ReadWriteWeb

I just watched a few minutes of Zach Galifianakis mock-interviewing Tila Tequila and Jennifer Anniston on a faux TV interview show online. Now I'm that many minutes closer to my inevitable death.

Clicker.com, the website that brought me this experience, worthless but for the 15 second pre-roll commercial now buried somewhere in the part of my brain that might buy things, has been acquired by CBS this morning and its leader will now run the Interactive division (the future) of one of the biggest media companies in the world.

Will hanging out with the geeks improve network news? Judging from CBS News anchor Katie Couric's comments at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, the potential is there.

Will it matter? In a news environment that has been irrevocably disrupted by the Internet, the role of broadcast news anchors has evolved out of necessity. Their ability to focus international awareness on the key issues of our time remains unparalleled, but the attention span and consumption habits of their audience has changed.

And so the question becomes: How will one of the nation's most familiar faces and sources for news will adapt, adopt and become adept in the context of a news cycle that refreshes as often as a click on a Web browser? By the time Couric presents the 22 minutes of news as CBS's anchor each evening, the Web has long since digested, analyzed and commented upon each item. There are few scoops by 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

CBS.com is experimenting with HTML5 video, the plugin-free video technology supported by Apple mobile devices including the iPhone and iPad. With HTML5 running on the CBS website's back-end, visitors from these and other Internet-connected devices could stream videos without having to install the Adobe Flash plugin, something that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is known to be vehemently against, having penned a public statement giving half a dozen reasons why Apple mobile devices won't include its support.

According to CBSi's SVP and GM of entertainment, Anthony Soohoo, CBS.com plans to reach HTML5 parity with the plugin-based Flash video, but is still trying to find the right mix of tools in order to do so.

How appropriate that these current tests utilize Star Trek Enterprise episodes for the experiments with this futuristic video technology.

NBC isn't hopping on the iPad bandwagon, according to recent reports. The media giant known for popular shows like "The Office" and "30 Rock" reportedly told Apple it won't be making any of its online shows iPad-compatible anytime soon. And it's not alone. Sources cited by The New York Post's Claire Atkinson say that Time Warner and several other "large media companies" are forgoing what they claim is an expensive reformatting of their video libraries.

But is conversion expense the real reason why some media companies are eschewing the Apple iPad craze? Or is the fact that the ad dollars just aren't there yet to make it worth their while?

CBS.com is apparently adding itself to the lineup of big-name media properties scrambling to get their websites ready for the upcoming Apple iPad, due out on April 3. Recently, both the Wall St. Journal and NPR.org confirmed that they were revamping their sites using HTML5 markup language, the upcoming Web standard that supports video playback without a Web browser plugin. The reason for the overhauls? Apple does not support Adobe's Flash technology on their mobile devices, a lineup that also includes iPhones and iPod Touches. That means that CBS.com's Flash-based streaming video wouldn't play on Apple's new slate computers - devices expected to land in the hands of anywhere from 1 to 6 million customers this year, depending on which analyst predictions you go by.

The words "mobile entertainment" are so overused that they fail to capture any real meaning anymore, but in 1999 Mobitv was one of the only companies trying to bring video to mobile phones. Today, most consumers would recognize Mobitv as the company that brings live CBS Sports coverage and NBA games to our iPhones. What many don't understand, is that in order to get all that great content onto our tiny devices, somebody had to convince Sprint, AT&T, US Cellular and Verizon to play along, while at the same time licensing enough high quality television content to make it a worthwhile service - President and Co-founder Paul Scanlan is that somebody.

Microsoft Silverlight may not be the first solution you think of when considering how YouTube might stream live TV. But in fact that's exactly what CBS used on their NCAA March Madness On Demand YouTube channel. It appears that the player and feeds for audio and video are coming direct from CBS, and upon further examination the Silverlight-powered player is identical to the one offered on CBS' own March Madness site.  We first heard about this new offering from a post on NewTeeVee.

Few elements of the "Open Stack" have garnered as much attention - or as much support - as OpenID, a way to use a single digital identity across multiple Web sites. That acceptance led ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick to call the OpenID Foundation "one of the leading organizations in the new standards world." In that same post, Kirkpatrick urged people to participate in the elections for the OpenID Foundation Board of Directors. Now, the time for that participation has come.