This is How Apple Will Eventually Defeat DIRECTV http://t.co/tjCVRNgP Bad technology compounded with a “don’t care” attitude.
Category: Media Consumption
Make No Mistake: Google Is Taking On The TV Industry http://t.co/6ntzqtFb The traditional TV industry should consider itself warned.
The biggest barrier to Google and Apple’s desire to create a new television distribution network has been the intransigence of the content owners to disrupt their own business model while it’s still profitable. So the obvious answer is for them to invest in content directly.
Second Screen Visionaries: 5 Ways Mobile Is Changing TV-Watching http://t.co/AacKJgKY
Last July, about a year and a half later, Rapid TV News reported on a white paper by British technology research company Mobile Interactive Group, which updated that number for the US and UK. It had “40% of mobile users saying that they are most likely to be multi-tasking using their phone while watching the TV.†(Some estimate that number nearly doubles when you look at the 18-24 demographic.)
Traditional TV is in for a heck of a ride http://t.co/AHXR0djD Meta trends in media.
This is a long article but well worth the read as Habib Kairouz runs through a comparison between the ills that afflict the print industry with those that are affecting television as we’ve known it.
The Future Of TV Is Coming, Slowly But Surely http://t.co/rQuQL5e1
Dan Frommer at Business Insider takes a look at the various aspects of the evolving future of Television.
If TV Companies Released Authorized Torrents With Ads, Would People Download Them? http://t.co/j6iEg9o
Other than legal constructs that make them different, in practice a download with embedded ads and a real-time broadcast with embedded ads should be the same thing. And yet, no-one in the TV industry has even thought of the possibility, despite it being a very old idea.
For years, I’ve been referring to Mark Pesce’s Hyperdistribution model – both here in the blog and also in some of my public presentations – as one viable alternative to the current situation that would allow more consumption flexibility without changing the economics.
The responses are mixed. There are, certainly, a lot of people who insist they would never do that because they hate all advertising. I still think those people really just hate bad advertising, and don’t realize that they actually like good advertising (for example, the TV shows they download? They’re just “advertising” for other episodes of that TV show). But there are two types of answers that stand out and are seen throughout the comments. The first are that some people would agree to do this, having no problem supporting the TV folks. The second are people who say they hate commercials and wouldn’t do this, but that they would pay for a similar thing without commercials.
I generally dislike advertising, although more correctly I should say that, like others, I dislike irrelevant advertising, so I’d prefer to pay the equivalent (not the inflated prices attempting to be charged via iTunes et. al. ) but might be prepared to receive relevant advertising. Now, I don’t have children, am happy with my current car and already know what will replace it, not planning on going out to dinner or movies anytime soon, really don’t buy many clothes, don’t buy cosmetics… Â I am a little non-consumerism, so just what advertising won’t be horribly intrusive and irrelevant?
Online video finally chipping away at broadcast TV http://t.co/LLmZhYg
There are some hints that the traditional US cable subscription may be in decline, but not only in the US but around the world are moving toward  more online video and less real-time broadcast.
The survey, which was conducted in Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, the U.S. and South Korea, consisted of 22 qualitative and 13,000 quantitative interviews, and represented almost 400 million consumers. The conclusion is that the Internet has changed the way we watch TV, but hasn’t cut down much on demand for broadcast television. However, it’s not the demand that’s an issue, but figuring out monetization strategies for what is essentially a new and fragmented delivery platform that’s leading to high drama and various strategies that make finding content a crapshoot for consumers.
We’re not there yet, but we’re heading there.
The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast. http://tinyurl.com/3w8xz3p Aided by Adobe Edge http://tinyurl.com/3djpdyn
After a slow start – and still controversy over exactly what format video will be supported in “HTML5” – is the Flash era finally over?
Colleen Taylor writing for GigOm discusses recent data on HTML5 and how Apple’s position on HTML5 and Flash has – as I predicted several years back – pushed the adoption of HTML5.
As is often the case in business, where there’s a winner, there’s usually a loser. HTML5 could largely replace Abobe’s proprietary Flash technology. And HTML5′s swift ascent could render Flash irrelevant in short order. “I think the disappearance of Flash is closer than people think,†ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue said in a press release accompanying the data.
HTML5′s projected growth is all the more impressive considering that the actual standard is not officially expected to be completed untilÂ
20202014, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won’t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features now, ABI said.
Full HTML5 interoperability isn’t expected until 2014 but we’re already a long way in, and will get further thanks to, somewhat ironically, Adobe. Â I’ve long advocated that Adobe were in the best position to create an HTML5 authoring tool, and indeed they have now shown one in Adobe Labs – Edge. AppleInsider has a first look at Edge.
[Update] One day later Flixmaster launched another HTML5 authoring tool
Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry. http://tinyurl.com/3spfm4o
Slate magazine’s Bill Wyman argues that the movie studios are repeating the mistakes of the record labels of the last decade, by refusing to adapt business models, suing customers and trying to make their business model problem a legal one.
Right now, in fact, the movie and TV business looks a lot like the music one did in the early 2000s. And as we’ve seen, that decade didn’t work out too well for the labels. So it’s worth looking at the situation and wondering how things are going to fare in the TV and movie world in the decade ahead. It can all be summed up in one single sentence. I’ll get to that in a minute.
He goes on to demonstrate how the legal offerings are inconvenient (at best) for the legal customers making unauthorized distribution not only cheaper but a significantly better product:
The trouble facing the movie industry right now is the same one the music industry had to confront 10 years ago. This is the summing-up sentence I referred to above:
The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally.
and
Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn’t just free. It’s better.
He goes on to suggest the solutions, but read the whole article (please), before commenting
Who Do You Trust On Whether Or Not PROTECT IP Will Break The Internet? The Guys Who Built It… Or The MPAA? http://tinyurl.com/3v7x4cg
PROTECT IP is a badly worded, very vague Bill being bought and paid for by the MPAA and RIAA that many think will break the INternet and criminalize normal behavior like embedding a video. The problem with vague Bills is that they tend to be interpreted to suit the enforcer of the day.
Trouble is, those that are supposed to balance all the needs of society before passing laws seem to not even have any idea what PROTET IP is actually about!
When these serious questions are raised, the MPAA puts its fingers in its ears and goes “nah, nah, nah, won’t happen, nah, nah” and never addresses the actual issues. Sadly, the Representatives have been bought and paid for and unless all voting Americans get to their Representative, it could pass and really, really screw up the Internet, and your life.
However, the guys who wrote the white paper have been speaking up lately trying to get our elected officials to recognize the consequences of passing PROTECT IP as is. But the really funny part is watching the technically clueless MPAA try to brush off these concerns. It’s almost laughable. Basically, the MPAA stamps its collective foot, and insists that it couldn’t possibly break the internet, and then suggests that “America’s technology community” can fix any problems:
As for the clueless Repreentatives: half of them have no idea what the Legislation is even about, thinking it has something to do with “immigration” or “the Internet Kill Switch” (it is neither).
Last week, we wrote about how Rep. Anna Eshoo (whose district covers much of Silicon Valley) is apparently so incredibly out of touch on what PROTECT IP is about (despite it having a huge impact on the economy of her district) that she thought it was really about immigration. We were willing to chalk it up to a busy staffer sending out the wrong form letter, but there’s growing evidence that our elected officials simply don’t know what PROTECT IP is about at all.Â
David Segal from Demand Progress was kind enough to pass on that they’ve been watching the responses from elected officials to letters sent via their form about PROTECT IP and nearly 50% of them seem to be about things totally unrelated to PROTECT IP. Are Congressional staffers really that busy or are our elected officials just clueless?Â
As an example, they sent over this letter, sent in response to someone who wrote to Senator Kristen Gillibrand protesting PROTECT IP, which, you’ll note, has nothing to do with PROTECT IP, but is instead about the “internet kill switch.”