Category: The Business of Production

Rumblefish’s Friendly Music relaunches with 750k licensed songs http://t.co/Eh05ehpr $1.99 per track for YouTube videos. All licensed, apparently only for YouTube, though.

One tool Friendly Music has added is a MoodMap, which lets users search for a soundtrack based on the feeling of the video they’ve created. By clicking within a rainbow-like circle, they can find songs that match a certain mood, which refines things a bit. There’s also a “What’s the Occasion” tab for finding soundtracks relevant to certain holidays and occasions. And finally, Friendly Music has an editorially curated Editor’s Picks, with songs focusing specifically on current events, pop culture or upcoming holidays.

Would be nice to get this level of simplicity (and cost) in licensing music for other applications. Until then, there’s Smartsound!

Update: On Twitter Chad Haberstroh @haberchad pointed out that jewelbeat.com has 35,000 tracks licensed for commercial use for 99c each.

Episode 41: The fallout from Bunim Murray’s NLE choice http://t.co/df0Yr4Am A new Terence and Philip Show

Starting with the decision to go to Media Composer at Bunim Murray, Terence and Philip discuss the state of NLEs today and the business behind them. Its a long show and it covers a lot.

Not surprisingly, Terry and I agree that Media Composer was Bunim Murray’s best choice, but from there…

Canadian musician outsources his indie video to Bangalore, beauty ensues http://t.co/CJroi0xH

In a recent Terence and Philip Show we wondered whether outsourcing or automation would kill us first. Now we have an example of a music video being completely outsourced, with apparently great results.

Changing Viewing Habits the Key to Winning the Streaming Video War http://t.co/IDLK7vDg

My first thought when reading that headline was “well, d’oh”, because it seemed like an oversimplification of the scale of the problem. Sure, if everyone switched over to streaming video for their media consumption, then we’d be in a different position. Trouble is, people generally are watching more television than ever, via more traditional channels than internet delivered streaming content.

Will we be outsourced or automated out of existence? http://t.co/ytsovtbR

In this episode Terence and Philip discuss the outsourcing of editing jobs, remote (a.k.a cloud) editing and automation in production. What’s happening now and how will it evolve in the near future. Philip also sneaks in a preview of an interesting show he’ll be involved with in 2012.

How the long tail cripples bonus content/multimedia http://t.co/PoDriUI7

I have a friend who used to do a large amount of bonus material for one of the major studios as they progressed through releasing their back catalog. He has already noted that, as of about two years ago, that work dried up completely and now is no longer part of his business, which fortunately is still fairly healthy for him.

This is a depressing reality check, and is probably the counter argument to “the year of Transmedia“. Transmedia is seriously expensive to produce!

The same thing that happened to music is going to be true of books. The typical ebook costs about $10 in out of pocket expenses to write (more if you count coffee and not just pencils). But if we add in $50,000 for app coding, $10,000 for a director and another $500,000 for the sort of bespoke work that was featured in Al Gore’s recent ‘book’, you can see the problem. The publisher will never have a chance to make this money back.

Sure, there will be experiments at the cutting edge, but no, they’re not going to pay off regularly enough for it to become an industry. The quality is going to remain in the writing and in the bravery of ideas, not in teams of people making expensive digital books.

The market didn’t really make a conscious choice here, but the choice has been made: it’s not a few publishers putting out a few books for the masses. No, the market for the foreseeable future is a million publishers publishing to 100 million readers. Do the math. Lots of choice, not a lot of whistles. And no bells.

What is the future of the post house? Episode 39 of The Ternece and Philip Show. http://t.co/dXUREMzz

Starting with an article “Hollywood & the Job Crisis” that leads to be a discussion about constantly changing business model. Right now the model seems to be “how low can you go” which is ultimately self defeating. Where do you go from here? Talent and desire are what will sell. How did post houses get to this, and what will the future hold? What is your Unique Selling Proposition?