Hulu Competes Against Cable…not YouTube

Not a coincidence that YouTube's making a bunch of news announcements and opening up much more of its inner workings to developers on the day that NBC and the guys I work for at Fox roll out Hulu.com.

Hulu's not supposed to compete with YouTube per se, though YouTube does want to compete with Hulu. Yes, even though YouTube is by far the most dominant video site on the net, it's the one who wants to compete with Hulu here.

Hulu's the first shot serious mainstream attempt at delivering a decent library of decent quality content for free over the Internet to the consumer.

Think there might be a market for that? Uh, yeah.

Google and Apple are still very much the best conduits. The content owners like News Corp and GE's NBCU are the best content plays -- content is king!. And yes, the cable companies are still the best shorts as their cable broadcast conduit can't compete with "Freely pulled over the Internet".

PS. We do talk about this on Happy Hour all the time, btw. And of course you can search this site or TheStreet.com or the Financial Times and read hundreds of thousands of words or analysis and predictions and what not that I've written about this Internet Video Revolution for the last five or seven years or so.

Lost in and Lost on Lost in the Revolution

I didn't see the first season of Lost until after James Altucher had convinced me it was the "perhaps the greatest television program ever" and I went on the DVD buying binge to make up for lost video ownership years.

So I watched a good half of the first season during what started out as a three day weekend of endless work, sorta in the background until I found myself glued to the 109" projector in my office. As the series bounced back and forth from the perspective of each character, both from before and after they'd found themselves plane crashed on this island, I think I might have watched about 9 episodes in row without barely leaving the room.

By the time I'd finished the last episode of the first season, the second season was well underway. So I started downloading episodes on iTunes, since my G5 at my office was also hooked up the 109" projector. Though the difference in quality between the standard DVD and the iTunes episodes was marked, the quality of the content and the story itself was so good, I blew through most of the second season over just a few more weekends.

Then I think I started watching the third season on my personal MacBookPro. But I forgot it at the office one night and I wanted to watch get my Lost fix on, so I downloaded a couple episodes to my iMac at my apartment.

And then I watched a few episodes on my iPhone on that mostly disastrous trip to Italy (though in this digital age, I did just get "friended" by the Italian girl on Facebook, btw). But as I mention in this month's newsletter, I've run out of storage capacity on all my computers lately, and since I'd rather delete the $1.99 episodes of Lost than "priceless" personal photos, videos, songs, etc, I deleted all those shows.

And now I have no idea where to start again. I don't want to read those descriptions on iTunes because they usually ruin the first 40% of the episode. And frankly, it's been so darn long since I last watched Lost I can't remember where the story stopped anyway.

I often expound on the virtues of the Internet Video Revolution, including how sweet it is for ABC et al to have gotten me on board with Lost even though I've never actually seen the show broadcast on ABC to a television set.

But, man, do we need more storage more cheaply and do we need it now (again, as noted in this month's newsletter and often on Happy Hour, that means stick with Seagate and Western Digital and perhaps nowadays with Sandisk again too) as underscored above.

And while it's really nice that my iPod and iTunes now ask me if I'd like to download the purchased songs from my iMac to my MacBookPro's and vice versa when I sync it back and forth from one to the other, I'd really like to just have some sort of easy storage and organization of my commercial video content.

Best publicly-traded plays on organized commercial video content? Google and Apple still, of course silly. This is part of the vision of my RevolutioNetwork too.

Wish we'd get us there already. I'm losing it by being Lost without my Lost. And, please don't tell me what's happening on Lost right now!

Btw, I'll be sitting down with Mike Workman, the CEO of Pillar Data, on Happy Hour tonight, and we'll certainly be talking about the data storage aspect of this.

Whoopi, TV Studies, and Economic Fred Sanford

I've been a fan of Whoopi since my old friend Neil got his first break in Clara's Heart after being discovered at an acting camp in Las Cruces.

But I've never seen more than maybe 30 seconds at a time of The View. With Whoopi booked for the show tonight, I'm watching this show for the first time. Strange job, I have, in that I never would have pictured growing up in Ruidoso or playing hoops at UNM or working at Oppenheimer that watching a women's day time talk show would be "work". I'm getting paid for watching this?

I've definitely become a student of talk show TV in the last few months, and this The View show you can see, really has put it together, with amazing guests, lots of production...

Happy Hour's Quick Shots, one of my favorite segments, sure takes some theme from the Hot Topics segment on The View, eh?

Whoopi's asking Sheri Shephard just now, "Who's your brother in law...Fred Sanford?" That got me laughing out loud.

I used to poke fun at the permabears and the mainstream media for constantly grabbing any negative datapoint and doing their best Fred, "Oh, this is the big one. I'm coming to join ya' Elizabeth" proclamations of economic doom.

Problem is that with all these bailouts and bubbles that we're living through right now really are going to bring a big one some day.

But I am thinking spring of 2008 is probably going to be as okay as Fred was during that long, glorious run of Sanford & Son.

Cody on Your World with Neil Cavuto and Cavuto on Business

Here are the other parts of Cody's most recent appearance on 'Cavuto on Business' on FOX News

Cody on the Lindsay, Britney and Paris:

http://www.mintrevolution.com/index.php?file=profile&video_id=36881

'Cavuto on Business' 06.02.07 FOX News (Part I)
Uploaded by marketwatcher73

Cody on why NYT stock is an internet play:

http://www.mintrevolution.com/index.php?file=profile&video_id=36882

'Cavuto on Business' 06.02.2007 (Part 3)
Uploaded by marketwatcher73

Cody on Your World with Neil Cavuto and Cavuto on Business

Cody was a guest on two shows on Fox News last week.  First, here is his appearance on Your World with Neil Cavuto (06.01.07) that aired live at 4:00 PM EST.

With record highs in the DJIA and the S&P, Cody encourages viewers not be afraid to take some profits off the table.

http://www.mintrevolution.com/index.php?file=profile&video_id=36620

Then watch Cody's Saturday appearance (06.02.2007) as he talks with Neil on Cavuto on Business (10:30 AM  EST).

Cody discusses about how it's really 'Little Brother' watching you with Street View from Google Maps.

http://www.mintrevolution.com/index.php?file=profile&video_id=36619

'Til Death Killed by Overexposure?

A few months ago I went with my friend Mitch to see his client Bill Maher at the Apollo theatre.   After a quick meet and greet afterward Mitch and a couple other Hollywood biz biggies and I took a car downtown to some incredible hidden gem of a classy Italian place.  It must be a Hollywood secret hangout or something because not only did we meet Jennifer Anniston (I smiled and have to admit I found myself a bit addrenalized as we chatted) but we also sat next to Brad Garrett at the bar while we waited for our table.

I sure thought Brad was good in Everybody Loves Raymond.  And 'Til Death, which I've seen a few minutes of a few times and found pleasant enough that I didn't immediately switch the channel, seems like, if given a chance, might develop into a decent enough family sit com.  But why is Fox intent on killing it with immediate overexposure before the show, the characters, the plotlines, the nuances and inside/recurring jokes that make a sitcom are even revealed, much less developed?

I mean, I think I've seen the show multiple times every night I've flipped through the channels on the television for the last two weeks.   I'm sick of it already.

Finding Sleep and Commercializing 9/11

Since I got back from my flyfishing trip (pics and stories coming in the next day or two...), I'd been having a terrible time sleeping.  I thought it was just usual stress about work, etc, but last night I got home from teaching my first class of "The Valuation of Innovation" at Seton Hall at 9pm-ish and I fell onto my couch and woke up to a bad episode of Law & Order on the TV at 10:40ish.  Sometimes I can't ever fall back asleep when I wake up so quickly from a night-time sleep, but I barely mustered the energy to get to my bed where I fell face first and didn't wake up til 7am this morning. 

Ahh, sleep.   Makes me think that maybe it's been this endless coverage and over-the-top media hype/commercialization of 9/11 that's been my biggest sleep deterrent of late.

Confessional: Love for Judge Judy

It's true -- I watch Judge Judy when I catch it on TV.  I love how cutthroat she is; you better know that there are only three answers to any of her questions:  yes, no, or I don't know I'll find out.   And there's nothing better than when she senses BS and then digs and prods until she gets the BS out in the open for everyone to see.

You wanna see a modern-day "Perry Mason" in action, it's not that contrived L&O spinoff with D'Onofrio -- It's Judge Judy.   

I think I'd marry Judge Judy if she were younger...well, that or at least I'm gonna set my Time Warner DVR -- which completely blows compared to Tivo in overall functionality (more on that in an upcoming RealMoney column) -- to start recording that show.

Uneasy at This 9/11 Anniversary

I'm flipping through my handful of HD channels on my plasma television when I once again can't turn the channel once I get to 706 Time Warner Cable NYC and the amazing Discovery Channel in HD.   This time they have this show on called "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb", and they are showing these what seem to be real-time clips of the first explosions of the A-Bomb and I've got the volume turned up on my system and I'm almost doubling over in shock over the impact these Hydrogen bombs are making.  The color video of Grable, a 15 Kiloton bomb shot out of a cannon on May 25, 1953 is so crisp, so cold and scorched in the HD imagery.  The power of the bomb.  The power of mankind.   

Great pine trees, crisp from a dry desert summer, are windswept as and pulled from their earth by mankind's creation as a toothpick is from a cheap glass trey at any remarkably cheap steakhouse in any city where a huge percentage of this population relative to any other civilization's population in the history of the planet can afford to eat meat.  Buses like those that I rode in and my parents rode in and children still ride in today are stripped of their paint, their glass, their metal til they are skeletoned and melted into one piece.

The awesome power unleashed in the torrent and delivered by the system on my wall really do almost make me double over.   The mushroom clouds, in what might or might not be slow motion are the buildings collapsing as I ran with my ex's cat, Marquis de Marmalade so named because he was one 23 pound portly orange tabbie-gentleman, in a porta-cage in my hand on that fateful day almost exactly five years ago.   

And you know what...the worst part of writing about this is the same reason I don't talk about it...I feel so guilty for not having somehow helped people get out...whew, that hurts to write...

I am feeling uneasy about this anniversary.   Restless nerves.

Hoping It's Insults From Ancient PR Policies, and, Learning to Fight Darfur's Horrors

I can't remember the last time I had the patience to sit through much more than five minutes of a traditional newscast.  I find the pace is too slow for my Internet-paced brain.  That, and the fact that the topics they most often choose to focus on are often pointless in the extreme (or is pointless a superlative?).  But isn't it mainly just infruriating how the media will print and broadcast ("push!") the most insulting comments from those who serve us and lead us in government?

I'm watching The News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight and they show a clip of a Democrat citing some ridiculous study that shamefully purports to somehow scientifically refute some other ridiculous study from a similarly in-the-pocket research shop of that other fraternity, er, "mainstream political party" -- that we collectively pretend provide us some substance of the actual concept of democracy.   Said report cited by the Sigma Chi, er, Democrat dude purportedly scientifically proving that we're safer today because of some combined, compromised foreign political policies that the Republican party I suppose rightly claims as being mostly closest to their compromised-among-hundreds-of-millions-of-individuals-in-the-fraternity (er, party).   This followed a similarly embarrassing clip from the President (fraternities and this nation each have Presidents, right?   Do sororities call their presidents, "Presidents"?  Have to ask my mom that one) in which he cited that other report.   

On a "flip it" side of things, I'd like to think that maybe all these endless insults and avoidance of responsibility for both the good and the bad of this world is all the collective result of ancient political PR parties and that most of the time these guys who can't possibly be so stupid as to believe for one second their own spewing of this pointlessness (to the extreme...or superlative?) is somehow going to determine whether each us "public" individuals out here think the policies of frat parties', er, political parties in power are responsible for how protected we are or aren't.  It might be just a wee bit more complicated than that, no?

But then again, sometimes optimism can be naivety , just as sometimes pessimism can be cynicism.  (And sometimes that's okay, btw.)

It also upset when they briefly overviewed the  the horrors of of Darfur and the rest of Sudan and they bothered to show and appeared to objectively imply that the people they chose to quote who shamefully/horrifyingly (neither superlatives, right (...or wrong?) ) said that a UN deployment of troops would be about expanding US/western values (man, I think I'm making the jackass they quoted sound good here).   THE PEOPLE, INDIVIDUALS, IN DARFUR ARE BEING SLAUGHTERED.   Seriously, this is like one of the the very few ways in which the UN could do some good and serve its purpose.

It's as if objectivity of any sense gets suspended in the name of trying to remain objective.   The horrid murderers and criminals which the mainstream press chooses to give any semblance of credibility as a government might be a case of when objectivity dictates not implicitly verifying such a body as a government.    Which is conceptually parallel to the idea of my complaining about the made-for-scroll-paper-town-crying coverage of the insulting claims/soundbites of our own politicians.

A few frustrations, er, "flip it's" in this one, eh?  Let's keep reading, learning and trying to figure out ways to help.