#25: AOL unveils free Web TV

Wonder if using "G" in a post is like taking a small sip of vodka ... admit it, Scoble, you've already invalidated your 100 list.

TDavid: heh!

Yep, TDavid beat me to it, but your list made it to 24. Still not bad since as you say, the buzz today has been around "G".

Sorry, I'm counting AOL out. In the words of Steve Jobs (paraphrased): "television is where you turn your brain off, a computer is where you turn your brain off." Every attempt to fuse the two together have failed — including Microsoft's. Add the infernal, awful user experience, and I smell a great, big cataclysmic failure.

Um, that is to say that a computer is where you turn your brain "on". Sorry for that bit of confusion

They're digging deep into the Warner library for this one - and offering nothing that's currently in syndication.

By all accounts (like CBS' recent VOD deal) this is a safe deal to make - doesn't cut into the broadcast revenue model - and even better, lets them toy with online TV distribution using the "deadest" titles in their library.

After a period of considerable inaction, broacasters are dipping their toes into the water...

Sorry, I’m counting AOL out. In the words of Steve Jobs (paraphrased): "television is where you turn your brain off, a computer is where you turn your brain off."... "Um, that is to say that a computer is where you turn your brain “on”. Sorry for that bit of confusion"

But you stumbled on the truth.

You CAN turn your brain on by watching TV. C-Span, some PBS, History Channel and things like that contain far more information than the average web page.

You CAN turn your brain off by using a computer. In fact I think you can turn it off a lot more effectively using a computer. Try and have an intelligent conversation with someone who plays first person shooters for 8 hours a day. Or auto race games, or roll playing games, or... blogs!

TV is a one way medium and computers are two way. That puts TV at a disadvantage, but not much of one. If you want to learn you only need TV and for the right material to be presented, and at a pace you are comfortable with.

The Internet however is like, as the expression goes, drinking from a fire hydrant. Only in addition to water, the Internet fire hydrant has sewage, and poisons and addictive drugs and a few other things you would rather not be consuming.

I'm not convinced that "feeds", "metadata", "XML" and the other dozen buzzwords that fly around today (particularly here) are the answer. I don't think I am getting a lot more out of the Internet today than I was 5 years ago, but I'm sure spending a lot more time getting it. My aggregators do everything but aggregate. Finding the actual SOURCE of a story rather than the thousands (or millions) of bloggers that have added their 2 cents (if they've added anything at all) is still largely a manual process. I don't see any of these new mechanisms solving this any better than just using a search engine that has recently crawled the web and has a modicum of AI built into it (EG: WSJ or Reuters is more likely to have the original story than Joe Blogger).

Have we forgotten that the World Wide Web and HTML were invented specifically allow ordinary people to EASILY share data? You can teach someone all they need to know about HTML in about and hour. But add ASP controls, Javascript, CSS, XML, RSS and EIEIO and suddenly we are back to having to have expert help setting up a web site and are totally dependent on expensive high level tools to do even the simplest thing.

Now think about who is most responsible for this race to complexity.

I think the situation will only get worse until individual users take back the Internet and just say no to the big software vendors, telephone and cable companies, Hollywood and all the other powerful interests that want to keep their positions as gatekeepers of what we see and hear.

If it's not something that you can work with on your own, without $700 worth of software or a $100/month internet bill then you should be asking yourself: "What is wrong with this picture?"

Ahhh, this is just a way to earn money off dead syndicated content, by going direct to consumer, and if enough demand, will indicate what to kick to DVD.

Warner not making anything offa back-catalog if not in syndication, and if enough web demand it might spur syndicators to kick it up. Always wondered however, why Warner left it to the syn's, they should do their own Nick at Night style cable channel, whatever syn's haven't bought, toss onto cable.

I see it win-win-win, for Warner at least. Not sure how MFST's hand can be played. As only content owners can win here.

Well, Apple's NOT a content owner, and they found an effective business model for distribution only - and that's just by leveraging their devices w/ software.

MS has software/services but hasn't really penetrated the market with devices with which to distribute.

That could all change with the Xbox 360, provided that MS is willing to leverage that foothold to open up new distribution channels. I've been saying this same thing for the past 6 months, but hopefully MS won't miss an opportunity here...