Digital Distribution issues
Northwestern Law professor Peter DiCola, has a new study entitled Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives. What’s interesting is the divided opinion among musicians on whether or not unauthorized distribution, a.k.a. piracy, helps or hurts their income.
Adam Singolda writes a report on a CES panel he moderated covering with the topic “Who thinks ‘Gangnam Style’ is good content?” His motivation was to:
My goal was to open the discussion, asking if it’s possible to bring scale to niche content — and if so, what’s needed: Great content? Great distribution? Both? And how is it done?
Dan Rayburn, has written a provocative post titled: Streaming Video Can’t Scale At Cable TV Quality, Will Never Replace Traditional TV Distribution. Essentially he argues that there isn’t enough bandwidth for the large scale events. He’s only partly right.
Video Insider is a good read, and I recommend following them. Like many sites, they take a pass at Online Video Predictions for 2013. They vary from the cute:
1. The term “This is the year of online video†will be written and stated about 35% more often in 2013 than it was in 2012.
to the sly and accurate, slipping in at the end:
6. Branded content (Branded Video) production will be on the rise, but not enough to grab headlines or the kind of attention this trend will deserve.
We usually think of Bittorrent in terms of film, music or television “piracy”, but there are increasing legitimate uses (see The Promo Bay for example).
I’ve also noted that the secret to success is to build a connection with fans and give them something to buy. Here’s an example where the author provided a lot of high value add-ons for his book, and linked to the book’s Amazon page, and sales go nuts.
The article of the same name at Techdirt starts with:
Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing — UK regulatory body Ofcom hascome out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).
While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay†initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..
From TorrentFreak.com
Conventional wisdom is that there is no value in “free” distribution, yet 10,000 artists – probably more than signed to all labels combined currently – have taken advantage of the offer: free music for promotion.
Who’s looking out of step now? Not the artists, that’s for sure.
At StreamingMedia.com  Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen wrote:
It came as no surprise to anyone working in our industry that MPEG DASH and HEVC were the talk of this year’s IBC in Amsterdam — at least in the Connected World area of the show in Hall 14, in which IBC cordons off those of us whose interest in the synergy between broadcast and online comes firmly from the online angle.
What was a bit surprising, however, was the degree to which both the DASH delivery scheme and the HEVC codec (also known as H.265) were discussed as faits accomplis and debated as either “it’s about time” standards or a combined one-two punch that would be the death knell of innovation in the online video technology space.
I’ve discussed HEVC (High Efficiency Video codec) a.k.a H.265 before. MPEG-DASH is a new streaming media format. Given that a large percentage of delivery has moved to a real-time delivery over HTTP then a consistent real time delivery format is desirable as a standard. MPEG continues to refer to the standards body – the Motion Picture Expert Group – while DASH referrs to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. This is very similar to what Apple and others are using now for HLS (HTTP LIve Streaming, which is also adaptive).
So we’re looking at an evolution into the next generation of MPEG codec with a newly standardized real time delivery format. I like standards, particularly when there aren’t too many! This one feels very real:
But the combination of MPEG DASH and HEVC created a perfect storm in which it was quite clear that for every vendor in our space who feels that any sort of standard is anathema to the advance of both technological invention and capitalist progress, there are just as many who feel like agreeing upon a standard delivery system and corresponding codec will actually enable greater innovation to occur on different fronts. The fact that word came out just prior to IBC that the French government had “mandated” the use of MPEG DASH in all connected televisions gave ammunition to the anti-standards contingent — which, of course, includes a subset that also happens to be anti-European, or at least Francophobic. (As Siglin also reported, the reality is quite a bit more nuanced — the requirement applies only to France’s TNT 2.0 HbbTV connected TV scheme.)
Streaming Media are putting on a special MPEG-DASH mixer at the Streaming Media West Show in two weeks.
Hey Hollywood, forget SOPA, ACTA, TPP, and look to Netflix for a glimse of your future. http://t.co/AaZMiXbJ
Instead of pushing for ever-more draconian laws in the US and beyond, instead, how about the studio look to what is working: Netflix.
Former NBC Entertainment Chief Discovers Watching TV With Commercials Really Sucks! http://t.co/UeXidppc So out of touch it’s unbelievable.
I’ve long hated commercials and want a reasonably priced alternative. By reasonably priced I mean that the price I pay is about the same as the revenue from advertising (25-65c per person per program) not the usurious prices through available outlets.
After watching earlier seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix, iTunes and recorded on his DVR he caught up and watched an episode live and had this reaction:
“We watched that live,†he said. “It was not nearly as good. The commercials broke the tension. We had watched the other episodes with blankets over our heads. I hate to say this to the AMC executives and everybody else in the business, but I will never watch ‘Walking Dead’ live again.â€
So, when you’re running the entertainment business for an ad supported broadcast network, ads are just fine! But when you’re a viewer, they’re not?