of community-building tools.

The underlying problem for many entertainment companies is that too many executives cannot bring themselves to loosen the distribution controls on their content. Rather than explore emerging alternative business models, they insist on sticking with what no longer works simply because it’s the safe thing to do. (Creative Commons photo by  Will Pate.)

As we commemorate the new president the new president and avert our eyes from some stupendously kitchy souvenirs, some people are grabbing what they perceive to be a marketing opportunity.

Attempting to be heard above the clamor of Obama’s inauguration was the launch Commander in Chief, a game developed by Eversim, published by IGS, and distributed in North America by Atari. It’s a multiplayer sim game in which players control things including the economy, the military, national security and terrorism, natural disasters, and alternative energy sources. Players are equipped with actual geo-political information on 400 key factors in 192 countries provided by 50 international organizations including the United Nations, G7, NATO, NAFTA and OPEC.

Apologies for slacking a bit on this blog recently, but I was suddenly called out of town to attend the funeral of a dear friend and incredible guitarist. I’m back now, and my toes have thawed out from the Ann Arbor weather, so I’ll soon be back to full speed. (Ron Asheton is 2nd from left.)