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Source:Mashable!

The BBC announced today that it would start offering its TV shows on its iPlayer service for longer than the seven days it originally offered them.  According to the organization, its “series stacking” initiative is one that should see more people watch its shows.

Prior to this announcement, BBC only allowed shows to air for seven days before it took them down.  But after realizing that most customers didn’t approve of such a policy, it reversed its stance and said that videos would be left on the site ‘indefinitely’ to allow users to catch up to their favorite shows.

Perhaps more importantly, the BBC announcement also included a point that would see the entire season of shows be made available and not just a select number.  According to the BBC, that more than anything this should see customers find more reason to use iPlayer.

But the BBC announcement runs in direct contrast to what’s currently offered on services like Hulu or Fancast, which only offer a select number of episodes from shows for a finite amount of time.

The BBC’s decision to do this runs directly against the services currently being offered on Hulu.  For its part, Hulu offers shows like The Office for a limited amount of time and only does so at about four to six episodes at a time.  That said, shows are made available (usually) right after they’re aired live.

Regardless, it creates an important dynamic in the space and could put the onus on US sites to do the same sort of thing.  After all, don’t users want to have constant access to as many shows as possible?

The BBC has made the right move in this regard.  It has finally realized that allowing people to watch shows and do what they want with available videos is the key to its success on the iPlayer.  And if it proves to be a success — and it probably will — look for Hulu and others to follow suit.

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Source:Mashable!

Jackie Peters is CVO and Founding Partner of Heavybag Media

I am pretty heavily involved in the expanding startup community here in LA and make my way up to the Bay area on a regular basis. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and see new startups every day. Many of these companies and the entrepreneurs who found them are deeply ensnared in the echo chamber, they’re all drinking each other’s Kool-Aid. We’re talking about people who are not just at the top of the technographic ladder, they’ve gotten to the roof and are looking down on everyone else like they are a bunch of ants.

We forget that there is a whole world out there. Most people have never even heard of Twitter, Brightkite or many of the other services that we have become accustomed to using. It’s a given that eventually these sorts of tools will be adopted by a larger audience, but only when they add real value and only if we present them in a way in which the barriers to entry are minimal.

I believe that if an idea is ever going to make it out of the echo chamber and appeal to a mass market, a company needs to be mindful of the market it’s hoping to serve from the get-go. It’s not enough to have amazing technology. In the end, very few of these companies are technology companies; they are simply built on technology. These companies typically begin with an initial vision that the founder(s)/ CEO use as their road map for success. Having an amazing vision is a requirement for sure, and it’s a great starting point. But rarely is the original vision the best outcome.

The initial vision is basically just one person’s idea of what they think will be cool, successful and profitable. Ultimately, it’s up to the market to determine what meets their criteria. The CEOs that I have admired the most are the ones who use that initial vision as a launch pad, and then listen to their market and iterate on their product, their brand and their marketing strategy to align themselves with their audience.

Photo Credit: 4pizon

It breaks my heart to see so many startups with amazing technology, brilliant minds, and visionary leadership fail due to the fact that they never bothered thinking about the market their product is designed to serve, or worse, they never saw the bigger picture of how their technology could be applied to better serve a larger, or more profitable market.

Good example: Private Beta strategies. It’s typical for most Web-based startups to implement a private Beta strategy, they invite people in who, in exchange for having a sneak peak, will find the bugs in the site, offer their feedback on the experience overall, and in some cases blog about the product or otherwise leverage their social graph to spread some buzz on behalf of the new product. It’s a sound strategy in many ways. Here’s the problem: the typical private Beta invitation list is primarily key influencers within the echo chamber. Is this minute portion of the population really the target audience for most of these companies? If they are, then how do these companies ever plan on monetizing?

An entrepreneur came to me recently with a new online product. It took fantasy football, a very middle-America sort of activity and added components which socialized the process and made it more interesting and captivating for the user. He was concerned that his product might not appeal to his audience and asked me for my advice. He had been describing it to some of his non-tech friends as being like “the Digg of fantasy football.” To which his friends responded, “What’s Digg?” You see, we forget the rest of the country isn’t up here on the roof with us. My advice to him was to explain the product from the point-of-view of the market it was designed to serve. Don’t worry about middle-America grasping on to social media.

Social media in another year or two will be non-existent, it will just be the Web, same as it’s always been, just the next evolution. We don’t need to confuse the masses by getting over their heads with all of the technological mumbo jumbo. We just need to integrate the functionality into our products and services and make sure that there’s a good enough reason for doing so - that it adds value and fulfills the needs and desires of a market, the rest will fall into place. So rather than focusing on the technology, why not focus on how the product makes the user’s experience better.

And what about the marketing strategies these companies employ to let the world know about their product? It’s understandable that a company that’s based on technology would want some presence within the tech world. In the fund raising process it’s essential to be visible and generate buzz within the community so that the investors know you’re there. But beyond that, these companies need to look at themselves and decide: Are we really a technology company? In most cases the answer is no. The answer might be: “We are a social shopping company” or “We are a search and discovery company” or “We are a music company” or “We are a dating company” or “We are a travel company” and so on. I see it over and over again, these companies and their agencies are so mired in the tech world, so caught up in the echo chamber, that they never break out, they stay inside and slowly whither away.

Who cares about the echo chamber? Who cares if they like your product or not? What every startup should be thinking about above all else is their market. How are you going to make money? Where is that money going to come from? And do everything in your power to make your product, your marketing communications, your brand, everything about your company, about one thing: Appealing to and serving the market that is going to make you profitable.

[Canyon image credit: James Marvin Phelps (Attribution)]

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Source:Mashable!

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new solution called Ubiquity, which will try to bring a disjointed Web together under the auspices of that one solution.

Ubiquity will try to “connect the Web with language to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”  More specifically, Ubiquity will try to get users to type what they want to do instead of what they’re trying to find in a search box, enable more mashups to increase the usability of different Web services, and extend browser functionality to make it a hub for online solutions.

As part of its announcement, Mozilla Labs announced Ubiquity 0.1, which will demonstrate some of Ubiquity’s concepts and its potential.  This first release focuses more on the platform itself, which the subsequent release will “explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.”

Mozilla also said that Ubiquity 0.1 will allow “users to map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; look up and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more.”

At this point, Ubiquity is obviously a crude version of what could possibly be, but it promises more than it currently offers.  And by performing the kind of functions that are simply impossible today (Mozilla mentions the difficulty with which people can work together on mapping), Ubiquity could be the centerpiece of the Web’s evolution.  At the very least, Mozilla hopes so.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under News, web 2.0, web, mozilla, firefox, San Francisco-San Jose, Ubiquity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.