Category: Random Thought

Things I think about, tend to be essay length.

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Random Thought

Will “amateurs” save democracy from the “professionals”?

Notorious publicity hound, author and possible Nazi, Andrew Keen, claims that “amateur” reporting, aka blogging, is ruining news and that only professional journalists (producers, writers, editors, et al.) can be trusted to produce content. I refuse to actually link to Andrew but you can find his book, his blog and the explanation for the “Nazi” reference with a quick google search if you must.

It’s so easy to blow up the whole idea that only professional journalists can be trusted because the slightest analysis shows that the people who can be least trusted to report news accurately and without bias, are in fact journalists. Let me ask you this:

  • “If you have ever been part of a news story, where you’re aware of the facts of the story, has it ever been reported 100% accurately?”

I thought not. I’ve been part of a number of newspaper stories, and been present at tapings of TV news stories about my mother’s business, and every single instance has had factual errors in the resulting story. Every single story. Since I’m not megalomaniacal enough to think that the media has in some way singled me out, I can only assume that the same level of (in)accuracy is part of every story in the professional media.

Not convinced yet? Fair enough. How about the White House Press Corps? We know, because we have videotaped evidence, that President George Bush has repeated lied to the Press Corp, contradicting himself and refusing to acknowledge that what he previously said was something he did say, despite abundant copies of the video being available to all press (and shown on “fake news” The Daily Show). Has the Press Corp ever taken him to task and asked, “with respect sir, you are lying and here’s the visual and audio evidence?” Perhaps they are awed by the Office of the President.

However there is no such excuse for continuing to give Press Secretary Tony Snow any credibility as he also can be demonstrated to have patently lied to the Press Corp repeatedly. In fact the only credible response to anything Mr Snow says at a Press Conference is “Sir, you’ve lied repeatedly to us in the past, we must assume you are lying to us now.”

Why does this happen? Because it’s more important to those so-called professional journalists that they have access to the White House, than doing the job they’re paid to do: report accurately what transpires, including calling lies, lies.

What about the countless times the professional media reports press releases from interested parties without, for one moment, applying any critical thinking to what might be being presented. An example from this week: according to a story by David Pendered – presumably a “professional journalist” at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reported the story Mayor rips craigslist over child prostitution, without for a moment applying any critical thinking. Absolutely zero evidence was presented (i.e. there is no factual basis for this report other than the Mayor said something); the only example given was a women who states that she is 21 on the site (but the “Mayor thinks she might not be” based on no evidence at all); and even if the ad were not true, Craigslist is a service provider and the fault is with the person placing the ad. The Mayor’s office, and the allegedly professional reporter (who clearly did no research) don’t realize that every Craigslist ad has a built-in reporting mechanism if the post is problematic.

So, instead of the Mayor reporting their concerns to the site, where something could be done, they picked a tame reporter who uncritically gave the Mayor the publicity they wanted, but failed the public and contributed to the recognition that the “professional media” is nothing but, once again, the lackey of the interested party.

This is not an isolated incident – in any given week you could find hundreds of such cases of media reporting that uncritically publishes whatever’s put in front of them. Take reports of “rampant piracy costing the US $12 billion a year” from the “think tank”, the Institute for Policy Innovation. Has any professional journalist examined the underlying assumptions of such a paper? No. Did any of those allegedly professional journalists check the background of the organization and find that it’s funded, mostly, by the RIAA and MPAA or even notice that much help was provided by organizations closely associated with the two-bit cartels? Of course they didn’t! That would require thinking and actually doing their job. Instead, it’s much easier to take the inflammatory headline bait and run with it uncritically.

Want more evidence? Back on August 22nd, ABC News polls asked who won the Democratic debate of the evening before. When Dennis Kucinich came out the winner, they simply changed the poll to give the results they preferred. That’s the “professional media” Andrew Keen thinks we’re supposed to trust because (and for no other reason) than they’re trained professionals.

Give me a break.

Of course, the professional media’s failings aren’t limited to egregious errors and lies, there’s the matter of accuracy of reporting on any technical subject. This week Adobe announced that the next generation of the Flash Player would support Industry Standard MPEG-4 H.264 video, but Associated Press, who apparently have no-one vaguely competent to report on the subject, made the discussion about High Definition video. That’s a small, tiny part of the story (a subject I do know a little about) but basically misses the real story – web video just became a whole lot better quality for small videos as well; we have one industry standard for multiple purposes and Adobe abandoned their proprietary video formats in order to embrace a ISO industry standard.

It’s not just “professional” journalists. Today Morgan Stanley’s Internet analyst Mary Meeker – a person investors are supposed to be able to rely on for accurate information – reported that YouTube’s new overlay advertising would bring in $4.8 Billion in the next year. Only problem was, she totally misunderstood that CMP is “Impressions per thousand” not impressions. She was out by only a factor of 1000! No wonder I haven’t believed an analysts prediction in more than five years. Guess compounded by bad math!

My final example is the way those “professional journalists” fell all over themselves to report Paris Hilton’s into-jail-out-of-jail-back-to-jail story. At best it was a footnote on life at that time, when there were thousands of more important stories, and yet news hour after news hour after roll of newsprint later all we got was wall-to-wall Hilton. So much so that one MSNBC on-air presenter had enough and refused to read the story placed in front of her.

Mr Keen (who will probably see this because for sure he has vanity searches at Technorati and Google Blog Search) couldn’t have chosen a worse example than attempting to defend “professional journalists”. To my mind, I’ve never actually run into one in the mainstream media.

What we need is a Fifth Estate, because the Fourth Estate has failed us. The Founding Fathers of this country had an experience of the press that was comprised of hundreds of independent voices, with a diversity of opinion. They did not expect it to degrade to just a few voices amplified in the echo chamber of incompetence, irrelevance and inaccuracy that is the mainstream media.

The Fifth Estate must rise up, it’s the only realistic way to keep Democracy alive in this great country.

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Distribution Random Thought

The Principles of Television 3.0

1. There is an open, unmediated marketplace between producers and viewers where viewers compensate producers directly.

2. Production values do count: at a minimum they make the communication visible, audible and so the editing won’t make the target audience nauseas.

3. High production values are not the be all and end all, there will be outstanding product that breaks all the rules and makes a fortune because it’s popular.

4. Prices paid for content will trend down.

5. More people will earn a living from this new model of Television, overall more money than is earned now by the existing ‘Television Producers’. This likely means that fewer people will get mega rich but more people into a “middle class” of producers, making a good income meeting their market.

6. It can be profitable to meet the entertainment, education (or a mixture) needs of audiences from 250,000 to 1 million, which is the new mass market. Smaller audiences can be profitable if they serve a niche well.

7. Simplicity and convenience can compete with free. It can compete particularly well in open marketplaces where otherwise trends downward in revenues would unfortunate.

8. There is a role for non-television, done-for-the-fun-of-it with no expectation of profit, but for the fame of it. Production values will count less, and poor production values would never stop a video going viral.

9. The rise of the citizen journalist with easy visual verification tools – still and video cameras everywhere – makes for more openness and honesty in the political and social realms. Citizen Journalists form a new line in the defense of Democracy and the US way of life from those who would subvert. They form a Fifth Estate, behind Executive, Legislative, Judiciary and Press.

10. Programming styles will evolve outside the constrains of parallel programming and “half hour” or “hour” programming blocks. If programming is viewed on viewers’ schedules it can be whatever duration serves the story of that episode.

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Distribution Random Thought

CBS is caught in 1975

In an article at Ars Technica today , Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment, told the New York Times

“…that if fans want the show to live, they need to watch the broadcast because that’s how the money gets made. Stressing that live viewing is “of primary importance,” Tassler said that “We want them to watch on Wednesday at 8 o’clock… and we need them to recruit new viewers who are going to watch the broadcast.”

If CBS believes that only “appointment television” matters my best advice is to short sell Viacom. Appointment Television is dying. Every single trend points to the move away from Television of the 50’s and 60’s with limited channels where the family sat down together to watch.

But since then, Television has moved on to place more and more choice and control in the hands of the viewers. If CBS and it’s cousins at the other networks don’t see that as their future, they are dead. Short them!

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Random Thought

If everyone’s a creator, who watches?

The way the hype has been growing around vlogging, video podcasting, consumer/user/viewer generated media, some people have extrapolated that we’ll all end up producing video. I don’t think that will be the case.

Many years ago, at least 5 but probably closer to 7 or 8, I promulgated the idea of “Video production as another form of literacy.” I wouldn’t say the general acceptance of my idea was strong – in fact my colleagues in the production community were only too happy to explain to me why I was wrong.

Not surprisingly, I think I was right then and that I’ve been proven so by the above-mentioned consumer/user/viewer generated media.

Literacy, in the sense of “reading and writing” has not been an almost-universal skill for that long in history.

For most of human history, the vast majority of people in every society were illiterate. In 1879 in this country, 20% of the population was illiterate and more than 70% of the black population was illiterate. Yet by 1980 – in a few generations — nearly all adults in the US had achieved basic literacy. Regrettably, 860 million adults worldwide remain illiterate.
Presented by Dean Debra Friedman on November 18, 2005, as part of the “Downtown and Gown” lecture series at ASU’s Downtown Center.

In human history, literacy is recent. Before the printing press very few read – it was an elite skill akin to the ability to drive the complex machineries that produced video and television throughout most of last century. Pre-Gutenberg there weren’t the available books to teach more than a small number of people. Manuscripts were a scarce resource, few needed them so the limited resource was restricted by the high cost of entry. Just like television and video production throughout the last 75 or so years.

What has literacy achieved? Well, most people read and write at some times in their personal or work lives. But there is no one way of “using literacy”. Very few people are employed because of their writing ability (and fewer employed for their reading ability) alone. Of those that are the professional uses are incredibly varied: from the successful Novelist to the Textbook writer, to those that write ad copy, to business reports, to magazine articles, to notes about the call-you-missed. It’s all writing but few are professional writers.

But even if your writing ability isn’t key to your job, everyone needs to fill in a timesheet/work order/sick leave application and needs to be able to read warning labels.

You don’t have to make your living from reading or writing to be literate. You don’t have to be a full time professional “video person” to produce video occasionally. The parallels are very strong between the two forms of literacy.

That’s why I don’t think everyone will be producing content for the 7,684* video sharing websites out there, just like I don’t see the average literate American producing novels, short stories or other written entertainment or educational material for their associates. Some do, most don’t.

Oh, and there’s the evolving 1% rule.

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it. The Guardian, July 2000

Either way you want to consider it, it’s highly unlikely that this near-universal infatuation with a new-found literacy will lead to more producers than consumers.

*In February 2007, that’s a pretty extreme exaggeration. However, there’s a chance this blog will stay online long enough for it to be true if the current rate of YouTube cloners all keep trying for a googlicious deal.

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Distribution Random Thought

What makes Television, Television?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly is television? It seems slightly odd to continue to define television by the very limiting factor it’s being liberated from: broadcast and cable gatekeepers.

We could define Television as something that we watch on the screen in the corner, and that’s probably as reasonable a definition as any, but a little shallow. The announcements of devices like Appletv, along with similar devices from Sling Media, Netgear and announced features for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, mean that, by this definition, every contribution to YouTube is Television? I don’t think so.

Getting Internet-delivered Television back on the familiar screen is certainly an important step toward Television 3.0 but the addition of user generated content reopens the question of what is Television. After thinking about it I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two factors that define Television other than by the distribution channel.

To my mind, Television is the business of creating entertainment or educational content on a regular schedule with attention to the craft skills of production.

Television is a business. Consumer generated media is a hobby. (A worthy, worthwhile hobby by all means.) People work in Television production because they like the work but it is just that: their work. Companies produce shows in the hope of making more income than they spent making the program. Networks and Cable channels pay producers for programs hoping to get more revenue from advertising than the program cost them. And so on.

The other part of the equation: the careful application of craft skills, is harder to pin down. Call it professionalism or craft skills, but there’s a certain something about well crafted Television (across a range of budgets for sure) that sets it apart from “consumer generated content”. Not to be complacent, there’s an increasing amount of that consumer generated content that’s demonstrating professional craft skills.

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Distribution Random Thought

What’s left for the Labels and Studios, Networks or Channels?

It seems that somewhere along the line we adopted a national culture that embraces the idea of “eliminating the middle man” as a societally desirable goal. Sound fair, unless you’re the middle man. In technical jargon this is called Disintermediation, although that sounds far more cruel than simply being eliminated!

The intermediary almost always starts with a useful and well defined role. Once upon a time, access to the airline and hotel booking system was complex, requiring a lot of training. Who needs to go through all that just to book one vacation a year (in a good year)? So we had an intermediary – the travel agent. A skilled professional who’s primary role was to interpret the Byzantine workings of Sabre for mere mortals booking travel! Technology moves forward and a good portion of the travel market is now booked directly by the customer, through those same back-end systems, but with sufficiently customer-friendly interfaces that it’s worth the effort to master it.

I’m not sure if travel agents have completely gone by the wayside – in fact we’re far from that – yet. But it’s inevitable that a travel agent will become a luxury for those who don’t have time to get online. Right now I book 100% of my travel online, but my mother still values the skill of the agent to find a good deal for her. That’s probably a generational thing, so if the trend toward self-booked travel will continue as each successive set of nephews or nieces will trend even further toward self-booking. Simultaneously the reluctance of the mature end of the age spectrum will slowly drop as sites and systems become more and more user-friendly. They’re already heading there.

So, an industry displaced by new technology has to reinvent itself or face extinction. The important thing is that, for many, many years the travel agent provided a valuable service, for which they were deservedly compensated. But when a channel, a middle man or intermediary, faces new technology that disrupts and inevitably destroys their business the choice is to adapt and find a niche to survive in, or die. Such is the nature of life on earth.

Heading the way of the dinosaur are our content aggregators and distribution channels: the Record Labels, the Motion Picture Studios, the TV Networks or even the cable channels.

If the assumption is that every channel or service is in place because it serves a function (or once served a function) that was considered valuable then Record Studios, Motion Picture Studios, Television Networks and Cable Channels (thank you Ted Turner) all all in place because of a valuable service, or services, that they provided. Unfortunately for them, the technology is rapidly making the service much less valuable, if it has any remaining value.

Let’s consider Record Labels as a clear paradigm to follow, mostly because music is much further through this cycle than is filmmaking (including production of entertainment to fill 500 channels with nothing on).

The Record Label performed several valuable services for the artist:

1) The cost of recording was high, so they pre-paid it, on the gamble that it would pay off, and all charged back to the artist’s future earnings, but we won’t go into the politics of it all, right now.
2) The cost of producing a record, physically, was relatively high, because of the up-front costs of producing the first disk, beyond recording the album.
3) Distribution was expensive, paying all the wholesalers and providing for margin at retail, plus those trucks and trains full of vinyl disks.
4) Promotion was expensive, simply getting the word out was expensive, particularly when there were only mass-market channels.

But technology has taken the value out of each of these in turn. First, the cost of recording dropped to the point that every star-struck teen and their friends can produce professional quality audio (even better if they know how to apply knowledge to the accessible toys of production). A purpose-built studio is always going to be better, but even there the cost, at least in this part of Los Angeles, of a recording studio has dropped to be very affordable. But even if the final sound is not at recording-studio-silence-and-perfection, the difference is small. Remember Pareto’s Principle also known as The 80-20 Rule? Even the worst bedroom with a bit of modern recording gear gets a kid 80% of the way to the sound. Like DV, the quality is “good enough” to be accepted in the professional sphere. Strike 1.

So, not long after the cost of recording dropped from the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to thousands of dollars, the cost of producing a CD dropped dramatically – burn individual units with Stomper-labels lovingly applied, or do a run of 1000 for less than $1 each, printed, with bar code and ready for retail. Strike 2.

Strike 3 was the Internet, and digital distribution. The Labels could live with Strikes 1 and 2 because it left them as the gatekeepers to the distribution and promotional channels. Even if you record and press yourself, you would still need the Label for distribution and promotion. But with the Internet with its file sharing and its bittorrents, the Labels really started to get worried. A band could, if anyone had heard of them, distribute their material free, or even sell it direct.

Phew, fortunately, if you never hear about the band or artist, free and direct distribution isn’t going help! The Labels might be down 3 for 3 but they still had a chance of keeping control of promotion.

Promotion. Once you’ve got the cash to spend on a marketing blitz, you can pretty much get your return on the artist back, even if success is moderate. There’ll still be a value-ad for the Labels. There’s nothing to replace that, surely.

Logged on to MySpace anytime? If not, go do it now.

I’m sure it’s not the only site like it. Social Networking online – the hot new growth area of the Internet – is the biggest word-of-mouth market, with viral capability, ever invented. And there’s no publicity like word-of-mouth publicity. It’s going to be a lot more credible because it’s from one of your Friendsters. You get a couple of million MySpaceCadets telling each other how great those free tracks were, and the profit from the next tour and sales of your CD at the venues are likely to be better than they were going to be before! Concerts have been the long term profit center for the artist.

In fact, in this deal, the artist is going to end up with a much bigger cut of the dollar take. Even if they don’t make a cent off the music they give away, artists signed to Labels don’t often see a lot back for their CD sales after the Label charges them, against any advance or royalty, for all that Production, Pressing and Promotion – every dollar of it.

Now the music industry is way further down this path than any other sector, but all parts of their story are in place. It is inevitable that there is no future role for Record Labels as they have been known. (I hear they’re thinking of retraining as travel advisors to the super-rich.)

This isn’t going to play out to the end game in 2006, but the trend is well underway and the conclusion is inevitable.

The movie industry is heading down the same sequence. The cost of producing a “film” (be it on chemical film or digitally ) has also dropped. The cost of producing entertainment Television to an acceptable quality standard is now entirely based on the cost of the content. Rocketboom demonstrates that it’s possible aggregate an audience without spending traditional amounts of money on production. And have you seen their ad rates? $40,000 for 8 ads tacked on the end of an episode thanks to an eBay auction. Starving artists live another year. Even more relevant – this is “consumer generated media” right outside established genres.

Given the relative ease of aggregating a mass (enough) market at relatively low cost, what role is left? The word-of-mouth through the social networking sites will be what’s important. I’m taking a poll on which studio or label will be caught red-faced manipulating or attempting to manipulate a social network. (I’m also expecting that someone will comment and demonstrate where that’s already happened.)

In the television realm, do people want to watch channels or do they want to watch programs? I would contend that the value of TV Networks, and subsequently the explosion of channels is that viewers got choice of programs. With the exception of, maybe, the Shopping Channel and Soap Channel, few people sit and watch “a channel’ all the time. They jump from channel to channel to choose the programs they want to watch. People want to watch programs, not channels and both advertisers and program producers will be better off without the intermediation (middle man) of the channel or network, just like musicians will be better off without the Record Labels.

Let’s consider a case study. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has, according to wikipedia one million viewers a night, although other sources have it as high as 1.3 million. Let’s stick with the one million mark for the moment, it makes the numbers easy. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything definitive on either the cost-per-episode nor ad rates for the Daily Show but let’s run some numbers.

If the show sold for 10c per episode and kept the same audience (What, this entertainment isn’t worth a dime?) then each episode brings in $100,000. Cost to the viewer per month (assuming all new episodes), something like $2. And we know that’s more than Comedy Central are getting as a basic cable channel, per subscriber to a cable or satellite system. For “disposable television” – view it once but it has little or no repeat value – like The Daily Show or Daily News – about 10c a program is what I’d like to pay, and 25c is the maximum I’d pay for that type of programming. Prime Time type programming would likely lever 50c out of my pocket per episode, and maybe for Monk I’d go to $1 an episode. Applying that directly to the production company… In this case we have 5.4 million viewers, most of whom would go to 50c an episode, the producer would get $2.6 million an episode. I think those numbers stack up.

The other model is to consider it from an advertisers point of view. Who is it worth being the exclusive sponsor of The Daily Show, or Las Vegas? It’s probably a more cost-effective buy for a car company to directly finance the production and be the only advertiser in the show, probably with a little product placement action going on. In parallel with the low-cost-to-buy-but-no-ads version at 50c (say). This concept is carried forward in an article by Mark Pesce called Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast Television

Whichever way you cut it, the middle men – the channel aggregators – look like being disintermediated progressively in the coming years. And there’s not much they can do about it. There are better, new models, like Mark Pesce’s. There are new micropayments systems coming that will charge through an RSS feed, only for what’s downloaded – pay for what’s interesting – in parallel with advertising supported content. Everything old is new again: back to the days when “Soap Operas” were indeed sponsored by a soap company.

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Business & Marketing Random Thought

How business can be its own worst enemy

Seems that I am on a theme where, if a supplier won’t provide the service I want to buy, I’ll go somewhere else. Well, it’s happened again. A website I used to have open most of the time for quick reference to the information finally drove me away tonight. Why? Because they’ve loaded their pages with so much flash-based advertising that having that site open used more than 70% of my processor capacity by itself.

I have nothing against sites that have advertising although I do object to the processor load that Flash ads force on me. Advertising is a given on the Internet, and until this site forced me to act, I was prepared to ignore their, frequently intrusive, advertising for the free weather service they provided. Much more up to date than the OS X 10.4 widget, which is often 2-3 hours out of date when it loads.

I almost reverted to that old standby – walking to the door and opening it – to check the weather when I noticed that ubiquitous RSS feed button on the site. Bliss, joy, glory!!! One click later and my weather is now in my favorite RSS feed aggregator (NetNewsWire Lite). Two items in the feed: weather prediction and current conditions. Exactly what I kept the browser window open full time to get.

Absolutely a reminder to me, and probably anyone in business, that the customer has to come first. The moment we start creating pages that are so heavy in advertising that they become unwieldy for the customer, we effectively put ourselves out of business. It’s not like this site has tremendous overheads – they’re only aggregating and presenting information from the National Weather Service. That the page is taking on advertising that slows my computer is greed, and greed only.

Worse still, the site has no feedback link so I can’t even help them improve by providing feedback. As a serial entrepreneur for more than 30 years, I don’t enjoy negative feedback but I want it and encourage it. I love it when people have positive comments about our products or my presentations. That feeds the ego and helps me know what works. But it’s the negative comment, or the critical opinion, that I can use to improve my presentation and/or product.

And indeed, some of the best improvements to the products have come from critical customers. Thank you. Feedback on presentations helps me improve for future presentations. The subsequent audiences thank you.

In the day of alternate distribution our customers have many ways to get the information we supply like using an RSS feed instead of going to a website, something I’m a huge fan of because of the efficiency. RSS feeds can (and some do) contain advertising and I don’t mind that, because it’s one ad per feed message, generally small and definitely not the processor-hogging flash banners that have become seemingly ubiquitous.

Customers have a choice. If we don’t focus entirely on their need, we’re only in business temporarily. If we’re in post production and don’t focus on the customer’s need for improved communication in the context of their business and message then there are plenty of alternatives. No longer are we the “gatekeepers” to production values because, frankly, anyone can buy or borrow the means of production with quality matching the best broadcasters of just a few years ago. Even HD has no significant barrier to entry.

When was the last time you solicited your customers for how you can improve?

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Distribution Random Thought

Do I really need a TV service?

A recent move across the Valley (San Fernando) to Burbank left us with a dilemma – having closed our Dish Satellite account (don’t ask, lousy customer service) we discover that DirectTV won’t work off our balcony, the only location the community will allow. Charter cable would be available, but for some odd reason they don’t offer a DVR in our area (even though they offer digital cable – go figure, it’s just a box requiring nothing on the service side.) So, since they won’t “sell” me what I want to buy, I don’t want to buy. (The fact they promise to respond to email queries within 24 hours and I’m waiting three days later is another negative.)

So, no supplier wants to sell me what I want to buy and I was under the very mistaken belief that the US was the “country of service”. Apparently only where a tip is involved. So, what’s the alternative? Don’t buy. But there are some programs I want to watch and my partner is addicted to “Project Runway” so absolutely no TV isn’t a desirable option either. Mmm.

Jump ahead a week and we’re cheerfully watching most of our regular shows and many of them look much better than they used to off the Dish Network receiver. We have our a la carte television – the brave new world.

Big downside is that I have to run cables from my laptop to the TV – VLC player puts the playback on my extended desktop on the extended desktop. VLC player plays a wider variety of file types and has no borders on three sides during playback so it gets lost into the overscan. (Tip, set the extended TV desktop to 800×600 so the pixels of the header on the player are relatively smaller.)

So how does the experiment go? It takes a few minutes a day to set up downloads of the shows I want to watch. But they’re mostly easy to find and quick to download. But so far I’m not missing “regular TV”. I can easily see how the whole oligopoly of networks and cable could fall apart with a little disintermediation. They are the reason I tried this experiment and it could really be a precursor to their demise. Networks and Cable systems/channels don’t add value any more. Once they did but now the technology is there to do without them. And, as much as the gatekeepers will fight it, when the technology is there for choice, choice will happen around the gatekeepers: they’re gatekeepers of a gate in a fence with holes in it.

One correspondent thought that I might miss the “serendipity” of finding new material, but because my viewing pattern was almost exclusively off the PVR in the Dish receiver, they tended to be only shows I knew anyway. New shows generally got picked up because someone I knew recommended them. In fact, while I write the blog I’m watching a documentary I found while searching for something else – the very definition of Serendipity.

If either DirectTV or Charter will offer me what I want to buy, I’ll buy it. If the cost of a disposable TV show, like, for example The Daily Show were under 50c I’d be happy to use the convenience of the ITMS to buy, but that sort of TV does not justify $1.99 an episode ($40 a month for the one show is not realistic or competitive). For shows that bear multiple viewings or are exclusive in some way, the $1.99 is not unreasonable.

All I really want now is a device like the Airport Express that lets me stream my video from this laptop across to a box near the TV to get rid of these unsightly cables!

Bottom line, the theory of disintermediation is not so much theory any more. Some of what I wrote about back in March last year is closer than even I thought. Not for my mom yet, but for some.

Categories
Distribution Random Thought Video Technology

A podcast is not the same media form as a video podcast a.k.a. vlog

I’m totally on board with audio podcasts. They have effectively replaced the car radio for all but the shortest drives. Perhaps that’s because I prefer "talk radio" in the car and the podcasts I subscribe to are most akin to talk radio and on business related subjects.

I’ll put up with inconsistent quality in an audio podcast – after all, it’s only taking up part of my attention. That is the crucial point with audio. We can listen to podcasts and drive the car, or go to the Fitness Center or Gym (and I should listen to more podcasts there) or do housework. The audio is only taking up part of my attention span.

But add video to it and you’re now demanding 100% of my attention while the video is playing. I can’t drive and watch a video; I can’t watch it while moving around the fitness center because the screen needs always to be in front of me; I can’t watch it while I go for a walk or do housework. Video assumes I’m going to give it, if not 100% of my attention, my primary attention.

If it’s not necessary to watch the video portion to get the value from a program, then dump the video and just go with audio.

I don’t normally subscribe to the highly regarded and very popular This Week in Tech a.k.a. TWiT, but a friend recommended a specific episode and suggested I get the video version. That one hour program has sat on my hard drive for six weeks waiting for me to have time to watch it. In that time I’ve listened to more than 15-20 hours of very similar programming. I’m still wondering why my friend had me get the video version: it’s just four guys sitting around a table in an infinite black set recorded by three cameras.

The video adds nothing. Apart from a short glimpse at an iPod Nano (is it really that old?) there were no props; no visual aids; no graphics; nothing that justified all my attention. Put the four faces in the artwork for the feed and I’d have had the same benefit.

Just because we can deliver video as enclosures in an RSS file, doesn’t mean we should. Bad video is easy. Good video is hard, and consistent regular production is very hard to do. I was talking with Scott Sheppard of Inside Mac Radio and Inside Mac TV about the difference in what he’ll have to carry to a trade show to get interviews for his iPod video show, compared with his weekly and daily audio shows. For audio: Marantz solid state recorder, microphone. For video: video camera, tripod, a basic lighting kit, microphone, radio mics, receivers… Instead of fitting in a shoulder bag or backpack with his laptop he’s now wondering whether he’ll need a custom cart to lug around – or an intern. This is, of course, because he’s trying to make the show up to something that uses the video well. You can find more ranting on this subject in an earlier post of mine: What makes good visuals

There are some programs, like Tiki Bar TV – always high in the new subscribers ranking in iTunes – that really try. While it may not be scripted in detail, it has good production values and I think I see some Apple LiveType and Motion effects in there – appropriately edited in the Final Cut Studio.

Bad video is easy. Good video requires considerably more equipment, effort, talent, skill and, most importantly, the need for video. Because if we don’t, we’re going to bore the market to sleep before they adopt any form of non-mainstream content as being valuable.

So, even though audio and video podcasts are superficially similar by their use of RSS and enclosed media files, they are not the same medium. Video requires a much higher commitment from the viewer than audio does from the listener.

Here’s a question for all the budding video podcasters out there: Is your content so valuable, compelling and well produced that I’d be happy to pay $100 an hour to watch it? If you wouldn’t, consider that is exactly what you’re asking me to do. OK, I don’t pay that to watch a "Hollywood" movie (but then again, I rarely watch them) but my time has a value and you’re asking me to give up that value to watch your program. With audio, it adds value to my time – redeeming time that would otherwise be wasted.

One media adds value to my time; the other robs me of it. That’s why they’re not the same.

Categories
Distribution Interesting Technology Random Thought

Yahoo and TiVo hook up, world shakes a little

Although it doesn’t seem like a big announcement, Yahoo users who own a TiVo can now program their TiVo from the Yahoo TV guide. No big thing because TiVo owners have been able to do that for years, so it’s only a minor additional convenience until we read some of the fine print and plans for the near future.

And in the coming months, possibly before the end of the year, Yahoo’s traffic and weather content, as well as its users’ photos will be viewable on televisions via TiVo’s broadband service and easy-to-use screen menu.

So now Yahoo content (pictures, traffic and weather for now) is available on the television with television/PVR/DVR ease of use. Remember TiVo already have many components of the digital home experience with TiVo to go to take digital material from the TiVo drive to PCs, DVD-R and portable media players.

Where it gets interesting is to project forward. Yahoo consider themselves a media company evidenced by the formation of the Yahoo Media Group back in January 2005 and an orgy of hiring media executives for the division since then. The purpose of the Yahoo Media Group is to “significantly strengthening our content pillar”. In April they hired Shawn Hardin, who, according to ZDnet, “Hardin has previously worked in television and the Internet, holding executive positions at NBC and Snap.com.”

Although Yahoo has been vague about its plans for the Media Group, it’s built a team with a strong balance of “Hollywood” and “Web” backgrounds and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that it has some big plans…

Oh, let’s not forget Yahoo Video Search. In competition with Google video Yahoo are building connections to a library of independent content. I’m sure the Yahoo Media Group are building a library of mainstream content: Santa Monica is not that far from Hollywood!

Now to my conjecture. TiVo has about 3 million subscribers. TiVo is linking with Yahoo to display Yahoo content via the TiVo device, direct to the living room. Aren’t there many people planning/desiring to bring Internet-delivered “TV” into the living room, right where the TiVo box is already sitting? Akimbo, DaveTV, Brightcove all seem to be going down that path with a dedicated box and service. Apple with its FrontRow and Microsoft with its Media Center PC are approaching it from the other direction.

But none have the penetration in the living room that TiVo does right now.

If the relationship with Yahoo goes just a little further then what’s to stop Yahoo delivering video content direct to the TiVo under some form of pay-for-view or subscription model? It seems self-evident to me that this is really about a much bigger play for the living room and part-and-parcel of the Yahoo Media Group’s efforts. Yahoo could launch with 3 million subscriber boxes already in place. A number that would bring much cheer to Akimbo, DaveTV or Brightcove’s investors if they ever achieve anything close to that. Apple and Microsoft (and its partners) have to get the computer moved into the living room, although don’t be surprised to find Apple taking a page from TiVo’s book and integrating a tuner, program guide and simplified iTunes into a future “Mac mini” with video output to sit under the TV. When they’re ready, of course.

Given that TiVo are somewhat struggling right now, it’s not far fetched to consider Yahoo buying TiVo? With a market capitalization of around $300 million TiVo wouldn’t be hard for Yahoo to swallow, or even Apple (as rumored earlier in 2005). Only time will tell, but when Yahoo buys TiVo, remember, you heard it here first!