Here’s What Oprah Should Have Announced

Only Oprah could make this choice and produced an immediate impact. Only Oprah could immediately make the Internet a viable platform for modern day broadcasting.

oprah.jpgLater today Oprah Winfrey plans to make public the announcement she made to her staff Thursday: “Oprah” will end its broadcast TV run in 2011 and she will concentrate her efforts on OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), a new cable network. Oprah is making a mistake! She should have gone direct-to-net.

First, a few givens. The local stations that currently run her show will be the biggest losers. Oprah has delivered killer lead-ins to local news for years. Oprah’s influence has been so strong it’s rumored many stations run the show as a loss leader knowing they’ll make it up during the news.

Second, Oprah will move to a new cable channel with no track record and currently no clearances. She will be on a channel t-b-a, but certainly not with the dial position and complementary programming (and promotion) she currently has.

As much as is possible when you’re the world’s best known TV host, Oprah will start from zero.

Establishing a new cable channel, even for someone of Oprah’s stature and means will not be easy. If anyone can make this a success she can, but there’s much more room for success if Oprah had blazed the path to direct Internet distribution.

To more and more people the Internet is a perfectly acceptable substitute for TV. With the ubiquity of high speed Internet picture quality is no longer a real concern. Hulu and Netflix have shown that. Even Youtube is getting ready to deliver HD quality videos.

Bandwidth costs, the deciding factor on video quality, continue to drop.

Going on the Internet gives Oprah a boatload of options.

  • The show could be served both live and on-demand to multiple platforms at multiple bandwidths.
  • Live events could be covered live without any worry about interfering with other scheduled programming. Imagine Oprah at the Oscars or at any compatible event.
  • Recorded shows could be served full and as smaller mini-episodes.
  • No need to share revenue with a cable channel or cable operators (by way of local spot breaks).
  • The total control that the Internet affords would allow more creative viewer interaction and sponsor opportunities. Spots don’t have to be the end all be all anymore.
  • The audience could be expanded to reach more working women via office computers and smartphone apps

My friend Brian Lapis points out Howard Stern’s diminution of reach and power since leaving terrestrial radio for Sirius. Stern went to a technology with a small installed base and then hid behind a paywall. Oprah doesn’t need to do that. I believe she can reach more people over the long run via the Internet than she could on TV simply by making herself available at more times and on more platforms.

Only Oprah could make this choice and produced an immediate impact. Only Oprah could immediately make the Internet a viable platform for modern day broadcasting.

Opportunity lost.

End Of An Era In Vegas

And now, they’re gone! Well, at least they’re gone at 99&#162.

On July 12, 2003, I wrote:

Before the hourly Fremont Street Experience started, Helaine took me to the Golden Gate Hotel. This is a Las Vegas tradition… actually more like a legend. You can go to the Golden Gate and get 99&#162 shrimp cocktails!

They were very good. The sauce is strong and tangy. The tiny shrimp are more texture than taste. But, it’s amazing that it’s still 99&#162.

And now, they’re gone! Well, at least they’re gone at 99&#162.

News from me is reporting the price has doubled to $1.99. That’s sad.

You can’t blame them. I’m sure even at $1.99, this is a loss leader. Still, it’s sad to see the end of an era.

They were really tasty.

Concerning Google – What An Idiot I’ve Been

What’s the biggest Internet success story? Google, right? And everyone, until recently myself included, thinks it’s because Google is so good at performing searches.

Tonight, I’ve changed my mind.

Before Google, there were some very good search engines. There were AltaVista and Metacrawler and others whose names are now lost to me. Yahoo!&#185 was more a directory than a search engine.

As a power Internet user in the late 90s, I was not unhappy. I was able to search and get the results I wanted with little trouble.

So why is Google such a big deal? It’s not the search as much as it’s, their search seems benevolent.

Google was very smart. They cleaned up the home page.

All the other site where you could find stuff were gravitating toward being portals. Their home pages were full of news and tips and links and they included display ads. It was obvious to their users, they were sales machines. Please click. Please buy.

Google was basically a box where you entered text and not much more. No ads.

But searching is not a one web page affair. The search page leads to the results page. No search ends on the home page. Google was satisfied making their money on that landing page.

After the home page, every subsequent page on Google does contain ads. And, they are contextually tied to what’s on that page. If it’s possible to say, they are good ads.

It’s genius. But I don’t think it would have worked had Google not been willing to treat their home page as a loss leader. No ads!

As time went on Google has been able to extend their brand. They have contextual ads on webpages, like this one (look to the right). The have a mail service, also with contextual ads. They have other services too, but the payoff (to them) is always the same, and you never see any sign of commerce when you begin to do what you want to do.

Even better, since each ‘lead’ is prequalified, they can charge a higher CPM.

It’s not like a movie on TBS, where the first block is 45 minutes long and by the end you’re stopping for spots every 120 seconds. Google works so well because they run commercials and no one minds!

In this TiVo world, where the publisher of the New York Times worries he won’t have a paper based paper in five years and where CBS has just announced they’re selling a handful of TV stations for a few million more than they paid for just one of them, Google has succeeded in making us forget they are running commercials.

It is the genius of what they do, and any other elegance in the performance of search is no more than an interesting footnote.

I doubt, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were testing Google at Stanford, they had a clue what their success could be. They were lucky wise to give away the product they had worked so hard to develop.

Business is always better when you don’t worry if people will buy what you’re selling, but instead try to sell what they are dying to buy.

&#185 – I have been on the Internet long enough to have sent a comment to Yahoo! and gotten a personally written response that referred to “Jerry’s reaction” to what I’d suggested. “Jerry” was Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang. That ain’t happening today.