Permit a short rant, please. This is one of those “revelations” that leaves you wondering what century we’re in. According to Curt Hecht, chief digital officer at GM Planworks, Starcom MediaVest Group’s dedicated media unit for General Motors (yes, THAT General Motors), the 30-second pre-roll spot may not be around long.

(Pause for effect) What a bulletin!

As reported in today’s Online Media Daily, Hecht says that consumer acceptance of pre-roll ads is “completely undetermined.” (Cough, hack, spit)

Forcing Internet users to watch a repurposed 30-second TV ad before a one-minute clip doesn’t make much sense, he said…

While the guaranteed impressions delivered by pre-roll ads appeal to marketers, they won’t amount to much if they end up alienating viewers. “If it’s not driving engagement, then the value proposition on pre-roll will be challenged,” said Hecht.

…Hecht said online video might borrow a page from PBS, where programs are preceded by brief sponsorship acknowledgements. “I really think that as a core model, having a lighter introduction and then something more substantial at the end makes more sense,” he said.

“The value proposition on pre-roll will be challenged.” Who knew?

When I read this, I immediately looked for the date of the article, because I assumed it was written two years ago. Where do they get these guys? I mean, this fellow is a HUGE player in the advertising world, and he’s just now coming to the conclusion that 30 second ads in front of clips are a turn-off? Do these people actually view what they sell? Apparently not.

In 2004, Microsoft did research that showed 7-12 seconds was optimal as a pre-roll. Have all these Madison Avenue types been living under a friggin’ rock?

This supports the old adage that nothing is real unless it’s real to you.

As the holidays approach, it’s time to bring “A Broadcaster’s Christmas Carol” back for new readers or those who just want a little entertainment for a December morning. File this under the category “time flies when you’re having fun,” for I wrote this (along with Charles Dickens) two years ago. 2006 has been a year when many broadcasters have had the awakening produced in old Ebenezer, but the lesson is still just as valid today as it was when I wrote it.

Last year, podcaster Hugh Brackett made an audio version of the story, and I will always be grateful for that. I think the story reads better than it plays, but if listening is your thing, Hugh’s made that possible.

Here’s a piece of news you’ll only get here. BIA Financial Network has revised their revenue projections for local television for this year and next. Mark R. Fratrik, Ph.D., Vice President, BIAfn, told me on the phone this afternoon that their “Investing in Television, 4th Edition,” which comes out next week, will project 8.7% revenue growth for 2006. That’s up from the 7.2% projection earlier this year. 2007, however, is being revised downward to a 1.3% decrease — down from the 1% increase that was forecast in May.

Prior to his job at BIAfn, Mark was an economist for the NAB for 15 years. He told me that political spending far exceeded anybody’s projections “It shows that television is a very valued part of the political advertising process,” he said, “even after all the other choices that are available today, which speaks well for 2008 and all of the even numbered years for a very long time to come.”

The odd years, he says, are what will make TV challenging. “In every odd year, broadcasters will be hard-pressed to even keep up with those revenues.”

He told me that Wall Street tends to get too caught up in quarterly reports, but that serious investors understand that this “piano key” graph is the pattern that they have to live with.

Meanwhile, E. W. Scripps Co. executives on Monday told analysts that they predict ad revenue at their 10 broadcast stations will decline 3%-5% in 2007, largely because absence of political advertising next year.

Frankly, I think this projection is probably more accurate for the industry as a whole. Political revenue surprised everybody, so the declines of next year will be more acute than what were projected before. We’ll see.

Scott Kirsner, author of The Future of Web Video, offers an interesting perspective in the San Jose Mercury News on what he views as a trend away from the amateur and towards the professional in online video consumption. Kirsner has little regard for what he views as amateur (pejoratively used) clutter (my term) that populates sites like YouTube, so the view espoused in this article isn’t surprising.

Kirsner is a very smart guy, and I love his blog. This article, however, left me scratching my head a bit. He argues very effectively that online video consumption is shifting to that which is professional, because media companies are learning that there’s money to be made. As such, more “good stuff” is appearing online, and people always gravitate to quality beyond that which can be sustained by amateurs.

In 1895, when the Lumiere brothers, August and Louis, assembled a paying audience in Paris for the first movie show, the program’s short films included “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory” and “The Sprinkler Sprinkled,” in which a prankster gets a gardener all wet. (YouTube now contains dozens of videos that echo “The Sprinkler Sprinkled,” many starring giggling, hose-wielding toddlers.)

In the early days of the Web, many of us visited homemade sites offering photos of people’s cute pets, lists of other interesting Web sites to visit, and information about whether the coffee was fresh on the fifth floor of the university science center. And because there wasn’t much else to do on the Web, lots of people stopped by.

…while amateurs may have a one-off hit video or a particularly thoughtful blog posting, media companies tend to be better at sustaining a consistent, lasting relationship with an audience…

Obviously, if you believe Kirsner, this is good news of traditional media companies, and I don’t disagree with that. There’s a lot of work to be done to make our material available via online channels, and the effort should return results in terms of revenue, if we play our cards right. It’s what I call online brand extension efforts.

But I think this misses the mark in three areas. One is that Kirsner’s talking about moving conventional television and films to the web — albeit in an unbundled form — without evidence that this is sustainable with the weakened Media 1.0 foundation that inevitably results. VOD plays are killing traditional video businesses (like TV), and it is those businesses that are offering this “professional” online video.

This short-sighted perspective assumes that content creation is still scalable, and there are many, many people now who disagree with that in light of long tail economics. I don’t care how you cut it, the money just isn’t there to support the kinds of professional videos to which Kirsner refers absent a thriving legacy platform, and there is little evidence to suggest it will ever be there. The real money downstream is with the aggregators of all that content, and that’s where Silicon Valley is putting its money.

Secondly, I think Kirsner assumes that mass marketing will always be the way media makes its money, and I don’t agree with that. Regardless of how clever one can be in assembling the mass, it will be rejected by those who are now tapping videos online — the people formerly known as the audience. We must remember that the reason we spend all that money to create a mass is to serve that mass with what Doc Searls calls “unwanted messages.” Give people the choice and what do they do? They skip those messages. In many ways, we’ve killed the goose that laid this particular golden egg, and I promise that the people formerly known as the audience won’t sit still for us duplicating the effort online.

Look at the CBS News experiment with a single advertiser. The audience loved it, and this is something that we simply cannot ignore. Time IS the new currency, and the perception exists that people don’t have time for all the ads. One third of prime time viewing is now marketing. One third! People with TiVos don’t skip ads because they hate them; they feel they don’t have time to waste watching them.

So any assumption that the new medium is simply a way for professionals to continue doing the same old thing is flawed.

The third problem I have with this is the assumption that every day people create these amateur videos for mass consumption in the first place. Little Jimmy doesn’t upload the neighborhood farting contest thinking that he’s going to win anything other than a few laughs from his friends. In the years ahead, the most-viewed HD video at home will be that which the family or family members shot for themselves, their relatives or their friends. Again, the aggregator is the one who benefits from video uploads.

In summary, I think much of what’s in this article is spot-on, but it doesn’t change my message to media companies that we have to start functioning as more than content companies, if we’re to survive in the Media 2.0 world.

Business Week’s Jon Fine is reporting that talks are underway between the networks to create a one-stop site for all their video content to compete with the Google/YouTube juggernaut. At the same time, Google is offering the nets HUGE sums of cash (nine figures) for rights to their content. Here are the key graphs:

Such a sum far exceeds what any single broadcast network can extract from the online world–and drops straight to the bottom line. But taking the dough fortifies an already threatening rival. One executive privy to the discussions says: “The reality is, if they are able to lock in major media [companies] for three years, then by default YouTube is the place to go” for Web video. Such fears may be what’s spurred several major media players to mull assembling a cross-company Web video destination–a YouTube killer of their very own.

“The theory is that if you were to aggregate enough exclusive content in one place, you could actually change viewing patterns,” says an executive familiar with the cross-company talks. Perhaps anticipating my jumping all over the fallacy of “exclusive” in an open online ecosystem, he concedes “it’s really tough,” though not impossible.

I continue to believe that cutting deals with companies like Yahoo to present our local content is penny wise and pound foolish. Better to create a local video portal that includes everybody, but that would take a level of cooperation heretofore impossible in any market. Stay tuned.