Story Found By: Robby Q.
Google’s Take on Search Plus Your World
A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.
While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even when users are not logged into a Google account.
Google+ Over-promotion
A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.
Twitter was perhaps the loudest complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on this @WWE search.
It is no surprise that folks like Ben Edelman, Scott Cleland & Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google’s path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move: the mainstream press like CNN, free market evangalists like the Economist, Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google & even ex-Googlers now call into question Google’s transparently self serving nature:
I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I’d rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.
The FTC’s Google antitrust probe is to expand to include a review of Google+ integration in the search results.
Facebook & Twitter launched a don’t be evil plugin named Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.
For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?
- Whether Google ranks any particular organic result above the corresponding Bing ranking in Google’s now below-the-fold organic results is a bit irrelevant when the above the fold results are almost entirely Google.com. But is the core problem that we are under-representing social media in the search results? According to Compete.com, Facebook & YouTube combine to capture about 16% of all downstream Google clicks. Do we really need to increase that number until the web has a total of 5 websites on it? What benefit do we get out of a web that is just a couple big walled gardens?
- If Facebook is already getting something like 20% of US pageviews & users are still looking for information elsewhere, doesn’t that indicate that they probably desire something else? Absolutely Facebook should rank for Facebook navigational queries, but given all their notes spam, I don’t like seeing them in the search results much more than seeing a site like eHow.
- The he said / she said data deals are also highly irrelevant. What is really needed is further context. Before Google inserted Google+ in their search results the Google+ social network was far less successful than MySpace (which recently sold for only $ 35 million). If social media is added as an annotation to other 3rd party listings then I think that has the opportunity to add valuable context, but where a thin “me too” styled social media post replaces the publisher content it lowers the utility of the search results & wastes searcher’s time. Further, when those social media results are little more than human-powered content scrapers it also destroys the business models of legitimate online publishers.
Over-promotion vs “Search Spam”
At any point Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare, account bundling & user laziness. What’s more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn’t acquire (talk to Groupon).
Amit Singhal is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, …
- “The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term.” If the product wasn’t ready for prime time you were not required to mix it directly into the organic search results right off the bat. It could have been placed at the bottom of the search results, like the “Ask on Google” links were. Bing has been working on social search for 18 months & describes their moves as “being very conservative.”
- “The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere.” Of course publishers who see their content getting scraped & see the scraped copy outranking the original have a financial incentive to care about a free & automated scraper site displacing their work. They don’t get those pageviews, they don’t get that referrer data, and they don’t get those ad impressions. Google’s PR team is anything but impressed when another company dares do that to Google.
- “The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same.” Much like the Google Webmaster Tools shows that pages with a +1 in the search results get a higher CTR, this Google+ social stuff also suffers from the same type of sampling bias & giving the listings a larger and more graphical stand out further help them pull in much more clicks. Any form of visual highlighting & listing differentiation can lift CTR. I might be likely to click on some of my own results more, but when I do so you might just be grabbing a slice of navigational searches I was going to do anyway where I was looking for something else I posted on Google+ or my Google+ account or the account of a friend & so on. Further, aggregate data hides many data points that are counter to the general trend. I have seen instances of branded searches where the #1 organic site was getting a CTR above 70% (it even had organic sitelinks, further indicating it was a navigational search) and for such a search in some cases there were 2 Adwords ads above the organic results & then the Google+ page for a brand outranked the associated brand in the SERPs for those who followed it! That is a terrible user experience, particularly since the + page hasn’t even had any activity for months.
- “Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through.” First, publishers are not fake users. Secondly, as mentioned above, there is a sampling bias & the + listings stand out with larger & more graphical listings. If they didn’t get a higher CTR that would mean they were *really* irrelevant.
- “out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results.” They could have been placed at the bottom of the search results or off to the side or some such until there was greater confidence in the training set.
- “People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships.” If a publisher promotes a site to the top of the search results & then says something like ‘we will improve quality later’ they are branded as spammers. In the past Google has justified penalizing a site based on its old content that no longer exists on the site. Investing in depth, quality & volume is a cycle. If others get prohibited from evolving through the cycles due to algorithms like Panda then it becomes quite hard to compete with a new start up when Google can just insert whatever it wants right near the top & then work on quality after the fact.
- “We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries.” If this is the case then why does it only promote Google+?
- “We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish.” The problem is, if a company builds a reputation as a secretive one that clones the work of its partners & customers then people don’t want to do open-ended transparent relationships. Naive folks might need to see the blood and tears 3 or 4 times to pick up on the trend, but even the slowest of the slow notice it after a dozen such moves.
- “I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed.” Considering Google’s lack of transparency & self-promotional bias on the social networking front, would you be fully transparent and open with Google? If so, then aren’t the search algorithms complex enough that it would make sense to make those transparent as well? How can you ask other social networks to increase transparency at the same time Google is locking down their search data on claims of protecting user privacy?
- “It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl.” This is where being trustworthy is so crucial. Past interactions with Yelp, TripAdvisor & Groupon likely make future potential partners more risk adverse & cautious. Outrageous “accidents” like those that happened with Mocality & Open Street Map from playing fast and loose further erode credibility. And even when Google hosts the media & has full access to user data they still rank inferior stuff sometimes (like the recent Santorum YouTube cartoon fiasco), even on widely searched core/head keywords.
The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won’t have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won’t share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don’t want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.
As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google’s mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list – sometimes by a substantial margin.
Identity vs Anonymous Contractors
In the past we have mentioned that transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.
When Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google “was mortified” and it was “a contractor.” If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on “the contractor” then the world would be a pretty crappy place!
Eric Schmidt warned that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote, Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.
What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact? They were fired on the hour:
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote.
Google’s staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer “will be terminated within the hour.”
When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name or don’t use the product. They later claimed that you can use a nickname on your account as well, but there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.
What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality if we are under an ever-watchful eye:
Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
In many markets ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter they can demand greater transparency to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)
Increasingly Google is placing more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions behind a registration wall. If you are rich & powerful they will sell you the data. If you are the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used in *exceptionally* personal ways.
User Privacy
Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about how they protect users online.
What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are framing everything, requiring registration to read more of public user generated content & sending outbound traffic through redirects.
Google’s new privacy policy allows them to blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:
If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.
Google & Facebook’s war (against) user privacy is catching media and governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google’s issues in their “putting people first” ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin “get the facts” styled blog posts, but to launch yet another ad campaign.
EU regulators have asked Google to pause their privacy policy changes.
Bogus Testimonials & Social Payola
Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won’t be long until a firm like Ad.ly offers sponsored Google+ posts.
Some have suggested that you won’t be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be & even when they didn’t endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).
Further, celebrities sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot their rates go up:
When Ad.ly introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $ 50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for Internships.com generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to Internships.com.
Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said “relevancy” signals.
Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn’t comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority & to like what others like:
The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on “social endorsements,” it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.
On an individual basis reviews and ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges game their ranking systems.
There recently was a question raised about how Google’s rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn’t promote Google’s trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.
Entire categories of demand are created by those tied in with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The US government is propping up home prices & the government bailed out a company that is now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out the secretary of treasury leaked it to some of his criminal investor buddies).
Millions of kids take drugs that address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm. In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don’t. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.
Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)
When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted how they would use the + button usage as a “relevancy” signal. Google recently started inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.
Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.
I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can’t state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.
Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that it was “childish” to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!
Google determines how much information is shown near each listing & can create “relevancy” signals in ways that things tied to Google get over-represented (look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course* Google deserves 100% of the blame.
Thin Content & Scraper Sites
Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?
In spite of sites like eHow getting hit, Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.
Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with Search Plus Your World:
The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but it doesn’t leave lots of room is left for others, as the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.
Start ups that were on a successful trajectory were killed by Panda:
The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.
“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition.
About.com was also smoked by Google:
The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.
The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.
Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought About.com one of the top competing bidders was Google!
Now that the “thin content” has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:
That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster’s website.
How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.
If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts…
…but they also list them from anyone you follow…
In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized to make filling them out faster & they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*
*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to S_E_O Book to help Google fix their relevancy problems.
Can anyone explain how Google’s speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.
And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.
Due to how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with Google’s photo meme feature will ensure that content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for mortgage loan search queries.
When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market in a way a social graph can not:
“The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English,” McNealy said. “All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Further, Google can chose at any point to respond to or ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be “open.”
A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google’s ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google’s internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google’s terms or you die.
When a public relations issue brews they can quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.
Brand Equity & Forcing the Brand Buy
Yahoo! put out a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for hemorrhoid treatment was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).
This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks online & offline.
Google did research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don’t realize that they are using the “returns” from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.
Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)
This goes back to Scott McNealy’s quote: “The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business.”
Analysts didn’t understand why Google CPC rates were down 8% last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR. Those additional clicks dragged down Google’s average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.
That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.
Online views are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that 31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will reach nearly $ 40 billion this year.
Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way credit card companies have.
On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.
Even if most people don’t participate on Google+, Google can still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.
Facebook earnings are still growing much faster than Google’s & Facebook encourages advertisers to advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is adding apps to the timeline & is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.
While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well. Google is becoming a walled garden:
Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.
Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.
A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
…
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.
I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.
“This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.” – Larry Page
Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now was clearly envisioned a decade ago:
I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA – not just a mediator of digital music licensing – but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never.” – Douglas Edwards
What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?
I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn’t score for them, but we have to be really careful we don’t out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won’t be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.
Is Bing Better? Will Enough People Ask That Question to Matter?
For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years Google has dialed up their ads to where they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as being a bug that was getting fixed!
Google’s big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization, aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like DuckDuckGo & Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from Gizmodo, Dave Winer & The Next Web.
BSkyB, British Sky Broadcasting Group plc, in whom News Corp has an almost 40% stake, have announced that they will start providing online streaming service this year. The service will work through a set-top box, won’t require a subscription and will eventually offer film and sports to go along with TV content. They also own some 19% in ITV in the UK as well.
The BSkyB Online Streaming Service
The move has many analysts saying this is Sky’s attempt to keep Netflix at bay in the market as they opened their streaming service there less than a month ago. Sky has some 10 million subscribers.
The country has about 23 million households so that’s almost one in three. If they could take that and turn it into streaming media customers it could definitely put a crimp in Netflix’s, or anyone’s plans, to become a household name in regards to streaming media.
The service, said to be going live by mid year, will see both a monthly subscription as well as single movie rentals. Later it will sell sports content and other content (which presumably will be TV shows, etc). This could be a response to a slow down in new customers that Sky has reported of late. Perhaps they’re clever enough to realize that streaming is going places and they had best get into the game now before it’s too late and their only recourse is to sell rights to someone like Netflix.
This service will be a stand alone and not tied into a satellite TV subscription package, subscribers to that already have online access to content.
Sky already owns rights to many of the new films that Netflix would want to stream and gain new customers. If Sky successfully opens its own streaming service it could seriously undercut Netflix’s ability to compete as their £5.99 a month fee would really only gain users access to the older library of films. Meanwhile, Amazon already have LoveFilm which is priced at £4.99 a month.
It definitely looks like the UK’s online streaming market is heating up for a massive showdown this summer. I’d be willing to place bets on where the chips fall with Sky in first, though they’ll probably have a higher subscription rate because of the newer films, Amazon’s LoveFilm in second because of the lower price and overlap with, ultimately, third place Netflix’s library.
Tags: Amazon, film, ITV, LOVEFiLM, Netflix, streaming, streaming media, UK
Most businesses, brands, and marketers are looking for social media activity around their video programming these days, whether the videos themselves are traditional ads or more content oriented. But for a video to truly “go social,” it’s got to be designed from the ground up to actually deserve that social buzz. While it’s definitely an inexact science–and often more of an art–there are definitely certain identifiable triggers that help spur certain videos to achieve more social interaction from viewers.
By isolating those triggers, and by developing a comprehensive campaign plan that includes strategies for distribution and marketing, it is possible to improve your video’s chances of receiving the kind of social media traction all video creators are after.
That’s why we’re pleased to offer you The Social Video Blueprint–a free e-book that will help you lay out the road map for your own social video success. This book isn’t about marketing your videos on Facebook, but about developing content from conception that naturally lends itself to social behavior and creating a strategic marketing plan–which will likely include marketing your videos on Facebook, of course.
The Social Video Blueprint is a framework… a collection of concepts, tips, and ideas that are proven to help videos gain social attention. We offered it last week for the first time, and because we know that our readers and fans all keep different schedules and have busy lives, I thought it would be a good idea to put out a reminder for anyone that might have missed it.
Get The Social Video Blueprint Today!
Getting the most social juice for your online video efforts starts from the very beginning with the concept, continues through proper execution, and involves making intentional decisions on distribution and promotion. That’s what The Social Video Blueprint is all about.
Grab a copy today by filling out the brief form below, and be sure to let us know if you find it helpful!
Tags: distribution, e-book, Facebook, social media, social video, tips, viral, viral video
It’s a digital world. From the web, to TV, to mobile phones, the digital age is here to stay, and businesses are increasingly realising its potential to reach not just a wider audience, but any audience at all. With research showing that over 90% of us use the Internet to research products or services before we commit to buy – with a growing percentage of this from mobile technologies – it’s essential for businesses to make use of the opportunities offered by digital media.
Online marketing spend has tipped the scales and overtaken print. It’s something many experts predicted but not quite so soon, with the rise of online tools to make marketing your company quick, easy, and most importantly, cost effective.
This increase in online advertising brings competition with companies dreaming up new and inventive ways to engage an audience – and with digital media, almost anything is possible.
The YouTube Black Hole
Video is often seen as expensive, time consuming and hard to get right. Many think of huge TV budgets, but it ain’t necessarily so. Video for web is growing at an incredible speed. As many as 150,000 and 200,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, with the UK the second highest uploading nation (6.9% of global uploads – beaten only by the US at 34.5%). It would take you over 400 years to view all the content on YouTube alone, but it proves the popularity of online video. But (and there’s a huge ‘but’) this is not the case for businesses.
Just because you upload a video to YouTube doesn’t necessarily mean it will get viewed, and more importantly by the right audience. Clients often ask us to produce a video for the web, saying they plan to “put it on YouTube”. That’ll be one among 200,000 on any given day – not great odds for getting it seen, unless you’ve really got something worth seeing. But a strong idea, well executed, can rise above the online video mire and reach out to capture an audience for your brand.
Going Viral
Viral video has become a term used loosely for an online video. But here’s the thing, something has to BECOME viral. If somebody passes your content from one computer or mobile phone to another, or talks about your content via the web, your content has become viral. But creating a successful viral campaign relies on a number of factors, most of which tend to be based on ‘hard work’ or ‘big budgets’. Most of you probably have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. You’ll have ‘friends’ or ‘contacts’, and like you’ll be involved in the ever-popular race to see who has the most ‘friends’. We’ve all received an invite from an old school mate that we barely spoke to then, and don’t see why we should now.
Ah, but your 300 or so ‘friends’ may well have another 300 or so ‘friends’, and they may have 300 ‘friends’ more, and so on. Soon you can get into some pretty big numbers. Now, let’s say you get a video produced and you ask your 300 ‘friends’ to pass it on to their 300 ‘friends’. If they like it, they will, and you can start to get a viral message that people will be happy to pass on for you – all for the cost of a single video. Viral video can have a terrific effect if you’re selling consumable goods, but what about ‘business to business’? Well, that’s the really clever bit.
The Seed
There are companies that offer ‘viral seeding’. This basically means that they will guarantee that your video gets a certain amount of views. Basically, there are two types of seeding. Firstly, ‘Natural Seeding’, which is similar to the Facebook ‘tell your friends’ approach. The second is through ‘Media Placement’, which you can do yourself or employ a viral seeding specialist to do it for you. If you decide to do this yourself, you’ll need to identify the media your target audience is most likely to be using, negotiate media buying and drive traffic through to the content that’s to become viral. A viral seeding company will either offer you ‘Natural Seeding’, ‘Media Placement Seeding’ or both. But this is where you need to be careful.
Contracting an agency to do any kind of marketing can have its risks. These are mainly based around an understanding of your offering and its target audience. Viral seeding companies tend not to be industry specific and will therefore take on any job. This can be very costly and sometimes quite damaging to a brand if your marketing isn’t effectively targeted. The third option is to contract a digital/advertising agency and make sure they have an understanding of you and your requirements. They’ll be able to offer you options one and two, but also add to that a myriad of targeted media solutions that are quantifiable and results driven.
Get Your Customers Talking About You
Most companies now have a website, and most use the web to either sell their products and services or promote them. Video is a great way to engage an audience. The single most powerful way of promoting your company is through testimonials, using the opinions of real people that have worked with you before and are happy to tell the world how great you are. Most companies use this form of marketing as soon as they get a happy client. They add a case study and publish both on their site, along with other forms of collateral. To be effective, they need to be well written, short and to the point. However, most are not, meaning the person that reads them turns off after a short while – this is where video takes over.
Video content is engaging. There’s an old saying that ‘people need to talk to people’, and it’s true. What you have written over six pages of A4, you can get across in less than a minute with minimal involvement from your potential customer. This can be hosted on your website and include any number of calls to action. It’s also very useful as a demonstration for your products – just glance through YouTube to find demonstrations of everything from turning on a vacuum cleaner to how to build a nuclear bunker.
Video and Online
Video is also used very effectively in online advertising. How many times have you visited a website to see a video MPU (Multi Positional Unit) running on the page? It grabs your attention almost immediately, and here’s where we start to see how this works for B2B. Most businesses use the web to research information about their industry. Most of these will probably advertise in their print versions, with little knowledge of how many people have seen their advertisement. Sure we have the ABC and PPA audits, but does a publisher know if John Smith has read his free circulated publication? No, but they’ll know if he’s looked at their website and clicked to view a video. Video MPUs on an industry-specific website, where viewers will be from a certain industry and in a work mindset, are perfectly targeted pieces of marketing.
They can even be placed in a dedicated ‘channel’ – so your accountancy software is placed in the ‘accountancy’ tab on a business website, for example – ensuring that your audience is most likely thinking about researching, upgrading or buying what you’re selling. Now imagine if your video MPU greeted your potential customers as they hit that page – a person talking to a person. Clever video marketing is always about engagement. How do I engage my audience as quickly as possible and make them listen to what I have to say? What would make me watch and take notice? What would make me click on the video for more information? These are questions that a specialist marketing consultancy should talk through with you for any form of marketing, and it’s the same with video.
The PowerPoint Presentation
Video also replaces presentations. How many meetings have you been to, where you have either endured or had to present a 30-page PowerPoint presentation? Ever switched off or noticed your client slowly die of boredom before your very eyes? Video can enliven any presentation and help get your point across in an engaging and entertainimg way. It can run through any part of the offering, in stages, and even be interacted with by the sales person.
And it’s so flexible – it’s easy to view, it can be left with the client on a USB key, and also hosted on your site. It can even be used at exhibitions and conferences. Mix this format with some intelligent digital marketing and you have a marketing medium that not only delivers results, but is trackable, controllable and engaging.
Choosing A Video Production Company
With a sharp increase in video for web comes a sharp increase in video production companies. Type ‘video for web’ into a search bar and see just how many companies are available. Three years ago there were just a few of us, now every Tom, Dick and Hitchcock who knows how to point a camera and use a cheap editing suite will try to convince you of their ‘creativity’ and what’s more, just how little you need to spend. Now here’s the thing. You have different spectra: the expensive, the competitive and the super competitive. If you care about your brand, you should certainly avoid a company that offers you a video for the price of a chocolate bar and a can of pop. We have often been called in to reshoot work for companies who have fallen foul of the ‘too good to be true’ trap.
At the other end of the scale are the expensive video production companies. They can produce something close to Hollywood standard, but will leave you very little budget to help market it. Or you go straight down the middle and get TV and film trained crews, directors and editors, who know all the tricks of the trade to get you a TV quality video for a snip of the price. The key here is to do your research and vet the company. All of which should have a showreel to display their work, but take a look at the individual pieces, as a cleverly put together showreel can mask a whole heap of bad work with quick edits and foot tapping music. Listen to sound and framing. Look to see if the production makes sense or whether the messaging has been blurred by the director’s ‘creative vision’!
Actors
To save on costs, most companies will offer their staff’s services for the video shoot rather than have the production company pay for talent. Normally there’s a budding actor or two flying around the office and normally he or she is the MD. “I’ll be fine” they say, “I’ve presented to hundreds at seminars and conferences”. But the fact is that most melt once we turn on the lights, cameras and prompt them to ‘act’. Not only does this waste the crew’s time and the client’s money, it also results in a poor product.
But, if you are to use staff, brief them well in advance. We have turned up to a shoot and the ‘actors’ have been told that same morning that they were starring in a video and had two hours to learn 40 lines of text! The client then wonders why the production looks a little false! For the sake of a few hundred pounds, you really should consider actors when shooting anything that involves people.
High Definition and Web Quality Video
HD (high definition) sounds like a great idea. But most people do not have the capability to view High Definition footage at work. So why pay more to have your production filmed in this format? Yes, it means you are effectively future proofing your video, but in most cases if you have a video produced for a product, service or even as a corporate message, these will soon become obsolete as your products and services develop.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that if somebody does have the capability to view your content in HD, they will be more likely to respond. The fact is that the only thing they will think about is ‘what’s in it for them’ and your offering. HD is a great format for TV, but have you noticed that High Definition picks up even more information, and how it can exaggerate mistakes? While most people associate video with TV budgets, many think if a video is produced for the web, it should be cheap as chips. Unfortunately, it’s not. Shooting a video for web uses the same processes as a TV commercial, with a few different elements to consider, that can sometimes make the production even more difficult than a standard TV production. For example, let’s say you produce a video that carries drama or suspense, the footage is normally mixed with a soundscape.
Let’s take a heartbeat for example. This will not be heard through a laptop or PC speaker, because of its low frequency, hence sapping the video of its effect straight away. Most work PCs don’t even have sound, so most videos for web should be treated as a silent movie. And if you do add sound, back it up with subtitles or at least make the storyline understandable in a silent context, so that you get maximum impact from your investment.
Free Advice and Great ROI
These are just a few things to consider when we talk about video marketing and video for web. Blue Chew Digital offers free advice to those wishing to take a leap of faith and market their company through video. From creative ideas to production and marketing, Blue Chew Digital makes the process simple, enjoyable and offers a great return on investment.
Tags: advertising, audience, camera, case study, engagement, video production, viral video, YouTube
Avid just announced that the first version of Avid Studio for the iPad is now available on the Apple App Store. If you have been using Avid Studio at home for years and always wanted to use it on the road, now you will be able to, albeit in a lighter format.
Avid Studio for iPad is priced at just $ 4.99 and is said to be easy enough for first-timers, yet sophisticated enough for more advanced editors. As the first iPad app for video editing to offer frame-by-frame editing accuracy and access to all kinds of media, Avid Studio for iPad allows users to quickly and easily create and share exciting, highly professional multimedia experiences, wherever they want to.
Now that $ 4.99 is just an introductory price so it will most likely increase later.
Avid Studio for iPad allows users to begin editing with ease by offering access to any videos, photos and audio already in their iPad library, or media that can be imported from iTunes, cameras and more. Users can then arrange clips in the Storyboard, make precision edits using the Timeline, and enhance their movie creations with high-quality transitions, effects and a soundtrack. They can then share movies directly to YouTube, Facebook and more—or export projects to Avid Studio software, where they can continue editing with even more advanced tools on their PC. In addition, editing enthusiasts can get started fast with an easy-to-understand how-to guide, included with the app.
Here’s a quick list of features:
- Precision Editing Tools: Avid Studio for iPad is the only app to offer a unique combination of Storyboard and Timeline features, allowing users to arrange clips in the Storyboard, then edit like a pro with the precision of the Timeline, which offers frame-by-frame trimming capability. Avid Studio for iPad also takes full advantage of touch capabilities to offer a fun, easy yet professional level editing experience. For example, with a touch or swipe, users can easily resize and rotate a title directly from the preview window, among other functions.
- Full Media Access: There are more creative options for editors, with access to all kinds of media—video, audio or photos—in their iPad library as well as access to media from devices via an iPad Camera Connection Kit (sold separately) or from iTunes or other sources. Users can also capture video and photos within the app for use in their projects. The app also automatically recognizes imported media that has been previously organized by albums, events, faces and more—providing fast, easy access.
- Easy Video and Audio Track Compositing: Users can unleash their creativity by dropping one clip on top of the other in the Storyboard to create a picture-in-picture effect or take advantage of the professionally-designed animated montage themes to layer their photos and videos, all included. Multiple audio tracks also allow for easy layering of music, audio and sound effects to create movie soundtracks.
- Export to Avid Studio for the PC: Avid Studio for iPad also offers a bridge to the power of the desktop by offering a direct link to Avid Studio software (for PC). Customers who use Avid Studio PC desktop software can continue editing their projects with additional powerful features including sophisticated photo and video correction tools, unlimited timeline tracks, an impressive collection of included content and more.
Pricing and Availability
The Avid Studio app for the iPad is available worldwide today from the App Store for a limited-time introductory price of $ 4.99. All prices listed are USD. For more information visit http://www.avid.com/avidstudioapp
Now I haven’t currently got an iPad so I can’t check out the software and get back to you with my thoughts on it, which is unfortunate. This definitely does sound like a pretty full editing studio for the iPad though with the frame-by-frame editing and the ability to export to the PC version of Avid Studio.
Tags: Apple, Avid, editing, iPad, movies, studio, YouTube
Story Found By: Robby Q.
In a recent statement Larry Page said if you don’t get SPYW then maybe you shouldn’t work at Google. To understand why he thinks this is such a good idea–and why the rest of the world thinks it isn’t–we need to revisit the concept of filter bubbles and why they are such a bad idea.
Last year Eli Pariser released the book the Filter Bubble (see my review of the the Filter Bubble). As part of the promotion, he was asked to speak at TED. While I wasn’t there, I understand from people who were in attendance that it made several Googlers in the audience … lets go with “uncomfortable” …
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: when you work at Google, your fellow employees, friends, and people you connect with on social networks like Google Plus are going to be some of the smartest, technologically savvy, and Google-centric people in the world. This is not true for the rest of the online population. Using SPYW to take the collective wisdom of your social network of Google employee/friends to influence your search results is a really good idea. When your friends aren’t Google employees, are not the smartest people on the planet, and in some cases are narcissistic and generally a lot more self interested, using your social graph to influence your search results is somewhere between stupid and insane.
We come back to the basic concept of filter bubbles. Using filter bubbles only works if everyone in your filter bubble is smart, worldly-wise, and open minded to different view points and perspectives. Paradoxically, this is self-defeating logic. If your filter bubble is “good” and you don’t realize that everyone else’s isn’t, you’ll never get why filters bubbles and ideas like SPYW are such bad ideas.
To be clear, this isn’t a case of sour grapes. All of my sites that I care about are doing better since SPYW went into effect. I’m playing the “social game”: broadcasting, engaging, and sending Google the signals it’s looking for so my websites benefit from SPYW and personalized search. However, I can tell you thatwhen I use Google as a regular user looking for answers to questions I don’t know and things I need to buy, I see the results are more polluted by the efforts of other marketers like myself who are playing the same social engagement games I do. The search results aren’t better. It’s nice to sit in the ivory tower of the GooglePlex and say this will teach people to choose wisely who they interact with on social networks. But, in reality, that type of thinking shows they are in a filter bubble: people have a tendency to act in their own best interests. Thousands of years of human history prove that people are really good at reacting to short term dangers like a lion or wolf who starts hunting near their home, but people are really bad at reacting to long term dangers like wildlife conservation, widespread deforestation, climate change, energy consumption, financial responsibility, worldwide poverty, and global starvation.
As regular users notice a decline in the quality of Google results, most of them won’t understand or quite frankly care that the people in their friend network are to blame. There is only so long you can serve inferior results and distract people with cutesy holiday logos before they decide to try another search engine.
photo credit: Shutterstock/NemesisINC
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.
Why Google Thinks SPYW is a Good Idea and You Probably Don’t
When history looks back on this week in the viral video world, the only thing they’ll remember is the Super Bowl and all the various online video buzz the commercials generated. The truth is, there were a lot of great videos this week, and only some of them were Super Bowl related. We have angry athletes, amazing athletes, cute animals, funny amateur short films, rap battles, and much more.
Grab a coffee–or tea, whatever you prefer–and enjoy some of the week’s best viral videos.
Super Bowl Bound
A lot of ads from the upcoming Super Bowl have been released online early by the advertisers–which says a great deal about the power of the Internet. I wrote about a bunch of these ads here, but I thought I’d still include my favorites in this week’s round up.
Volkswagen owned last year’s Super Bowl with their “The Force” ad featuring a mini Darth Vader. Unfortunately, their attempts to recreate that magic are a little flat in this year’s ad:
Click here to watch the video.
While Volkswagen’s ad is a slight disappointment to me, Toyota’s Camry ad may win best Super Bowl spot:
Click here to watch the video.
And Audi’s is a dark horse candidate in my opinion, with a hilarious vampire-take on bright headlights:
Click here to watch the video.
But by far… the Budweiser rec-league hockey game is my favorite:
Click here to watch the video.
Non-Super Bowl Brands
Old Spice launched Old Spice Man with a “super bowl” commercial that never even aired during the big game. So it’s no surprise to see them employing a similar strategy this year. The ads are already online, but won’t debut on television until the day after the Super Bowl. The new ads show Old Spice interrupting ads for other real products (also owned by P&G), and I expect the online and television portion of this campaign to get tons of attention:
Click here to watch the video.
Thinkmodo struck again with another buzz-worth hoax video–this time some fake flying humans in NYC to help promote the movie Chronicle:
Click here to watch the video.
Speaking of the Super Bowl… EA Sports is getting more of their annual online video buzz from their Madden version of the upcoming Super Bowl game:
Click here to watch the video.
Microsoft’s Kinect teamed up with the new Star Wars game for an ad promoting them both… and the results are pretty funny:
Click here to watch the video.
Twitter knows the way to viral video viewers’ hearts… intentionally bad production values! Here’s their cheesy homage to tech company recruitment videos:
Click here to watch the video.
This Week In Sports
Sports videos are always going to be popular–well, at least as long as sports are popular. Sometimes it’s an incredible act of athletic ability, but other times it’s a colossal fail… and this week we have some of both.
If you like the NBA, you’re already familiar with Blake Griffin. If you are not familiar with him, allow me to introduce you to why he’s so popular:
Click here to watch the video.
Griffin’s not the only NBA star who had a huge jam this week. Lebron James can dunk too:
Click here to watch the video.
Not all the NBA highlights are positive ones. And when a man misses a free throw as badly as this guy, well I have a responsibility to bring that content to you:
Click here to watch the video.
Here’s a talented young Russian hockey player named Alexander Radulov (I’ve actually seen him play in person, as he used to play for the local team). In addition to being talented… he’s also very angry at his coach:
Click here to watch the video.
This kid is probably going to go down in history as one of the all-time most talented ball boys:
Click here to watch the video.
Tallest high school basketballer player in the world plays like you’d expect the tallest basketball player in the world to play… with dominance:
Click here to watch the video.
Great Performances
Here’s a dog in a vet’s office, which is not all that uncommon. But one that has a key job to do in the business’ daily operation is quite uncommon indeed:
Click here to watch the video.
Here’s an amazing video I think a lot of you will enjoy. It’s a rap battle in the UK between a 17-year-old kid and his former teacher:
Click here to watch the video.
Impossible pool trick shots? Yes, please:
Click here to watch the video.
This is as strange as talents get, and exactly why the Internet was created:
Click here to watch the video.
Love car explosions? You’re really going to love a car explosinon, in HD, at 1000 frames per second:
Click here to watch the video.
What does your brand & logo say to a five year old? You may not care from a business standpoint, but your sense of humor is going to want to check it out:
Click here to watch the video.
Wakeboarding videos aren’t really anything new–unless they’re shot in Alaska like this video:
Click here to watch the video.
Sometimes the act of describing a video makes you feel silly, so let me just tell you that this next video is weird, and it got a lot of views this week:
Click here to watch the video.
I also loved a couple of short films I saw this week–both go for humor, and both succeed:
Click here to watch the video.
Click here to watch the video.
Tags: Freddie Wong, funny, hoax, sports, Star Wars, television, Twitter, viral, viral video, YouTube
Story Found By: Ralph P.
You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:
Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.
If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it’s pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It’s a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn’t be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you’re selling, and, generally, be a “good match” for what the user wants. – Googley Jon Rockway
Would love to hear someone more senior confirm this as the official Google company position, however they are too skilled at public relations to make that blunder (at least outside of foreign AdWords ads that tell you to “forget SEO”).
Story Found By: Ralph P.
Boxee had already announced that they were going to to stop supporting the computer application, available for PC, Mac and Linux, they had made. But they never mentioned they were going to completely remove it from their site, yet, that is exactly what they’ve now done.
Boxee is now focusing solely on the Boxee Box hardware since they believe that the future of the digital living room is not the PC. Yet, isn’t the Boxee Box just a single-function PC of sorts? It seems like just a way to shoot themselves in the foot with their community who has been with them from the very beginning.
Boxee Strategy No Longer Includes Software Support
Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen had stated that he believed people would continue to watch video on computers but it would be laptops and not media centers any longer because of the rise of the OTT boxes and connected TVs with a second screen in the living room being a tablet.
However, they seem to have failed to realize that serious cord-cutters are already using their computers as media servers and those who aren’t in the market to upgrade their TV or buy an overpriced, single use PC (like a Boxee Box) will still need software.
I do agree that connected TVs and the rebirth of Google TV would definitely cut into their community simply on the power of the companies behind the products. Google TV is going to be everywhere with at least five TV manufacturers working on getting products to market and a handful of new OTT boxes based on the software. Clearly, Boxee lost the race to win the hearts and eyeballs in the living room because of the way they positioned themselves.
Google TV can’t simply be downloaded and installed on a device, which was were Boxee had the upper hand. But Boxee don’t seem interested in that section of the market anymore and instead seem to want to go head-to-head with the likes of Google TV, Apple TV, etc. A mistake on their part if you ask me.
In light of today’s news that they’ll pull the software off their server, I’ve compiled some alternative software that you can use to get your media from your PC to your TV via game consoles, etc.
- Serviio - A new update was pushed out today. The free DLNA server streams audio, video (SD & HD) and image files in their native format or transcoded in real-time as well as content from online sources, like RSS feeds, live audio/video streams, web page content and is compatible with a long list of renderers like Samsung TVs and Bluray players (supports additional features, e.g. subtitles), Sony TVs and Bluray players, Panasonic TVs, Playstation 3,Xbox 360,LG TVs and Bluray players,Toshiba TVs,Sharp TVs, Philips TVs (quite good, I have some friends using this).
- TV Mobili
- PLEX Media Server – As I said in my LG article, this is part of the LG Media Link.
- Myth TV – A full-fledged and feature-filled DVR software.
- TVersity - Offering both a free and a Pro version. A full DLNA UPnP A/V software. Game consoles, Set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, Networked TVs, phones and tablets can all connect via a web browser and media player.
- Twonky – A company I saw when I was at CES who have a commercial media server application. Admittedly, there are great free solutions so I see little reason to go to a paid one like this. Products include: TwonkyManager (media management), TwonkyServer (to serve the media) and TwonkyBeam (an IE9 add-on, with no Firefox support).
Of course, there’s always Windows Media Center, which is what I use to manage my media on the PC and connect to my Xbox 360. Of course, my PC is in the living room and connected to my Optoma projector so I don’t really even need that. I have been toying with the idea of getting a Google TV device but mainly for research purposes but I just can’t justify $ 100-200 on something that seems somewhat redundant for my current configuration. Plus, Media Center lets me pull in a good amount of streaming media from the web right from the interface.
Tags: Apple TV, browser, connected TV, Firefox, Google TV, LG, Panasonic, Playstation, Samsung, Sony, streaming, streaming media, Windows Media, Xbox, Xbox 360