Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before It's Too Late | Hacker News Reader

Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before It's Too Late

techcrunch.com

6 pointspg12 comments

There's nothing to see here. This is not technology. It's not a site. It's not a product. It's just a handshake between a bunch of executives who think that having meetings about innovation is the same as innovation. They're equity partners in an idea. Which we all know isn't actually worth anything.

Actually, if they were innovating, or planning to innovate, that would be something. But they're not innovating (or rather, nothing in the article led me to believe that they are). They're desperately trying to find a way to map their business from the old media (Television) to new one (the Internet). The new transcends the old. What worked well on one isn't necessarily going to work well on the other, and unless they "get" this sometime between now and launch, they'll fail.

This is going to be something to watch as media conglomerates don't have a good track record with partnerships, especially with their Hollywood-sized egos playing into name selection.

I'm thinking the name is going to resemble that of a puppet company (think MovieLink) trying to be sexy, so it definitely won't contain the words "News Corp." or "NBC." They'll try to openly brand it this way so that Viacom and ABC have an option to join the syndicate. Such a move would obviously strengthen their leverage against YouTube, but would be difficult to pull considering we haven't heard any hard details as to how revenue sharing would work.

Just imagine throwing 4 retarded gorillas in one cage with one banana. All YouTube needs to do is sit back and press RECORD.

MovieLink sounds to be on the right track. Remember MusicNet? Ugh.

The Clown Co. execs will fumble this big. The good that can come from this is that conventional media might further understand the paradigm shift in how people want to be entertained. The record companies are still trying to get on the ball so it'll be interesting to see where this is heading.

If only one could buy puts on this thing...

You've got something there.

YouTube doesn't really "do" full-length videos (30 minutes+). At least, that's not what I use it for. It gives me my diet of 2-minute-max vids of clips off of the news, silly crap, and, well, mostly silly crap.

So I don't really see this as a YouTube competitor as much as an iTunes competitor. And I'm okay with that. I'm curious to see where this goes, even though I really don't see it being a "game changer," as they state in the press release. BitTorrent was the game changer. These guys are just trying to save their business models.

Oh man, someone's got to start the weblog to follow this thing. This has "desperate failure" written all over it.

So obviously that was a foolishly harsh take on it. Here's my optimistic take so you don't think I was too reckless:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5815

Maybe a "Fake Jeff Zucker" or "Fake Rupert Murdoch" blog.

True. Personally though, Fake Steve Jobs is one of those things that's too perfectly executed to even riff on.

This will be a gigantic failure. It will be fun to watch, too... like a giant car accident in slow motion.

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