Investment and the Media April 20, 2006
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So this entry is going to be a bit of a strech by my mind has been wrestling with various investments. So to tie it to my Comm/Media blog concept how do recent changes in the media investment world play out financially over time.
Om Malik (by Robert Young???) had a thought provoloking entry tangentially related here:
http://gigaom.com/2006/04/15/is-network-10-also-network-20/
So if the web is the way TV is going to be accessed (and it is) does a large amount of web traffic inevitably preceed financial success in media? Can I use Alexa rankings to predict media company (or even other tech related companies) stock prices?
http://www.alexaholic.com/nbc.com%20+abc.com%20+cbs.com
Says ABC cheats and leverages espn etc. Does this mean they are ahead, yup I think it does.
Some other charts of interest…
http://www.alexaholic.com/amazon.com+ebay.com?y=r&r=5y&z=50
http://www.alexaholic.com/dell.com+apple.com+hp.com+ibm.com+sun.com?y=r&r=3y&z=30
Anyone know how to easily mash these up with stock prices?
Engaging Players/Viewers March 27, 2006
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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
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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
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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…
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.
Bit Torrenting the world February 13, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications, Distribution, Marketing, Uncategorized.3 comments
So 60% of all bandwidth is attributed to bit torrent. Wow…. seriously wow.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1083
I use it to download lots of shows I have no other way of getting (international stuff not broadcast here generally). I even occasionally use it to supplement my Replays time-shifting when something gets missed or when something is in HD and I would really like to see in HD. (Although HBOs current lack of new stuff has stopped that from happening lately).
But I don’t know anyone else other than my brother that does this. So where the heck is all that traffic coming from? Is it shows? Pireated software? Music? Sure that is alot of it but 60%? How many people does that 60% represent?
Another obvious answer that now jumps into my head as I type is that it could be the porn community has somehow adopted bittorrent. You always hear about them being involved in pushing the technological envelope. It makes perfect sense actually. Cheap mass distribution. No censoring or monitoring of any significance. I dont think there is a lot of time sensativity to exactly when most of that content shows up. So in many ways its a better fit than regular broadcast TV. Theres tons of it and a seemingly endless appetite for it. That’s got to be it. Anyone have anything better to explain it?
Its about the transactions friction, not the cash. February 9, 2006
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Its funny but it has become increasingly obvious to me that money is really not a big determination on whether anyone makes a purchase unless someones sense of what is “right” or “fair” sets in. As long as it is what is what X costs and its right there in front of me, boom, get it. Unless its a really major transaction it wont really show up on most peoples balance sheet.
Now where money is generally not a turn-off, ~any~ friction in the transaction is. Make it harder and it can be free but won’t be used. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70150-0.html?tw=rss.index is what is making me think about this again.
Free ringtones of any song in three or four easy well laid out steps. Fact is three or four easy steps is three or four two many. A few bucks every time I want to get a new one though is apparently no friction at all for millions of people. What the carriers and ringtone vendors need to be worried about is when the free methods become frictionless. Literally billions are on the line. Truly astounding to me.
Media flowing to market and the path of least resistance. February 3, 2006
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Fred from a VC in NY has a really well put together argument about the new ways to syndicate conent and the clear sense of going as wide as possible. http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/02/syndicate_your_.html
There will certainly be some pain for many in the current video media distribution chain, local affiliates from the write-up above, but there will certainly be many more.
It’s interesting to me that the Telco’s think that they are the new path for delivery with VDSL and Fiber to the premise initiatives. These however have currently only been framed up as being conceptually perhaps 10% or 15% different than current distributions. Monthly payments for scheduled programming. IPTV gives a few new capabilities and a wider lineup but they and their traditional mindset are not getting very far outside of that. Such small thinking probably comes from their defensive reasons for the moves.
It seems that fundamentally “trickling” the content (bittorrent or download) rather than needing a big pipe has some fundamentally superior characteristics and represent a much bigger change than anything the Telco folks or even the cable or sattelite folks have thought up. Replay and Tivo are great but I don’t need them for that capability at all.
On a related note I noticed Slingbox and place shifting got a bunch more funding. I sort of get it but should really try one since on some level that sort of placeshifting doesn’t seem worth the effort. Sitting in a hotel room on the road it just seems easier to turn on the TV there rather than sling something to my laptop or treo. And again, isnt a little automatic RSS/torrent magic better. Wider choices and I can watch it on the plane when I am completely unconnected. I understand downloading shows, particularly automatically, takes set up but that up front cost will be driven out over time.
Actually if someone had one self configuring SW package that read the RSS TV feeds, downloaded the conent through a torrent client, resized it for the Video Ipods or PSPs of the world and then transfered it the next time the device was avaialbe, that might just give that model the chops to show its superiority. Still represents a questionable source in some senses (user redistributed shows) but wow would it be smooth. I want one!
Anyone got a spare million or two they want to give me to build the tool out and push it out into the world? Or even a few hundred thousand to prototype and assemble the POC?
What the FON? January 31, 2006
Posted by innov8ordie in Communications, Distribution.2 comments
Not to become overly obessed with wireless data access (although I am, major emerging platform) but I realized I have never mentioned FON before the last entry.
FON is a fascinating company coming out of Europe delivering software to run on your linksys router to create a wireless network out of existing connections. A good overview can be found at:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/01/HNhotspotsunite_1.html
I am really not sure how feasible is but if it caught on it sure would be interesting. Maybe they even could be knit in some fashion to the emerging muni networks. Sort of an open internet model but for all semi-public wireless access types…
