Last week Eric Schmidt spoke with the LA Times (found via editorsweblog) about the recent deal that Google has made with Lionsgate, and also about how newspapers were going to have more trouble adapting to the internet than video.
There are three things about this interview that I want to highlight:
1. The reason that Schmidt thinks video is OK and print is not is not just the split between entertainment and news (as he implies). The reason is that there’s currently no good way to track print content to its original source the way video can be tracked.
YouTube can pay Lionsgate because it knows which videos are Lionsgate property, regardless of where they’re being played.
2. One of the major shifts that I think might have to happen for newspapers to start seeing real online revenue is tied directly to Google’s self-admitted “moral obligation” to help print publisher’s out: it needs to help publishers protect copyright in the only way that matters — revenue.
This is yet another one of those posts that I haven’t had time to write yet. Google should work on a system whereby ads served against words will always pay back to the content originator, not simply the site it is on, which means that suddenly newspapers will get the revenue from all the sites that re-serve their content against Google ads.
3. I think Eric Schmidt is actually wrong about how you’d put together a modern day Sopranos series. He says you’d do a weekly thing and then schedule teasers and text messages and what not.
I think that the idea of getting people to schedule their lives around TV programs or news is a thing of the past. TiVo, podcasts, the internet all treat timeshifting as core elements, and it is one of the big drivers of internet-based video: watch it on your schedule, not theirs.
Expanding this to newspapers: papers need to make their news available to consumers on their terms, not on the paper’s terms. There are too many competitors, and news is too interchangeable (one AP reprint for another…) to rely on forcing consumers into anything.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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