Category: Monetizing

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Assisted Editing Business & Marketing Item of Interest Metadata Monetizing The Business of Production The Technology of Production

Episode 18 of The Terence and Philip Show

What’s going to happen in 2011? http://tinyurl.com/48f979s

Our longest show ever!

In this episode Terence and Philip, with Greg Huson from Secret HQ, look forward to what we can expect in 2011.  You might want to pace yourself on this one as we’ve set a new record for show length.

What will the Microsoft Kinect be used for? Who’ll be releasing new software this year – will we see new versions of Media Composer, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Creative Suite? Will Avid open up to 3rd party hardware? What will be in those releases? Is this the year Metadata (finally) takes off?

How many movies have to not make money from 3D before the fad is over? Or will 3D TV spark 3D production? Will we see RED Epic this year and will it be a success? What will develop with large sensor cameras?

How will the collapse of State Governments affect production subsidies? Will runaway production come back to LA?

When will the tipping point come when distribution breaks out of broadcast and cable channel models? Is ivi going to be ruled legal? What’s the future of Netflix? Is a social network a replacement for channel guides?

What do we wish we could predit for this year? More use of metadata for production automation and where it comes from? What if we didn’t do a first string-out manually? This leads to a discussion of the philosophy of editing.

What will be this year’s surprise? Another DSLR? Another daVinci/Smoke on Mac?

What will happen in distribution? What’s the future of DVD Extras?

What isn’t going to happen that needs to happen?

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Item of Interest Monetizing

‘ShapeShifter’: Are Short Films the Future of Advertising?

‘ShapeShifter’: Are Short Films the Future of Advertising? http://tinyurl.com/4ehcq3k

Continue reading “‘ShapeShifter’: Are Short Films the Future of Advertising?”

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Item of Interest Monetizing The Business of Production

McRibs and the Art of Artificial Scarcity

McRibs and the Art of Artificial Scarcity http://tinyurl.com/2ebms7v

I loved the Disney example in the article – it’s a perfect attempt (a good one) at creating artificial scarcity. It’s easy to take a physical good off the market – like the MacRib – but with Snow White, I wonder if the artificial scarcity will be as successful when beautiful digital copies get “out there”.

And that’s the problem with artificial scarcities on digital goods: they don’t work. DRM is an attempt to force artificial scarcity and it’s cracked time, after time, after time. If your customer and hear and see your product, it can be reproduced infinitely for little cost.

So the ultimate question is: what are the real scarcities surrounding a film or TV project and how do we monetize them?

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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?

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously http://tinyurl.com/34586kb

It seems the problem of “book piracy” is more of an issue for scaremongers and “the sky is falling” types. In practice book sales stay constant or grow with the wider exposure unauthorized distribution can bring.

Lieber shared his findings in a blog entry, complete with fancy graphics which show that the 4Chan piracy resulted in a flood of new customers.

The picture [on the article site] shows how Lieber’s site traffic surged after the pirated scans were posted, and how 4Chan brings in more traffic than BoingBoing. But Lieber also said that the spike in sales was even more impressive.

This isn’t an isolated instance. I’ve blogged before the Corey Doctorow, who believes that widespread distribution helps more than it hurts, has always made all his books available for free for download, and yet has had many best sellers than have been translated to six languages. While every book was available for free.

David Pogue’s publishers experimented with making one of his books DRM free, which inevitable led to unauthorized distribution, but sales increased slightly.

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Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

Are Corporations back to funding creative endeavors?

Looking to a Sneaker for a Band’s Big Break http://tinyurl.com/25q3dvy

A shoe company giving away studio time might seem peculiar. But with its new project, Converse — whose sneakers have been worn by generations of bands, from the Ramones to the Strokes — wants to become a patron of the rock arts. The company is not alone: lifestyle brands are becoming the new record labels.

This is remarkably like the sort of patronage a King, Lord or Knight would make of an artist in return for the artist creating the art for the patron’s benefit.

Not long ago most youth-minded brands’ pop strategies were limited to tour sponsorships and licensing songs for TV commercials. Now they compete to offer bands the kind of services once strictly the province of record companies: money for video shoots, marketing, even distribution. Red Bull and Mountain Dew have record labels with credible rosters. Levi’s, Converse, Dr. Martens,Scion, Nike and Bacardi have all sponsored music by the kind of under-the-radar artists covered in Pitchfork and The Village Voice, and they blitz the blogosphere with promotional budgets fatter than most labels could muster.

Overall, I see this as another positive step in the direction of financing independent production. One sponsor is less intrusive than many advertisers and it’s a better deal for both audience and advertiser.

These deals certainly seem to be better for artists than traditional record labels who now want “360 degree” deals where they get a cut on every dollar earned by an artist:

Major labels’ 360 deals, he said, are “way more of a sell-out than doing a collaboration with a brand where you have full creative control and you give free content to your fans.” (Many artists on Atlantic have extended-rights contracts, but a spokeswoman said Chromeo does not.)”

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Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Models are ‘Exceptions’

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples The ‘Exception’ http://tinyurl.com/35znl9a

So often I’ve heard that new business models for music, game creation and other creative endeavors are all exceptions because the majority of money is still being made by the record labels and the successes of the new business models are not typical of the “average musician”.

Except, when you consider it carefully, so few artists ever made money from their Record Contract, that the few successes were indeed the exceptions.

Less than 10% of signed artists recoup. Take Maximo Park for example. They have by their own admission never made a penny from record sales and make their money from DJ sets in the main. An example I have first hand knowledge of, Embrace, have sold millions of albums, they were a genuinely massive band; they performed from Glastonbury main-stage to Top Of The Pops and everywhere in-between. When they split from Virgin, they owed their label three quarters of a million pounds. I guess my point is that if we promote the Trad Music Biz’s model as “The model” then the message we’d be sending is:

  • less than one percent of musical artists are part of the music business
  • only a tenth of those will recoup and make money from their record sales, and that’s good
  • an artist should be saddled with debt, the rate at which they pay that back is equivalent to a credit card with a 900% interest rate

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Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

When A Humor Site Understands the Implications of Abundance better than the “Experts”.

When A Humor Site Understands The Implications Of Abundance Better Than The ‘Experts’… http://tinyurl.com/2bn6zuv

Here’s the bottom line: you can only sell scarcity. Digital files are abundant: they can be replicated indefinitely at minimal to no cost. Yes, various attempts at creating a Forced ARTificial Scarcity or FARTS, but they only ever succeed short term.

The key point, raised at the beginning of the article, which is the point we’ve been trying (and most likely, failing) to make for years, is that this isn’t just about music and movies. Issues of abundance where there used to be scarcity is going to impact all sorts of industries, even beyond what many people expect.

If you are interested in how the next generation of creative endeavors will be funded both the Techdirt article and the original piece at Cracked.com  – 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. – are absolutely essential reading.

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows

iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows and sports broadcasts http://tinyurl.com/352at7h

In-App Purchases Yield More Revenue Than Mobile Ads http://tinyurl.com/24k6d75 Apps have bigger audiences and more revenue than ads. Mmmm

These two stories have been hanging around for a while for me to comment on.

The daily audience for apps that run on Apple’s iOS operating system (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) has now surpassed 19 million users, who spend an average of 22 minutes per day using these apps, according to one measure. That means the audience for the iOS devices is now bigger than NBC’s Sunday Night Football and is just shy of the audience for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Only 4 million daily viewers separate the iOS audience from that of the No. 1-ranked TV show, Fox’s American Idol, according to data collected by analytics firm Flurry.

<snip> Based on its own estimates, Flurry believes that the iOS is already bigger than all the TV shows if you consider the entire iOS audience.

The article goes on to talk about the influence on advertising revenue before pointing out that this is in aggregate: there is not yet a single app whose audience is so big that it can match the audience of a single most-popular TV show. And that’s a lot of the problem. If in the 1940’s each network had required a different receiver or box (or app) Broadcast TV would never have caught on. This is the biggest problem with Internet delivered media now.

But the advertising issue should worry TV networks (broadcast and cable) as they see their dominance being challenged. In-App revenue is exceeding mobile advertising revenue. In-App revenue can include pay-for-view; virtual goods, upgrades and a range of other options. Advertising is just annoying.

A look at the chart below shows that for the month of September, the average monthly advertising revenue is roughly $1 per app user. For virtual good sales, however, the revenue per user is closer to $8.

Flurry data also highlights that, as of February, mobile advertising revenue per user has remained flat, while in-app purchases are trending upward. “During 2010 … revenue increasingly shifts from advertising to virtual goods sales until reaching a proportion of more than 80% from virtual goods,” according to the report.

 

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

Top 5 Ways to Fail at Crowdfunding

Top 5 Ways to Fail at Crowdfunding http://tinyurl.com/234p3co

Of curse, do the opposite if you want to succeed.  From a documentarian’s perspective, slightly rewritten by Documentary Tech.

The film version:

  1. have an online support network in place before you start
  2. Keep your goal realistic
  3. Know who your audience is – particularly your “first audience”
  4. Keep the crowdfunding campaign tight
  5. Offer imaginative perks for donors.