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Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.




Posted by Ed Cotton There’s no doubting the functional power of iTunes software, but it plays second fiddle to the more powerful and dominant iPod.

Now it looks as if Apple would like to beef up the  iTunes brand a little more.

No 9 on Influx's prediction list for 2007 is happening

In the UK, Apple worked with the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) to create the iTunes Music Festival. The festival takes place during the month of July at the ICA where bands and artists will play to an intimate crowd of 350 people. Acts lined up for this include; Ash, Athlete, Groove Armada, Imogen Heap.

Not surprisingly, there’s some nice integration with the iTunes brand, as all the concerts will be recorded and be available for sale on the site.

You can’t buy tickets, you can only win them in a prize draw, so Apple gets to capture lots of nice data.
 

Posted by Ed Cotton Peter Moore, VP of Xbox, in a recent Bloomberg interview, higlighted the need to expand his brand's franchise.

``If we don't make that move, make it early and expand our demographic, we will wind up in the same place as with Xbox 1, a solid business with 25 million people,'' said Peter Moore, a vice president who oversees the Xbox. ``What I need is a solid business with 90 million people.''

The Wii has changed the gaming landscape and it's competitors are finally starting to pay attention.

It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can maintain its momentum, if Xbox can realistically re-position itself as a family machine, without alienating it's core audience and if Sony can get back into the race.

The game is far from over in this category.

Posted by Ed Cotton Last week, Ben Silverman was made co-chair of NBC Entertainment. In an interview with TV Week he was asked  what kind of projects the "community should be bringing to the network.

This is his reponse.

"I want to be aspirational. I want to be positive. I think people are so busy and overwhelmed in their lives and have so much choice, but also a cacophony exploding in their brain, and they look to television to disengage from that. I want to create environments that are warm and places they want to be—whether funny places or happy places or aspirational places. I want to lighten up the air.

I also want to be pro-social and conscious and deliver through humor, character and narrative strong emotional connection. I want to find quality that has inherent touchpoints that could make it mass. I wouldn't make shows about Hollywood. There's just certain things I wouldn't do based on my knowledge of them being too coastal."


The Guardian reports on three pilot concepts for reality shows being considered by the networks.

RealityLASIK - a show following models as they go through laser surgery to improve their eyesight;

Wedding SOS, featuring betrothed couples stressed out about their pending nuptials and in need of a wedding planner;

Anchorwoman, where an urbane east or west coast model (again) is sent to a hick southern town to present on a local TV channel.

Of course, there's always the reality shows that we are going to see this season. CBS's Lord of the Flies, or as they prefer to call it, Kid Nation.

 
Will Ferrell's Landlord film has been an incredible success, generating over 15 milion views in a short period of time. Interestingly, the film isn't available on You Tube and can't be embeded in other sites. The only way to view it is on Ferrell's new site Funnyordie.com.

Forbes Magazine has an interview with the Funnyordie.com's founders.

Here are a couple of highlights.

I'm sure there's something to the instantaneous piece of it too. This stuff doesn't have to sit in development for years.

Absolutely. You just go do it. Grab a video camera and do it. You don't even write a script; you just get the beats for it and do two takes, three takes at the most. And because of that, some of them aren't going to be great, and some are. But the whole spirit of it is, Who cares, let's just do stuff and have fun with it.

Do you see a trend emerging? Will other celebrities start to make their way online too?

Yeah. And I hope they do it in this way, kind of messing around and loose. I think if celebrities start entering it with a team of professionals, agents and executives, and the Internet short becomes really thought out, I think instantly people will smell that out. So I think the spirit of it has to be sort of screwing around, to be real and not overly premeditated. If you want to see that, you go to big movies or television--and that's a great thing, but the Internet has a looser form to it.

It's surprising few celebrities have gone down this path, but we can obviously expect hundreds of films to be hitting the pipes in the next few months, to compete directly with user-created content. Celebrities clearly have the name recognition advantage and a fan base, but can they be as creative as everyday folk and can they generate more than one hit?

Again, it's another example of doing more stuff, for less money and experimenting to see what sticks.