The present and future of post production business and technology

Hulu’s Views Are Up, But Its Audience Isn’t http://bit.ly/c0hjqb

It’s a very interesting graphic/statistic. Apparently the same viewers are going back to Hulu more often, but it’s not growing the total numbers of viewer anywhere near as quickly.

It’s hard to interpret other than that some people have really gotten into the Hulu Habit, watching a lot of their TV viewing there, while it’s not catching on beyond that core group. This could simply be “early adopters” and it won’t be until it moves more into the mainstream that the unique viewers will go up. Viewer numbers have actually dropped a little since last year.

Hopefully they will, or Hulu’s problem in brining in sufficient revenue from the service for its Corporate Masters will be exacerbated. Advertising more to the same people isn’t going to fund growth at Hulu.

Hulu had 43.5 million unique visitors in May, which is just barely above the 40 million unique visitors it had a year ago. It’s down from Hulu’s peak which was 44 million last December.

Add a story to a near worthless trinket on eBay and it sells for more! http://bit.ly/dj5JAe

A great followup story to the earlier post today on Paypal and the future of Media this study shows how attaching a “story” to a near-worthless trinket increased the value significantly. They got higher bids on eBay than other similar items.

This is a near-perfect analogy of how giving fans a reason to buy (something) using the infinite digital good (the music, movie or TV show in download form) works.

The “story” was given away for free, but the object cost money. What those involved in the project quickly found was that these worthless trinkets were suddenly selling for a lot more than their nominal “price.” It was a perfect example of how an infinite good (the story), when properly attached to a scarce good (the trinket), can make that scarce good much more valuable. This is a point that many have trouble grasping. They think, when we discuss the economics of infinite and scarce goods, that the price on scarce goods always remains the same, and never seem to take into account how a connected infinite good can greatly raise the value and the price of a scarce good. A hit song (infinite) heard by millions increases the price of a concert tickets (scarce). A brilliant blog post (infinite) can increase the price of a consultant (scarce) who wrote it. A sterling reputation (infinite) for an automobile company can increase the price of the cars (scarce) they sell. It goes on and on and on.

Everything you need to know about SEO http://bit.ly/bPtdEt I shall be working through this tutorial myself!

Search Engine Optimization is one of the key topics in both my “Grow you Business” and “Grow and Monetize and Audience” seminars. It’s crucial for being more visible on the Internet. Most SEO optimization is relatively simple. You can get 80% of the benefit with relatively little work, or you can spend a lot more time to optimize that last 20% if you desire. (Personally I’m an 80% guy with stuff like this: I’ll put the extra effort into great content, itself very good for SEO optimization.)

This free tutorial cov ers every thing you need to know to get started improv ing your search engine rank ings in the major search engines. Put sim ply, this is the resource I would have kicked a fool in order to get my hands on when I was first div ing into the wild world of SEO.

The guide is the result of hun dreds of hours of research and includes chap ters on all of the following topics:

1. How Search Engines Operate
2. How Peo ple Inter act With Search Engines
3. Why Search Engine Mar ket ing is Necessary
4. The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development
5. Key word Research
6. How Usabil ity, Expe ri ence, & Con tent Affect Rankings
7. Grow ing Pop u lar ity and Links
8. Search Engine’s Tools for Web mas ters Intro
9. Myths & Mis con cep tions About Search Engines
10. Mea sur ing and Track ing Success

How Paypal Can Help Save Media—And Itself http://bit.ly/ddotgG similar to Techdirt’s CwF+RtB=profit. (Probably a truth if from 2 sources)

The essence of the article is that:

I wrote recently that there is an easy formula for consumer spend on media:  
Desire + Relationship + Ease = Spend

What struck me with that was the similarity between Ben Elowitz understanding of the future of media and that at techdirt.com. Techdirt expresses it as:

CwF + RtB = profit.

Connect with Fans (build audience/followers) and give them a Reason to Buy and they will buy stuff.

The ease of purchase is of course what we were trying to achieve with klickTab/Open TV Network: one of the easiest ways to get media is via RSS and we added in a commerce engine to make the process of paying for digital downloads much easier. Maybe PayPal can make it easy enough.

With ad revenues going less far to foot the bill for published content, making media profitable will increasingly mean turning to consumers to pay for content and experiences. And consumers open their wallets in proportion to how badly they want it (desire); how well they know the other parties (relationship); and how little work it takes (ease). This is why there is such a strong future in bite-size media consumption: for all the talk about paywalls and subscriptions, it is far easier to get payments of a buck or two. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)demonstrates the value of bite-size with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues from apps alone, far exceeding any leading online publisher’s subscription programs.

Petition: ACTA ‘threatens’ Public Interests http://bit.ly/a8EeuV

ACTA is a “trade negotiation” supposedly about trade mark protection, but is actually intended to force even more restrictive copyright on all signatories, that will eventually be used to become law. Given that all the evidence points to a loose copyright being best for society, this is very bad news. That it’s being negotiated in secret, with direct input by “big copyright” (ie MPAA, RIAA and their sister organizations internationally) one could hardly think it’s going to be in the best interests of society.

About 650 people, including 11 members of the European Union Parliament and about 90 intellectual property (IP) professors, have signed a document saying an international IP enforcement agreement being negotiated by the U.S. and 36 other countries “threatens numerous public interests.”

After I posted that last reference to Boing Boing’s iPhone photo and video examples I read the very last line:

Video is saved and exported as h.264 QuickTime, and you can email, MMS, or publish to YouTube right from the iPhone. Editing on the device is possible with iMovie for iPhone ($5 in the Apple App store).

So, iMovie on iPhone can edit H.264 QuickTime Files but Final Cut Pro has to transcode to ProRes? What’s up with that?

Now there’s a lot of good reasons to transcode to ProRes (or DNxHD even with AMA for H.264 QT files) but surely if the underpowered processor in an iPhone (relative to any desktop or laptop) can do it, why not a fully blown 8 core Mac?

iPhone 4 video camera “outperforms other smartphones and ultra-mobile devices” http://bit.ly/bpIQib

That’s good news as I’m finally going to get an iPhone. Just never seemed the right time or device until now.

There’s some video and nice still examples at Boing Boing.

You can see the difference, but the verdict in short form is this: iPhone 4 outperforms other smartphones and handheld ultra-mobile digital video camcorders, and I’ve tried nearly all of ’em for web video production while on the road. When it comes to video recording in a smartphone (and in “Flip” class devices), iPhone 4 is the one to beat.