Yahoo! as the TV Network of the Future

The NY Times story about the next generation media strategy of Yahoo!'s Terry Semel and Lloyd Braun is worth a read. What first struck me:

As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like "Lost," which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" are in the works.

My first thought was of Songline Studio's Ferndale, the first soap opera on the net, and Tom Arriola's CrimeScene, an interactive whodunit, both of which had the internet buzzing back in 1995. Dale Dougherty, O'Reilly's long time VP of online invention, and the head of Songline, the joint venture we started with AOL after selling GNN to them in 1995, was thinking all the same thoughts as Lloyd Braun, just ten years too early! Similarly, every time I hear people laying claim to being the father of podcasting, I think of Carl Malamud's pioneering Internet Talk Radio back in 1994. It's great to see some of those early ideas coming "back round on the guitar", as Arlo Guthrie says.
 

But obviously, the net is a very different place today, and these ideas now have a chance to be truly transformative. Yahoo!'s strategy is fascinating. They are trying to span both user-created and professionally created content, reinventing an internet age media network:

Mr. Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.

I was particularly heartened to see that Yahoo! is not abandoning user created content, just working to supplement it. However, the characterization of user-generated content as "community" has a 1990's ring to it, and misses the insight that value added by users is the secret sauce of all successful Web 2.0 applications. Yahoo! also needs to understand that personalization doesn't just mean narrowing down the broadcast stream so that it matches the user's interests, but creating radically new mechanisms for harnessing the collective intelligence of users to provide better results. (We need to continue down the path that Google first trod when they introduced PageRank, giving better search results by using the preferences expressed by millions of net users in the form of their links to each other, rather than just studying the characteristics of the documents themselves.)
 

The bottom up nature of internet innovation does get a nod in the description of how video is becoming a first class content type on the net:

Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

However, I find myself fascinated by the following assertion:

"The basis for content on the Internet is now shifting from text to video," said Michael J. Wolf, a partner at McKinsey & Company. "This allows advertisers to take advantage of the kind of branding advertising they are used to on television."

The first sentence is profoundly thought-provoking, while the second is profoundly short-sighted, reminiscent of how existing media companies approached the text and image based internet of the 1990s. While I imagine that advertisers will indeed try to take advantage of the branding opportunities of video, that is hardly what makes this an interesting development! I much prefer Brewster Kahle's vision of a remixable video archive that will enable an new generation of citizen documentaries and other video content analogous to the now largely text-based blogosphere. The bottom up net will redefine the possibilities of video, adapting it to the new medium.
 

Still, a nice nod to Yahoo! and Lloyd Braun. I expect to see some exciting innovations on the media front!