A press release laid out some of the new offerings, including:

“Blockbuster films The Hunger Games, the Twilight movies, Tyler Perry’s Madea Gets a Job, Skyfall, Rocky, Fargo, Flight, Paranormal Activity 4, Act of Valor, Safe Haven, House at the End of the Street; independent films from Film Buff’s catalog including Charles Swan and Exit from the Gift Shop; and TV shows like Mad Men, Border Wars, Great Migrations, Amazing Planet; as well as educational content via Little Pim, the leading foreign language learning program for young children, plus many more.”

The Nook Video store already included content from HBO, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Starz, Viacom and Warner Bros, plus some Disney movies. Barnes & Noble says the store has “thousands” of titles and is adding “thousands and thousands more.”

A number of Nook Video’s offerings are also available for streaming from Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video. Unlike those companies, Nook doesn’t offer streaming memberships — content has to be purchased à la carte on a Nook tablet. (Barnes & Noble says the content will be able to be streamed from its website soon.) It’s certainly an option for someone who already owns one of these devices, but it’s unlikely to draw users away from Netflix, Amazon or iTunes. Adding these titles is B&N’s attempt to create a viable media ecosystem for Nook — and the company insists it’s “committed” to these devices, even as Nook sales plunged in the last quarter.

This story was updated at 3:24 p.m. ET with a comment from Barnes & Noble on how many titles Nook Video contains.

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

Let me say that again: a door-to-door salesman.

I think that’s a first, for me at least. While lots of internet services market heavily — television ads, radio spots, billboards, leaflets and print — I have never come across this sort of feet-on-the-street approach before. Trying to prevent customer churn is one thing, but this just has the ring of desperation about it… and comes as another piece of anecdotal evidence that suggests Lovefilm’s feeling incredible pressure from Netflix.

When Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland a year ago, it was a clear who would be in its sights. Reed Hastings and his team may say they are targeting the bigger pay-TV services, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, but their first hurdle was undoubtedly trying to surpass the Amazon-owned rival.

Lovefilm has been competing where it can, particularly in trying to head Netflix off at the pass by signing exclusive content deals with Universal, Fox, and others. But it’s also trying extremely hard to defend itself by stopping customers from fleeing: when I tried to unsubscribe a while back I realized it was one of those irritating services that forces you to phone up to cancel (a surefire sign that I will never go back).

And you can’t blame them: it would take a brave gambler to bet against the American company right now.

Netflix is storming on almost all fronts, from its acclaimed original programming, to its balance sheet: Wall Street loves it again, as it finally recovers from the farcical series of events it inflicted upon itself in 2011.

And that is having an impact on its rivals.

Former Lovefilm boss Adam Valkin told me last year how the company had feared Netflix since 2004. And though Netflix still has some way to go — it’s still unclear whether Netflix is making inroads against its real targets, the broadcasters, and claims almost dubiously high membership numbers across the British Isles — it definitely has some crucial competitors, at least, running scared.

The defining feature of Twitter used to be the brevity of its messages: 140 characters and no more. Debates periodically flared up about whether this would ever be increased, but Twitter made it clear that it had no intention of expanding the nature of a tweet — until it decided to do so itself, of course. Expanded tweets or “Twitter cards” were launched in stages, first with a redesign of the company’s website and then with the mobile apps, all of which allowed additional content from certain partners (photos, video, music links, etc.) to appear inside a frame within Twitter.

Six-second video clips — the essence of simplicity?

Now users can download the Vine application for iOS, which was developed by a company that Twitter recently acquired for an undisclosed sum, and create short video clips (no more than six seconds) that they can share on the network, which will show the entire clip inside an expanded tweet. Although they use video, the effect is similar to that created by Cinemagram, a service that lets users create small animated GIF images from photos, as well as Viddy or YouTube’s new Capture app.

To some — including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who raved about the experience on Twitter after the launch — the effect is artistic:

Vine is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. Not just because of the team, because it brings an entirely new art form to the world.

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) January 24, 2013

To others, however, having tiny video clips auto-play inside your Twitter stream is annoying (the clip that Vine used on its blog announcing the launch was a good example). As my GigaOM colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the news, other short video services such as 12seconds have not lasted very long once people grew tired of the novelty. Will Vine be any different? Animated GIFs have become part of the media sphere — with some sites such as Tumblr creating specific GIFs for news events like the presidential debates — but they are still a relatively niche attraction.

What is Twitter’s vision of the future?

But apart from the ephemeral nature of Vine clips themselves, for me the launch raises questions about what exactly Twitter sees as its unique value proposition in what has become an increasingly crowded media environment. Not so long ago, Jack Dorsey — who is widely admired as the product visionary behind Twitter, although he is no longer the chief product officer there — made it clear that simplicity was one of the core aspects of the service. Does showing movie clips inside a tweet really fit that description? You could argue that it’s better than full-length movies in a tweet, but still.

And what about the decision to acquire Vine instead of just partnering with it, or giving it the ability to embed content via expanded tweets? Jason Goldman — who was the former VP of product at Twitter before he left to join Twitter co-founder Evan Williams at Obvious Corp. — said in a tweet that he thought acquiring Vine and leaving it as a standalone entity (in much the same way Facebook did with Instagram) was a stroke of genius for the company, but others aren’t so sure.

Acquiring and launching Vine as a separate product and brand is one of the best product decisions Twitter has made.

—
Jason Goldman (@goldman) January 24, 2013

Perhaps Twitter sees the potential for Vine to be monetized by including product shots for commercial brands inside tweets, something that might help the company generate the kind of revenue it needs to justify its estimated $10-billion market value. That’s a goal that has also led Twitter to shut down partnerships with services like Instagram and Tumblr, which it sees as competitors, and restrict what others can do with Twitter data. But are those good decisions for users, or just for Twitter?

In a recent post about Twitter’s ambitions — or potential ambitions — to be a media company, John Battelle of Federated Media wrote about how the service could not only curate but eventually create media, and I argued that if it wants to do this, it is going to have to get a whole lot better at finding and recommending relevant content. Are millions of short video clips going to help it get there? I don’t see how. And adding more and more content to each individual tweet threatens to overwhelm a service that used to be a bastion of simplicity in an ocean of noise.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72

RIM is also adding more discoverability and social capabilities to the new BlackBerry World, allowing customers to share their content and app choices with friends through messaging and social networking apps, and even through a form of proximity-based communications. From the Inside BlackBerry Blog:

With BlackBerry World, there are various ways to browse, download, buy, and manage apps using a BlackBerry smartphone, BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, or desktop or laptop computer, — inspiration is at your fingertips. And if you find something you love and want to tell the world, you can easily share it with your friends over BBM, Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can simply tap smartphones together and invite your friends to download it — just like that.

There’s no word yet on how extensive RIM’s multimedia library will be, what pricing will be like, or whom the company is partnering with to supply those songs and videos. We’ll find out soon enough though. RIM said the new content would soon appear in the BlackBerry World web storefront, and in the coming weeks BlackBerry phone and tablets will receive software updates to reflect the app store changes.

In related news, BlackBerry is again publicly mulling the possibility of licensing the BlackBerry OS. In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, CEO Thorsten Heins said that RIM is now focused on proving its net-gen QNX-based OS BlackBerry 10 in the market. If BB 10 is a success it would consider licensing it to other manufacturers, Heins said – and not to just handset makers. The BlackBerry OS and RIM’s QNX automotive infotainment software are converging in a platform called Car 2, which could make BB 10 the first industry-spanning operating system.

Much of the coverage of Costolo’s talk has focused on the numbers he provided during the speech, including the fact that Twitter now handles more than one billion tweets every couple of days (it took over three years for the service to hit its first billion) as well as the promise he made that users would be able to download their entire archive of tweets by the end of the year — although Costolo hedged his bets about whether the company would be able to meet his deadline.

Twitter brings back the real-time, unfiltered conversation

But apart from those headline numbers, and some history about Costolo’s experiences at the University of Michigan, much of the hour-long talk (which is embedded below) was devoted to how the Twitter CEO believes that the service has reshaped and disrupted media. Ever since the invention of the printing press, he said, we have had what amounts to broadcast media of one kind or another: it is one-way, and while it achieves broad distribution, it loses some of the benefits of the original town square or what the Greeks called the “Agora,” where townspeople shared the news of the day.

“The interesting things about the Agora, the interesting characteristics of it, are that it was multidirectional, it wasn’t someone standing on a stage like I am with you and just dictating. So there was a conversation, a real dialogue [and] it was unfiltered, it was not interpreted… and it was real time.”

Along with all of those benefits, Costolo said, there were also disadvantages — in the sense that there was a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes and rumors, and the information took a long time be distributed. But while the invention of newspapers and radio and television solved the distribution problem and much of the accuracy problem, it dramatically increased the costs of distributing news or information, and it lost the multi-directional and unfiltered aspect that the town square used to provide. And it also made the news very “outside-in,” with observers providing the details instead of participants.

In a nutshell, that’s what the Twitter CEO says his network provides now: a way of injecting the real-time, multi-directional and unfiltered nature of the town square back into the media. And the best part, Costolo says, is that while most new technologies are disruptive to traditional forms of media — in the sense that they disintermediate them — Twitter is actually complementary to mainstream sources of media such as television. More than once, the company’s CEO referred to the “second screen” experience that Twitter provides for real-time events such as the Olympics and Hurricane Sandy.

Although Costolo said that the “town square” aspects of Twitter apply to all kinds of media and not just television, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of examples he used to demonstrate where he sees the company going — and the power he believes it has as a media player — involved television, and Twitter’s ability to drive viewership of real-time events. This was most obvious when he talked about the Olympics and how despite the criticism from Twitter users about NBC tape-delaying events, the viewership for those events was still the highest NBC had ever seen. And it raises questions about where Twitter is focusing its attention as it tries to reinvent itself (it’s also worth noting that if Twitter is a town square, it’s one that is owned by a single company).

“So along comes Twitter, and Twitter reinvents the Agora. We once start to see multiple perspectives on a particular news story or event that’s happening. We once again start to have a shared experience across the globe about what’s happening and what we’re viewing right now. We once get an unfiltered perspective on what’s happening. But at the same time, it complements all these traditional forms of broadcast media, and all sorts of fascinating in ways that we would have never predicted.”

Looking for the signal amidst the noise

Costolo also talked about how the company sees Twitter as “the pulse of the planet,” and said that one of the biggest challenges for Twitter is to figure out how to handle the massive flow of content it gets every day — and to sort through and filter that in a way that allows people to find the things they are interested in, and avoid some of the noise. But if you try to present just the best tweets, he said, you lose what he called the “roar of the crowd” during events like the World Cup, which is also an important part of the experience. Costolo said Twitter now has 1,400 employees and half of those are engineers.

The Twitter CEO also said that the large volumes of information and the large numbers of people participating in the network actually help, because “it helps us do things like dispel rumors more quickly.” After the riots in Britain last year, Costolo said, The Guardian newspaper did a study that showed that Twitter was particularly good at dispelling rumors about the riots — even though the CEO admitted that Twitter was also a source of some of those rumors to begin with.

“Again, if you think about going back to the Agora, what if everyone in the world is at the Agora? The benefits to that are we can see each other as people and not as cardboard cutouts. We don’t see these two-dimensional media filtered perspectives of people, we see the real person. The down side of that is, man, it’s noisy when everybody is there.”

Costolo said that solving the problem of managing the noise in Twitter while still increasing the signal for users was one of the biggest challenges the company faces in the future — along with the need to generate enough revenue to justify its $10-billion market value, presumably, although the Twitter CEO didn’t get into the details of how it plans to do that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

A new study reports that faster internet connections have made viewers more impatient, and that people begin abandoning videos if they don’t load within two seconds. Every second of additional delay results in approximately 6 percent more viewers jumping ship. This chart shows how about 20 percent of viewers are gone after five seconds but that viewers are slightly more patient for long-length videos:

The research comes by way of Ramesh Sitaraman, a computer science professor at UMass Amherst, who studied data representing 23 million video views from 6.7 million unique visitors. The study offers new metrics for streaming views to complement existing studies that describe the “four second rule” — the amount of time people will wait for a webpage to download. It also shows that people will abandon a video faster based on their type of connection (note how people are more patient with mobile) :

The study, which you can read for yourself here (PDF), contains no startling surprises — most of us probably suspected that people give up on watching videos that don’t load. But it does provide useful empirical evidence for companies who must decide how to invest architecture to support their video platforms.

Akamai, a content delivery network that helps sites speed up delivery, provided data and research space for the study but did not influence its findings, according to a spokesperson.

(Image by andrea michele piacquadio via Shutterstock)

AOL executives’ comments on a Tuesday morning earnings call suggest they believe the company’s future identify is tied to grabbing TV dollars and becoming a video powerhouse. And the plan is not a crazy one.

First, some context. Recall that, after getting thrown out of the Time Warner nest, AOL faced a bleak future of squeezing value from troubled content sites like Patch.com while watching its cash cow of dial-up subscribers slowly dwindle. Earlier this year, the end seemed nigh after the company sold off its patent portfolio and used the proceeds for dividends rather than reinvestment.

But now comes upbeat news. This morning, the company announced its best results in 7 years as ad networks and video platforms experienced impressive revenue growth. More striking, analysts sounded pleased as CEO Tim Armstrong and other executives described what sounded like a bona fide strategy.

That strategy involves pruning the company into three operational units: a membership and subscription group; a “content brands group” (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, etc); and an advertising group.

The first group amounts to a legacy unit that will presumably be spun off or milked for cash while the other two units could drive AOL’s re-emergence as a powerful media entity. According to Armstrong, advertisers are looking for “fewer, bigger partners” that can distribute their messages on a massive scale. If he is right, AOL is well-poised to offer ad buyers what they want through its network of content providers, partners and ad platforms.

And then there is video. Armstrong says AOL expects to do $100 million in video revenue in 2012 compared to $10 million two years ago and that video will eventually overtake display dollars. The company also claims it has moved from #27 in overall video views to #2, behind only YouTube. Finally, AOL predicts that 2013 will see more and more TV dollars pouring into its sprawling video properties.

If these predictions are even partly correct, it means that AOL has a leg up in the emerging (and lucrative) video ad market and that it will have to be less pre-occupied with the problem of mobile media consumption that keeps up other publishers up at night. Finally, AOL appears to be less distracted by pet projects like Patch which it has slimmed down and even predicts will be profitable by late next year.

AOL’s promise to pull off a third act as a video star doesn’t mean it has turned the corner on the soap operas and dysfunction (hi there, Arianna) that have plagued it in recent years. But it does mean that, for the first time in years, the company looks to have a fighting chance at a comeback.

Disclosure: GigaOM distributes some video content through AOL.

(Image by Matej Pavlansky via Shutterstock)

Partners so far include HBO, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, STARZ, Viacom and Warner Bros. Entertainment, plus “favorite movies” from Walt Disney. “Other leading studios” will be announced soon, according to the release. For now, Paramount and NBC/Universal are missing.

Barnes & Noble is partnering with UltraViolet, the initiative from Hollywood studios that lets viewers watch content across devices and aims to break Apple’s stranglehold on the digital movie market. (Amazon is also an UltraViolet retail partner.)

Many details are missing from the press release, including prices, availability and free streaming options (if any). It’s also unclear which devices — Nooks and otherwise — will support Nook Video. Barnes & Noble is expected to release a new tablet soon, and the company also promises “soon-to-launch free Nook Video apps.”

“Excited to see HBO join us in offering standalone streaming service in Scandinavia…what about the USA? We thought the first match-up would be in Albania.”

HBO had announced earlier Thursday that it was going to bring its programming to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland this fall. The network will be available via pay TV subscriptions, but viewers will also be able to subscribe to a stand-alone Internet-only plan – something that HBO has long ruled out for U.S. consumers. HBO Nordic will cost less than €10 (about $12.50).

This will mark the first time HBO and Netflix squarely compete for the same customers on the Internet: Netflix had announced earlier this month that it was going to bring its service to Scandinavia before the end of the year.