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(cc) flickr autowitch

Según esta infografía, las estadísticas actuales indican que los canales de televisión tradicionales perciben cada vez menos dinero por publicidad a causa del creciente interés de las empresas por pautar espacios de publicidad en medios digitales.

Esta conclusión nos puede hacer pensar que, si la publicidad es uno de los principales ingresos económicos de los grandes canales de tv, si el interés fuera 100% por la publicidad digital, los canales podrían enfrentarse a una situación de crisis económica similar a la de los medios de comunicación en papel, como diarios y revistas, quienes intentan replantearse su actual modelo de negocios plagado de pérdidas.

Pero, ¿que es lo que tanto atrae a las empresas a pautar en medios digitales? La respuesta parece estar en la calidad y cantidad de los usuarios, producto de una considerable baja de permanencia de estos usuarios frente a sus pantallas de tv. Las personas optan cada vez más por utilizar plataformas digitales como medio de entretenimiento y ocio.

Incluso, gran parte del tiempo que se le dedica en la actualidad al esparcimiento en formato digital se realiza dentro de las redes sociales, los grandes ganadores económicos de este pleito que al parecer en pocos años tendrá su primera gran batalla. El botín no será otro que el público. Los consumidores no crecen en dimensión, se diversifican o sustituyen por otros, pero el volumen global es casi siempre el mismo.

De las decisiones de esta gran torta de consumidores es desde donde sale la inspiración para las empresas que invierten en publicidad, y si la gente no está delante de la tele, hay que ir a buscarla adonde esté. Este complejo desgaste de un modelo de inversión tan fructífero como el de la televisión ha producido incluso un gran cambio en la manera en que los vendedores buscan efectivizar sus pautas publicitarias, tratando de entender el comportamiento del consumidor y diversificando su inversión para que sea más rentable. En consecuencia, durante el último año registrado (2009), la inversión en publicidad en canales de tv bajó un 12% en relación al año anterior, con la pérdida de la escalofriante cifra de 10 mil millones de dólares.

Otro dato que no para de crecer en los últimos años es la cantidad de descargas piratas de los tanques de las grandes cadenas de televisión, como Lost, 24 o Héroes, lo que ha provocado que incluso en algunos casos hasta se vean comprometidos los costos de realización ante la cantidad de consumidores que espera descargar su serie favorita en lugar de verla en directo.

Los canales de noticias siguen con su hegemonía, pero aún así pierden terreno ante el avance de medios de comunicación informales como las redes sociales o twitter, servicios que todavía deben demostrar su rigor y efectividad para difundir noticias.

Link: State of Broadcast TV infographic (PennOlson)

Let’s fire a few missiles at politically correct ideas such as “Digital media makes all of us journalists”, “citizens will soon displace professional reporters”, and so on.

That’s nonsense (I have more explicit words in mind). Does it means public input in news should be kept at bay? Certainly not. Quite the contrary, actually. Newsrooms have a challenge on their hands, they need to get better at handling such input.

First, would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid’s neuroblastoma? No, you wouldn’t. You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities. Or even a people’s car repairman. Then, for information, why in hell would we accept practices we wouldn’t even contemplate for our health (OK, big issue), or for our washing machine?

Fact is, with the advent of digital media, the very notion of rigor and accuracy has become more… fuzzy, more analog. As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards. The first two are expanding and the third is getting to look like a Zant currant, (Raisin sec in French): good, tasty, but tiny and dry. And produced in small quantities.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a remarkable piece about fact checking at the New Yorker. In a loving and witty rendition, the author, John McPhee, details how an army of minutiae-obsessed researchers will spend days to check the smallest assertions in order to remove even the palest shadow of doubt. (I’m linking to the PDF file, hoping Condé Nast’s legal department will forgive this copyright infringement in view of my heartfelt homage; this article really deserves to be dissected in journalism schools).

A few years back, this colleague showed me a mail exchange he had with a sub-editor at a major US daily about a long feature story of his. Its original submission triggered a long email with dozens of questions about every aspect of the story: “Who says this? Could you add a source of this data? Isn’t there a contradiction between this figure and the other in paragraph six? Can you be more specific on this and that? It went on an on. The story was actually seen as a good one; the painstaking editing, checking and challenging process was merely standard procedure.

Who has the luxury of applying such treatment to news material, nowadays? No one, almost. Only some “Zant currant” news organizations are still holding firm on such a practice. Which leads us to my point: journalism is a profession; it comes with standards, techniques, and a certain level of demand, from the author and his/her editors.

These notions collide with the new information chain: Algorithm => Search => Filtering => Aggregation => Mashup => Social Feedback (i.e.: commenting, sharing, tweeting, blogging…).

We’ve been through the hardcore part (fact-based reporting, checking, sourcing, editing). Now, let’s sort out the new jargon...

Algorithm: it has become the main underlying engine for digital information consumption.  Think about Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News traffic: 3.7 billion people exposed per week, according to GeographicalMedia . For many news sites, GN has fostered a dope-like addiction, with a 10% or more dependency level. New York University Professor Clay Shirky has theorized the “Algorithmic Authority“, one that leads to the shift from individual to collective expertise, sometimes self-organized through a Wikipedia-like structure.

Search, Aggregation and Filtering are just by-products of the algorithmic engine; in the better cases, they are supplemented by a small amount of human editing. See excellent examples such as Techmeme or Mediagazer; they combine a strong home-brewed algorithm with a thin layer of human intervention, hence the term of “Aggrefilter” coined by our friend Dan Farber.

In this context, Blogs range from the best to the worst. Professional blogs – either independent or hosted by traditional medias – can be the most advanced form of written journalism. Quite often, blogs produced by good journalists are as insightful as standard stories, but way more fun to read. (In France, I do know editors who wish their writers were as witty in the paper as they are on their blogs). Good bloggers sometimes border on columnists. Their work is solid, precise and, sometimes, edited; they take time to write their pieces and it shows.

At the other end of the spectrum, blogs can be utterly superficial, lacking precise facts, or agenda-driven and written with a shovel. Unfortunately, both kinds of blogs are sometimes found under the same roof. In many news organizations, big and small, instead of being considered as a more modern form of journalism, the “blog” name tag is a synonym for lower expectations.

The same kind of carelessness goes for comments. I do believe that opening news content to public feedback is a good thing. At its very core, journalism begs for argument; pundits need detractors. But most online editors satisfy themselves by opening the floodgate of comments, without a strategy, or even the slightest attention to content. As a result, everybody loses: the writer who sees painstaking work defaced by shouts; and the publication for allowing substandard, unmoderated feedback. Participation without relevancy is pointless. Unfortunately, in most news sites – including big ones, very little thought seems to have been given to raising the level of public contributions.

This leads us to the oxymoronic notion of citizen journalism. Using public contributions to compensate for the absence of a reporter on the scene is nothing new. For decades, finding pictures taken by witnesses (sometimes paying for such) has been part of the job. Today, Twitter has replaced the checkbook. In many instances, Twitter has proven extraordinary precious and efficient. But, soon, the spontaneous stream of accounts has to be supplemented by professional editing and checking. This is the kind of powerful combination that made the coverage of civil unrests in Tibet or Iran so compelling.

Last March, professor George Brock, head of journalism at the City University of London, gave an absolute must-read lecture on the evolution of journalism titled Is “news” over? (see video and text). Here is what he said about readers input:

“This is a competition for trust between two different forms of collective intelligence. This argument is not being openly and clearly mapped by those who run news media. Perhaps understandably, no editor wanting to encourage the highest level of participation online wants to underline that the suggestions, tweets, tips and facts flowing in from this rich new sources are being filtered in a traditional way.

“But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in the old days to be known as “editing”. If it’s done right, it should be for the benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.”

These distinctions are essential to the preservation of quality journalism. Many wondered why the Yahoos, Googles, Microsofts, where unable to setup news organizations despite their incommensurable wealth (to put things in perspective: Google spends five times more each year for its datacenters than the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) spends for its entire newsroom). Part of the reason is the return on such an investment. Financially speaking, the news business is not very appealing. See for yourself in this revenue per employee table.

Google being the 100 index :
Amazon:……………85
Microsoft:…………..53
News Corp:………..47
Yahoo:……………..40
Washington Post:…19
NYTimes:…………. 22
Gannett:……………13
McClatchy:…………10

But, to thrive, journalism requires more than a checkbook. It has to be built around a set of cultural traits that are in total contradiction to the engineering efficiencies of a search engine or an internet portal. Evidently, the modern news business requires more technology; and journalists needs the dialectics from their public. But news requires more professionalism than mere crowd-powered demagoguery. Today and, I believe, for as long as trust is to be part of the relationship with readers.

Reprinted from MondayNote with permission. Based in Paris, Frédéric Filloux is a freelance writer and a media consultant. Untill recently he was a working as an editor for the international division of the Norwegian media group Schibsted ASA. In 2002, he was part of the team who launched the free daily 20 Minutes which is now the most read newspaper in France with 2.7m readers.

Let’s fire a few missiles at politically correct ideas such as “Digital media makes all of us journalists”, “citizens will soon displace professional reporters”, and so on.

That’s nonsense (I have more explicit words in mind). Does it means public input in news should be kept at bay? Certainly not. Quite the contrary, actually. Newsrooms have a challenge on their hands, they need to get better at handling such input.

First, would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid’s neuroblastoma? No, you wouldn’t. You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities. Or even a people’s car repairman. Then, for information, why in hell would we accept practices we wouldn’t even contemplate for our health (OK, big issue), or for our washing machine?

Fact is, with the advent of digital media, the very notion of rigor and accuracy has become more… fuzzy, more analog. As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards. The first two are expanding and the third is getting to look like a Zant currant, (Raisin sec in French): good, tasty, but tiny and dry. And produced in small quantities.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a remarkable piece about fact checking at the New Yorker. In a loving and witty rendition, the author, John McPhee, details how an army of minutiae-obsessed researchers will spend days to check the smallest assertions in order to remove even the palest shadow of doubt. (I’m linking to the PDF file, hoping Condé Nast’s legal department will forgive this copyright infringement in view of my heartfelt homage; this article really deserves to be dissected in journalism schools).

A few years back, this colleague showed me a mail exchange he had with a sub-editor at a major US daily about a long feature story of his. Its original submission triggered a long email with dozens of questions about every aspect of the story: “Who says this? Could you add a source of this data? Isn’t there a contradiction between this figure and the other in paragraph six? Can you be more specific on this and that? It went on an on. The story was actually seen as a good one; the painstaking editing, checking and challenging process was merely standard procedure.

Who has the luxury of applying such treatment to news material, nowadays? No one, almost. Only some “Zant currant” news organizations are still holding firm on such a practice. Which leads us to my point: journalism is a profession; it comes with standards, techniques, and a certain level of demand, from the author and his/her editors.

These notions collide with the new information chain: Algorithm => Search => Filtering => Aggregation => Mashup => Social Feedback (i.e.: commenting, sharing, tweeting, blogging…).

We’ve been through the hardcore part (fact-based reporting, checking, sourcing, editing). Now, let’s sort out the new jargon...

Algorithm: it has become the main underlying engine for digital information consumption.  Think about Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News traffic: 3.7 billion people exposed per week, according to GeographicalMedia . For many news sites, GN has fostered a dope-like addiction, with a 10% or more dependency level. New York University Professor Clay Shirky has theorized the “Algorithmic Authority“, one that leads to the shift from individual to collective expertise, sometimes self-organized through a Wikipedia-like structure.

Search, Aggregation and Filtering are just by-products of the algorithmic engine; in the better cases, they are supplemented by a small amount of human editing. See excellent examples such as Techmeme or Mediagazer; they combine a strong home-brewed algorithm with a thin layer of human intervention, hence the term of “Aggrefilter” coined by our friend Dan Farber.

In this context, Blogs range from the best to the worst. Professional blogs – either independent or hosted by traditional medias – can be the most advanced form of written journalism. Quite often, blogs produced by good journalists are as insightful as standard stories, but way more fun to read. (In France, I do know editors who wish their writers were as witty in the paper as they are on their blogs). Good bloggers sometimes border on columnists. Their work is solid, precise and, sometimes, edited; they take time to write their pieces and it shows.

At the other end of the spectrum, blogs can be utterly superficial, lacking precise facts, or agenda-driven and written with a shovel. Unfortunately, both kinds of blogs are sometimes found under the same roof. In many news organizations, big and small, instead of being considered as a more modern form of journalism, the “blog” name tag is a synonym for lower expectations.

The same kind of carelessness goes for comments. I do believe that opening news content to public feedback is a good thing. At its very core, journalism begs for argument; pundits need detractors. But most online editors satisfy themselves by opening the floodgate of comments, without a strategy, or even the slightest attention to content. As a result, everybody loses: the writer who sees painstaking work defaced by shouts; and the publication for allowing substandard, unmoderated feedback. Participation without relevancy is pointless. Unfortunately, in most news sites – including big ones, very little thought seems to have been given to raising the level of public contributions.

This leads us to the oxymoronic notion of citizen journalism. Using public contributions to compensate for the absence of a reporter on the scene is nothing new. For decades, finding pictures taken by witnesses (sometimes paying for such) has been part of the job. Today, Twitter has replaced the checkbook. In many instances, Twitter has proven extraordinary precious and efficient. But, soon, the spontaneous stream of accounts has to be supplemented by professional editing and checking. This is the kind of powerful combination that made the coverage of civil unrests in Tibet or Iran so compelling.

Last March, professor George Brock, head of journalism at the City University of London, gave an absolute must-read lecture on the evolution of journalism titled Is “news” over? (see video and text). Here is what he said about readers input:

“This is a competition for trust between two different forms of collective intelligence. This argument is not being openly and clearly mapped by those who run news media. Perhaps understandably, no editor wanting to encourage the highest level of participation online wants to underline that the suggestions, tweets, tips and facts flowing in from this rich new sources are being filtered in a traditional way.

“But the facts of news consumption on the web tell us clearly that filtering is exactly what people tend to prefer when they have the choice. Filtering used in the old days to be known as “editing”. If it’s done right, it should be for the benefit and protection of the viewer or reader. It should create trust.”

These distinctions are essential to the preservation of quality journalism. Many wondered why the Yahoos, Googles, Microsofts, where unable to setup news organizations despite their incommensurable wealth (to put things in perspective: Google spends five times more each year for its datacenters than the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) spends for its entire newsroom). Part of the reason is the return on such an investment. Financially speaking, the news business is not very appealing. See for yourself in this revenue per employee table.

Google being the 100 index :
Amazon:……………85
Microsoft:…………..53
News Corp:………..47
Yahoo:……………..40
Washington Post:…19
NYTimes:…………. 22
Gannett:……………13
McClatchy:…………10

But, to thrive, journalism requires more than a checkbook. It has to be built around a set of cultural traits that are in total contradiction to the engineering efficiencies of a search engine or an internet portal. Evidently, the modern news business requires more technology; and journalists needs the dialectics from their public. But news requires more professionalism than mere crowd-powered demagoguery. Today and, I believe, for as long as trust is to be part of the relationship with readers.

Reprinted from MondayNote with permission. Based in Paris, Frédéric Filloux is a freelance writer and a media consultant. Untill recently he was a working as an editor for the international division of the Norwegian media group Schibsted ASA. In 2002, he was part of the team who launched the free daily 20 Minutes which is now the most read newspaper in France with 2.7m readers.

It’s not even a rounding error but one of the numbers Rupert Murdoch seemed to really enjoy tossing out during the News Corp earnings call: more than 64,000 active users for the Wall Street Journal iPad app after its first month. “Unlike the Kindle, we keep 100 percent of the revenue from the iPad.” That doesn’t mean each subscriber equals new dollars—or that each “active user” is a subscriber. The app itself is free. Ostensibly full access runs about $18 a month but any current WSJ subscriber with a log in can get full access for now; as is the case with WSJ.com, some content is free for registered users. 

The WSJ stat provided Murdoch’s segue into a very limited mention of the long-expected News Corp (NYSE: NWS). digital media consortium: “We’re in final discussions with a number of publishers, device makers and technology companies. We will soon develop an innovative subscription model to deliver digital content to consumers wherever and whenever they want it.” Later during Q&A, Murdoch said the company is planning a press conference on the subject in three-four weeks (hmmm, an announcement at the D conference the first week in June?) and said it would include entertainment as well as news. A question about whether it would be competing with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iTunes stopped him briefly, and drew an admission that it would.

Related

• News Corp's Big Subscription Plan Coming Next Month - But What Is It?
• News Corp. Beats Estimates On Profit, Revenue But Digital Losses Increase
• Targeted Advertising: WSJ Courting FT Readers For iPad Switch
• WSJ.com Expands Premium Service Aimed At Professionals To Consumers
• WSJ Puts High Price On iPad App Subs

In the mid-90s, at least 45 U.S. newspapers charged for online access, though almost all of them later hopped over the fence to the free side. Now, the paywall brigade is rising again—albeit slowly. On the eve of this year’s American Society of News Editors conference, where the question of charging for digital content will be center stage, we’ve assembled a list of the local and metro papers in the U.S. that have paywalls. We found more than 20 that charge online readers up to $35 a month, in an attempt either to preserve their print circulation or to add a new stream of revenue. They range from major metros like Newsday to sub-20,000 circulation papers in small northeast towns that have charged online readers for years.

And this list is about to get longer. At least six other papers have announced they will put up some sort of online paywall in the coming months. How these papers do financially with their new paywalls will determine, in part, whether hundreds of other papers decide to take the same step. As a result, we’ll be updating this list periodically with new entrants and checking with these papers to see how they’re faring. We aimed for comprehensiveness, but our list is certainly missing papers that have paywalls and is missing some details too—so please help us out and send us the names of others that aren’t here, via the comments at the end of this story, and we’ll update. Click on the thumbnail below to see the full chart.

Related

• Taking The Plunge: How Newspaper Sites That Charge Are Faring

Facebook has eclipsed Amazon, Walmart, Netflix and even Google as the foremost brand name in web searches from U.S. users, according to research from Hitwise.

In terms of both traffic and revenue, Facebook has been leaving other social networking sites in the dust for some time. Yet in terms of web search — the terms people use either to find information or navigate to websites — Facebook is just now topping the bill.

For some perspective, consider the fact that “Facebook” as a root search term commands 2.8% of all brand-related searches, while MySpace accounts for around 1.1% of them. Sites such as YouTube and Twitter don’t even rank a tenth of a percent of searches, according to Hitwise’s metrics.

Part of what makes these results so fascinating is that many users still prefer to search for the term “Facebook” rather than typing “Facebook.com” into their browser address bars. What this could mean is that, even with less web-literate users, Facebook is still growing significantly.

It’s also interesting to note that Hitwise’s data takes into consideration more than 10,673 unique variations on the “Facebook” root term over the past week alone.

For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: facebook, Search, social media, social networking

U.S. consumers are not only buying phones with touchscreens, but they are tending to be more satisfied with the experience than people who bought phones with physical keyboards, according to a J.D. Power and Associates’ wireless satisfaction survey released today.

It found that more than half of the respondents said their smartphone had a touchscreen, which is in line with a report that came out in February from the NPD group that said in the fourth quarter of 2009, the top 10 best-selling mobile phones all came equipped with a touchscreen, a Qwerty keyboard, or both.

In addition to being more satisfied, smartphone owners with touchscreens are more likely to download or watch video. JD Power found that 17 percent of smartphone owners with touchscreens indicated they frequently watch content on their device, which is significantly higher than the segment average.

Other findings:

—On a scale of one to 1,000, touchscreen smartphone owners have an average satisfaction of 771, which is 40 points higher than those who don’t have touchscreens.

—Perhaps, smartphone users satisfaction with touchscreens are impacted by the fact that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) continues to rank highest in customer satisfaction among manufacturers of smartphones with a score of 810.

—BlackBerry is in second with 741 points (despite only having one touchscreen device in its line-up).

—When it comes to feature phones, LG (SEO: 066570) ranks highest in satisfaction at 729 and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is in last place with a score of 667. Surprisingly, Samsung, which is the largest handset manufacturer in the U.S., ties with the industry average of 703 points.

Al parecer la desesperación de las discográficas por “defender” la propiedad intelectual de sus artistas esta alcanzando niveles nunca antes vistos, llegando incluso a acusar a los propios artistas de violar la propiedad intelectual de ellos mismos.

Es el caso de la compañía discográfica Sony BMG que, con tal de proteger el copyright de la artista Beyoncé (cuyo catálogo musical distribuye la compañía), decidió censurar los videoclips que la artista había subido a su canal oficial en YouTube. Lo curioso del caso es que dicha censura no se aplica para el portal de videos musicales VEVO, en cuya propiedad participan la misma Sony en conjunto con otras grandes discográficas.

En la página oficial de la artista sólo se publicó una nota donde se invita a los usuarios residentes en Estados Unidos o Canada a visitar el portal VEVO para ver los videos, mientras que para el resto de los mortales se les recomienda visitar un canal alternativo de la artista en YouTube (que para el caso de Chile tampoco permite la reproducción de los videoclips protegidos por derechos de autor).

Link: Sony BMG takes Beyonce’s official YouTube channel down for “copyright infringement” (DownloadSquad)

Al parecer la desesperación de las discográficas por “defender” la propiedad intelectual de sus artistas esta alcanzando niveles nunca antes vistos, llegando incluso a acusar a los propios artistas de violar la propiedad intelectual de ellos mismos.

Es el caso de la compañía discográfica Sony BMG que, con tal de proteger el copyright de la artista Beyoncé (cuyo catálogo musical distribuye la compañía), decidió censurar los videoclips que la artista había subido a su canal oficial en YouTube. Lo curioso del caso es que dicha censura no se aplica para el portal de videos musicales VEVO, en cuya propiedad participan la misma Sony en conjunto con otras grandes discográficas.

En la página oficial de la artista sólo se publicó una nota donde se invita a los usuarios residentes en Estados Unidos o Canada a visitar el portal VEVO para ver los videos, mientras que para el resto de los mortales se les recomienda visitar un canal alternativo de la artista en YouTube (que para el caso de Chile tampoco permite la reproducción de los videoclips protegidos por derechos de autor).

Link: Sony BMG takes Beyonce’s official YouTube channel down for “copyright infringement” (DownloadSquad)

Google News has just open-sourced its code to create what it calls Living Stories. What this really is, I think, is Google’s attempt to take editors to school on content presentation in our new world.

The article, I’ve argued, is outmoded as the building block of news. The new atomic unit(s) of journalism needs to reflect the transition of news from a product to a process. It needs to gather updates and corrections on a story. It needs to put that story in context and history. It needs to link to other versions of the story from other sources. Going past what Google’s Living Stories format does, it needs to open the door to collaboration. It can do so much more: showing the provenance of the news and linking to original sources, gathering comment and perspective, soliciting questions….

Daylife (where, disclosure, I’m a partner) its own vision of the future of the story, called Smart Stories, that will do more neat things; I’ll let them tell you about it. Daylife also sees that news needn’t exist in isolated, short-lived, repetitive units of presentation invented for the age of print. News should reside in a nest of relevance, which not only improves the presentation, it gives you more options on how you want to delve into the story and follow it and eventually contribute to it. It makes news more personal.

Both companies are doing something important for the benefit of journalists: making them look at what they create in a new way. This is just one possibility, just one step. We also need to think about making news embeddable and distributed. We need to insinuate news into your stream (“if the news is that important, it will find me“) and make it collaborative and enable you to triangulate from different viewpoints and footnote our work and….

The way for Google to serve the interests of news is not to make deals to mollify the mewling Associated Press or cater to pipe dreams of charging. The way that Google and other technology visionaries can help is by reshaping the form of news to show the people who do it how they can do it now. The open-sourcing of Living Stories is a welcome start.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of Brightcove. Prior to Brightcove, Jeremy founded Allaire Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Macromedia due to the success of their web development tool ColdFusion. At Macromedia, Jeremy helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform. You can see a recent interview of Jeremy here. As one of the guys who helped build the Flash Platform, we asked him to weigh in on the recent HTML5 v. Flash debate.

The recent introduction of the new Apple iPad has stirred the discussion over the future of web content and application runtime formats, and shone light onto the political and business battles emerging between Apple, Adobe and Google. These discussion are often highly polarized and irrational. My hope in this post is to help provide some balance and clarity onto this discussion.

I have a particularly unique perspective, stake and role in this discussion. My first company (Allaire) was born during the advent of the Web, with the idea that a browser and HTML could form the basis for creating content-rich, interactive software applications, ones that didn’t require native code and could be platform and operating system independent. We built ColdFusion as a way to realize this vision. We later became deeply committed to the world of HTML as a developer format, acquiring and building HomeSite, what was the world’s dominant Windows-based HTML authoring application.

In 2000, it became clear to me that web applications and runtimes were not advancing fast enough, and that with the emerging world of broadband internet connectivity that an entirely new realm of rich internet applications would be possible. We (Allaire and Macromedia) merged our companies with the vision that a new class of browser-based applications would emerge, and that we could evolve Macromedia Flash Player from its origins as an animation and motion-graphics engine into a real application platform and rich client runtime that fused media (text, audio, images, video), communications (web services, real-time APIs) and interactivity (rich client-side object model and UI component framework). In March of 2002 we launched the Macromedia MX Platform, anchored around the new Flash runtime, and realized this vision for the transformation of the Web experience and enabling a new class of rich, browser-based applications.

For several years, the Flash Platform was unique in its ability to create highly interactive browser based applications. Around 2003-2004 HTML/JavaScript (Ajax) started to meaningfully emerge as a competing approach to building apps on the Web. Meanwhile, as new Flash Players shipped, it’s ubiquity ensured that the birth of the online video industry would be largely built on Flash. This gave birth to everything from YouTube and Brightcove and Hulu, to hundreds of other online video companies.

Today, my company sits at the center of these new battles over the future of web content and app formats and runtimes. We work with thousands of media publishers who aim to maximize the distribution, reach and user opportunities with their content. This new re-fracturing of web content runtimes is creating challenges (and opportunities) for us and our peers.

A Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Developers (and Audiences!)

I think it’s critical to first frame and understand this discussion with the broader political economy of Internet software platforms. Most of the debate and discussion over HTML5 vs. Flash vs. Native Apps has little to do with what is the right technical approach, or whether something is open or closed, it has to do with the expressions of power and control that drive the businesses of the Internet’s dominant platform companies — Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft.

Each of these companies seeks to create unique runtimes and APIs that provide a strategic wedge that can drive other aspects of their business. At one level this is a battle for the hearts and minds of developers and ISVs, but these developers are merely a means to an end. Gaining broad adoption for their runtime platforms translates into their ability to create massive derivative value through downstream products and services. For Apple, this is hardware and paid media (content and apps) sales. For Google, this is about creating massive reach for their advertising platforms and products. For Adobe, this about creating major new applications businesses based on their platform. For Microsoft, it is about driving unit sales of their core OS and business applications.

Web Apps and Content

I’m often asked “Will HTML5 replace Flash?” on the Web. The quick answer is no. However, there is a lot of nuance here and it’s helpful to make the distinction between two broad classes of content applications that are deployed in browsers.

First, there are what I would call Web Productivity Apps. These kinds of applications require responsive, cross-platform, desktop like and highly interactive experiences. They often require seamless integration with existing web content and data. For several years, the Flash Platform was the best platform for creating these types of applications (per above). However, in the past several years, HTML+JavaScript (Ajax) and now HTML5 have created a highly compelling framework to build these applications, and for a large number of web productivity apps, the HTML5 approach will become the preferred model. The best examples are Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and even Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Online. There are also a class of Web Productivity Apps where Flash is the preferred runtime, especially those that involve working with and manipulating media such as images, audio and video. We, like many companies, are pragmatic and use both Flash and HTML as the technology needs require. Other examples of this include rich data visualization applications, where Flash has gained prominence inside of enterprises because of its rich data and visualization features.

The second broad class of applications are what I would call Rich Media Apps. These kinds of applications include largely consumer-facing, audience and media centric experiences. In particular, this includes online video, rich media advertising and marketing, and online games (casual games). All of these kinds of applications are highly focused on having a great and immersive experience that just works, and the creators of these apps are very focused on audience reach — anything that impedes 100% consumer acceptance is a significant concern. Here, Flash is dominant. The unique runtime characteristics of Flash, combined with its incredible reach, has led these types of apps to become highly dependent on Flash, and massive amounts of the broadband economy are dependent on it. It seems unlikely that HTML5 would be at all positioned to replace Flash for these categories, though it is clearly worth watching how consistent rich media runtimes find their way into the HTML5+ standard. Right now, it is a non starter.

The Handheld Disruption

Much of the above classes of content applications are in reference to the PC/Browser-based Web. The explosive growth in hand-held computing has introduced an entirely new dynamic into the content and app run-time battles which in turn will have a cascading impact on the PC Web. Hand-held computing includes smartphones (iPhone, Android, Nokia, et. al), portable music/entertainment devices and tablet computing devices (iPad and Android devices).

In many respects, the successful launch and growth of these devices has created an entirely new and largely blank canvas for content and applications. First, these devices offer new native services and OS-specific features (location, multi-touch UI, local media, wireless networking APIs, cameras, offline) that are giving birth to a massive new class of non-Web Apps that are built using proprietary native-code APIs and runtimes. Because of always-on broadband connectivity and easy to discovery App Stores, there has been rapid adoption of these new “disposable content apps”.

Hand-held platforms create a new opportunity for platform vendors to disrupt runtime hegemony from platforms that have seen ascendance on the PC/Web, and controlling these new run-times and developer adoption of these runtimes has a direct impact on these platform vendors ability to own audience relationships and monetization opportunities. For example, a web-centric, HTML5-centric handheld world favors Google because it can leverage it’s existing dominance in search and web advertising. A proprietary App-centric universe favors Apple because it can become the primary gatekeeper to reaching the mobile audience and already has a pole position in integrating payments and advertising into content applications.

In the case of hand-held platforms, however, it seems quite apparent that it is not a zero-sum game. Three runtime platforms will gain adoption and often even inter-mingle — HTML5 content and apps, Native Apps (that may contain Flash and HTML content), and HTML5 apps that contain and leverage Flash Player. There is a rich pallet of capabilities emerging, and each developer will need to consider what will be appropriate for their specific audience or application. It is also clear that the adoption of these diverse run-time platforms has the real potential to reconstitute fundamental relationships to audiences and monetization systems.

Video as a Cornerstone Issue

I’m also often asked “Will HTML5 Video replace Flash Video?”. Posited as a winner-take-all, absolute, the answer is clearly no. But like the nuance of HTML5 vs. Flash on the Web, there is also a very nuanced and complex evolving landscape in the video format world.

On the PC/Web, video has gained enormous momentum as a fundamental media type for all content on the Web. This has largely been driven by the adoption of Flash Video, which has approximately 75% market-share for online video. For most web and content app developers, this is fine, it is a great run-time and offers an excellent user experience and Adobe has done a very good job keeping the platform contemporary with the most demanding needs of video delivery and quality.

It is the rapid emergence of hand-held devices, however, that is bringing this issue to the forefront. With massive growth in hand-held web browsing from smartphones, iTouch devices and the pending iPad product, this has raised a deeper issue for media publishers who are eager to have their content be accessible to end-users. In particular, it is the show-down between Apple, Google and Adobe over who can control video formats on these devices that is creating challenges. Again, this is not about “what is the right technical solution”, it is about the political economy of who controls the formats that in turn lead to owning downstream audience and monetization opportunities.

The basic idea behind HTML5 video is that there would be a common video format that could be placed and rendered into any compatible web browser, conceptually replacing the need for the Flash run-time to render video in browsers. But there are enormous challenges with this, some political, some technical and some based on audience behavior.

First, right now, there is a lack of common approach among browser makers on what format to use for the HTML video object. This lack of agreement represents a proxy for broader political battles. Apple promotes MPEG-4/H.264, which it uses for it’s device platforms. Microsoft promotes VC-1, it’s own standard video codec. Google has yet to fully weigh-in on what format to support, which leads me to speculate that they will soon introduce a new format, based on On2 VP8, but under a broad open source license to the format and technology. Firefox, with 24% share of the browser market, proposes to use the open source Ogg Vorbis codec. What few people realize is that while H.264 appears to be an open and free standard, in actuality it is not. It is a standard provided by the MPEG-LA consortsia, and is governed by commercial and IP restrictions, which will in 2014 impose a royalty and license requirement on all users of the technology. How can the open Web adopt a format that has such restrictions? It can’t. Google will make an end-run on this by launching an open format with an open source license for the technology, which according to industry experts delivers almost all of the same technical benefits as H.264. All of this is a long way of saying that there is still significant format tension and that it will take a long time for it to be resolved in next-gen browsers.

Second, but related, is the raw reality of browser adoption and churn cycles, and the fact that online video publishers will only adopt standards that have extremely broad adoption. Until penetration rates consistently reach 80%, it will be hard for publishers to switch and adopt a single, new solution. It is more likely that HTML5 Video adoption will reach that critical mass on hand-held devices before it does on the PC/Web.

Third, and equally important, is the more practical issue of the massive industry-wide ecosystem support for Flash Video. From advertising formats, to business logic for the interaction of video with ads and analytics, hundreds of 3rd party technology companies who have built solutions around online video that are built on Flash, not to mention high quality design and authoring tools that sit at the center of a large labor market for Flash design and development; all of this creates inertia for Flash and a relatively high industry-wide switching cost.

But stepping back and looking at this specifically in the context of hand-held computing, where Apple is politically motivated to block the Flash runtime, it is apparent video publishers will be driven to build and operate solutions that leverage HTML5 Video on mobile and iPad browsing environments.

It’s All About Reach

Whether on the supply side of content and applications, or on the distribution and run-time side of the equation, what is abundantly clear is that reach is still king. For platform makers, these battles will continue as they all seek to drive sufficient reach for their open and proprietary standards such that they can exploit this distribution for their core commercial goals. Likewise, and more important, whatever standards and models deliver the broadest reach will ultimately drive what is adopted by publishers, developers and ISVs.

While it is easy to take a binary position in the future of content applications and run-times, it is evident that the competing interests of platform vendors, consumers and app and content publishers will ensure that this remains a fragmented and competitive environment for many years to come.

CrunchBase Information Jeremy Allaire Adobe Systems Brightcove Information provided by CrunchBase