AOL’s strategy, the latest new one, is to shift away from being an ISP to being a “next generation publishing” entity. Without parsing what it means to be “next generation” when you are doing what Yahoo has been doing for years, this sounds like a reasonable strategy but the anchor that weighs it down is that the bulk of AOL’s traffic comes from AOL’s ISP customers and there is no data that suggests a meaningful shift in where site traffic is coming from.

People login to AOL and follow links to AOL sites which generates the traffic that underpins the advertising revenue… facts are stubborn things.

CEO Armstrong says that the content portal traffic is not dependent on the ISP business but the data simply doesn’t support that contention, and the content sites that do stand up well on their own have a relatively small unique visitor and pageview count; while we could argue that these are increasingly outdated measures the fact remains that an advertising driven site is dependent on showing strength on exactly these 2 measures.

Today it was announced that AOL is going to shed 2,500 employees ahead of the planned spinoff from TimeWarner, reducing their operating expenses by approximately $300 million annually once the restructuring costs are accounted for. This move suggests that AOL understands that the move away from the ISP business will stunt their publishing aspirations.

Armstrong is giving up his generous bonus for 2009 but far from being the magnanimous gesture from Armstrong it is rooted in the reality that a full blown employee mutiny would have been certain were Armstrong to take his bonus while pink slipping 1/3 of the employees.

Armstrong’s (expensive) goodwill gesture: He is giving up his 2009 bonus, which was to be at least $1.5 million. His explanation to employees: “As a member of our team and the person who takes accountability for the results of the company, I am making the decision to forego my 2009 bonus. That decision is a personal one and is not a sign for the future payout of the overall bonus plan for employees.”

[From AOL: We Need to Fire 2,500 “Volunteers” | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD]

AOL is the tech industry’s General Motors, it’s legacy for many will always be this and spinning it off and buffing up a new media strategy simply won’t be enough…

I read this short Reuters piece on President Obama’s Fox interview last night and simply thought “who are these people?”

Here’s my edited version of the full piece:

BEIJING, Nov 18 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip recession. His crack team of economic advisors made the previously undiscovered link between deficit spending and negative economic consequences on Tuesday night and defended the $3 trillion in debt accumulated in 2009 as necessary spending to expand the role of government , denying that any link between massive public debt and economic conditions was evident before Tuesday.

With the U.S. unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, Obama told Fox News his administration faces a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and spur job creation while putting the economy on a path toward long-term deficit reduction, saying “because let me be clear, we have to get ourselves re-elected next year!”

His administration was considering ways to accelerate economic growth, with tax measures among the options to give companies incentives to hire, Obama said in the interview with Fox conducted in Beijing during his nine-day trip to Asia. With his team of economic advisors behind him, shuffling their feet and looking downward, Obama admitted that “basically we have no idea how to create jobs because outside of government payrolls we’ve never done that, we’re pretty much guessing at this point and anyone with a good idea should send me a tweet.”

“It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession,” he said. With consumer confidence at record low levels, many argue that it’s hard to imagine that confidence in the economy could be any lower but the President needs Americans to keep buying Made in China to ensure the flow of recycled dollars into U.S. debt purchases.

Fox News, which released a transcript of the interview, showed that comment by Obama on Wednesday morning and said the full discussion would be broadcast later in the day. (Reporting by Caren Bohan; Editing by John O’Callaghan)

[From Obama: Too much debt could fuel double-dip recession | Markets | Markets News | Reuters]

Blazing Saddles Scene Nick | MySpace Video

I read this and shook my head in amazement at the limited financial acumen of reporters covering business.

General Motors, encouraged by its improving financial situation, could repay all of its $6.7 billion in loans from U.S. taxpayers by the end of next June, the company’s top executive said Monday.

[From With $42B, GM moves ahead | freep.com | Detroit Free Press]

Let’s recap what is going on at GM. The Federal government - aka “us taxpayers” - gave GM $57.6 billion in exchange for equity in the company and a debt instrument for $6.7 billion, which is referenced in the above pull quote.

One of the favorable consequences of reorganizing GM in the bankruptcy court is that the company was relieved of servicing the $50+ billion in corporate debt that they had accumulated and suspended payments to their employee pension fund. What all this means is that $GM’s fixed burn rate went way down… way way down.

So fast forward to today and we learn that GM posted a loss but increased it’s operating cash by $3.3 billion. The increase in operating cash is what is really important, not the accounting loss… but it’s no surprise that they increased their cash considering that they didn’t have all that debt to pay interest on and then there is that $25 billion owed to the VEBA trust (another employee benefit expense) that payments were suspended on until December.

GM has the chutzpah to hold up high their plan to pay back taxpayers with the same money that the taxpayers originally gave them and claims that their increasing cash position as a consequence of not having to pay the VEBA Trust and the now extinguished bondholders is a win… really.

Let’s talk in January after they pay $10 billion to the VEBA Trust, $8.1 billion to the US Treasury and Canada, $2.8 billion for the fiasco at Delphi, and another $900 million for Canadian worker benefits.

This is really nice.

Brilliant.

My wife came home with a Droid yesterday, which on one hand was pretty cool while on the other very disturbing as she is by no means a geek and not once did she ask for my opinion on this device. I suspect that some kind of counseling may be necessary.

Having had the opportunity to play around with the device I think I’m going to hold on to my iPhone for the time being. The Droid is really nice but it’s simply not appreciably better than the iPhone therefore it’s hard to justify switching.

My first concern, having seen the Droid only in press photos, was that the build quality was suspect but I’m happy to report that those fears are unfounded. The Droid is solid and conveys a sense of quality when held in your hands. The slider is smooth and the touch screen is crisp.

The camera is one area where the Droid excels compared to the iPhone. While it does have some latency that could disrupt your ability to get a shot “in the moment”, the quality of the images more than makes up for this negative. The flash and picture controls, white balance and color effect, are nowhere to be found on the iPhone.

I am not so enthusiastic about the keyboard, for several reasons. First of all, I’m not a big fan of the iPhone virtual keyboard but I do appreciate how it can be reconfigured for the app, such as offering a different layout when in the email address field as opposed to the body text, and when spun in landscape mode the virtual keys are plenty big enough even for folks with big fingers like me. You really do get used to it.

The Droid keyboard will no doubt please many and also be subject to the “you’ll get used to it” clause, but there are several design elements I just don’t like. The keys are flat, reminiscent of the laser etched keys on the old Razr handset, and while they do offer some tactile feedback (and in all fairness the iPhone keyboard offers no tactile feedback) it still isn’t enough to comfortably type without looking at where your fingers are going. The spacebar key is too small, which makes no sense because there are two unused key positions on the lower right and lower left of the keyboard; certainly they could have made that space bar larger by moving the ALT key left and right (there are 2 ALT keys, one on each side).

I found the keyboard keys to be really small for my fingers, and ironically I discovered that my typing speed and accuracy were greatly improved using the Droid virtual keyboard. This may be a simple transition issue for me, coming off an iPhone, that my wife who uses a Blackberry and never got used to the iPhone keyboard doesn’t experience.

The Google App Market needs some work, and this is probably the single dominant reason why I would not switch off the iPhone just yet. My favorite apps (e.g. Evernote and Tweetie) were not available and while promised I have long ago learned to judge application offerings on what is available rather than what is promised to be delivered.

I also found it interesting that many of the featured apps in the Market were priced in € and UK£. This is probably not a big deal from the standpoint on handling the transaction but is it really too much to ask that the storefront merchandizes every app in USD$ for customers who are clearly entering it through a U.S. carrier?

Aside from a couple of annoying usability issues (I still can’t figure out how to wake the device without opening the slider) the Droid is nicely designed and well appointed. The build quality is impressive and it feels substantial, and perhaps most importantly my first impression of it as an actual phone are pretty good although I would have to use it for a couple of weeks to really get the gist of integration of phone features in the apps (e.g. click on a phone number in an email to make a call).

In the final equation, the Droid is impressive for a v1 handset but it’s not enough to make me switch… yet. The openness of the Android platform is a big strategic advantage for Google and handset partners, providing they don’t allow the carriers to dictate what the handset can and can’t do from an app standpoint, but if allowed to develop momentum I could see this putting real pressure on Apple even among the hardcore user base.

Interesting times we live in… the UAW is finding itself increasingly at odds with it’s members over the negotiated but not yet approved Ford labor agreement.  

On Sunday, 92 percent of workers at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant voted against proposed contract changes. The vote there came after a stormy meeting at nearby Winnetonka High School where UAW Vice President Bob King, head of the union’s national Ford section, made an appeal to workers to support the agreement, which was negotiated by the UAW and Ford earlier this month.

[From Ford workers in Sterling Heights reject concessions | detnews.com | The Detroit News]

The main issue that workers are objecting to is the no strike clause in the proposed agreement. This same clause was instrumental in securing the Chrysler takeover by Fiat, which the UAW now owns 55% of, and ensures that Fiat will not face union work stoppages until at least 2015.

This brings about an interesting question, can the UAW be both an owner of car companies and a representative of the employees at the same time? The entire UAW strategy to date has been to establish a common labor agreement across all U.S. car companies (no foreign company has a UAW plant except for the joint venture between GM and Toyota in Fremont, Nummi, and that is going to shut down, according to Toyota).

With the UAW ownership stakes in GM and Chrysler, the pattern agreement strategy appears to be thrown under the bus and if so would the labor agreements with GM and Chrysler put Ford, with no UAW ownership, at a competitive disadvantage? It’s not like this administration is going to do anything under the guise of antitrust given their complicity in the current state of affairs, but one has to wonder if this is ultimately an anticompetitive scheme set up by the UAW and government that will be applied against Ford in the name of leveling the field.

What comes after hard drives? Good question and one that is critical to our future computing ambitions.

According to a new study, if HDDs continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100). Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs - the cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs.

[From What Comes After Hard Drives?]

As we look to a future with smart grids/cities, digital medical records, lifestreaming, and things we haven’t even thought of yet, the one constant is that we are overrunning our capability to store all the data that is being generated. I am not talking about the physical requirements for storage because we can simply keep building bigger storage arrays that constantly catchup to what our requirements are, but the problem that remains is overcoming the mechanical limitations of a hard drive in order to serve up the piece of data that is required when it’s required.

So there is a physical performance issue and most likely a schematic issue as we come to terms with the limitations of data storage models for accommodating 10, 50, 100x the amount of data that we deal with today. Just building cheaper bigger hard drives is not the solution, it helps but it’s not the primary problem that requires solving… data storage models, the digital detritus problem, and data performance are the problems I foresee.

One sobering thought to think about while you are celebrating the FCC’s decision to move forward with net neutrality regulations is that for the first time the FCC is asserting itself as the authority to regulate how the web is governed.

With Thursday’s vote, the five-member panel began the process to move forward with the regulations announced last month by the agency’s chairman, Juilus Genachowski. His proposal would formally codify the FCC’s four existing principles, intended to prevent Internet service providers from giving preferential treatment to certain content and services. He also proposed two additional principles: one to ensure providers do not discriminate between applications; and another to require Internet companies to disclose their network management practices to consumers.

[From On 5-0 vote, agency moves ahead in push to regulate Internet - TheHill.com]

If I am incorrect I would appreciate hearing about it, but to my knowledge all regulatory action to date involving the internet has been specifically targeted at commerce activities that are potentially fraudulent, data privacy (or lack thereof it would seem at times), technical aspects, and specific speech, such as SEC regulations on company disclosure. VoIP has been another focus of regulation but that would appear to be an extension of their traditional focus on telecommunications more so than Internet regulation.

I am a proponent of net neutrality but in the pit of my stomach I have a strong fear that now that the FCC has determined they can broadly regulate the relationship between internet technical service providers and content providers that they will have a reflexive desire to overreach much like the FTC did with their much maligned “guidelines” for bloggers and advertisers. There is one absolute truth about Washington D.C. and that is the desire for turf knows no bounds and once authority has been established it is fully exercised and rarely relinquished.

I simply hope that now that we have achieved what has long been desired with net neutrality that we won’t ultimately regret it.

Cablevision must have gotten punch drunk with all of the talk coming out of newspapers about going to a subscription model for their online services, because they are going big, really big, with a $260 a year pricing plan for Newsday.com

Those who are not customers of Optimum Online or the newspaper - both owned by Bethpage-based Cablevision Systems Corp. - will have to pay a $5 weekly fee. However, nonpaying customers will have access to some of newsday.com’s information, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings. There also will be some limited access to Newsday stories.

[From Newsday.com moves to subscriber model]

In reality this is a lot of talk about something that will actually have very little impact on revenue because if you are a Newsday subscribers or a Cablevision cable customer you will have access to the Newsday.com site for no extra charge. Given that Newsday is concentrated on Long Island and Cablevision has a virtual lock on that region, what the online pricing plan is doing is not increasing revenue but defending revenue that is under assault by adding the online service as something extra subscribers get.

In the final analysis, this is exactly why it will fail. By creating a pricing plan that defends rather than attacks a market the company is conceding defeat in print and this strategy will have the effect of slowing audience growth online in the one segment that the paper requires, young people. I am willing to give Newsday and Cablevision some credit for being creative with a multichannel strategy that covers TV, print and online, but this pricing plan is a throwback to a subscription model that simply doesn’t work anymore.

I used a new app from mobiQpons yesterday and color me impressed.

The way it works is you install their iPhone, Android or Blackberry app (no signup required, just load the app) and when location services on the device is turned on you will get notifications of merchants offering coupons or promotions in your area. Merchants have to be signed up for the service in order for their promotions to run through the network but that’s not surprising.

From what I can gather the only time that mobiQpons gets paid is when a coupon is redeemed by a customer. This is good because it’s true performance based advertising but it has a potential downside if the merchant in question already has a pretty good online promotion capability, in which case advertising that would normally reach the customer through free channels, like email, will be shifted to the mobiQpons service in which case the merchant is paying not just for the value of the coupon but the fee to the network as well.

It is still a great convenience and I love the fact that the geolocation capabilities filters out the offers that are available to me based on my physical location. Despite the strength of the product and service offering, the key execution variable for mobiQpons will be their ability to promote their merchant partners and for their merchants to promote their mobiQpons offerings… I found out about the service not from a tech blog, press release or the tech press but because Sigonas Market emailed me about it as part of their normal customer outreach. I probably would not have taken the time to download and try out this app were it not for a merchant I already rely upon endorsing it.

It’s not often that I disagree with Mike and I am not ready to fully do that here but he is not fully centered on the core issue either.

Kimball is correct that he should be better defining his brand and proving his worth — that’s what we’ve been saying all along. But you can do that without insulting the riff raff, as well. You can do that while embracing the “bottom up” process. You can do that without being a total snob that has no time for the people who actually pay your salary. [From Cook's Illustrated Editor: I Wish All Those Amateurs Out There Would Just Shut Up | Techdirt]

The underlying issue that Kimball is pointing out is that the internet has become one great big !%$@$^ book club… everyone has to have an opinion about everything (don’t think I don’t realize the irony of ME writing THAT sentence). Kimball’s point is that real expertise is acquired through great effort, not just through the ability to peck away on the keyboard and hit publish, and that authority directly correlates to the relationship you can expect with your audience.

The second point that Kimball is right to make is that advertising has been the seed of destruction for magazines in the food space, but more broadly I would say across the board. Taken online the display advertising model deployed by the vast majority of publications is simply unsustainable and in the process they are destroying the delicate balance between content and advertising.

Case in point is the restyled Bon Appetit magazine, which has gotten really light on content and really heavy on advertising in all forms; if it takes you more than 15 minutes to read the last issue I would be very surprised, and color me shocked when advertiser products are rated “top 5″ out of, say, 7 tested products. It’s almost as bad as automotive magazines where no product is ever rated “don’t buy this piece of shit” because every possible product is being advertised in the magazine.

The fascination with lifestyle has also distorted Bon Appetit and alienated their core audience… who I cannot imagine are really that interested in celebrity chef interviews. The remake process for Bon Appetit probably resulted in a more intense discussion of what type of typefaces they would use than what type of content they would be providing their subscribers.

Cooks Illustrated goes into excruciating detail about food and how the process of preparing is affected by the chemistry of food. I have subscribed to this magazine for years and marvel at the lengths to which they will go to find the ideal process, ingredients, and tools, all the while challenging the conventional wisdom about what is the proper method. When it comes to presenting food expertise it is without question that serious foodies, professional and amateur alike, will agree that Kimball has earned his stripes in the expertise department.

Secondly, Cooks Illustrated does not have any advertising, it’s entirely content driven, and what that means is that Kimball’s interests are completely aligned with that of his readers. His is the only publication that I know of that actually has a “not recommended” category for product reviews, and they don’t hesitate on recommending products that are cheap grocery store staples if in fact they are the best ingredients based on taste.

Mike is right to point out that Kimball comes across as a petulant snob with nothing but disdain for food blogs and websites, but Mike fails to acknowledge the broader point that Kimball is making, which isn’t just about defining your brand, that the internet has devalued authority. This is a point I think we can all agree is an issue to be resolved (the measurement of authority).

Where we end up is at an interesting intersection triangulated at by both pieces, which is that the internet has not destroyed traditional publishing but rather exposes the vacuous nature of many established publishing brands. This leveling of the playing field has followed the path that many technology dependent industries have followed, which is that distribution and gatekeeping is increasingly not the dynamic that your business relies on but rather the ability to engage and sustain a valuable audience. Given Kimball’s resume and actual experience in building Cook’s Illustrated, I think he is exceptionally well qualified to opine on the state of affairs but like Mike I would appreciate a little more humility in the process.

Lastly, this is a very interesting discussion because with newspapers dead set on charging for online content we are going to see in realtime what the relationship between newspapers and readers really is.

I have often featured artists who work with wood, people who know me understand my appreciation for this. The ability to work in 3 dimensions with a material that can’t be stretched, smudged, or repaired easily is a skill that few people truly excel at and wood is a marvelous material that never ceases to amaze me with it’s figure, depth of color, translucence, and array of visible textures. Wood, along with snowflakes, is the original “no two are alike” material.

There is also something primordial about art that centers on the vessel form. The earliest human artifacts found to date are vessels, often featuring decorations of some form and I never grow weary of vessels, whether pottery, wood, or glass. Though the days of relying on them for function is long past, I can still admire these pieces for the effort required to create them.

William Hunter is a Palos Verdes based artist who is exceptional in skill, a resume stretching back 25 years featuring numerous gallery and museum exhibitions.

Every friday I ride my motorcycle over to the coast, stopping in at a local bar for much needed refreshments along the way. Over the years I have gotten to know the locals and have bonded with one fellow in particular.

I knew that my friend is a veteran and yesterday he revealed that he was in the Marine Corps for 5 years. Here’s how that conversation went:

Me: “so where were you based?”

Him: “I did basic in San Diego and moved around, eventually spending 2 years in Washington D.C.”

Me: “DC huh, what did you do there?”

Him: “I was attached to the White House detail.”

Me: “Really… that’s pretty damn interesting. So you were one of the Marines in full dress blues standing guard at the White House and at Marine One and Air Force One?”

Him: “yeah, pretty much… it’s surprising how well you get to know the President when you do that for a couple of years.”

Over the course of our conversation I learned that he lives in a large yurt on 40 acres of land and has camels, alpacas, goats (miniature fainting goats no less), sheep, about 40 chickens and a contingent of very large turkeys.

For the rest of my ride I could not help but be reminded that you can learn fascinating details about people when you simply talk to them. For all of the technical gizmos that our industry takes great pride in, nothing can replace the texture of real face to face interactions, what Stowe Boyd aptly calls the meatspace.

Darth Vader spoke volumes when he opined “don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed; the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”

You gotta admire people who have a sense of humor about what their company does:

• You need to buy a minimum of 5 cars in licence
• You need at least 1/2 year to adapt your street, garage and parking space to use your SAP ECar
• But you can run it on bicycle tires, train tracks and hula hoop-rings
• The door handles are on the underside of the car
• The steering wheel makes 20 clicking sounds when you turn it, because all 4 tires - including the spare tire - send back multiple messages
• You can see your whole driving record, but not the current street that you drive, because of missing authorizations
• The repair contract was just incrased from 17% to 22% fee, though simple repairs take 2 weeks; but they are available 24/7
• The driver’s seat has 250 switches and controls, but because of a bug that will be fixed with SP7 (release date still unknown), the back of the seat is stuck in complete forward position
• The gauge is configurable in km/h, miles/h, steps per seconds, wing bats per millisecond and WARP
• The exchange of the battery can only be done with external consultants, but they are already fully booked for the next 12 months. As workaround you receive a 10 miles long power cord
• The engine is scaled for a Jumbo and has only two settings: Off and Full Throttle
• The brakes react only after 7 seconds because of authorization checks
• But you can scale passengers indefinitely by clustering multiple cars
• The speed is displayed as ABAP-report
• The manual comes as a Powerpoint slide deck

H/T to Jim Fisher at Gaspar Partners for sending me the link… he found it on Marc Benioff’s Facebook profile.

Check out this really cool looking mushroom that I discovered growing in my garden today. Can anyone offer some guidance on what kind of mushroom it is?

At first I thought this was pretty clear but then the FTC decided to complicate things by saying about their own regulations that they were “guidelines” and not “regulations”. However, in that same statement they said that advertisers would be required to adhere to the guidelines, so what is the difference between a guideline and a regulation if compliance is mandatory… obviously nada, zip, zero difference.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to withdraw its recently revised guidelines governing dealings between bloggers and marketers. The ad trade group says the rules “unfairly and unconstitutionally” impose penalties on online media for practices, while exempting traditional media. Furthermore, in an open letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Randall Rothenberg, the IAB’s president and CEO, says the FTC’s distinction between offline media and online media, “constitutionally dubious” by invoking the First Amendment right to free speech. Release

[From IAB Calls For Reversal Of ‘Unfair and Unconstitutional’ FTC Blogger Regs | paidContent]

Given that the burden for compliance falls to advertisers under these guidelines, it is not surprising that the IAB is calling for their reversal, or more accurately for the FTC to just go back to the way things were. Given the confusion that has followed this announcement by the FTC I think the agency either has to cut bait and rethink their process or refine them to be less of an overreach.

I really wonder what is worse for Ralph Lauren’s brand, their use of Photoshop to distort their models in unnatural (and a little perverse as well) ways, or their public relations efforts in the wake of coverage of it. Their efforts going after bloggers brings them unwanted attention (not all PR is good PR, really) yet the Photoshopping exposes them for something else altogether.

Defrag, one of my favorite events, is just around the corner, November 11-12 in Denver. Use discount code “EJN1″ to get 10% off the registration fee.

I recommend this event without reservation because this is not only a timely event in terms of topic but it also brings together a powerful collection of can-do people who take advantage of the opportunity to actually talk and interact rather than just pontificate. You could go to Defrag and not attend a single presentation yet come away feeling richer for the experience.

It’s a tough budget year for travel and events, but this is one you don’t want to miss.

Broadcast schedules are two dimensional, there is a time slot and a desired demographic, which has conspired to make broadcast networks rather uninteresting destinations for good TV. The 22 minute sitcom format is dead while dramatic series are rarely given the time necessary for characters to develop.

It’s often forgotten that the venerable Law & Order series struggled in the early seasons (CBS originally ordered the pilot but rejected it, sending it to NBC where it now generates approximately $1b a year in revenue) but as we enter the 20th Law & Order season one has to wonder if it could be done again in a network landscape best described as hyper attention deficit disordered.

Case in point is a well reviewed series called Southland that NBC ordered with the intention of airing but later changed their mind, canceling production after 6 episodes had already been produced.

The network has six produced episodes, which were originally scheduled to begin airing on Fridays starting Oct. 23. Instead NBC has shut down production on “Southland” and plans to keep “Dateline” in the slot.

[From NBC cancels 'Southland' before its premiere--The Live Feed | THR]

This is exactly the kind of content that should be finding it’s way onto Hulu and iTunes. Online distribution is not bound by scheduling considerations and on the web every minute is prime time. This would suggest that given the right merchandising and promotion capabilities (think Amazon meets TV), Hulu could dramatically reshape the way we watch television because the original content we could be watching wouldn’t even make it to television.

This is highly speculative given that Hulu doesn’t yet have a subscription or micropayment mechanism and substantial quality of experience issues persist, yet it’s still exciting to consider. We’ve been promised “500 channels” of content for many years but when you end up with 500 channels of crap year over year you end up feeling a little jaded about the prospects, so perhaps the expansion of the web as a primary distribution vehicle for entertainment content could bring about positive change, but having said that it will take broadcast networks abandoning their long held reflexive view that the web is an extension of what they offer in broadcast form.