Few media are as ephemeral as online video. You’ve experienced this if you’ve ever bookmarked a video and it wasn’t there when you checked on it later. My short-lived video blog, One Stop Video, provides a good case study of the impermanent nature of online videos. I started the blog in March 2009 to spotlight and save some of my favorite funny videos online in one place. I officially quit the blog a year later after many of the videos I had posted had become unavailable. Based on my recent count, 218 videos that I had embedded on One Stop Video in that year are no longer available. That’s the vast majority of videos I had posted. I posted a few more items after that and stopped for good in October 2013. This extended period now includes 27 embedded videos that no longer play. One Stop Video is now an empty husk of a website. Some of those videos likely are still available somewhere else but were moved during a change in content management systems or licensing deals. I would guess that videos by The Onion and Saturday Night Live in this category. But others disappeared when their websites folded (Atom.com, Break.com, Current.com, Spike.com, etc.) or their associated television shows were canceled (“The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” etc.). Other videos were taken down because of perceived copyright infringements. I find this transient nature of the internet frustrating. But in a world where copies of most videos are only a Google search away, most people probably don’t mind.
Photo: “Broken Television” by Aidan Morgan via Creative Commons.
Zombies usually are used for scares in movies and TV shows. But in commercials, they’re used for laughs.
The living dead are frightful in “World War Z” and “The Walking Dead,” but are funny in recent TV ads.
Here are links to 15 ads using zombies. They’re posted on sister site One Stop Video and curated from YouTube.
I’ll lead off with the funny zombie commercials for Sprint’s “unlimited for life guarantee” on talk, text and data plans.
Other sets look at zombies in car commercials (Ford Escape, Honda Civic, DieHard batteries), junk food commercials (Snickers, Doritos, Starburst), tech commercials (Toshiba notebooks, Microsoft Windows 8), and commercials for FedEx, Axe and other products.
Photos: Stills from Sprint’s zombie customer commercials.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is a frequent target of criticism by government watchdogs and citizens’ rights groups. It also has been lampooned by the entertainment and advertising industries.
Prime-time cartoons “South Park” and “The Simpsons” have taken aim at the TSA this season. A villain on the sci-fi drama “Fringe” turned out to be a TSA agent. The lead characters of the NBC comedy “Up All Night” endured the indignities of a TSA screening this season. And Barney Stinson (portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris) on the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” also faced off with the TSA on a recent episode.
The TSA has been parodied by comedians on “Saturday Night Live” and “Conan.” It has been mocked in music videos (Sean Paul’s “She Doesn’t Mind”), porn parodies (“TSA: Your Ass Is In Our Hands”) and commercials for everything from chocolates to power tools.
For a sampling of advertisements that have portrayed the TSA in an unflattering light, check out this post on One Stop Video.
It’s a case of art imitating life. Creative professionals are tapping into citizen outrage over the TSA and its procedures for a laugh or to get people to think and take action.
In December 2010, I did a roundup of the funniest TSA parody videos at the time. As long as the TSA exists, it will continue to be a target of the entertainment and ad industries, because artists know it’s a hot button for viewers.
Photos:
“South Park” parodied the TSA in the episode “Reverse Cowgirl.” (Top)
“The Simpsons” also took on the TSA this season.
The NBC comedy “Up All Night” made fun of the TSA in an episode titled “Travel Day.”
The Fox sci-fi drama “Fringe” featured an evil TSA agent in one episode this season.
Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris, squared off with the TSA recently on “How I Met Your Mother.”
Olivia is searched by airport screeners in the children’s book “Olivia Goes to Venice” (2010).
Actress Pamela Anderson as an abusive, but hot TSA agent, in a PETA advertisement titled “Cruelty Doesn’t Fly.” (See video here. And read articles about the controversial animal rights video on Ace Show Biz and the Boston Herald.)
Hustler takes on the TSA in the porn movie “TSA: Your Ass Is In Our Hands” (2011).
As people store more things online, having a way to sort and search through those things is critical.
Google and Yahoo figured that out early with their e-mail services. People don’t want to have to sift through hundreds of e-mails looking for a particular message when they can just do a keyword search.
Social media is the next frontier for search.
Millions of people are actively using Facebook and Twitter and building up thousands of posts in their message streams. But they can’t search their postings easily on either of those sites.
I recently wanted to show my son some funny videos based on the Angry Birds video game. I had shared links to those videos on my Facebook wall, which I’m using now in place of Digg and separate bookmarking services to save weblinks to interesting sites or articles.
Long story short, I couldn’t find those videos quickly because Facebook lacks a search tool specifically for users’ postings. Same goes with Twitter.
Those services need such a search tool pronto. Its need is going to be more important over time.
I eventually found those Angry Birds-themed videos, but not before sifting through months worth of my posts. Not great. You can see a compilation of those videos at One Stop Video.
Photo: Photoshopped image of a National Geographic cover featuring a red bird from Angry Birds. (See Laughing Squid.)
The second season of AMC's survival horror series "The Walking Dead" premiered Sunday night. It was pretty intense. So to lighten things up, check out these eight funny zombie videos posted to sister website One Stop Video.
Missteps by online video service Netflix have turned a once-beloved brand into a laughingstock.
First, the company bungled its message about a rate increase on July 12. (See press release and company blog post.) Then, it tried to apologize but ended up enraging subscribers by splitting its DVD-by-mail service (to be called Qwikster) and streaming service on Sept. 18. (See company blog post.)
Finally, today Netflix flip-flopped and said it wouldn't go through with Qwikster and would keep the websites for the DVD and streaming services integrated. (See press release and company blog post.)
Comedians have had a field day with how Netflix confused and angered subscribers with its seemingly hasty decisions.
Netflix was parodied in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch on Oct. 1 and at CollegeHumor.com on Oct. 6. Landline TV was out with a parody video on Sept. 19.
Cartoonists also dinged Netflix. The Joy of Tech (see above cartoon) and The Oatmeal were among those mocking Netflix in comics.
Netflix’s Qwikster service now ranks with Coca-Cola’s New Coke among major corporate blunders. Now Netflix must work to rebuild its reputation with consumers.
Russia’s biggest export must be penis enlargement pills, judging from the spam e-mail I receive.
These e-mails prey on male insecurities by promising to increase a man’s penis size. If these pills actually worked, the scientists who invented them would get a Nobel Prize. But of course, they don’t. (See WebMD articles here and here.)
But the e-mails are good for a laugh for their poor English, ridiculous claims and bold promises.
Most of them include websites with the suffix “.ru,” which is the country code for Russia.
Here are some of the pitches I’ve received in recent weeks:
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However, in college and after that I knew that my small size was here to stay. I thought that there was simply nothing I could do and resigned to living with my small size. As you can imagine, this was a huge blow to my confidence.
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Consider the difference between a 7, 8 or 9 inch penis that is thicker and a penis that is 4 to 6 inches and narrower
Consider the difference between a 7, 8 or 9 inch penis that is thicker and a penis that is 4 to 6 inches and narrower.
With a larger penis you penetrate more sensitive areas of the woman. Your longer penis probes deeper searching those special nerve endings. The added width to your penis fills and presses her from side to side to give your partner the most exhilarating sensations.
As for me, I’m more likely to use el Shrinko advertised this month on “Saturday Night Live.”
The Transportation Security Administration has become the much-deserved target of American anger and complaints lately.
And because art reflects life, humorists have lambasted the TSA in essays, drawings, music and videos. On sister website One Stop Video, I've posted the Top 10 funniest TSA videos of the moment. Above is the cover art for a fake children's book called "My First Cavity Search."
Yesterday I mentioned that the Onion News Network videos at TheOnion.com are among the funniest on the Web. Equally funny are those by CollegeHumor.
CollegeHumor does great movie parodies and humorous takes on pop culture. If only Saturday Night Live could have the same batting average for funny sketches.
I post my favorite CollegeHumor videos at One Stop Video.
CollegeHumor is owned by InterActiveCorp.
For a year starting in March 2009, I ran an experiment in video aggregation called One Stop Video.
I posted videos to the site from many sources – YouTube, Vimeo, NBC.com, Onion News Network, CollegeHumor, Funny or Die and others.
A good number of those embedded videos no longer work.
For instance, of the 64 videos I embedded on One Stop Video in January through March this year, seven of them no longer work. That’s 11% dead links.
I’m certain that the dead video ratio is just as bad for last year.
The reasons for the dead links include content owners pulling videos from their own sites and enforcing copyright restrictions on other video posters. (See screenshots above and below.)
That’s one of the big reasons that I decided to pull the plug on One Stop Video. There was no sense posting interesting and funny videos if they weren’t going to last.
Seven months later, I’ve decided to post videos to One Stop Video again. I’m doing this mostly as a way to compile my favorite comedy videos in one place. It sure beats bookmarks.
I had thought that I’d do this here on Tech-media-tainment, but it just wasn’t a good fit.
So check out this first bunch of videos from the Onion News Network on One Stop Video.
The Onion, which posts consistently funny content, hasn’t let its online videos expire like NBC.com and others.
Funny or Die hit a home run recently with its “Presidential Reunion” video. It featured an all-star cast of “Saturday Night Live” veterans playing Presidents Ford through Obama.
Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog had a good write-up on the project.
The behind-the-scenes video showing director Ron Howard and cast is also a treat.
10 online videos worth watching:
Funny or Die’s Presidential Reunion (FunnyorDie.com)
Behind the scenes of Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion (FunnyorDie.com)
Jon Stewart investigates the Chatroulette trend (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)
How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers? (Onion News Network)
Winter Olympics in 60 Seconds (CollegeHumor)
Biathlon as envisioned by 13 Eme Rue, the French action and suspense channel (Vimeo)
Tiger Woods is deeply sorry for his long hard staff (HuffPost)
One month after NBC yanked all the comedy videos from Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” run off its websites, Comedy Central is pulling its most popular content from Hulu.com.
Viacom’s decision to delete its Comedy Central programs “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” from Hulu will create a lot of dead links for websites using embedded videos. (See reports by EW and Gizmodo.)
That includes my video website, One Stop Video.
I started One Stop Video in March 2009 as an experiment in video aggregation. The idea was to curate some of the best videos from around the Web, including Atom.com, Break.com, CollegeHumor, FunnyorDie, Hulu, Vimeo and YouTube.
That one-year experiment comes to an end today.
I had hoped that the embedded videos I posted would stay active for the foreseeable future. But that was not to be.
In addition to Hulu and NBC.com deleting videos, I’ve seen videos discontinued because of copyright concerns.
It’s a waste of time to build a library of fun and informative videos if those videos aren’t going to be there to be enjoyed.
Speaking of copyright issues, a good article by Techdirt today calls out the overzealous copyright police at YouTube for silencing a video by law professor Lawrence Lessig. His video used a snippet of a Warner Music song to demonstrate a point about fair use. Apparently Warner and/or YouTube thought it wasn’t fair use and silenced it.
I’ve seen this many times on YouTube.
Consider the video in the screenshot below. A remix artist made a mashup of Disney Tinkerbell videos and the Gwen Stefani song “Sweet Escape.” The record label objected and had the music pulled.
Or how about the video below it? It was a short clip from “Saturday Night Live” on YouTube that NBC ordered deleted. Hence the dead link.
As I’ve said many times before, nothing’s permanent on the Internet.
Tech-media-tainment doesn’t have a blogroll. It has a list of favorite websites in the right column, but none of those are blogs.
The list includes web resources that I frequently use as well as fun and informative sites. Any web surfer who stumbles onto Tech-media-tainment can get a glimpse of my interests from that favorites list.
But it’s not a blogroll.
Blogrolls got their start during the early days of blogging when online writers and artists wanted to generate traffic with fellow bloggers. The philosophy was: You post a link to my blog and I’ll post a link to yours. The name blogroll comes from the term “logrolling,” a political term for trading favors.
But blogging has changed. Some popular blogs have joined media organizations and mainstream media have adopted the blogging format for posting items online. Meanwhile the individual voices of amateur blogs have been drowned out.
Most of those corporate blogs do not have blogrolls. The people behind them probably figure: Why send traffic elsewhere when we can entertain and enlighten those web surfers longer here?
Blogrolls remain relevant to certain online users, such as political writers and activists who are building communities of similar thinkers.
But for the general blogging community, blogrolls seem out of date.
With Tech-media-tainment now in its second year, it’s time to update the TMT list of favorite sites.
The old list had 15 websites. Three are self-serving – Investors.com (owned by my employer, Investor’s Business Daily), my video website One Stop Video, and my Twitter feed. I’ll keep those and add IBD’s new tech blog, Click.
I’ll keep most of the others too, but I’ll drop Lolcats – I Can Has Cheezburger? and Yahoo’s most popular news stories and photos. I still like Lolcats, but just don’t visit it much anymore. I also don’t visit Yahoo’s most popular any more.
In their place I’m adding Geek Tyrant and At the Movies, both of which I’ve written about on TMT.
In my series “The failed promise of digital content,” I’ve lamented the fact that nothing lasts forever on the Internet. NBC provided a case in point last week when it excised all of Conan O’Brien’s comedy bits from his eight-month run on “The Tonight Show” from the web. It was a harsh end to a bitter contract dispute between NBC and O’Brien. (See Wikipedia entry on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”) On Tech-media-tainment’s sister website, One Stop Video, I had posted seven videos from the show from Hulu and NBC.com. These included funny bits with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Conan interacting with tech geeks at Intel. Now those embedded videos no longer work. Instead they have text that reads “Unfortunately, this video is no longer available” or “The video you are trying to access has expired.” GE-owned NBC Universal yanked the videos off the web late last week, according to All Things Digital. In the digital age, there is no expectation that videos on the web one day will be there the next. This case is proof of that. At least with physical media such as DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, people have something tangible. On the web, videos are ethereal.
Previous articles in the series “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.”:
Here are the most popular posts on Tech-media-tainment and video website One Stop Video in 2009, based on total visitors according to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is an awesome service by the way.
Tech-media-tainment
1. First Lingerie Football League game gives fans a wardrobe malfunction (Sept. 5, 2009) 2. Top 10 cat names Apple hasn’t used yet for its Mac software (Aug. 26, 2009) 3. ‘The 800-pound gorilla in the room’ is probably more like 400 pounds (Sept. 11, 2009) 4. Quit stalking me, Summercusp (Dec. 12, 2008) 5. Sugar Stacks: Graphically shows you how much sugar you eat (Aug. 29, 2009) 6. DJ Tiësto rocks Microsoft party in New York (Oct. 7, 2009) 7. Google’s book scanning is a public service (Sept. 1, 2009) 8. Netflix instant-viewing queue gets slashed (Dec. 28, 2008) 9. Portrait of a forgotten pop rock band: Wild Blue (July 12, 2009)
One Stop Video
1. ‘Saturday Night Live’: Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley as Chippendales dancers (Sept. 17, 2009) 2. U-Create Music television commercial (Nov. 11, 2009) 3. ‘Saturday Night Live’: Dateline (March 24, 2009) 4. ‘Firelight' – ‘Twilight’ parody with Frankenstein twist by SNL (Nov. 9, 2009) 5. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ opening with music performed by student orchestra (Oct. 10, 2009) 6. Garmin 2009 Holiday Ad (Nov. 19, 2009) 7. Autotune controversy (Sept. 20, 2009) 8. “Twilight’ spoof by G4’s ‘Attack of the Show’ co-hosts (Oct. 5, 2009) 9. Levi's 501 Jeans commercial: Lola (March 29, 2009)
Photo: Chicago Bliss quarterback Elle Cartabiano of the Lingerie Football League
Current.com recently posted a video mocking LinkedIn, the professional social networking website, as a useless service.
Current was an early basher of Twitter through video satires. Now that microblogging service is losing steam.
Is Current on to something now with LinkedIn?
The main points of Current’s video are that LinkedIn is a waste of time and that it won’t help you get a job as advertised. If these beliefs take hold, it could mean the start of a backlash against LinkedIn. (See the video at sister site One Stop Video.)
LinkedIn describes itself as an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world. The service has more than 50 million members in over 200 countries worldwide.
“Our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” the Mountain View, Calif., company says. LinkedIn says it can connect people to potential clients, service providers, subject experts and employers.
I like LinkedIn. It’s Facebook for professionals. I use it to manage my online professional profile and to connect to sources and colleagues. I use it as a digital Rolodex to keep track of sources, their titles and employers.
I do think LinkedIn is useful. But I’m not interested in paying for a pro account. Too expensive. The cheapest plan costs $24.95 a month. I would like the ability to put contacts into folders based on subject areas. That would be helpful for me, but isn’t worth $300 a year to get the LinkedIn Pro feature.
One Stop Video, the sister site of Tech-Media-Tainment, is four months old tomorrow.
Started as an experiment in video aggregation, One Stop Video now contains 123 posts, including many funny short videos from the Onion News Network, Comedy Central, Barely Digital, CollegeHumor, YouTube and elsewhere on the Web.
The site also has music videos, entertaining television commercials and user-generated mashups, remixes and dubs. The subject matter is mostly at a teenage boy level, but I make no apologies for that.
If you haven’t browsed it lately, check out One Stop Video.
Industry speculation over how much money YouTube is losing for parent company Google heated up again Wednesday with the release of a new report.
In the report, consulting firm RampRate estimates that YouTube will lose about $174 million this year. That compares with an estimate by Credit Suisse of a $470 million annual loss.
So, either YouTube is losing a lot of money or an astronomical amount of money.
Much of RampRate’s report seems self-serving, touting how it has saved clients “an average of 20% on IT infrastructure services including bandwidth, data center/co-location, managed services, content delivery, IT support/helpdesk, and other related areas.”
Ring the bell for a marketing plug!
RampRate says it can “secure very favorable wholesale (bandwidth) rates … based on our experience working with other top Internet, e-Commerce, and media firms.”
Ring! Ring!
RampRate seems to know what it’s talking about when it comes to how much companies can and do spend on securing Internet bandwidth for distributing video.
But where I fault the report is on some of its other headline-grabbing conclusions.
The authors of the RampRate report say Google is seeking to create the impression that YouTube is a big money loser in order to ward off competitors, secure favorable deals with licensed content providers and to keep copyright lawyers at bay.
The name of the report is provocative: “YouTube: Google’s Phantom Loss Leader. How Google shelters profits from content owners while building a delivery juggernaut.”
What profits? Even RampRate admits the video-sharing Web site is a big money loser.
RampRate says Google likely gets very favorable wholesale rates for bandwidth and runs its data centers in less expensive locales.
What RampRate admittedly doesn’t understand is advertising and the content side of the business. And that’s precisely where RampRate overreaches with its nefarious claims for “Don’t be evil” company Google.
RampRate doesn’t challenge Credit Suisse’s revenue assessment for YouTube, which is trying to build a business selling advertising with its videos.
Most of the videos on YouTube are low-quality, user-generated content that YouTube can’t monetize. And there’s a lot of it. In May, YouTube reported that users were uploading a staggering 20 hours of video every minute. And that figure has been growing.
RampRate must assume professional content providers like the TV networks and movie studios are a bunch of rubes. Content providers can see the metrics on video viewership. They aren’t going to give away their content because they feel sorry for Google losing money. The value of their content has been established by other channels of distribution and the studios won’t want to undercut that.
As for competition, Hulu and other video sites have sprung up to offer professional video content. No one is going to chase the user-generated video content business now, because there’s no money there. Rivals however will go after the premium content business.
As the Associated Press notes, there’s no benefit to Google for making public its expenses for running YouTube. It’s likely Google is using the scale from YouTube’s traffic to get favorable IT infrastructure deals for its Web search and cloud computing businesses.
So Google is not trying to scare away rivals and attorneys with reports about its massive losses at YouTube. It’s speculation by analysts and consultants who are driving this story.
RampRate should stick to what it knows well and leave the crazy conspiracy theories to the bloggers.
Amid all the garbage on YouTube, there are some gems. At top is a video of a dance-off at the 2009 Big East Baseball Tournament. When their baseball game got rain delayed on May 21, players from the USF and UConn settled the score not with bats, but with dance. For more entertaining YouTube videos check out sister site One Stop Video.
Spammers haven’t taken a break during the recession. Unwanted commercial e-mail, or spam, accounts for 86% of all e-mail traffic, according to Symantec’s March report on the “State of Spam.” That explains all the penis-enlargement, Viagra, luxury watch and weight-loss e-mail pitches I’m still getting. (Sample ad above.) The comedy news Web site, Onion News Network, has posted a video that says 90% of spam e-mail comes from a little known Eastern European country called Koy4Goff. (I’ve posted the video on sister site One Stop Video.) Actually, according to Symantec, the U.S. is the source of 25% of spam e-mail received here. That’s the most of any country. Brazil was second with 9%, followed by India with 5%.
The feverish media coverage of microblogging service Twitter as the next big thing has prompted the inevitable backlash.
People who don’t feel the need to express themselves in 140-character blurbs online are mocking those who do. While the technorati have flocked like sheep to be a part of the supposed next big thing, many others think they can get along just fine without it.
The same sort of rush to the latest and greatest Web service has occurred before, but few of those services have been big financial successes. Social networking sites, bookmarking services, online video sharing, peer-to-peer music swapping, and virtual worlds, among others, all have had their day in the spotlight.
Media reports have criticized jurors for twittering during trials and congressmen for posting tweets during President Barack Obama’s Feb. 24 address to Congress.
Celebrity Twitter user and actor Ashton Kutcher is looking into making a movie inspired by Twitter, according to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker. As if “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) wasn’t bad enough. If Twitter were a TV show, it would have jumped the shark by now.
Twitter parodies are showing up on YouTube, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and elsewhere. Check out some examples on sister site One Stop Video.
Isn’t that so American? Build something up and then tear it down.
