Chatting with Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine on viral video after seeing him in the NYTimes. Viral is right. But old-line media types don’t want to get viral. They think it means “steal”. Or loss of message control. They don’t master it. They really should read Sun Tzu. They also don’t get that they’re increasingly dependent on the whirlwind of the Internet, networks, computers, and other technology. That it’s rapid response and message control by using the medium itself. Jeff’s right when he says “welcome to the future of TV”.
What else does he say. “There will need to be a Google of video — a means of helping people find what they want. And, no, that’s not just about creating a search engine. It’s about capturing the metadata we create when we watch and share things and making sense of it. It’s not trivial but it’s vital for without a great guide, we’ll never find the programming we want and this new medium won’t work. This video Google thing will be the next Google and TV Guide and it will be big. And I doubt that either Google or TV Guide will be the one to create it.”
Jeff’s right on the money. And metadata has been quite an ExecProducer obsession for several years. We don’t just do search for video – that’s too narrow and doesn’t leverage the medium well. We care about the metadata and the meaning. It’s the end-to-end production to deployment that’s key. Very difficult. Years of technical work. Operational system. Deep business model.