Hey NBC -- grab a clue:
As an example of the kind of "viral marketing" that the Internet can achieve with very little effort, the so-called "Lazy Sunday" video from Saturday Night Live is about as good as it gets. In the clip, which was aired on December 17, comedians and show writers Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform a rap about how much they love cupcakes, and take a trip to see the movie The Chronicles of Narnia. The combination of the subject matter and the gangster-style rap made the video a huge hit over the Christmas holidays, to the point where it was downloaded more than three million times in just a couple of days.
What great advertising for NBC and the show Saturday Night Live, right? After all, the success of the video led to stories being written in the New York Times and elsewhere about both the writers and the show itself. So what did NBC do -- send a cheque and a big thank-you to YouTube and other sites that helped to drive this Internet phenomenon? Er, no. They sent a letter from their solicitors, telling the site to remove the video or face legal action.
NBC's argument, of course, is that this is a blatant copyright violation, and that viewers should be forced to go to NBC's website to see the clip (where it can be watched free of charge) or to download it from iTunes for $1.99 (U.S.). Why? So that NBC can make money from it, obviously. What seems to have escaped the network's mind is the fact that the video already aired on the program, and therefore has made as much revenue as any episode of the show normally does, not to mention the fact that the attention the video got could drive thousands more people to watch future shows. As usual, the network seems prepared to sacrifice all that free marketing for a little short-term profit. And that's why it's called "old" media.
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After email, then what?:
Last week, a short item appeared on a blog written by Garrett Rogers of ZDNet about something interesting he found while poking around in the Javascript source code for Google's popular web-based mail service Gmail: the word "domain." Putting two and two together, he theorized that Gmail would soon be offering a hosted email solution for anyone with a domain of their own - such as a corporation, for example, or a university. In other words, Google would be your email administrator, but the email would look like it came from your domain.
As it turned out, that's exactly what Google had in mind. The first glimpse was a note on Google's blog about the company providing hosted-email service for San Jose City College. A little while later, Google put up its hosted service "beta" test. In a nutshell, Google is offering a seamless email service to companies, with two gigabytes of storage space for each individual email inbox - and a webmail interface with their company's logo. For some companies, this could replace Microsoft's exchange server and Outlook email service.
That idea hasn't escaped Microsoft. The software giant has also been testing a hosted email solution as part of its Windows Live beta program, which gives companies up to 60 email inboxes (with 250 megabytes of space each). According to one report from a Microsoft insider, the company has a trial going with about 20 universities and has plans to add more. Some industry watchers have wondered, however, (and rightly so) just how committed to this venture Microsoft is likely to be, given that hosted email is almost certain to cannibalize its existing Outlook business.
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