Category: Distribution

Optimization Tips for Google TV http://bit.ly/alUtTf

Since there are currently no available Google TV devices, this advice is somewhat premature, but you might as well file it away for the day you’ll need it.

Personally I’m not sure about where Google TV fits with Apple TV: nerds vs normals?

My friend Carey Dissmore commented on Twitter today:

AppleTV represents a ‘new model only’ (internet+local content streaming), Google TV attempts to skin old tech. That old tech being traditional cable and satellite. It’s middleware to bring legacy tech together.

Independent Film’s Path To A Viable New Business Model http://bit.ly/d6CMtj

A longish, but great take on where we are now in independent distribution. Covers topics:

• The Landscape
• Where we stand
• What’s ahead
• The New Ground Rules

On licensing in the new ground rules, he’s a realist:

On licensing, if anyone can get your film for free, the only sensible licensing scheme is to distribute with no restrictions on copying and reuse. I realize this rubs some people the wrong way (it used to rub me the wrong way), but in the new era, attempting to enforce all-rights-reserved copyright is a business disadvantage for anyone without a team of lawyers. With no feasible technical approach to stop reproduction and sharing, the only option is to attack legally. That takes lawyers and they are not cheap. Which approach is cost efficient – a market with profits that depend on copyright enforcement via legal channels or the venue that makes money despite unrestricted distribution? If you want to understand the future for copyright licensing, Lawrence Lessig is required reading. He lays it out far better than I ever could, plus his work is of the rare sort that is equally genius, entertaining, and inspiring. Specifically, hit up Remix and Free Culture – pretty sure a couple chapters will convince most anyone. You can buy the books or (Lessig puts his money where is mouth is) download them legally for free here and here.

How to Create Marketing That Makes You Rich and Famous http://bit.ly/9V6Oqj

We’re all marketing all the time, whether it’s our opinions in the organization, selling our ideas to producers when we edit, or developing a marketing campaign for a film or TV project.

Amazingly, most people haven’t even got to the 1940’s era concept of “Unique Selling Proposition” and applying it to their business, so maybe they can leapfrog to an updated view.

Original Mad Man David Ogilvy called it a “big idea.” He applied it specifically to advertising—but it works for all kinds of marketing platforms, especially websites. He said:

You will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.

Read the article for the answers.

This cannot be right! http://bit.ly/bfVfgc

I don’t care what you think about unauthorized downloads, but there’s no way in any sane or moral society that a fine for unauthorized distribution should be 3 times more than compensation paid to Air France crash victims. Lives are not lost with unauthorized downloading, just the excessive profits from a temporary monopoly on distribution.

RIAA and MPAA you should be ashamed. You do nothing to help your cause (which btw is a business model problem you could have solved by now if you’d focused attention there instead of trying to support obsolete business models).

The recession in the music industry – a cause analysis http://bit.ly/9OtrH1

I love good research. It beats speculation, rumor and opinion every time. (I’m most easily persuaded with fact.) This rather long article examines why the CD business (not the music industry really) has been shrinking.

It’s not “unauthorized downloads” that’s the problem, according to the article:

To sum up, the expanding market from the 1960s to the late 1970s was based on a market segmentation strategy by establishing new music genres and long-play products as a key source of sales. But this led to smaller and less profitable market segments and subsequently to declining sales and revenues in the late 1970s. With the launch of the CD in 1982/83, the major companies focused on superstar acts, and revenues soared again in unprecedented heights in the 1980s and 1990s. One must not oversee that the CD-boom was mainly fueled by the re-release of repertoire still existing on vinyl. The superstar-orientation as well as the CD format ensured that the album became the main source of sales in the industry. The single lost its importance and finally assumed only the roll of a test market.

When these structures were confronted with the track-culture of the Internet, the album market turned once again into a less economically viable single market and caused the slump in sales of the last decade. The figures also show that the single-format, thanks to strong sales of digital downloads, is on the rise and already have matched long play-sales on a pure per unit basis. The labels’ task is now to find again a model in which music in bundled form increases not only the revenues and profits but also the music consumers’ benefits. However, this is more difficult to achieve under the prevailing conditions than the increase of mobile and online music sales based on single-tracks. If, in addition, the insight prevails that file-sharing is in fact not the cause but merely a side-effect of the current transitional phase and that it actualy represents a promotional opportunity for thus far unknown acts, then sales might increase again that thus help overcome the recession in the phonographic industry.

Where the music industry goes, film and TV will follow as bandwidth increases.