Non-exclusive is the new exclusive

The New York Times has now joined the trend of other media entities (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) by providing embed codes to increase exponentially the viral reach of their videos.

Brightcove's Jeremy Allaire told BeetTV the thinking behind all this.



This comes at the end of a week marked by a few noteworthy Media 2.0 items.



The 80th and final 90-second episode of Prom Queen was released. NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes looks back on this bold and, it appears, commercially successful foray into a totally new storytelling space here. And the Washington Post has coverage here.

Jefff Jarvis cites a new Magid report: "Daily usage of online video rose by 56 percent over the last year. In 2006, 9 percent of 12- to 64-year-old Americans who used the Internet reported using online video daily — every day. Today, in 2007, this number has risen to 14 percent of Americans 12 to 64 years old.

Weekly usage of online video has also risen over the last year. Now, a majority of online Americans 12 to 64 are using online video once a week or more. In 2006 this number was 44 percent, and now it is 52 percent — for a growth rate of 18 percent.

The breadth of content viewed by consumers regularly online is amazing. This is not just short clips on YouTube. Consumers are watching news stories, movie previews, clips from TV shows, and, in some cases, even full-length TV shows and movies.”

Sandlander finds the data unsurprising. I think those who attended the international advertising industry event, the 12,000 delegates who attended the Cannes Lions may also have been unsurprised; the industry seems to be facing up to the content-monetization challenges as boldly as possible and with as much innovation as the best creatives in the business can bring to bear on the emerging new paradigm.

And then there was the other media event of the week in Cologne, the Medienforum. The 'forum', we learned in school, was where you exchanged views with others and left enlightened.

This seems not to have been the case in Cologne. On Day One the dinosaurs huddled to reassure each other that , really, nothing much was going to change; tomorrow's television is sure to be much like yesterday's television, yada yada yada. User generated content? Piffle! The internet? It's a series of tubes, right enough, for the well-paid civil servants of the state broadcasting system. IPTV? Stories distributed as videos by the print media? Must absolutely be controlled and regulated by the Teutonic equivalent of the FCC (that's to say, a bloated mini-FCC in each state of the German federation).

After these bouts of fervent preaching to the converted one presumes that the old media deluded-and-in-denial contingent all got on their trains and left Cologne before later in the week it was the turn of the Media 2.0 cohort, IPTV people, bloggers, even podcasters. Their equally fervent espousals of a very, very different kind of media future were heard exclusively by their like-minded peers.

A true forum? Not. Finde ich traurig!