Whole Foods has been doing this for about a year with both audio and video podcasts, all of which are produced using in-house talent. Scott Simons, Regional Marketing Director, hosts the Secret Ingredient show. There has been discussion on the Yahoo Videoblogging List about this show and the opportunities to also integrate both freelance produced content as well as user-generated content. Word on the street is that Whole Food is not interested, preferring to control the show in-house. It’s a full service blog-based site, with comments accepted and RSS. Visitors can manually download the flash version of the episode, though that is not playable on most MP3 devices.

American Express last year launched LX.tv which is a combination traditional web site and video blog, using the “new” part of the media and not so much the “social” part of the media. It is Flash-based, which makes the site a bit slow for my tastes, but does allow the designers to create a very rich, urban mood and feel. They use freelance contributors and the episodes focus on restaurants (AMEX merchants) and celebrity/social life. You can get an RSS feed, and in their grab the embed code for each episode, but the flash programming makes that part very cumbersome and the interface is elusive unless you know what the little icons represent. Viewer comments are not accepted.

Starwood Hotels launched The Lobby as a text blog in 2006. It also hires freelance contributors around the world, sharing local life stories and virtually always ending with a link to a hotel or hotel service found in the region. They have started including YouTube-hosted videos made by their contributors. I really like the widget they have in addition to traditional RSS options.

We are in production with a Fortune 100 company to develop a branded show that is educational in nature. Naturally, the goal is to drive sales for this particular service, but the company believes (and so do we) that creating original branded content that is useful and entertaining using new media (aka your own internet TV station) is a terrific, largely untapped opportunity at this time.

There are many other examples of companies who are doing direct ad sponsorships of independently-produced shows. I discussed the Ford – Amanda Across America collaboration in this post with follow-up in this post. Earthlink was an early sponsor of the Washington Post video podcasts and pharmaceutical companies are pursing this as well.

I definitely have my preferences, based on years of experience as a consumer (!) and also the past three years of being on the forefront of creating audio and video content for the web. Keep in mind as well that the criteria will vary depending on your audience and your product/service – there is no cookie-cutter solution here. And if things go wrong, as they did on the Edelman-managed video for Walmart, do like Edelman did and learn from the experience. It’s not possible to know it all – and that’s the reason for us to keep talking. I look forward to reading your comments.

You can find me at these places on the web:
Twitter @ roxannedarling
Bare Feet Studios LLC
Beach Walks with Rox

…do everything I can to make the adoption of “new media” as easy for everyone as possible. We “early adopters” can’t forget that most folks are still digesting the internet as a whole, much less all it has to offer. There is so much more going on than Google, iTunes, and text messaging.

…remember there is a difference between sending a message and conversing. Spend more time talking face to face or on the phone with people. Text, e-mail, etc. are great for quick thoughts but can never replace the emotion of a great conversation.

…work to improve the quality and the content in my writing. I write more now than I have in years and I want my blog posts to be more than articles. I want them to inform, inspire, and entertain all at the same time. (Okay, this one is going to take a lot of work.)

…work to improve the quality of the audio online. I was listening to my son’s iPod the other day and realized that we’ve taught people to settle for audio quality that is, to put it politely, not so great. When we adopted the CD we sacrificed some depth to our audio, just as we did when we started using audio tape. Now that we are using the internet as our main source of music we have sacrificed even more or that sound quality. I heard a record the other day and I was blown away by the sound I had been missing. If you have some vinyl around you should do the same. (If you have no idea what a record is, please seek one out…maybe your attic?) I had become use to the sound of an mp3, probably downloaded a terrible bit rate. I will do whatever I can to hear more of what the musicians and performers worked so hard to put into their recordings.

…work to improve the quality of video online. The same challenge faces us with what we see online. With the advent of HDTV the bar has been raised even higher. What I see on my Smartphone should look just as good as what I see on cable.

…convince advertisers that the “new media” audience is of incredibly high quality and is worth more than a traditional media user. There are already scores of studies highlighting the incredibly high recall rates for online advertising (even higher with a mix of media), we need to get the advertisers to respect that and think beyond “cost per thousand.”

…enjoy more time outside the ether so that I can bring more reality into it. Pull myself out of the screen, away from the keyboard, and off the cell phone. I need to go outside and take a walk whenever I can. In fact, there’s a new layer of snow and a crisp morning waiting for me right now…

Happy New Year!

This post can also be seen at RemainComm.com

What does all of this have to do with Downloadable media? How will media delivery and consumption evolve on the Internet? It is helpful to look back to understand a likely pattern to emerge in the future. Back in 1995, one of the hottest destination on the web was a site which hosted a lot of user generated content. Geocities was eventually bought by Yahoo for twice the price Google paid for Youtube. As the web matures with professionally produced content and applications, the Internet traffic patterns are consolidating with the top 50 or so destinations driving a majority of the traffic and audiences. As we look into the future of video (and audio) on the Internet, I see a trend where the audiences will “go to” a few (consolidating) major web destinations on a regular basis, and a super large majority of consumers will “visit” their own “personal storage” on a super regular basis. Let us call this exploding personal storage as “my site”. My site is where all of my media is delivered to me. There are two forms of download deliveries which will end up my in my site (a) RSS based subscription content delivery (ex. using an application like iTunes, or the soon to arrive Adobe Media Player) and (b) Direct Downloads (ex. using applications like BitTorrent, iTunes store purchases, ripping web video with Real Player, etc.)

So why ADM? Media companies have known for a long time that content needs to be delivered to be successful. For example, Fortune magazine would much prefer to sell you a subscription for a fifth the magazine retail price. Therefore it is a no-brainer to assume all content producers, large and small, will want to prep their content for automatic delivery to subscribers. As consumers continue to snap up large high def TV screens, their tolerance for low quality web video is going to wane in preference to higher quality HD downloads. The problem now, is who pays for all this high quality content on “my site”? Clearly I will pay for the stuff I purchase from a content store. The majority of the content on my site will be free. It is becoming obvious that advertisers have a major role to play in making content free on my site. But there are a lot of open questions. ADM can begin to help answer some of these questions. Questions like – What are the standard forms of acceptable advertising on “my site”? How much should advertisers pay for “my site” audiences? What personal information, if any, should I disclose for the privilege of free content on “my site”? How is all of this measured? Can much of this be standardized in a manner acceptable to consumers, publishers and advertisers? Can the grand bargain of free content for advertisements be well understood and largely acceptable to “my site” audiences?

I founded Podbridge in 2005 to help monetize the “my site” audiences. Over the last two years we have seen a rapid expansion of the medium. Increasingly it is more video content. Big companies like Adobe are joining Apple in adopting RSS subscription media delivery. Many well funded peer-to-peer companies have come into existence to legitimize p2p download content. New attempts to bridge the media on the PC to the Television – ex. Apple TV and Sandisk’s TakeTV. In light of this type of continued expansion of the download medium, we announced today, we are changing the name of our company to VoloMedia (derived from the Italian word volo: flight) reflecting our company’s mission of helping publishers unlock the value of their video and audio content while enabling advertisers to reach the emerging and valuable “my site” audiences. At the end of the day, all of our endeavors will have been for naught if we do not end up in an environment of expanding opportunities for consumers to access to highly desirable downloadable media. That is the vision.