Engaging Players/Viewers March 27, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Distribution, Marketing, Web Life.add a comment
Much of the evolution of media is clearly about the movement from completely passive to progressively less passive forms of entertainment. TVs to WoW.
With that in mind, games and traditional media entertainment will continue to blur and lose a meaningful seperation, becoming a spectrum rather than disctinct channels.
With that, more robust ways of engaging with players/viewers will become increasingly critical to successful media products. (Thinking SMS voting for American Idol as an example.) An interesting analysis would be which engagement techniques gaming products use which could translated to slightly more passive forms could provide some amazing insights.
To help make this clearer, here is a great (highly linked to) presentation at ETech
http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm
This is a GREAT presentation, simple and clear as all great presentations are. Actually seems obvious after the fact but again, sign of a great presetnation in my mind…
So how can we use these tools in new ways and in the blending world of the TV/game/MMOG/MySpace landscape?
Content Creators and Broadcasters. March 25, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Distribution.add a comment
A tidbit on ITunes selling 4 million disney owned television downloads:
http://ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/disney-sells-4-million-itunes-video-downloads/
Interesting. First question, how many were ~paid~, probably most or all but just checking. 4 Million is not nothing and will only grow.
It’s another example of what I truly believe is underappreciated in business in general and broadcasting/media in particular. $$$ are not the real friction, convenience and awareness is. That is why people download music, as much about accessilibity as cost.
People are at ITunes and want to timeshift and placeshift shows. Convenience. They will pay for these things as long as its easy. They already have ITunes accounts so its a few bucks, no big deal. I wonder if a comparision of total Tivo/Replay users (somewhat similar value proposition) to the number that have downloaded shows on ITunes. My guess is ITunes is higher at a similar point in the lifecycle, basically because its easier.
Another implication of ITunes chugging along is that generally there has been a very close association between the producers of content and the broadcasters of content. (Networks.) Recent developments appears to be adding a new layer and player.
Originally broadcasters were on the airwaves. But then a layer was added for last mile to help add choice and reliability with cable. They took a cut from the consumer to add themselves to the value chain. Now it appears that to really enable placeshifting and timeshifting a new layer in that value chain is being added. Through data (cable or telco pipe providers), ITunes (or Replay/TiVo) provide another layer of value (and cost) to the chain to shift it. Interesting, new dimension, new player, but why? Why didnt broadcasters become cable companies? Will last mile providers become place and time shifters? Time will tell. They want to but will they?
(But so far it feels like the answer is no, new dimension, new players in the chain.)
Way over my head on what spectrum really means… March 25, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications, Distribution.add a comment
On my way back from some time down in Dallas this week I had a thought I wish I knew how to verify. How controlled is the spectrum used for AM,FM and broadcast TV? Could a station partition off part of the spectrum it controls (leaving the rest for the primary use) and use it for something else? Say something similar to a modified WiFi type or WiMax type connection from all its broacast towers?
This is probably controlled for by our good old FCC (nothing like a government agency to stifle creativity) but it would be a fascinating world if some of the broadcasters all of a sudden were in the connectivity game in a whole new way. Might help some of the WiMax/WiFi players out there. A cozy deal between Earthlink and Disney going around last mile operators sure sounds fun!
Connectivity… March 25, 2006
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A really good analysis by Om Malik on WiMax:
http://gigaom.com/2006/03/12/the-truth-about-wimax/
Bascially I have been wondering for some time what the total per site capacity is because clearly the range for WiMax is huge. This entry and the PDF it links to is pretty clear. In the short term the capacity is relatively low as a total figure. ” one cell could theoretically allow hundreds of business
connections at 1.5 Mbit/s and thousands of residential connections at
256 kbit/s.” That is simply not a huge amount of total bandwidth.
That is why WiMax is about backhaul for the Wimax mesh, not a replacement for it. Capacity and a bit of cost.
So WiFi Mesh (N will do nicely once they stop their infernal standards bickering!) with generally WiMax backhaul. Its where a heck of lot of its going, particluarly where there is not already an infestation of pesky infrastructure getting in the way…
Old news, new word, “slivercasting” March 15, 2006
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The NY Times has a pretty good overview on some of the recent developments of the splintering of the media landscape.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12sliver.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I gotta check out the sailing channel, sounds cool and I used to sail some when a close friend of mine lived much more locally. Good rule of life by the way, be the ~friend~ of the guy with the boat.
So as people can more specifically targeted media nuggest that interest themfor lower and lower costs the mainstream is splintered into tons of little niches. No news there. The question I find more potentially signficant the media market place how fast does this diminish the giant clump of “mainstream”. Does the mainstream prime time audience erode at 2% or 5% or 10% a year and when does this impact the cost structure of those products?
Evolving Software Licencing Models March 14, 2006
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So Oracle is one of the first big SW companies seriously contemplating moving away from paying for lisences. Simply pay for support in a nice steady stream and no one needs to get hurt. I happen to agree that this is where the enterprise software market is going but I believe there will be short term pain for all public SW companies that try and make a switch.
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002800.html
First Wall Street will definitely not like turning off any revenue stream and it will breed insecurity about the companies prospects. Never good. Second, any change in how a company charges for its services (particularly big companies) lets its clients step back and consider if all those checks they have been writing make sense. This is particularly true of major infrastructure purchases like Oracle. So many will decide open source options like MySQL still are not up to snuff, but how many will reconsider?
It really feels inevitable long term to shift to a quasi-services model, particularly as the open source options get better and better. As inevitable as it may be it will not be easy.
Flexible Organizations and WoW March 13, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Web Life.add a comment
Joi Ito world famous blogger and VC had a recent entry about leadership and how it works in guilds in the World of Warcraft. It fits really well with alot of my thinking about how leadership is evolving and small flexible, reconfigurable groups are where it is at.
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2006/03/13/leadership_in_world_of_warcraft.html
Before you dismiss this out of hand as a strained metaphor the trends of emphasis on knowledge assets rather than physical ones, specialized knowledge and outsourcing to the best fit, small is the new big, even megatrends like the retiring boomers (less employees, more choice for them) all work to fuel this potentially fundamental change in how organizations must work to flourish.
Of course I may just be hearing what I want to hear because that flexible lead by consensus rather than lead by hierarchy really fits my style of leadship and how I enjoy working. The change will take time but it can’t happen fast enough for me, even if the US suffers as a result.. But what is the world without personal bias.
(Actually that is a whole seperate discussion about how more noise and news outlets actually enables bias in modern society rather than elimnates it but that is for another day.)
The big merger March 9, 2006
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So its been a few days since the big announcement AT&T/SBC is buying BellSouth.
I am fairly directly affected by this as my day job involves managing folks writing lots of software for both these companies and it is sort of scary on that front. As the RBOC re-com-bobulate (seems like it needs a new word) into one big Ma Bell shadow the IT departments get bigger and my leverage gets lower. In some sense I am a little tiny fragment of their old IT department, Bell Labs, spun off to the side and forgotten. I say shadow becuase frankly the RBOCs are a shadow of the old behemouth. The level of people and understanding and innovation at those companies does not come close to the hey-dey of Bell Labs when nearly everything in the world was invented in Murray Hill, even if they did not know how to market and serve it up to the market.
But I digress. The big issue here is really about network nuetrality. These children of Ma Bell are mean spirited and desperately want to take control of the internet and the new age of communications. They can’t do it worldwide but they are powerful enough, and cunning enough, to really retard innovation in the US. They will do this by choking the backbone in the US. The good old super highway will be a toll road if they and their pets at the FCC have their way. The toll will up the ante forcing table stakes for the future of the webback to the millions or even tens of millions. Today I can start a web service and offer it to the world for nearly nothing. Tomorrow if I need to pay for good performance that will simply retard innovation anywhere the RBOCs hold sway. So my innovative Korean competition will not just be able to compete with me but will have a head start. Not good for the US in the long term.
Some part of my idealistic nature wants to think some of the newer emerging players like Google and Yahoo will remember their roots and try and stop this from happening. I still hope they do. But they already have the table stakes. Does it help them or hurt them to retard real innovative competition? Is it good business for them to fight this battle? I really don’t like my brains answer to those questions.
Flow is a beautiful thing… March 9, 2006
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http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar2006/id20060306_579621.htm?link_position=linkxtra
Implications of the atomic audience. March 3, 2006
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All the current media trends make it obvious that the audiences consuming any one piece of content is getting smaller as
the increments of media consumption are getting smaller. So advertisers and marketing types can get a better targeted (when its measurable which generally the new outlets are) but much smaller audience.
To pull in those audiences the content creators need to spend less on the content (fewer overall viewers) and make much more niche specific content for these outlets. Charging those highly interested audiences may also help defray costs somewhat. Many have talked about this as the demise of the blockbuster era. All the references to the long tail are the other side of that coin.
The tools for creating media have also gone way down so it should lower the cost of media creation somewhat. But were the tools the real price? It does not seem that for most forms of traditional media to be the case. The cost has generally been about the talent and the distribution. Harnessing user generated content seems to be at least some of the “fallback” position for the talent part of the equation but obviously this has a lower overall quality than a group of professionals all working together. Or perhaps I mistake polish for talent. Was there a monstorous pool of untapped talent? Perhaps, but even if there was the ability to group all the best together at the highest level appears to be eroded. So without the premium tier does the compensation for the stars go down along with the number of blockbusters? The talent is flattened but is it lowered overall or raised overall?
Distribution cost is clearly is going down rapidly but again like creation that does not appear to be the real “cost” it just represented a barrier or choke point rather than a real cost to media creation. It feels like the removal of this barrier really does open up the amount of content like floodgates and it is this effect which started the atomization of attentiont in the first place.
So it seems the top tier of media will come down a few pegs. (I would like to say the current raft of reality shows are a symtpom of all this but that is probably just my dislike of most of it speaking.) The analysis could take a step further and look at different types of media as clearly TV, magazines, books, music all have different dimensions. Music has been the hardest hit so far but its only a matter of time unless the dynamics between these media types are much more different than they appear. There are obvious reasons music has been hit first but that is a matter for another day.
