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.

George Lucas has long allowed fans to make their own Star Wars fan films, as can be seen here on YouTube, as long as they did not profit from them.  The rock band Phish has sued T-shirt makers in the past over the sale of shirts with their logo and title of songs, even though fans may have found them more creative than the official offerings.

That is why the current deal between ABC and Cafe Press is groundbreaking.  Fans are allowed to upload shirt designs based on the tv show LOST to their website, sell them and profit from them.

So what kind of shirt do you want to make?

As we hit a new decade, those companies have merged and merged, leaving us with 2 powerhouses: Verizon and AT&T.  Only one thing is left, for Ma Bell to become whole again.

The truth is that the services that AT&T had a monopoly on in the 1980s no longer exist.  The phone companies offer a powerful suite of services including internet access and TV service, along with the dying legacy business of local and long distance phone service.  The competitors are no longer other phone companies, but cable companies with competing digital broadband pipes.

Oh, and mobile phones too.  Verizon and AT&T have become significantly better known, marketing-wise, for their mobile networks, compared to the so-called dumb pipes.  They currently run their networks using incompatible technologies (CDMA for Verizon, GSM for AT&T).  Both services, however, are transitioning into 4G LTE networks, that would be compatible with each other.  The mobile divisions may be the biggest antitrust issue with a potential AT&T/Verizon merger, but the rest of the elements in the modern “Triple Play” business of Phone.

Do you project a Verizon / AT&T merger attempt in the next decade?  Do you think that they are already talking about it?  Discuss!

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.

You’ve got mail.

Goodbye.

Today, AOL officially spins off from TimeWarner as an independent company, the last remnant of a merger originally announced in 2000, where the company was briefly known as AOL Time Warner.  AOL had 30 million subscribers at its peek, when they were the leader in online access.

Here is a brief history of AOL, known at its peak as America Online.

1980s: Control Video Corporation is founded.  Its sole product is Gameline, which allows users to download game to Atari video game systems, using a modem built into a cartridge.  Games are $1 rentals which expired after multiple plays or when the console was shut off.  The company also pitched music downloads to cable TV boxes, but it was rejected by the music labels.  Namely Warner Music.

1983: Future CEO Steve Case joined the company, near bankruptcy, which was reorganized under new management

1985: Company is renamed Quantum Computer Services.  Launch online network for Commodore 64 and 128 computers called Quantum Link (Q-Link for short).

1988: AppleLink is created as a joint venture with Apple for Macintosh computers.  PC Link is launched for PCs.

1989: Joint venture with Apple ends.  Service and company is renamed America Online.

1996: AOL institutes a $19.99 unlimited access rate.  Membership explodes.

2000: AOL announces a merger with Time Warner.  The new company, finalized in 2001 was called AOL Time Warner.

2003: AOL Time Warner removes AOL from its name, returning to the Time Warner name.  AOL remains a division of the company.

2009: Time Warner spins off AOL into a separate company, officially ending the relationship caused by the merger.

Now, comes news that Comcast, one of the largest and richest cable television and broadband providers in the US is a player to purchase and contol NBC Universal.  This is quite disturbing to the 7 year old inside of me.

I grew up without pay tv, until my father got DirecTV 3 months before I left for college.  My media influence centered on free, over the air, ad-supported TV and Radio.  Both are businesses destroyed by options from paid pipelines like cable, as well as legal and pirated content available online.  Where is TV?  Where is the spirit displayed by Weird Al Yancovic in UHF?

NBC made a bold move this year by programming Jay Leno at 10PM.  This is the beginning of the end of the diverse, 60 year history of broadcast network television.  The dual revenue streams of subscriptions and advertising are something that broadcast TV can’t compete with.  ESPN has become the self proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports” for this reason.  Their most recent acquisition was the college football Bowl Championship Series, which is moving from Fox and ABC to ESPN.  Broadcast can’t compete.

Currently, the FCC prohibits one company from owning broadcast TV stations AND cable systems.  Expect a potential Comcast deal to have General Electric be the sole owner of the NBC stations, with GE’s majority stake in NBCU turned into a minority ownership, with Comcast in charge.  Would the FCC even allow this?  It is quite a dangerous precedent.  NBC made a bold move a few years ago acquiring the #2 US Spanish language broadcaster Telemundo.  Will that momentum fall apart?  Is Telemundo more valuable than My Network TV?

The digital transition has come and gone.  It has left a lot of unprofitable TV stations with fancy new technology.  A merger between NBCU and Comcast essentially concedes that broadcast TV is dead.

What do you think?  Am I being too hard?  Is this just Comcast’s way of keeping that cash machine known as Joel McHale in the family?  Discuss.

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.

Gary’s success is completely deserved.  An immigrant from the former U.S.S.R. republic now known as Belarus, he uses social media, centered around a daily video show, to transform his family’s wine store in New Jersey from a $1 million dollar business to roughly $50 million in annual sales.

However, this post is not centered around his financial success.  Many successful businesses have made more than him, with or without the use of social media.  The most astounding success of Gary Vaynerchuk is how rich and powerful the results for him are on Google and other popular search engines.  This is why I have declared Gary Vaynerchuk the King of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

I consult businesses on how to utilize social media and other internet marketing to their advantage.  I happened to be in a fairly large wine store in New York City, talking about Vaynerchuk’s unprecedented success.  They were very aware of him, and clearly not fans.  These people shared with me the belief that Wine Library hurts their sales, because they are located in New Jersey, and have lower taxes on win than they do in New York.  The belief, if you believe these people, is that any and all tactics used by Gary Vaynerchuk to sell wine are frowned upon by the rest of the wine community, and wouldn’t be caught dead using anything that made him a household name.  Videoblogs?  Facebook?  Having personal relationships with customers?  Sorry.

This was an education I did not expect.  Gary Vee has enemies.  He has controversy.  I immediately went home and did some Google searching to dig up this alleged dirt.  However, to my shock, I would not find anything remotely negative about him at all.  There was nothing about undercutting wine prices using interstate loopholes.  Nothing was written about people having bad experiences with him personally or with his products.  I was looking for content that was quite specific, expecting a certain result, yet all I found was his official websites, videos and positive things about him.  Wow.

I then did use a search term that was bound to bring up something bad.  That term:

“Fuck Gary Vaynerchuk”

Back when I originally did this search in January, I found a blog post criticizing Vaynerchuk’s own post criticizing Howard Stern. Here in September, I can no longer find it.  All that is listed is some Howard Stern message board discussing the topic, and how it was out of context on Stern’s part.  Five results from the same thread.  That’s it!

The post in question criticized Vaynerchuk.  However, he left a comment on the post.  That led to a follow-up post respecting him.  Gary Vaynerchuk listens to all feedback, positive and negative, and responds to it.  That creates a level of authenticity, something that Google and the other search engines value when determining who should be on the top of the results page.

How do you respond to feedback?  How active are YOU, the owner of your business, in sharing with the community?  Please respond in the comments.