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The Genius of Charles Darwin

To mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins presents the ultimate three-part guide to Charles Darwin on Channel 4.

Shocked to hear that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary four out of ten British people still believe God created the Earth and everything on it. But perhaps this is unsurprising given that only a few hours are devoted to Darwin's ideas in the typical school curriculum. Dawkins struggles to win round a class of school children. His tested and forthright arguments are clearly no match for a lifetime of religious indoctrination.

Channel 4 websites have an all too familiar chaotic offering. A programme page offering embeddable clips with links to other programmes of interest but not the long form programme on 4oD. Searching Channel 4's site reveals great content from the Cheltnam Science Festival with additional lectures by Dawkins, behind the scenes footage, illustrations, pictures and text but no links to the clips or programme pages.

Dr Horrible

The world is a mess and I just need to rule it. - Dr Horrible

A few months ago I gave a presentation on how professional content producers will be siphoned off traditional platforms over the next few years. While I concentrated on on-air talent like Ricky Gervais, Stephen Fry and Chris Moyles, there may never be a better example than Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog, penned by godlike genius and creator of Buffy the Vampire slayer, Joss Whedon. To my mind it is the best example of on-demand TV to date.

Composed during last year's writers' strike, when Whedon found himself at a loose end, this is big TV production talent making something themselves and importantly something bespoke for the web. The first of three acts was released for free on July 15th and the final act on July 19th. From July 20th onwards all three episodes were available exclusively through iTunes where they continue to occupy 3 out of the top 5 TV download slots. This clever windowing gave access to all those with their ears to the ground (reviews and bloggers), to watch it for free and to tell the rest of the world it was unmissable.

While unquestionably ambitious from a TV perspective Whedon, who's known to be a bit of net-head, has sown his horribleness across the web with manifestations on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and YouTube. For me the icing on the cake has to be the Dark Horse comics and Dr Horrible / Captain Hammer t-shirts. Now if they'd make the Doc's X-Ray goggles available!

TV

Eventually everything connects

Thinking about how the BBC might produce more short form factual content and came across this:

Written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames in 1977 it couldn't be more suited for distribution and consumption on YouTube.

UK Video: YouTube still dominates

Loving the new look iPlayer. Came across this nugget on PaidContent.UK

Still, despite its strides, YouTube continues to dominate online video viewing in the UK, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). The research firm’s Video Metrix service found that Google--of which YouTube accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on the site--attracted a 48 percent share of all online videos viewed in the U.K, or an average of 81.1 videos a viewer. BBC sites came in a distant second with a 1.2 percent share, an average of 6.7 videos a viewer

Quick conclusions:

• YouTube dominates video search and delivery in the UK
• Users prefer short form video to watching long form VOD at present
• YouTube's dominance will decrease over the next year or so
• Comparison by session time necessary

Across the pond things are much the same with Google sites once again ranking as the top video property with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), gaining 2.6 share points versus the previous month. According to ComScore data the average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.

Hulu, the TV streaming service most comparable to the BBC's iPlayer, owned by NBC Universal and News Corp doesn't figure in the ComScore data. But according to Nielsen May was a different story. Nielsen reported that Hulu climbed to no. 9 among video sites, ahead of ABC.com (79.9 m streams) and behind CNN (89.7 m).

Last week, Hulu themselves reported that they saw 63 million streams during their first month of measurement, April 2008. Despite the number of visitors and streams, Hulu's success doesn't translate into big business. A recent Silicon Alley Insider article is speculating that Hulu will earn between $45 - 90 million during their first 12 months - April 2008 through March 2009. However, after paying off their content partners, their net revenue will be between $12.5 million and $25 million.

Television of Tomorrow

Cartoon genius Tex Avery produced this short in 1953, showing off TVs for smokers, water drinkers, and those afflicted by airplanes overhead.

The future of entertainment is a tricky subject and we're probably no more likely to end up with the right answer about where the future is leading us than Tex Avery did in his toon. Yet, if we look closer at this 1953 cartoon we see a number of trends we recognise today; the challenges of simplifying the technology and the audiences expectations of that technology is introduced into their homes, examples of customisation and specialised devices, the disruption of ordinary social life and it's reconfiguration in response to the media and towards the end of the cartoon we see new forms of interaction that reminding us of the Wii remote. The ideas of games and television are there from the very beginning - at least in the popular imagination.