Eastern Syndicate

Great, another Boston-New York championship game. Just what we need.

I'm not a fan of the Least Coast, especially the northeastern section of our country. Hate the time zone. The Bawston accents. The NY cockiness. Now we have to go through the annual two-week hyperbole of "the greatest game ever played."

I'm still pissed the Cowboys blew it in the Divisional Round but the fact that their division rival Giants are going all the way only fuels the fire. I guess I'll root for the Pats only to wach them run the table at 19-0. But I'll definitely take the 14 points that Vegas is giving the Giants.

I'm more interested in learning about the TV spots airing during the Super Bowl. $2.7 million per 30 seconds is again a record amount but most all of the advertisers will realize most of that money in the exposure leading up to the game.

We'll soon see snippets of the ads on YouTube, sponsor websites and entertainment shows. USA Today will have a daily watch of celebrities, athletes and pets starring in them. We already know that Justin Timberlake will dance in a Pepsi ad with an Amazon tie-in. Note: free music downloads!

Oh well, we'll still celebrate February 3 around here. I turn XLIII.

YouTube the next Clear Channel?

Mark Cuban is pissed. Maybe because his Mavericks were knocked out of the NBA's first round of playoffs. But he ain't happy.

His latest blog goes off on YouTube (remember late last year when he said any company thinking of buying YouTube would be a stupid mistake?). YouTube just announced a pay-for content program that would pay content owners money for their content (note to self...create content!).

Cubes says that YouTube

immediately went from a small but interesting community for its original content, to basically being just like Clear Channel, responsible for programming its different "formats" with the "best" possible content that creates the greatest number of eyeballs and maximizes advertising revenue. It's big business, just like Clear Channel.

And what's wrong with Clear Channel??

More Awards

YouTube announced its first-ever awards, naming winners in seven categories ranging from Best Comedy, Best Series to the Most Creative.

No surprise in that Most Creative contest...OK Go. The band. Their ubiquitous treadmill music video still captivates me; just how many takes did they do to get it right? Amazing. And that lead singer looks eerily like Chris Baker with big glasses and sideburns.





Check out all the winners here.

Big Day For Your Videos

Apparently Microsoft has a great sense of timing or they decided to roll the car out of the garage at an ironically good time. The MSN gang sent out a mass email to beta subscribers today to stand on their Soapbox...the same day that Google agreed to fork over $1.65 billion for YouTube.

My beta invite arrived late this afternoon and I heard from several people who got the same email today. One of the folks I used to work with at Sidewalk.com is on the Soapbox team up in Redmond. He said they burned the midnight oil for the past few weeks getting this product out the door.

As we have been talking about on the radio show for a while Soapbox is Microsoft's attempt at the video sharing craze. In typical MS form, it may be a little too little and a little too late. YouTube is the category killer here (see also iPod:Zune, AIM:MSN Messenger, Netscape:IE).

I just uploaded a few videos to my Soapbox account to test the process. I had a few issues with some formats - an .avi file did not seem to load on the site but this is why it is in beta mode. It supposedly will publish video from "any major digital video format (AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP, DV, H.263, H.264)." Like YouTube it uploads relatively fast and there is a waiting period of at least several minutes while it is processed on their servers.

Interface seems pretty clean and some people are already using it as I received a comment on a video within a matter of minutes after uploading them. And like YouTube it is possible to embed the videos in any web page like this:

To see some of my other videos do a search on my name once you get in to the Soapbox website. I promise I will come up with more compelling video soon. If not I'm turning my video camera over to my kids.