I feel I can now exit my self-imposed hibernation-slash-exile.
And, in honour of CSS Naked Day, this blog will go naked to celebrate.
Being in a startup in some crucial phases, I felt I was a little too close to the industry to be blogging about it; I didn’t want to have too many conflicts of interest.
Time, and that time, has passed. Viva gkoya.
With a new business venture, come new challenges. I’m not endorsing any brand here, nor am I saying that the pictured vendor has any formal, informal, or inferred relationship with my new company.
But I am saying that I am now embedded in a new network/platform project, and that this device might have something to do with it.
Joost, the future of television (or not), was hands-on critiqued by Chris Lynch. And I paid even more attention when he ended a paragraph with
[...] from an entertainment and television platform perspective, it’s no more interesting than watching TV shows on my iPod. Sure, I do it, but I only do it when I don’t have any other choice.
He had expressed the widely-blogged/widely-held story of
The quality is poor, the content is rather bland right now, and shows didn’t really hold my interest very long.
But it was the expression of want:need that made me think of the reasons why people buy into, and build, content experiences that result in a “meh!” reaction. Of course, joost didn’t mean to create a meh. And users certainly don’t want a meh. But it’s what happened.
I think people expected a really, really new-feeling experience. Chris’ description sounds like “Amigo TV” [I refuse to link to it, sorry. Google may be your friend] and even the ICI Media experiments with tagged and hyperlinked sports video [I think David Gratton's new venture is music-oriented].
Getting to your big screen will take more than a nice platform.
Agreed! Why?
It’s all about content.
and
Using Joost certainly points out a void in the world that exists between the computers and the television today.
Yes. It’s very hard to get people to give up preprogrammed notions of “what TV is” and “what PCs are”. If you build your application and platform, from the ground up, with the idea that there is no difference in what each can do: you will find out what each thing is best at.
So you start to analyse problems differently.
Why email through the TV when I have a perfectly good computer on my lap already? But isn’t that great that I can get a “boxmail” that tells me what is cool on TV right now, this very moment, with an action-button to take me to the cool stuff?
Then more understanding comes: I can link the systems on the backend, so if people are using multiple forms of communication and entertainment at once, the data can be shared to enable something new.
My chat status changes automatically depending on what I am watching on TV or the top downloaded show’s latest episode is on right now or I’m going to guess what happens next and “spoiler” my friends.
But I, the author, won’t be telling people what to do and how to do it. I’ll just publish the data via an interface, actually create the mini-apps that will generate me revenue or attract an audience, and let the rest occur.
No, of course not.
But REUTERS, the esteemed organisation that it is, used a Billboard article by Antony Bruno to propose just this (second paragraph, even).
In 2007, the majors will get the message, and the DRM wall will begin to crumble. Why? Because they’ll no longer be able to point to a growing digital marketplace as justification that DRM works. Revenue from digital downloads and mobile content is expected to be flat or, in some cases, decline next year. If the digital market does in fact stall, alternatives to DRM will look much more attractive.
At least the article has a good look at the 1Q2007 market we’re all returning from holiday periods to face, reviewing:
By volume, I think MySpace has a chance of driving demand for liberated MP3s.
By quality, possibly David Goldberg’s deals with Sony BMG and EMI Music could influence the marketplace.
It’s a selectively-edited interview, but Ashwin Navin, co-founder of BitTorrent publicly puts forth “common sense”.
I actually don’t think that if content owner and content rights holders take an inventory of the way that people want to consume content and embrace, rather than fight it, DRM almost becomes irrelevant. If people can use content in the way they want offline and online they won’t care about DRM, because the content is consumed in a flexible use case.
Yes, absolutely: this statement means two things though.
And as the interviewer emits surprise at the possibility of point 2, Navin explains that
[...] There’s huge amounts of value for publishers to license a TV show over and over again. Today they can’t stomach the risk of allowing content to be published free and clear of DRM. But eventually they’ll realize that’s the way people are going to consume it anyway, so they might as well profit from it.
Media houses coming to grips with the freedom ethic of digital content will prosper.
The BBC listed their sources, gave us the sampling methodology, and drew us some pietastic metrics.
But pie charts and surveys are not very good at illustrating qualitative responses.
Take this one:
But where is the “I downloaded all the stuff I wanted to see, so I watched less real actual TV” or “Four hours on YouTube left me with one hour of BBC3 before gran told me to go to bed”? Under the label “normal TV”.
The venerable Beeb trudged on with their second tasty pie graphic:
[Part 2 of a brainstorm. Part 1 also available]
Dion Hinchcliffe uses the word “monetize” [sic], but the principle is the same. Compare folio the diagram in Part 1.
But the biggest question that comes up is that if you let your users generate most of your content and then expose it all up via an API, how can a profitable business be made from this?
His thesis is to examine methods to go far beyond advertising, subscriptions, and commissions. The bullet points below have been abbreviated for readability.
Some of the indirect ways which lead to revenue growth, user growth, and increased resistance to competition [...] are:
- Strategic Acquisition
- Maintaining control of hard to recreate data sources.
- Building Attention Trust
- Turning Applications into Platforms
- Fully Automated Online Customer Self-Service
The article is a comprehensive read, and acknowledges pro and con viewpoints for each opportunity,
While a great many startups are not generating revenue in huge quantities yet, the companies that have been diligently exploiting open APIs such as Amazon and Salesforce are in fact generating significant revenue and second order effects from opening up their platforms and being careful not to lose control. This is actually a large discussion, and as large Web 2.0 sites continue to emerge, we’ll continue to keep track of what the successful patterns and practices are.
Thus we are left with questions. Always more questions.
The one that concludes this brainstorm is:
What other implications are there by putting users in control of content generation and open everything up?
How would you advise a client on the best way to drive participation in one shaded ball towards revenues from another?
I can’t see a clear path forward, as you can’t make a consumer do something; one can suggest and imply a desired action, or one can induce behaviours. You can also create desire for something seemingly unattainable.
But forcibly obliging a customerbase to perform an action? That’s performing-animal territory.
Or is that capitalist monopolism?
(Summit + Commentary = Summitary)
Om Malik encapsulated the Summit right at the end of his overview.
Here, we’re so far ahead of the curve, it’s a race to see who can be cynical first.
Twice at the Web 2.0 Summit, we had funny conversations with people on the topic “what will be the online pet food of bubble 2.0″? Nominees on the floor are social bookmarking sites and mommy-oriented social networks.
The quotes, and rollcall, are the best part of Constance Loizos’ somewhat meandering look at the online video (platform) market.
Looking for the next X, the MySpace of Y, and the del.icio.us of Z in two-dot-oh video sites harks back to the “Pets.com” (inter alia) debacles of Web One; there’s plenty of opportunity to create self sustaining businesses, but everything can’t win, and you can’t “YouTube” every concept.
Those groups creating entire environments, and rounded platforms, for digital audio-visual media including video are potentially being lost in the hype of revveryoutubenetscapebrightcove.
Some people are talking about the realities and the flipsides, such as Fred Wilson:
I have no idea if we are headed for another bust. I sure hope not. But having lived through the 2000 bust with a portfolio that was not “bust proof”, one of the things I think about all the time is how to build a “bust proof” portfolio.
Business 101 Assignment: Consider these VC/C-level-Exec viewpoints, via their notable-quotables, and design an investment portfolio that tracks, but bucks, the trends in order to avoid negative market confluence.
They still want to know that programs reflect the particular values of their product; you largely can’t get that right now at a YouTube.
[...]
Despite what everyone in Silicon Valley likes to think, it’s not in advertisers’ interest to abandon broadcast and cable networks. That’s still where the money is.
Todd Chanko, JupiterResearch
[seeing] a huge move toward higher-end content because cheaper bandwidth and tools are making it more affordable to produce and distribute quality programming online.
Jason Pressman, Shasta Ventures
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that there’s a shift strictly to more quality video. Rather, I think there’s plenty of room for top-of-the-pyramid programming online and YouTube and lots of stuff in between.
Josh Bernoff, VP Forrester Research
I now spend about 60 percent of my time looking at video-related start-ups.
I invested as soon as I was invited to [in Revision3]. I would have liked a bigger piece of Revision3. It costs nothing to create these shows. They can just roll out a new program, and if no one likes it, they can try another.
Mike Maples, USD$15m microfund manager
Two years ago, I spent 20 percent of my time on the space. Today, I’d say I spend at least a third to a half of my time.
Jim Breyer, Accel Partners
I don’t want to announce anything until we’ve locked up what we want to do. But we may create derivatives of our core (TV and movie) programming and we may do some original programming.
Ross Levinsohn, CEO Fox Interactive
