Podtech may be a perfect textbook example of how to lose $78 million quickly for the venture capitalist. The much ballyhooed start up was supposed to have become a giant in tech and informational video programming.  After sputtering along and never finding an audience, Podtech has been sold for les than $500K to the holding company Viewpartner.

What happened? A quick scan of Podtech reveals a complete lack of compelling content.

A few years ago, PodTech was a high-flying Silicon Valley web startup. First it offered podcasts, then video and a video player — and was aiming to become a video content network, that also provided advertising services to other video creators. It hired some big names in the technology media world, including Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble in January of 2006.

It raised $5.5 million in a venture round of funding from US Venture Partners and Venrock that year, then raised another $2 million from the same investors in 2007.

But the bloodletting started last summer. The investors, from my understanding, were looking to make PodTech more of a blog network, and didn’t see eye to eye with early employees on what, exactly, the company intended to be.

Top employees started to leave. One of the first out was Jeremiah Owyang, an online marketing expert who went to join Forrester as an analyst last August.

Then founder John Furrier left his job as chief executive of the company, last August. Scoble left late last year.

Furrier stayed on the board until he left that, too, several months ago, a source says.

Yesterday, a tipster told Valleywag that the company may have stopped paying employees after a “reorg” and was basically “in hock” to its investors. From what I’ve learned, at least the latter was true. (Venturebeat)

Consumers balked at Amazon’s Unbox service because it required the download and installation of yet another proprietary player. The current problem the download model is that the big studios currently insist on restrictive  DRM which puts restrictions on portability for viewing on other devices. Now Amazon is betting that consumers will take to streaming movies in  a pay per view format.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service. That is different from most Internet video stores, like Apple iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to endure lengthy waits as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

“For the first time, this is drop dead simple,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media. “Our goal is to create an immersive experience where people can’t help but get caught up in how exciting it is to simply watch a movie right from Amazon.com with a click of the button.”

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is also pursuing the technology and media world’s holy grail — an Internet pipeline to the TV. It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs. (New York Times)

Back in the day, like 2 years ago, TV stations had ‘Green Rooms’. Places where upcoming guests could be preped, preened and soothed before going on camera. Purpose was to calm the precamera jitters and get the guest in the right mood. The lubricant was usually free drinks and snacks. Well that may be coming to a close. A combination of technology and strangled budgets is making that room a thing of the past. Evidence by this —

That’s Ben Popken of the Blog Consumerist being interviewed via Skype Video at the station WTVT in Tampa, Florida. First, cool dude. Innovative too. It shows some intelligence of the broadcaster that the world is truly getting flatter. It will not be much of a leap that we will see a 3 way talking head Skype call on Sunday Morning with Chris Wallace. If you got that far then why even bother with having the Panel show up at the crack of dawn either. Just pipe them into the Skype conference and you are done. By the way Skype has been supporting video since early this year. See here.

My only question? When will Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit be doing this from his media center?

Linky.

The RIAA keeps claiming that artists are being kept in poverty by greedy radio stations who don’t pay for play, even though radio play is the industry’s top promotional tool, and bittorrent thieves. Outside of the “A” listers, very few artists have been paid much of anything by the big music companies who distribute their work.  Lyle Lovette provides a fine example of how even a top selling artist can come up short when dealing with the labels. Most would consider a 4.6 million album seller and “A” list performer who is treated well by big music, but even “A” listers come out empty handed in many cases.

 Lyle Lovett says he has “never made a dime” from album sales during his two-decade career, and hopes to rectify that situation when his contract expires. The eclectic country singer has two more albums on his deal with Curb/Universal, his home since 1985, and figures the horizons are wide open.

“The possibilities are very exciting, I think,” Lovett told Billboard.com. “I’ve never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I’ve been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows.”

Lovett, 50, has sold 4.6 million albums in the United States since 1991, the year when SoundScan sales data were introduced. His most recent release, “It’s Not Big It’s Large,” has sold about 145,000 copies since debuting at a career-best No. 18 on the Billboard 200 last September, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Yahoo)

Lyle Lovette’s case is not new or unique. The RIAA’s public parading of indigent artists in their golden years to push ever more draconian copyright laws is a ruse to keep attention away from its members business practices. By in large, big music, not the consumer is most to blame for the lack of payment to artists for recordings. This has been case since the industry began.

Since the invention of magnetic tape, a small number of individuals have copied and exchanged music, and the music industry has blamed them for artist’s poverty. Do you have an obligation to pay for music you hold a copy of? Yes, unless the artist freely offers it without payment. However, if you paid for a copy of the artists work, you should be able to move it to and play it on any device you like without the need to buy a new copy for each device.

The music industry needs to start paying artists fairly before blaming piracy for their plight. Unfortunately, an unchecked parasite will kill its own host before curbing it’s appetite. If big music continues operates like a parasite, it will be responsible for its own demise.

As we continue our death of pulp coverage, former newspaper writer and current tech pundit John C. Dvorak did a postmortem on the death of the print mews industry on the most recent Cranky Geeks program. Click here to view an excerpt focused on newspapers. Most interesting is how guest John Markoff, Senior Writer of The New York Times defiantly defends the incredibly poor decision making of his company’s management.

Google may have been a bit too hasty in responding the the Obama army’s group of internet activists who are working tirelessly to squelch any criticism, negative information on, or challenges to their chosen candidate. To be fair, most candidates have a little army of activists doing the same sort of work, however, their effectiveness is directly dependent on the persons and/or systems responding to their complaints. We’ve often heard that failure to exercise prudent due diligence before acting against sites flagged by fringe activists has been an ongoing problem at Google’s Blogspot. Perhaps it’s just the fault of automated systems being gamed or perhaps it’s……I won’t speculate.  If you don’t run with the Daily Koz herd, it may be in your best interest to avoid Blogspot as the place to express your opinion.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com a Web site that opposes Senator Obama. They include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.

In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by activists supporting Senator Obama. According to the bloggers, the Obama supporters had clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs alerting Google that they were spam.

If so, that would be an embarrassment for Google. On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.” (New York Times)

As the the death star and the cable guys continue their assault on free online video, Google just added their own take on how to get programing from the desktop to the living room. The app works in conjunction with Google desktop and serves to any UPnP or DLNA certified gadget you may have attached to the big screen.

While many UPnP server solutions already exist for Windows (it’s a pity Google hasn’t targeted Mac users), Google Media Server does bring a few specific features to the table. Namely support for Internet-based content from its photo sharing service Picasa, along with videos hosted on YouTube (using H.264 not Flash Video). From this we can conclude that Google Media Server is designed to make Google’s desktop search application that bit more useful, as well as offer another means of accessing YouTube on a TV. (Last 100)

Anyone who thinks that Google isn’t making incremental moves toward becoming the dominant content indexing and delivery service needs to spend a little time at burning man. More captive screen time, more ads, more profits.

While the debate continues over the actual impact of online viewing on broadcast industry in the US, it’s become the preferred delivery medium for the UK’s comedy fans. Availability of an increasing  connection speed with no fear of reaching a download ceiling will certainly aid the continued growth in this trend. Could it be our American duopoly’s slow connections and threatened monthly download quotas will negatively impacting our entertainment industry?

Here’s something for all you statistics fans out there. Up to 40% of total viewing of BBC3 sleeper hit comedy The Mighty Boosh is via the iPlayer broadband TV catch up service, according to the BBC. 40% - and that’s not including all the students watching the Boosh on YouTube.

Amid all the hand wringing in recent years about comedy disappearing from TV - well the mainstream channels, anyhow - are we overlooking a flippin’ great resurgence for the genre through the medium of online video? (Organ Grinder)

How about accelerating the seed change that gained momentum during the recent writers union strike? The forces in play today could make that a reality.

It seems the actors union is feeling abused by the big greedy studios. Funny thing, the consumer is also tired of being abused by the big greedy studios and not as many returned to the big media’s realm after the last strike ended. With production grinding to a standstill in Hollywood again less than a year after the last walkout, it could end big media as we know it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Consolidation has built a monolithic Hollywood with few divergent ideas and stunted creativity. Any slowdown in Hollywood at this time will be a huge win for independent producers and non union craftspeople.Look for more from the mainstream to join them.

The contract dispute, this time between the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and their white-collar bosses, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), is causing what industry experts have called a “virtual strike”.

Production deadlines for dozens of major projects have been scrapped amid growing signs that the SAG, which has 120,000 members, will fail to resolve its dispute before a deadline for industrial action on Tuesday next week.(The Independent)

Lest you Dear Reader as the last hold out as a NYT reader, changes are coming to the media industry. We mentioned here how bad it is getting in the revenue phase. But as Ed Driscoll points out, when they erect a museum to your profession, your job is about over.

Ed Driscoll is of course a blogger. He has thoughtfully produced two pieces that summarize what we are observing in the shift from pulp to electronic information media. Highly recommend you watch both pieces that appear at the bottom of the article, located here.

Enjoy.