There you go, like many of you, I got the back story of Chatroulette before actually using the service.  It’s like Chris Rock joking that the rapper 50 Cent was known for being shot 9 times before anyone heard his music.  Everyone heard about a rapper that got shot 9 times, but not the actual song.

That is how I felt about Chatroulette.  I saw this long word that started with the letter C before realizing that it was a compound word of “Chat” and “Roulette”.  The truth is that I wasn’t that familiar with what the term NSFW meant before going on Chatroulette for the first time, although it was in many reviews.  That changed fast.

Chatroulette is a website where users engage in random video chat.  It is a very simple design.  Your video on the bottom.  A stranger’s video on the top.  If you don’t like what you see or hear, just click the next button.  Genius!  I had conversations with people in London and Berlin, from my laptop in New York.  I convinced college kids to brush their teeth on camera and a 12 year old girl to remove her pony tail.  Wow, random chat is fun.

Just be warned of porn.  There are people who put sickening stuff on there, so it is highly advised to keep Chatroulette away from children.

That being said, NBC made the right move this time, with Jay Leno.

As I previously mentioned in my post about the success of CBS, television is a legacy business.  In the world of time shifting through DVRs, Hulu and piracy, the most valuable TV viewers are those that do not follow these practices.  Wow, Ted Koppel may have been right.  TV is an ad supported medium, advertisers pay the networks for their commercial messages to be seen by viewers.

It is the older audiences who watch commercials at their regularly scheduled times, and not just the programming.  CBS is the highest rated and most profitable TV network for this very reason.  They program to get the highest overall audiences, and not just the 18-49 demo.

Jay Leno is a proven brand, having grown a huge audience in most of his 17 years on The Tonight Show, beating The Late Show with David Letterman in total viewers, if not ad revenue.  If Conan O’Brien was given more time on The Tonight Show, would he have eventually garnered the market share of Leno?  Perhaps, but not guaranteed.

Also, as much as The Jay Leno Show was a flop in primetime, Monday-Friday at 10pm, he got higher ratings than he ever did when he was WINNING at 11:30.  I personally did not watch, but somebody was.

Why am I discussing this in a blog about the creation, distribution and interaction of content? There is one large, major media company which unlike its competitors runs its legacy television broadcast business in the same way.

That company is CBS, the General Motors of television.

ABC, NBC and their sister cable networks target a certain, young demographic to determine ad rates. CBS does not. They aim to have the largest number of viewers for their programs, and they generally do.

However, this success may only be good for the short term. Television audiences are shrinking across the board. Even Fox’s American Idol, consistently the highest rated program on US television, has seen its ratings drop. On the broadcast front, CBS may be #1 in prime time television, but the significance of that designation continues to fall in value.

Does this make CBS wrong? Are they planting seeds to grow new, younger viewers? Do they even need to? Sure, they have their sports division, featuring the NFL and NCAA basketball tournament. CBS Corporation a 50% owner of The CW and their buzzworthy shows like the new 90210 and Gossip Girl. However, they don’t instantly stream many of their shows online and are the only major US television network to not be a part of Hulu.

CBS is making a boatload of money in the aged, traditional business of prime time broadcast television. Once this market dries up, will CBS be able to prevail? Please discuss in the comments.

One of my favorite shows the past few seasons is Heroes.  In fact, the season premiere is tonight, September 21^st at 8:00 PM ET on NBC.  It had aired at 9PM for most of its run, so you’d think there would be ads, on TV, Radio, Print and online to signify it.

No.

Last season, to launch season 3 of Heroes, NBC had a massive print campaign with billboards in train stations, on busses, etc.  Not this year.  I don’t see any ads for Heroes, The Office or any of their returning shows.  NBC does have a lot of print ads up for The Jay Leno Show.  NBC has scrapped 1/3 of its primetime schedule for Leno (for reasons that many others have written about and I may revisit in the future).  It makes sense that they spend a lot of their marketing muscle on it.

However, what about the other shows?  I’ve seen a few ads for their new hospital drama Trauma.  I have not seen anything for their new sitcom Community, or returning midseason shows Parks and Recreation or Southland.

Is NBC relying on internet buzz to promote the new season (and timeslot) for Heroes?  Do they just want to rest on their online laurels?  Heroes, despite being one of NBC’s most popular drama series, doesn’t have the strongest TV ratings, but is consistently one of the most watched shows online.  A lot of the buzz is negative.  This season, only 18 episodes have been ordered, with a season finale slated for December.  Will this lack or offline promotion make that episode the series finale?

Is NBC purposely sabotaging Heroes?  Will the show make it to season 5?  Discuss below.

This is a big change in the FCC, which recently went to a Democratic majority now that Obama is in office.  They reacted quick to the issue, to prevent important useful content from being blocked.

Meanwhile, the Bush FCC, and their battle over idecency, was about blocking content.  What we now see is the polar opposite.

Google has only been around for 11 years.  A long time in the history of the internet, but still fairly new.  We have the world’s smartest programmers and scientists.  Somebody can make a better search engine than Google.  However, Google and Microsoft have boatloads of money and can hire that talent to work on their own search engines.

Google can be beaten, but its more about their business models than the actual search engine.  Google and Yahoo make their money from advertising and premium subscriptions to their services.  They have essentially replaced AOL as the go-to online web portals.  They are destination sites with lots of goodies like free email, online word processing and online games to keep people thinking about their brands all day.

Check out ask.com, previously askjeeves.  They are owned by Barry Diller’s IAC.  They have a lot of money and a huge marketing budget.  However, they are still a distant 4th place in the world of search.  Remember Lycos, one of the earlier search engines?  They were around before Google, yet are afterthoughts today.

10 years from now, chances are that Yahoo, Google and Microsoft will still be in search engine business.  However, will a company emerge to provide search engine services, external applications and profitable ads to sell around it?  Only time will tell.

Who is Ben Silverman?  He is a successful agent turned producer turned network head.  His specialty has been adapting international TV formats in the US.  This is not necessarily the easiest thing.  Remember Coupling?  Silverman’s two biggest successes are The Office (which started slowly, but was saved after Steve Carrell’s success in the 40 Year Old Virgin and the sale of its reruns on iTunes) and Ugly Betty (which was very successful in many different markets, and had Hollywood star Salma Hayak as one of its producers). In fact, rumors had linked Silverman to running the UK network ITV.

Shows launched by Silverman at NBC weren’t that successful.  Kath and Kim, which was adapted from a show in Austrailia was a flop.  But there were also quality shows launched on his watch that just didn’t get an audience like Life and Kings.  There were also victims of the Writers Strike like Journeyman.  At least Chuck is living on for another year.

This fall, NBC is stipping Jay Leno at 10PM on Monday through Friday, removing 1/3 of its prime time lineup.  If it fails or succeeds, who gets the credit?  Silverman is gone, perhaps at the right time.

2. ESPN exercises its sports TV monopoly muscles by refusing to report on two major stories, one involving sports and another involving one of their reporters.  First, they refused to report about a sexual harrassment suit filed against Pittsburgh Steelers Quaterback Ben Roethlisberger.  Second, they won’t report about the peephole video of their sideline reporter (and frequent target of Sports/ESPN satire site Deadspin) Erin Andrews.

3. A Chinese employee of a manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone committed suicide after a prototype for a 4G iPhone went missing.

4. It’s been 40 years since we landed on the moon.  Hooray!

5. No more Cancer.  Play it Leo!

Then Google bought it, froze the ability for its users to invite others.  Anyone interested, was put on a waiting list.

A few months ago, Google announced that the service would be reborn as Google Voice.  And it is amazing.  Free text messaging and transcribed voice mail messages.  Amazing.

Now you can try it.  Almost. Google is finally invited members of the 2 year old waiting list to join.  Hooray!