Category: Distribution

Digital Distribution issues

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

Maybe New Media are closer to being media than we thought? [Updated]

Yahoo IS Focused: “We’re A Content Company” http://tinyurl.com/286g7dv See update at end.

Yahoo’s CEO Bartz made an interesting statement in light of yesterday’s The Truth about the Future of Media post: Yahoo – one of the new media companies listed – has come out firmly that they are a Content Company.

On stage at Web 2.0 last month, CEO Carol Bartz said Yahoo is focused on content. Technology is important to personalize that content to users, but editors are important as well–for instance, no algorithm could have predicted that users would be interested in the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, since a similar event hadn’t happened in a long time.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. When I posted the link yesterday I really felt that it was a stretch to consider Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Apple et al “new media” as we think of it from a content perspective, but the above post and some other items today make me wonder.

There’s an unsubstantiated rumor that Apple are negotiating a deal with Howard Stern for an exclusive agreement after his Sirius radio contract ends, although I do feel it’s unlikely.

Stern’s contract with Sirius is up in January, and the response from the media has been mostly skeptical. Objections include the expense and short term of the deal, Steve Jobs’ stated dedication to keeping iTunes family-friendly, the FCC fines Stern has accumulated in the past, and the probable angry reaction from the many fans who have paid to follow him on satellite radio.

Apple are showing some signs of intending to be a distributor. They have an exclusive period with the Beatles collection until some time in 2011. They also have an exclusive deal to distribute a single from Michael Jackson’s posthumous album via Ping. But these are distribution deals, not content creation like the Howard Stern deal would be.

Then on another note Facebook CEO is quoted as saying:

“Facebook expects insurgent entrepreneurs to “reform” the film, TV, news, e-commerce and music industries with the help of Facebook. Some of these companies will be incumbents. Some will unseat incumbents.  Facebook will then – perhaps through credits or advertising, but also perhaps some other way – tax these companies in exchange for the value it has added”  Here is “Zuck” quoted:

“Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area – games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything e-commerce, any of this stuff. Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good businesses built. Our view is that we should play a role in helping to re-form and re-think all those industries, and we’ll get value proportional to what we put in. In gaming, we get some percentage of the value of those companies through ads and credits. But that’s all because we’re helping them…”

This suggests Facebook see themselves as playing a role in the inevitable changes that are coming to media production and distribution (and want a cut).

So, of the “new media” companies identified in yesterday’s quoted post, Yahoo and Facebook are both focused on content creation at some level, with Apple a possibility. I hypothesized about this about a year ago when I wrote What if Apple or Google simply bypassed Networks and Studios?

[Update] Not even an hour after I initially posted this the news comes that Google has purchased content distributor Widevine (from Google’s announcement):

“So we’re pleased to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Widevine. The Widevine team has worked to provide a better video delivery experience for businesses of all kinds: from the studios that create your favorite shows and movies, to the cable systems and channels that broadcast them online and on TV, to the hardware manufacturers that let you watch that content on a variety of devices. By forging partnerships across the entire ecosystem, Widevine has made on demand services more efficient and secure for media companies, and ultimately more available and convenient for users.”

Now its getting interesting.

 

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest

DirecTV Kicks Niche Content to the Curb [Updated]

DirecTV Kicks Niche Content to the Curb http://tinyurl.com/27j6278

If networks carrying niche content don’t find distribution with the traditional cable and satellite broadcasters their only recourse will be to find distribution via the Internet. Once people get used to consuming content through that infrastructure – because they were forced to in order to watch the content they enjoy – it becomes that much easier to drop the rest of DirecTV (or your cable provider) and go all IP.

So, good on DirecTV for driving the conversion to IP based networks and the eventual lack of need for DirecTV.

The decision by pay TV providers to drop low-rated networks is happening as distributors are coming under pressure to pay ever-increasing fees to programmers. In most cases, those costs get passed on to the consumer in the form of higher cable bills. But with cable bills rising about 8 percent over the past year, it’s clear that continually raising rates is unsustainable. Rather than pay increasing fees, some consumers have begun canceling their cable or satellite subscriptions altogether, as the number of people who pay for TV hasdropped for two consecutive quarters.

[Update] It was pointed out by Austin Wallender, via Twitter, that G4 was rating poorly on DirecTV and was owned by a competitor so it’s dropping was from “normal business practice”. I can support the low ratings but if ownership by a competitor is really driving DirecTV’s programming, that’s a bigger and more worrying issue.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Media Consumption New Media

Here’s The Truth About The Future of the Media Industry

Here’s The Truth About The Future Of The Media Industry http://tinyurl.com/2627upb

The presentation takes a very liberal view of media – essentially anything that is presented with ads beside it to support it (and I’d disagree with that definition but whatever) – but makes the point that “new media” companies are as large and important as “old media” companies.

Slide 8 of the deck shows the relative sizes (market cap) of new and old media and the companies that are included.

Slide 12 introduces the question of “the next battleground: Video” and shows that the trend to IP-delivered video entertainment is “real”.

Good stuff – hard to copy and past images of graphs but clicking through is worth the effort.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest

Hey Hollywood: Netflix Isn’t the Enemy.

Hey Hollywood: Netflix Isn’t the Enemy, Old Thinking Is http://tinyurl.com/3xasbo7 Netflix wants to pay “Hollywood” good money but no….

The studios and networks helped create this monster by selling Netflix streaming rights to their content, and now they’re finding that they can’t control it. The feeling from content owners — that Netflix is going to eat their lunch if they aren’t careful — has got many rethinking their dealings with the company, and how they distribute digital content in general. But instead of blaming Netflix, movie moguls need to figure out how to make money as their industry moves online, just as moguls in the music and media industry are trying to do today with varying levels of success.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 14

The Terence & Philip Show Episode 14: The future of PBS & Alternate Distribution. http://tinyurl.com/39am779

The discussion starts with KCET’a exit from the PBS network and the implications – including loss of revenue to PBS – does it signal the end of PBS. Will there be a PBS of the Internet?

Will direct producer-viewer connections drive the future. Remember too, that independent production is a business and needs the business model being determined before production starts. How do we fund production?

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

Who Needs TV Networks?

Who Needs TV Networks? Mattel Grabs Whitney Port and Goes Right to Hulu http://tinyurl.com/2ej52pz

In what I think will become the dominant trend, Mattel are creating their own programming and going public with it via Hulu. Traditionally Advertisers/Brands rented the eyeballs that Networks and Cable aggregated (in a neat bait and switch to the viewer).

But why should Brand “rent” an audience when they can buy their own? It’s generally cheaper and more effective.

The real story here is the end-around the brand is playing here, bypassing a large spend on traditional TV with a non-trivial spend sent right to an online network (Hulu) for an original web series. Hulu and other online networks like YouTube have proven they have the scale of audience to deliver on what the brand wants to reach. So why bother with bloated TV budgets? The significance of this isn’t lost on Hudsun Media’s CEO Michael Rourke.

“What we are doing with Mattel and Genuine Ken is a complete game changer, ” said Rourke. We have created a wildly compelling, network-quality reality show that, for the first time, can be distributed directly to the viewer in a non-traditional but very effective way.”

All those charts that get marched out in board meetings about how ad spending for online video is shooting up, have projects like this to thank for such lofty forecasts. With some $70 billion spent by brands on Television, the measly $1.4 billion or so in online video seems marginal, but the shift is on.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest New Media

Broadcast Networks – On Death and Dying

Broadcast Networks – On Death And Dying http://tinyurl.com/2w3dcfo

For Broadcast Networks, the end is coming and it’s time for them to Accepttheir fate.

Kind of premature because Broadcast Networks(and cable) are still dominant,still making the money and still have the premium content, but it’s also equally obvious that status will not remain static in the future.

According to a model developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying”, there are Five Stages of Grief.  
Over the past 20 years or so,Broadcast Networks have bounced around the First Four Stages in an effort to fight off the inevitable:

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest Media Consumption

The Golden Age of Choice and Cannibalization in TV

The Golden Age of Choice and Cannibalization in TV http://tinyurl.com/29h5dov My third GigOm referal today!

Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv writes as guest blogger at GigOm about how audiences are fragmenting and where the opportunities lie. It’s a little long but it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Other than live event programming like the Super Bowl, however, the days of a single television show pulling in the vast majority of American TV households are over. The broadcast networks are long past their peak. Their audience — in absolute numbers, not relative numbers — has been shrinking since the early 1980s.

and much later

People often say that the web video industry will not come into its own until it creates a hit. This thought is, quite frankly, wrong. The cable TV industry has clearly come into its own. And it’s done this without producing a single hit on the order of a network TV success. Yes, the network television business is meaningful, but it no longer produces the hits it did just a few years ago. This year’s slate of network series premieres was the first to pass without a clearly defined “hit” show. That’s no accident. The networks are lost.

Media naturally trends towards fragmentation. As capacity increases so does choice. As choice increases audiences fragment. When given a choice people generally prefer media that speaks to them as individuals over media that speaks to the “masses.” While American Idol remains strong, the trend is clear. Americans have been abandoning broadcast television in favor of cable’s niche shows for thirty years.

For me the key takeaway is that it took Cable 20-30 years to dominate over broadcast, so it’s unreasonable to think that the distribution (and therefore democratization) revolution of the Internet is going to happen in just a couple of years? It might, but I think it’s safer to assume that long term “Internet TV” will be dominant. Broadcast Networks might still be relevant for sports and other live events, while cable’s best bet is to become an intelligent network provider. (Yes, I am saying that in the world of IP-based distribution why do we need someone else negotiating for “channels” that we may watch, when we can go direct to the source of the programming and watch it there.)

This will be a great opportunity for Producers who understand how to make a direct connection with their audiences and can package up the whole business and distribution package themselves. There’s got to be more profit (or overall lower budgets) if we remove one entire layer of distribution – the channel aggregators (TV networks, Cable networks, etc). Those Channels that focus on original programming will transition just nicely I imagine (restrictive legacy contracts not withstanding).

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Distribution Item of Interest

Cord Cutters Are Young, Educated and Employed

Cord Cutters Are Young, Educated and Employed http://tinyurl.com/2ale9dw

After the first drop in subscriber numbers ever, Comcast tried to spin it like this:

“Mr. Moffett said the image of the cord-cutter had been that of a ‘cutting-edge technologist’ who preferred to bypass cable to watch programming on computers and on an ever-proliferating array of devices. ‘The reality is it’s someone who’s 40 years old and poor and settling for a dog’s breakfast of Netflix and short-form video.”

GigOm hare only to happy to correct Mr Moffett.

Contrary to Mr. Moffett’s statement, the typical cord cutter is young, educated and employed, based on research from Strategy Analytics. The research firm surveyed 2,000 Americans, and found that 13 percent of them intended to cancel their cable subscriptions in the next 12 months. But the profile of those who said they wanted to abandon cable is what’s really interesting.

A majority of those likely to cut the cord (54 percent) are under 40, according to Strategy Analytics, and they are well-educated: a full 97 percent of those surveyed have graduated high school and more than two-thirds have pursued or are pursuing secondary education. And it’s not a lack of income that is driving them to save on cable bills — 91 percent of likely cord cutters are either employed, students or retired, and 57 percent make $50,000 a year or more.

In other words, cord cutting is real, and rife among the very people you need to have on board to keep your business going for the next generation. And they don’t seem to be doing that.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest

Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast

Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast http://tinyurl.com/3yj6lsn

Microsoft has sold more than 42 million game consoles worldwide, but the more impressive stat is that its Xbox Live subscription service now has more than 25 million users. That’s more subscribers than Comcast, which earlier this week reported that its subscriber count had actually decreased by 275,000 over the most recent quarter, ending at less than 23 million for the first time in years. And while many Xbox Live subscribers are clearly international, with the service available in 26 countries, Microsoft clearly has some scale and a huge audience that it could leverage.

Of course, Xbox Live is mostly about inter-person game play over the network, but Xbox Live users also watch live and on-demand video an average of 40 hours a week on the service, of which an hour a day is for media watching: 7 hrs watching media; 33 playing games.

…over the past year, the amount of time those users have spent watching TV and movie content has grown 157 percent. Not just that, but Xbox already makes more money from media sales than through its Xbox Live subscription revenues.

The console currently has video content from its Zune marketplace, Netflix and ESPN3, and early next year will also have video content from Hulu’s Plus subscription service. That range of content has 42 percent of Xbox Live subscribers watching an hour of TV and movie content on average per day, or 30 hours of video per month.