…brought to you by the geniuses at The Daily Show. I’d rather post the link to this clip on YouTube (you’ll see why) but since Jon & Co. are under the Viacom umbrella, I figured the clip will be deleted soon. That and because I fear the wily band of ninjas that Viacom might send after me.

A group of DMECers just got back from our annual trip down to L.A. We are grateful to the companies who hosted us:

Fox Interactive Media
Warner Bros.
20th Century Fox
Yahoo! Media
Universal Music Group’s eLabs
Vivendi Games

For me, the highlight of the two days was contrasting the different ways the two News Corp. subsidiaries think about distributing content.

We had a great turn-out for our Thursday night happy hour in Santa Monica. A big thanks to everyone who came out!

I can’t wait for our next trip to LA. The town grows on me more and more everytime I visit. If you have suggestions for companies in the greater Los Angeles area worth visiting (maybe yours) or want to be sure we include you on the invite list for next year’s happy hour, just drop us a line.

(If anyone who was on the trip wants to add things to this post, feel free to edit it.  Of course, comments by all are always encouraged.)

I found this service the other day, Streamick.com- It’s basically a free online cable network with channels that include the BBC, Fox, CNN, ABC, Animal Planet, and others. Much like real cable, it’s ad-supported.

 http://www.streamick.com/index.php

 Now, this service also acts like real tv, in that you can’t pause, rewind, fast-forward or even select particular segments to watch. But for those of us who don’t want to pay $100 for cable AND internet, it could be a good choice.

I’m still exploring the service, and it has enough professional content right now to keep me entertained…but only time will tell if this service really will make the cable companies scared.

Now, it’s off to watch some good ol’ SumoTV…

Big news from Joost… they just scored a big win in signing up entertainment giant Viacom. One of my criticisms in an earlier post was the lack of compelling content. Joining forces with the MTV, BET and Paramount parent demonstrates their ability to secure big-time partnerships in this space.

And that’s not all they’ve been up to over at Joost. Another beef I noted was the lack of support for the Mac… well just last week a version for OS X was introduced. Anyone trying this out? What do you think?

Heading to Sundance with 15 eager MBA students all addicted to independent film was a fantastic idea! Lots of great firsts — great films, beautiful mountains, oh and a few awesome star sightings (Queen Latifah and Darryl Hannah to name a few) - what more could you ask for? Plus, going on Park City TV for an interview about why a bunch of Haas students from DMEC would ever want to check out Sundance…. well, let’s just say it was a new experience, and I’m just glad I’m choosing a career that will put me behind the camera more than in front of one. If you want to check out Eric and my debut on TV go to:
http://parkcity.tv/live

When it’s done loading, choose Friday, January 26th. Our interview comes on at 6:20 pm. Enjoy….

This Sunday, look for a new development to make a splash during the Super Bowl- ads created by consumers.

While some advertisers, like Budweiser and Nationwide, will display their traditional, big budget, big name ads- companies like Frito Lay will showcase ads inspired by user-submissions, YouTube style. You can see some of the ads created by consumers and submitted to Frio Lay on YouTube now: submission 1 and submission 2

Who will win the “Talk of the Water Cooler” award- the traditionals or the user-generators? That remains to be seen. But the very fact that major marketers have even considered spending millions of dollars of air-time for ads created by regular joes certainly shows that a new era of advertising has been ushered in.

TV on the internet has just received a boost. Or should I say a Joost. What used to be The Venice Project, a quiet but not entirely secretive initiative from the guys who invented Kazaa and Skype, has been publicly announced as Joost, and billed as “truly interactive TV.” This is a good thing if you actually want to watch TV on your computer (although for now it has to be a PC).

I’ve been beta testing Joost, and sure it’s a cool technology. But I think I spent more time surfing and searching through the channel listings than actually watching TV. It’s great if you want to watch music videos or concert footage. Lassie re-runs? No thanks. Reality TV knock-offs? I’d rather watch animals doing bizarre things. Oh, well they have that too… on second thought, I’ll pass. So my early review is that the content leaves something to be desired. Maybe that’s why they’re still in beta. The good thing is they are working hard to sign up new production companies (it’s totally legal, they get content from studios and what they describe as “professionals and enthusiasts”).

On the flip side, there are some nice features.

• Interface- the interface is slick and original. It doesn’t look like any media player you’ve seen, and the controls pop up when you move to different parts of the screen.
• Channel searching- search by program title, actor, keyword, etc. This will be really useful when the content improves.
• Video quality- with most things I watched, the quality was great and the screen is big! One program was low res, but I think that was the fault of the provider (production company) rather than the player.
• Instant play- virtually no waiting for a stream to load up. This is a function of their peer to peer sharing format.
• Extras- Joost offers social networking features like chat, and personalization that improve usability.

Early reviews are mixed but these guys have a lot of goodwill built up from their previous projects. This is an interesting model, video first and social networking second. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the YouTubes and Yahoo Videos of the world, and how it competes with new offerings like Microsoft’s IPTV.