Author: Philip

Categories
Distribution Media Consumption

What is the future of broadcast and cable TV?

The catalyst for this post was Henry Blodget’s provocative post Sorry, There’s No Way To Save The TV Business. There’s a lot in the article I agree with, but also a lot of good counterpoints in the comments. Clearly it’s not yet universally agreed upon!

That article alone would probably be worth commenting on, but add it to a whole bunch of other articles I’ve been holding for comment:

TV: The Next to Fall by Jeff Jarvis at Seeking Alpha (i.e. strong/good) Media

We’ve been wringing hands over newspapers and magazines, but TV and radio aren’t far behind. Broadcast is next.

It’s a failure of distribution as a business model. Distribution is a scarcity business: ‘I control the tower/press/wire and you don’t and that’s what makes my business.’ Not long ago, they said that owning these channels was tantamount to owning a mint. No more. The same was said of content. But it’s relationships (read: links) that create value today.

Why Television Needs a Reality Check on Sustainable Business Models by Diane Mermigas

Time for a reality check. You know your business model is in trouble when …

Revenues and free cash flow recede and profits evaporate

The TV Industry Is Terminally Ill by Bruce Everis, also at Seeking Alpha

The demise of TV is because it is old technology. Quite frankly I find it pretty boring these days. They just cannot compete with computing, the internet and gaming. And they cannot compete because they are not interactive (except in a farcically limited way), they do not connect the user with other users and their content is purely linear. Their main market now is the educationally subnormal, geriatrics and babies, because these are the only people left who aren’t online.

Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable in the New York Times by Tim Arango

For decades, the big three, now big four, networks all had the same game plan: spend many millions to develop and produce scripted shows aimed at a mass audience and national advertisers, with a shelf life of years or decades as reruns in syndication.

But that model, based on attracting enough ad dollars to cover the costs of shows like “Lost” and “ER,” no longer appears viable. Network dramas now cost about $3 million an hour.

The future for the networks, it seems, is more low-cost reality shows, more news and talk, and a greater effort to find new revenue streams, whether they be from receiving subscriber fees as cable channels do, or becoming cable networks themselves, an idea that has gained currency.

For Television, It’s a Whole New World again by Diane Mermigas

Anyone expecting television advertising–including network upfront spending that could decline more than 15%–to rebound to former levels is in serious denial of the deep-set economic changes underway.

Systemic shifts in how companies and consumers make and spend money could throw media and other commercial players into a death spiral if they are unwilling to alter behavior and expectations. Advertising is not going away, but its fundamental economics are changing. That makes widespread media market deflation and deterioration (the worst being local media) much more than a cyclical glitch, according to a new Goldman Sachs report.

There are others but it’s too depressing for a Monday evening!  For an industry that’s still making money and still incredibly popular – latest figures show the average American viewing about 310 minutes a day (just over 5 hours) – that’s an awful lot of doom and gloom.

And probably unjustified. New technologies have never wiped out any preceding industry. Film did not destroy stage. Radio did not kill film. Television killed neither radio nor film. It’s unlikely that Internet Video or Internet TV (call it what you will, I still like New Media with the caveat that it’s unmediated) will replace Television.

What has happened is that the role of different media has changed. Radio has few panel or game shows and very few drama programs anymore. These have migrated to Television. A lot of film production is dedicated to Television distribution so, instead of replacing the Film Industry, Television helped it grow.

So, it’s likely that Broadcast Television will remain – the big four networks will have a role. But I think we’ll see it change to feed the few mass markets remaining: sports (definitely); news (although most TV news is pre-recorded and edited before the broadcast); reality television, talk and game shows (because they’re relatively cheap to produce).

Pretty much everything else will migrate to on-demand consumption. There’s little loyalty to a channel, but there is loyalty to the programs. What a lot of TV executives haven’t yet realized is that people don’t care about their network or channel, just the individual programs that they carry. Increasingly – since the Betamax in 1976 – that has been consumed on the viewer’s schedule. The only thing I’ve watched real time in the last three years has been the Superbowl, because I’m at a Superbowl party! (And to be truthful, I’m there for the party and people first, the ads in the broadcast second with little interest in the actual game.)

As the audience for drama and comedy splinter, the advertising supported model is almost certainly unsustainable. Advertising online isn’t going to match broadcast revenues per viewer leaving only subscription or direct pay to support quality programming.

Not that any of this is going to happen overnight. Still, I have to agree with the doomsayers: the traditional advertising supported broadcast model (aped by most cable channels) is unsustainable long term for most programming.

Categories
General

How has the Internet changed viewing windows for Programs?

I was reading and article on TorrentFreak discussing how the unaired (in the US) finale for Prison Break is already available via bittorrent sites. 

For those not following along, Prison Break wrapped up its run recently, without being renewed. Fortunately the producers and writers had enough notice that they were able to wrap up storylines for a neat ending. (I wish more shows would do that – even if it meant doing a special for the following season to wrap stuff up. But I digress.)

What’s different is that Fox didn’t really show the last two episodes on US television, withholding them for July 21st release on DVD. This is called artificial scarcity, or more accurately an attempt to create scarcity where it really does not exist, since these episodes were shown in non-US territories. The global nature of media consumption being what it is, there’s no way that program owners can artificially limit access, once it’s been broadcast or made available anywhere. 

In fact, it’s one of the things that will drive non-authorized viewing that does not accrue to the producer/copyright owner. 

Here’s the message if you’re a content owner: do not try and manipulate your audience, they’re smarter than you are. If you won’t provide your customers with:

  • the programs they want to watch
  • on the schedule they want to watch them
  • at a “price” they’re prepared to pay

then you don’t have a business any more.

The Internet was designed to route around “damage” (even survive nuclear war). Artificial limitations based on territory might have once worked, but the world has changed. When your environment changes there are two alternatives: adapt or die. Apparently big  media has chosen “die”.

It’s not just this isolated case. When the modern series of Dr Who was held back from US release, but broadcast in the UK, it was downloaded over 5 million times. (Didn’t hurt the ratings though.) Australia, where there are too few outlets for programming anyway, frequently doesn’t get new programming from the major studios until months, or even years, later. Not surprising, Australians download a lot of unauthorized content because the content owners will not provide a legitimate alternative.

What we’re seeing is a broken system where the content owners will not listen to their  customers, so the customers take things into their own hands, providing the product the content owners should have been providing all along.

The fact that content owners want to charge about 2-3 times for every viewing than what they ever got from advertising revenue just adds insult to the “injury” of not serving your customers’ needs.

Like I said, the two choices are adapt or die. The old status quo is not an option.

Categories
Distribution Media Consumption New Media

Why is “three strikes” such bad idea?

In case you haven’t heard, The RIAA/MPAA and their international equivalents, are working desperately to make ISPs kick people off the Internet if they are accused of file sharing more than three times. (Three strikes and you’re out.)

There are so many things wrong with this idea it’s hard to know where to begin. Firstly, there’s no current legislative support for file sharing P2P being illegal and the RIAA, despite suing thousands of  people, hasn’t obtained a conviction. (It obtained one conviction but the judge himself overturned it when he discovered that “making available” was not a crime, contrary to his comments to the jury during the trial.)

Then there’s the methodology. These organizations are seeking to implement three strikes merely based on their accusation. No legal due process, no right of appeal. We already know that these same clueless organizations have been very, very wrong in the past, attempting to sue people who had no computer (but may have paid for an account) or other blunder. No other place in law, particularly in a “innocent until proven guilty” legal system, allows – effectively – conviction upon accusation. There is no right of appeal.

Finally, there are already copyright laws in place that provide the protection that the copyright owners feel they need. They have it. It just has this teeny tiny shortcoming that the copyright owner has to prove   that the accused actually committed the “crime”. They’d have to actually prove the case to a suitable legal standard.

Fortunately, although France’s ruling body enacted three strike legislation. That legislation was rendered Unconstitutional by the French Constitutional Council (their highest court). This is in line with the European Parliament who also ruled against three strikes laws as has the UK.

The real problem isn’t file sharing because it turns out file sharers are also those industries’ best customers and the piracy can actually help sales, but rather there’s an industry that’s changing in a way that means there is less and less need for the role that the RIAA or MPAA’s members once played.

Instead of doing the hard work of trying to find a new business model they expect governments, ISPs and just about everyone else to help maintain the one that is heading for obsoleteness. Of course it doesn’t help when the make up totally bogus numbers to support their contention as to how much is being lost to “piracy”. (I’d call it free promotion.) 

Even actually studies manage to be spin-doctored beyond control, even exaggerating the number 10x, and yet no reporter or journalist checked them for accuracy, leaving the thorough debunking of the numbers to non-professional journalists. (This is why I don’t care about the news industry as it is; they’re notoriously inaccurate.)

The solution isn’t to try and prevent piracy, because it’s not possible. It’s time to realize that you can sell abundant goods at premium prices. What you have to do is to find where there’s scarcity that can attract premium prices. The role of abundance and scarcity is the subject of another post.

Categories
Apple

Why no ExpressCard34 slot on new MacBook Pro models?

Digital Rebellion blog called it “one step forward, two steps back” and questioned whether or not Apple are in touch with their “pro market”. I’m sure they care about their pro markets. Note the plural? While the pro video market is significant, the pro photography and pro audio markets by comparison are huge.

As for the ExpressCard34 slot. Sure I’m disappointed. I’m ready to upgrade laptop and want to use it for video and now my storage won’t be able to connect. That said, I have to take a step back and look at the business from Apple’s perspective. As Phil Schiller said during the presentation, only “single digit” numbers of their users use the ExpressCard34 slot. At least 90% of people were paying for a feature they didn’t use.

It’s not like the SD card slot is useless. There are a couple of Sony HDV models that optionally record to SD cards; the new JVC FCP-specific camera records XDCAM EX to a SD card and most digital still cameras work with SD cards (including a Canon 5D Mk II).

It won’t be as convenient for SxS users either, but USB adapters, although probably slower, are available as they have been for the old P2 form factor when CardBus was dropped.

I think it’s important to know that, while I’m convinced Apple are serious about Pro Apps long term, that division does not control the hardware direction of the company. There is still a model MacBook Pro that has everything (well except an eSATA connector natively) that a pro video or audio person would need. It’s bigger and more expensive than I’d prefer for most of my needs, but if my primary application for the laptop was digital video, then the 17″ meets the need as well, or better, than the 15″.

Frankly, my experience with the ExpressCard34 slot has hardly been stellar: cards unmount with the slightest bump.

So, I’m personally disappointed that Apple haven’t tailored the perfect laptop for me personally. Boo hoo. Life is full of compromises and I’ll either limit myself to digital ingest via FW or SD card or I’ll compromise and go for the 17″. I’d probably appreciate being able to play 1080 video full screen at last! That’s not possible on either of the other models.

As for QuickTime X – like OS X pronounced “ten” not “x” – we still don’t know anything more than when I wrote about QuickTime X about a year ago after the last WWDC. Sure, we’ve seen a new interface and we’re told it’s “all new” underneath (again – QT 7 was all new also). What we don’t know is if it supports all the non-video features of QT or if it’s an optimized video player targeting the <video> tag in HTML 5. (I’m not a developer and if I was I’d be under NDA on the subject, fwiw.)

It’s clear Apple’s goals for QT are now much more modest than the complete Rich Media Architecture that QT 3 introduced but hasn’t received much development since QT 5. Practically speaking, that also makes sense for Apple (and will annoy many QT-loyal developers) as Flash/Silverlight currently dominate the interactive space. But with faster and faster Javascript (note how much that was mentioned today), HTML 5 and a QT that was open to both and supported the <video> tag, that might be enough to replace most of what QT 3 introduced.

A while back I conjectured that Apple’s answer to Flash was QT/HTML 5 Canvas element/Javascript. Of course, my good friend James Gardiner pushed back, given Flash’s current dominance, how could Apple get traction against Flash?

Well, we now have Apple and Google actively pushing the HTML5/Javascript combination with the <video> element. (While what format the video element must support hasn’t been finalized MP4/H.264 is almost certainly to be one format with support for the significantly inferior quality Ogg codecs, which are open source, included in some browsers.) Two of the biggest companies pushing open standards against another two big companies with their own competing proprietary standards. But still, Flash is very entrenched.

Except there are 40 million active Internet users who see every Flash site as a black blob (iPhone and iTouch users according to figures from today’s keynote). Use Flash and alienate these mobile users (which account for 65% of mobile browser usage). Add in 20-30 million OS X desktop users who have a very poor experience with Flash, but who will get great performance with Javascript/QT X, also hating Flash.

If you were building a site, what would you use? Can you afford to alienate 40 million potential users? If you can, go ahead and use Flash or Silverlight. The rest of us aren’t able to be so arrogant.

Categories
Metadata Random Thought

I think there’s a sixth type of metadata

When Dan Green interviewed me earlier in the week for Workflow Junkies, in part about the different types of metadata we’ve identified, Dan commented that he thought we’d get to “seven or eight” (from memory). I politely agreed but didn’t think there were going to be that many. I should have known better.

The “iPhoto disaster of May 09” is actually turning out to be good for my thinking! In earlier versions, iPhoto created a copy of the image whenever any adjustments were made. The original was stored, which explains why my iPhoto folder was almost twice the size of my actual library as reported in iPhoto. iPhoto 09 (and maybe 08, I skipped a version) does things a little differently.

When I changed images while the processor was under load, the image came up in its original form and then – a second or so later – all the corrections I’d made would be applied. It was obvious that the original image was never changed. All my color balance, brightness, contrast and even touch up settings were being stored as metadata, not “real changes”.

The original image (or “essence” in the AAF/MXF world) is untouched but there is metadata as to how it should be displayed. Including, as I said, metadata on correcting every image blemish. (The touch up tool must be a CoreImage filter as well, who knew?)

So, I’m thinking this is a different type of metadata than the five types of metadata previously identified. My first instinct was to call this Presentation Metadata – information on how to present the raw image. Greg (my partner) argued strongly that it should be Aesthetic Metadata because decisions on how to present an image or clip or scene, but I was uncomfortable with the term. I was uncomfortable because there are instances of this type of metadata that are compulsory, rather than aesthetic.

Specifically, I was thinking about Raw images (like those from most digital cameras, including RED). Raw images really need a Color Lookup Table (CLUT) before they’re viewable at all. A raw Raw file is very unappealing to view. Since not all of this type of metadata is aesthetic I didn’t feel the title was a good fit.

Ultimately, after some discussion – yes, we really spend our evenings discussing metadata while the TV program we were nominally watching was in pause – we thought that Transform Metadata was the right name.

Specifically not “Transformative” Metadata, which would appear to be more grammatically correct, because Transformative has, to me, a connotation of the transform being completed, like when a color look is “baked” into the files, say after processing in Apple’s Color or out of Avid Symphony. Transform Metadata does not change the essence or create new essence media: the original is untouched and Transfomed on presentation.

Right now we’re a long way from being able to do all color correction, reframing and digital processing in real time as metadata on moving images as iPhoto does for still images, but in a very real sense an editing Project file is really Transform Metadata to be applied to the source media (a.k.a essence).

This is very true in the case of Apple’s Motion. A Motion project is simply an XML file with the metadata as to how the images should be processed. But there’s something “magic” going on because, if you take that project file and change the suffix to .mov, it will open and play in any application that plays QuickTime movies. (This is how the Project file gets used in FCP as a Clip.) The QuickTime engine does its best to interpret the project file and render it on playback. A Motion Project file is Transform Metadata. (FWIW there is a Motion QuickTime Component installed that does the work of interpreting the Motion Project as a movie. Likewise a LiveType QuickTime Component does the same for that application’s Transform Metadata, a.k.a. project file!)

I think Dan might be right – there could well be seven or eight distinct types of metadata. It will be interesting to discover what they are.

Categories
New Media Random Thought

Why don’t I care if newspapers die?

I was once an avid reader of newspapers – a three-paper-a-day man: the local paper for local news; the capital city daily for national and international news and the national Financial Daily for business news. I now read none and think that the whole industry has the stench of death about it – not financially (although it certainly has) but the quality of work was what sent me away.

Newspapers (and television news) is notoriously inaccurate. There are exceptions. Occasionally a paper will do a great job of investigative reporting and team it with great writing, but this is not the “norm”. Most newspaper content is filled with slightly rewritten press releases, information easily found elsewhere (movie start time, tides, weather, TV program guides, etc) and copied from the real source to the newspaper) and some hastily written article about an event that is full of inaccuracies because the reporter hasn’t a clue about the content.

Do you think I’m judging too harshly? Consider this. Have you ever watched the TV news report, or read a newspaper article, of an event you were part of or participated in? Has that report been 100% accurate? I can honestly say that, of the dozen or so appearances I’ve made in newspaper or TV media, or those associated with other family business where I’ve been privy to the facts, not one report was 100% accurate. Not a single one.

So I have to assume that every article is written with the same sloppy adherence to the facts of the story.

The average newspaper adds very little value. Most of the content is not original reporting – between the previously-mentioned press releases and Associated Press and/or Reuters and fact-based content sourced from elsewhere there’s not much original, true news gathering.

The little there is is easily reproduced elsewhere. For example, local news site Pasadena News outsources the writing to Indian writers. If you’re only rewriting a press release, or reporting the outcome of local council meetings, which are placed online anyway, then the desk could be in Pasadena or Mumbai. Fact checking (if anyone actually does that) is an email or phone call away wherever you are in the world (as long as you’re prepared to deal with time zone issues).

Newspapers, in their current dying form, are not adding a whole lot of value. Instead it’s nostalgia that’s keeping them going – the nostalgia of lazy Sunday mornings with paper, family and coffee, not the delivery of well-researched original reporting.

If we have Associated Press – who have a very useful RSS feed to deliver relevant content directly to me – why do I need the LA Times to print it for me? If they added a local angle, maybe.

Journalism won’t die with newspapers. In fact, contrary to the opinion of some journalists, the blogosphere – the sheer number of people fact checking – has led to some real stories breaking. Remember the Dan Rather/George W Bush faked papers scandal? Or how the citizen reporter who videotaped (and shared) George Allen’s “macacca” moment that lost him re-election in 2006? It seems in many, many recent cases, citizen journalists have out-performed (in aggregate) the established media in uncovering stories.

So, I’ve gone from a three-a-day habit to a zero newspaper life and am better informed about news than ever. I keep track of Australian news and am better informed than my Australian-resident mother. I scored very highly ion the Pew Research Test Your News IQ with a better score than my newspaper-reading, TV news watching friends and associates.

I won’t be dancing on the graves of newspapers, but their failure to adapt and their high minded refusal to see the log in their own eye makes me indifferent to the failure of the whole industry. Let it be replaced with new forms of news-gathering where some accuracy might slip in.

See also: We need a Fifth Estate and Will “amateurs” save democracy from the “professionals”?

Categories
Metadata Random Thought

What is the fifth type of metadata?

Right now I’m in the middle of updating and adding to my digital photo library by scanning in old photos, negatives and (eventually) slides. Of course, the photos aren’t in albums (too heavy to ship from Australia to the US) and there are not extensive notes on any because “I’ll always remember these people and places!” Except I don’t remember a lot of the people and getting particular events in order is tricky when they’re more than “a few” years old, or those that were before my time because a lot have been scanned in for my mother’s blog/journal.

Last time I wrote about the different types of metadata we had identified four types of metadata:

  • Source Metadata is stored in the file from the outset by the camera or capture software, such as in EXIF format. It is usually immutable.
  • Added Metadata is beyond the scope of the camera or capture software and has to come from a human. This is generally what we think about when we add log notes – people, place, etc.
  • Derived Metadata is calculated using a non-human external information source and includes location from GPS, facial recognition, or automatic transcription.
  • Inferred Metadata is metadata that can be assumed from other metadata without an external information source. It may be used to help obtain Added metadata.

See the original post for clearer distinction between the four types of metadata. Last night I realized there is at least one additional form of metadata, which I’ll call Analytical Metadata. The other choice was Visually Obvious Invisible Metadata, but I thought that was confusing!

Analytical metadata is encoded information in the picture about the picture, probably mostly related to people, places and context. The most obvious example is a series of photos without any event information. By analyzing who was wearing what clothes and correlating between shots, the images related to an event can be grouped together even without an overall group shot. Or there is only one shot that clearly identifies location but can be cross-correlated to the other pictures in the group by clothing.

Similarly a painting, picture, decoration or architectural element that appears in more than one shot can be used to identify the location for all the shots at that event. I’ve even used hair styles as a general time-period indicator, but that’s not a very fine-grained tool!  Heck, even the presence or absence of someone in a picture can identify a time period: that partner is in the picture so it must be between 1982 and 1987.

I also discovered two more sources of metadata. Another source of Source Metadata is found on negatives, which are numbered, giving a clear indication of time sequence. (Of course Digital Cameras have this and more.) The other important source of metadata for this exercise has been a form of Added Metadata: notes on the back of the image! Fortunately Kodak Australia for long periods of time printed the month and year of processing on the back. Rest assured that has been most helpful for trying to put my lifetime of photos into some sort of order. The rate I’m going it will take me the last third of my life to organize the images from the first two thirds.

Another discovery: facial recognition in iPhoto ’09 is nowhere near as good as it seems in the demonstration. Not surprising because most facial recognition technology is still in its infancy. I also think it prefers the sharpness of digital images rather than scans of prints, but even with digital source, it seem to attempt a guess at one in five faces, and be accurate about 30% of the time. It will get better, and it’s worth naming the identified faces and adding ones that were missed to gain the ability to sort by person. It’s also worthwhile going through and deleting the false positives – faces recognized in the dots of newspapers or the patterns in wallpaper, etc. so they don’t show up when it’s attempting to match faces.

Added June 2: Apparently we won’t be getting this type of metadata from computers any time soon!

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution

What is the future of publishing and what does that have to do with production?

On Wednesday I more than doubled the sales of the paperback edition of The New Now. Since the paperback has just gone on sale, that’s not surprising. This is our first foray into publishing via paperback and we’re not certain how it’s going to go. We’ve had great success (for a book) via our PDF publishing efforts, but are only now giving paperbacks a go.

Apparently we’re not alone. Publisher’s Weekly has an article where it notes that there were more books published “on demand” last year than by traditional publishers. On demand is the method we use, via Amazon’s CreateSpace, and is most commonly used by self publishers.

It’s not hard to understand why. The deals being offered by publishers in our space are, frankly, insulting for the amount of work that goes into creating a book. By self publishing – and giving people a choice of an information-only PDF or the same information in a solid book form (well, paperback) – the author gets a larger slice per book. It’s not unusual for an author to make more money from the Amazon Associates commission on the sale than from the publisher. Seriously.

That means that books break even for the author much faster and the author retains the copyright. While in theory the author owns the copyright for a book through a traditional publisher, in practice, while there’s any outstanding balance due to the publisher, the publisher owns the rights.

The way a book deal works is that the author is paid an advance, based on the expected sales of a book. That used to be based on 5,000 units selling at full retail (because author’s don’t get a penny from remaindered and discounted copies). While there have been one or two breakout successes in the space, most books never reach that level of sales so the advance is never fully repaid from sales, and consequently the publisher owns the work. Since the standard contract also allows them to publish new editions with new authors (if the original author declines), effectively the author has lost control of their work.

Self publishing the HD Survival Handbook we reached the level of the currently offered advances with just 375 sales. The book became profitable (i.e. it returned a reasonable return for the amount of time that went into it) at about 600 copies and sales have been way above that.

It’s all possible because new printing technology prints soft-cover books very, very quickly (about 6-8 minutes) and remarkably cheaply, without having to commit to a large pre-order. This technology is going to get twice as fast for half the cost in the generation of printing/binding machines just announced. The cost of printing the book is almost inconsequential.

This is what digital technologies do when they disintermediate an industry. Like the record labels and (to a much lesser degree TV and Movie studios) the role of the publisher – the intermediary who traditionally made the most money – has faded.

An author would have gone to a publisher to: a) fund the printing of the physical books, b) give the book an ISBN, c) get the book into “the channel” – the bookstores where people can buy it, and d) promote the book. Through CreateSpace the paperbacks are printed as they’re ordered (a.k.a on demand) and CreateSpace assigns the ISBN so the book can be found by any reseller. The book is automatically listed in Amazon because Amazon owns CreateSpace. While, in theory, a publisher would promote the book, in practice for most books on production and post-production, that meant sending out a media blast to the usual suspects and from there it was up to the author to promote the book.

CreateSpace gives me all of those. I own the copyright; books are printed on demand inexpensively enough that the return from an Amazon sale is only slightly less than the return from a PDF sale (so the knowledge carries the same value). It’s listed in the only bookstore my customers are likely to use, although it can be ordered in by any bookstore – online or physical. Better still, I directly benefit from new sales, rather than simply promoting the book to recover money I’ve long spent (the advance).

The author is an independent in the disintermediated world. Similarly, digital video technologies allow writer/producer/directors to make their project without needing the backing of a studio. Budgets can be shrunk considerably when you take out the middle man. The most expensive part of an Amazon sale is the Amazon commission, which is more than double  the cost of producing the physical book.

Even using that third party distribution channel, the return per sale is way higher than from a publisher.

Similarly owning the copyright for a reasonably-budgeted production leaves margin to offer producers or allows the creator to go direct to the viewer. (The only thing I call New Media!)

When more money goes back to the producers more production gets done, because shows can be supported by smaller audiences, in the same way that a book can sell many fewer copies but still make a better return for the author than through traditional channels.

Categories
General

Why are people so stupid?

Well, I haven’t had a real good rant for a while – in fact haven’t written much lately – but I’m finally drive to a good old-fashioned rant against stupidity. There seems to be a lot of it going around right now!

Politicians are an easy target, particularly when they get into any sort of tech areas, where they only open their mouth to demonstrate how stupid they are. For example, Missouri passed a law that text messaging is fine if you’re over 21 if you’re over 21! Stupid! Texting while driving is dangerous, period. Not only is it stupid to have a specific law against it (it’s always distracted driving, which has been illegal for years) but it’s a stupid law. What magically happens on the anniversary of 21 years alive that gives the driver super-powers to focus on two things at once? Stupid!

Then there’s stupid California, who are insisting on taking their (obviously illegal) video-game sales law to the US Supreme Court. They’ve “only” wasted $1 million of tax payers’ money on a law that’s been struck down in 12 rulings in the last eight years as State by State have tried to bring in similar legislation that has always been struck down. Stupid waste of tax payers’ money in a State that’s just about bankrupt. Stupid!

And there’s STUPID, stupid, stupid South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, who tried to go after the principals of Craigslist despite the very, very clear provisions of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. (Section 230 of the DMCA if he’d like to look it up.)  Pure political grandstanding from a stupid man who, rightly, now has an injunction against him and his office preventing them from acting. Craigslist quite rightly pointed out they are doing nothing illegal, that there is no legal way to go after the principals of the company and that there are wider and greater “illegal” actions by newspapers and magazines in South Carolina. A stupid man who should be drummed out of office for stupidity alone.

Then there’s the stupid TV broadcasters who’s business model is changing, so they too want a bailout form the Federal Government. Stupid.

But my greatest act of stupidity for the week comes from Podcasting news. In an article “Online Video Advertising…Is Horrible” James Lewin made the strangest comment:

“We already know that ad-supported Internet video is the future.”

Now you can imagine that caught my eye, because I have a pretty much 100% contrary opinion – new media (Internet Video) is very unlikely to be advertising supported. So, I was interested in what was behind the assertion as this forgone conclusion had gone by without me noticing!

Turns out, if you follow the link in the quote, that no such thing was proven. Stupid!

The report they are actually commenting on (through very biased and uninformed eyes imnsho) did state that people “were willing” to put up with advertising to watch free video on the net. Not that people wanted to; where happy to; or other qualitative information, just that they would watch advertising to get free video. Woopee. Like that’s news. 

But there isn’t enough advertising to fund new media; advertisers generally are not transferring substantial parts of their budgets to new media and that advertising support is the old media model and failing pretty much at every turn.

And yet, this is the “future”? The only future we’re considering? Even when their own report on the survey concludes with:

“The research suggests that people trying to make money with video podcasts and short-form Internet video may need to look for options other than traditional intrusive ads.”

How stupid is that? And yet, these type of stupid people have jobs! They have employers who obviously know less than they do and won’t call someone to task for drawing a clearly bogus conclusion (is the future) in one article that is not supported by the referenced article. Now that’s clearly stupid.

It’s particularly stupid when the New York Times is reporting in an article titled Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet that web startups are looking beyond advertising as a business model. (Well, d’oh, what have I been saying for the last two years?)

It’s also stupid when better thinkers in the space, like Chris Brogan, in an excellent post on The Next Media Company says as it’s fifth point:

“Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.” 

Anyone who’s not stupid has realized by now that advertising is not going to be the predominant means of supporting new media. It’s not even desirable because as soon as you take in advertising you’re beholden to the advertiser not your audience.

And that’s stupid.

But not as stupid as Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton who thinks nothing good can come of the Internet, when the problem is that the company (and it’s CEO) are simply too stupid to adapt to changing business circumstances. That’s another whole level of stupid.

Stupid people. Do not want!

Oh wait, there’s another level of stupid! Commercials between web pages. Just when I hope we’ve reached the ultimate level of stupidity it turns out there’s another stupid person just waiting to be less thoughtful, with less consideration for the real world, than everyone else.

Categories
Distribution New Media

Why do people have no sense of perspective?

The article “Original Web Video Still A Bust” by Dan Fromer really made me smile. Web video – not year five years old – has not yet replaced programming from the major networks and studios. Who’d have thought!

It’s not like the early days of cable. Where articles written “Original Cable programming still a bust” in the mid 70’s and the very early days of Community Antenna/Access TV, the precursor to modern cable. It took more than 20 years of cable, and more than 10 years of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is when modern cable really started to take off before we got Mad Men or Breaking Bad or any of the current crop of high quality drama and comedy now available on cable. 

We are much further advanced with Internet TV than we were at an equivalent stage of development for cable. Product equipment is much cheaper and much more accessible compared to limited access to a studio provided by the cable network as a condition of their franchise on a city. One studio that was a limited asset. Nowdays, pretty much anyone with an idea can create it. I’ve interviewed guests who made movies for under $500. Matthew Winer (in the Spring edition of Produced by magazine from the Producer’s Guild) says that he made his first film for $20,000.

But like cable the growth to quality programming will be slow and gradual. It won’t take 10 or 20 years but I do expect that it will be five to ten years before we get million dollar budget for programs specifically for Internet distribution. The numbers do add up if the distribution channels are handled right. (Hint: it won’t be advertising supporting it this time round, at least not in the annoying intrusive formats we’ve seen on television.)

So, it’s a little premature to say that original web video is a “bust” just yet. Get back to me in 2020 and I’ll be very surprised if we don’t have a vibrant new media creating great drama, comedy and other formats we haven’t seen yet for Internet distribution that is viewed primarily on TV screens (however the big set in the corner evolves).