The difference between marketing, advertising, PR and branding. http://bit.ly/M745k
A nice simple cartoon that sums up the difference quite nicely.
If ‘Piracy’ Is Killing Filmmaking, Why Do Nigeria, China And India Have Thriving Movie Businesses? http://bit.ly/boSQWe Damned good question!
As China, Nigeria and India are hotbeds of “piracy”, why is it that they still have thriving (bigger than Hollywood) movie production and distribution  businesses?  If we actually listened to the garbage that the MPAA puts out (usually without factual basis) then conventional wisdom would be that piracy is killing the movie business (and yet the movie business keeps having record years).
Perhaps it’s not piracy, just an unwillingness to understand how the world has changed combined with a distaste for actually providing value. Movie theater owners: stop treating people like criminals and perhaps they’d come back. Stop overcharging for garbage food and beverage; make an experience that people want. Adapt and provide value, then you’ll discover that piracy is not the problem: you, the studios and the executives therein are the problem.
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Want to monetize online video?
Want to monetize online video? Make an app for that. http://bit.ly/b1gdo3 Long thought that an App was a great way to market a project.
Its not for nothing that ABC have a very successful iPad app. It’s long been part of my thinking around iPhone/iTouch that apps are a great way to wrap up a project: put the previews, purchashable items (not only the media), community and so on, in one place.
Internet video startups Roku and Boxee are also enabling video publishers to build apps that can be monetized. Both companies have launched software development kits (SDKs) to enable third-party content publishers to build applications or channels on their hardware devices, and both are committed to enabling publishers to charge for content directly through their systems.
How To Market Your Film: Getting Results on YouTube http://bit.ly/9Hm2sM Who doesn’t want that?
Democratized production is great, but we need to democratize distribution. Once upon a time we (or the studio) spent money – lots of it – to promoting a film or other independent project. Now we trade off time and effort to do the promotion and keep control.
Part of that process will involve putting the trailer up on YouTube. The author argues that there’s a right way, and wrong way, to go about it.
Part two of the series talks about How to get more views on YouTube.
Ohh, interesting. Apple’s Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference http://bit.ly/bDnW36 So Adobe can accelerate Flash on OS X now?
These are newly published for Mac OS X 10.6.3 and later with Mac models equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M, but mark a big step forward in third parties (like Adobe) being able to hook into the same frameworks Apple hooks into.
These frameworks seem to be mostly focussed on hardware decode of H.264, but no doubt there’s more in there than my cursory read suggests.
Brand and build your production or post production business. http://bit.ly/bJlTL7 Free seminar from me on May 4.
Your brand defines you post production business and the stories you tell define your brand. This webinar will help you understand how to establish and create you brand by better knowing what business you are in, because it’s probably not the one you think it is. Having established the brand we’ll learn how to build an internet presence by understanding how marketing, PR and social conversations have changed the business promotion landscape. The webinar will conclude with the top tips on maximizing your business’ visibility on the Internet.
Did I mention free? How can you lose.
Some background in Adobe v Apple re Flash http://bit.ly/dygV0N It’s still complicated but apparently Adobe haven’t been as proactive in the mobile space as they could have. Dan Rayburn is editor of Streaming Media magazine and doesn’t appear to have bias in this discussion.
I have to say though, that my experience of Adobe engineers and product managers has always been of people enthusiastic about their product(s) and their users.
Can Inidie Films make money on YouTube? http://bit.ly/cvtnHb Mostly not. Much on Demand Media again. (Pay attention to Demand Media!)
A few “indies” have made decent money from YouTube but the general consensus is:
These are happy accidents, but should indie filmmakers be using YouTube as a component of their finance plan?
No, they should not.
And right at the end of the article:
Instead of layering the “old school†indie on top of a new platform, the smart approach is to follow Demands’ lead and recognize this is a new medium, with different requirements; it’s actually more a search engine than a content delivery system or distributor.
While there’s a lot I find disturbing about Demand Media’s model – mostly that it’s scraping by with the barest of production values – it is a new business model and one that I think has the best chance of showing us how to reduce the cost of quality production down, so it can survive in a world of niche programming, which is the inevitable direction we’re heading.
Wired’s article on Demand Media from last year: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/
and from yesterday: Is Demand Media’s CEO Going Hollywood? New Board Member at Demand Peter Guber is the former head of Polygram and former chairman of Sony Pictures. What does he say about Demand?
As someone who’s always understood the power of the narrative for attracting audiences, I believe Demand Media has discovered a new and largely untapped story telling platform on the web. As part of its Board, I look forward to helping unlock this value and drive innovation online, using the insight and experience I bring from the entertainment industry.
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Copyright and Wrong
Copyright and Wrong http://bit.ly/cfX7ql The Economist weighs in on a return to the root of Copyright. Statue of Anne – for 14 or 28 years.
The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creative people to make more work by giving them a limited period of monopoly license before the work returns to the public domain. This has been so blatently perverted so that a successful artist – with only one success – may never have to work again. How is that creating new works?
The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable, however. Authors and artists do not generally consult the statute books before deciding whether or not to pick up pen or paintbrush. And overlong copyrights often limit, rather than encourage, a work’s dissemination, impact and influence. It can be difficult to locate copyright holders to obtain the rights to reuse old material. As a result, much content ends up in legal limbo (and in the case of old movies and sound recordings, is left to deteriorate—copying them in order to preserve them may constitute an act of infringement). The penalties even for inadvertent infringement are so punishing that creators routinely have to self-censor their work. Nor does the advent of digital technology strengthen the case for extending the period of protection. Copyright protection is needed partly to cover the costs of creating and distributing works in physical form. Digital technology slashes such costs, and thus reduces the argument for protection.
Time to return to the roots and limit the monopoly license. It was never intended that copyright should create any “intellectual property”. Whatever that is. (Is it property? Then it’s physical.)
Great HTML5 experience on iDevices with Sproutcore Touch http://bit.ly/aQB4Ih Fast Javascript interpreter. Who needs Flash? (ducking!)
Javascript is what drives a lot of web interactivity outside Flash. Shadowbox image or movie displays, slide shows, etc. It also powers interfaces like Apple’s .me rendition of an image browser like iPhoto.
Sproutcore is the Javascript engine inside Webkit, which is the html renderer for Safari, Chrome, Mobile Safari, Firefox and a whole bunch other browsers.
Since all of our views provide touch support automatically, this means that you can actually use SproutCore Touch to build apps that run both on the iPad and desktop computers.  In fact, we’ve found that usually its easier to build our apps for the iPad first and then desktop next – since things usually just work when you transition.