UtahSaint

Same interweb stuff, different year should be this years mantra. MC Hammer, sorry, he’s just known as “Hammer” now-a-days is probably sick of the big-pants comments and wants to be known as a serious bithnessman. “There is no high-tech lingo or business strategy that you can talk that is above my head. I breath this stuff.” he told the AP whilst announcing DanceJam, the latest effort to topple YouTube and become a dominant player in the online video scene.

Dubbed the “fight of the century”, the Floyd Mayweather vs. Ricky Hatton fight no doubt drummed up millions of dollars on HBO and all the other PPV channels around the world. At $49.95 to watch the fight, I skipped it, even though it had my hometown hero The Hitman as the star attraction. Reason why I skipped: YouTube Yet again, YouTube proves it’s almost impossible to police video content from users. A simple search for Mayweather v Hatton followed by sorting by date gives any visitor the chance to watch either the full fight, the last round or just the part where Mayweather is consoling Hatton. I’m pretty sure HBO and the promoters will be all over the videos and demand they are taken down, but at 8am on the day after the fight, I’m pretty sure many boxing fans, who for so long have seen the sport placed in the same conversation as WWE, will be quite happy!

In the late eighties/early nineties UK broadcaster Channel 4 launched a new program titled Network 7. This was pretty innovative stuff - with short features, news articles served as entertainment and random acts of stupidty served as infotainment. All in all, it was pretty much the same as Fox News, but without the BS or pretense that it was all factual.

Surprising to see the BBC are now displaying online ads on their website starting today. The ads, using IAB standard skyscrapers (and I suspect leaderboards) are showing up inside the navigation bar on the left hand side (see image after the Jump) and are being handled by DoubleClick. Whilst the BBC have talked about it for quite some time, I’m sure they’ll receive plenty of feed-back, both positive and negative from users. I’ll be very interested to hear what their rates are, and more importantly, as one of the longest running and most respected websites, I’d love to see what kind of CTR performance they generate.

NBC and Fox are not rolling over to Google/YouTube and are launching Hulu, an advertising-supported video site with content from Fox, NBC, MGM and Sony in a bid to stop the tidal wave of people from watching stuff on Youtube. Taking another leaf from Google, a test version of the site is now live with plans to premiere a final version in a few months.