Loose Ends

Give me that old time rock n' roll

As an addendum to my last post (To Free or Not to Free), I see that Fast Company in their piece 20 Riskiest Business Moves of 2011 has listed as the 19th riskiest business move Music Labels Surrender to Spotify.  The main risk: jeopardizing paid sales with the freemium model.

Also, the recent update of Google TV and the announcement Friday that Google will be acquiring a lot more original content for YouTube should pretty much clarify where they are headed.  If you thought that 900 cable channels was amazing, get ready for hundreds of thousands or maybe millions delivered online.  As I've said before, there will be more content than ever. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity out there to those who can visualize and take advantage of this new order.  As the curse goes, may you live in interesting times...."

Even a Broken Clock is Correct Twice Per Day

Fast Company seems to be going full-on into the media/tech battle I briefly discussed a couple of posts ago (and earlier).  They refer to it as The Great Tech War of 2012.  I am very interested in learning about Amazon and where it is headed.   Hopefully this article will fill in some of the blanks, particularly with regard to how each company is using its data.  Amazon seems to be building its empire the most quietly, with the exception of the cloud data loss debacle.  It also seems to have a maniacal attention to detail.

I can attest to receiving in-depth customer service with regard to a complaint I made over the intricacies of the Amazon MP3 download system: how annoying it was to constantly update the downloader, how the whole system feels jury rigged, how it creates a media folder separate from the iTunes media library folder and just generally messes with the whole "it just works" juju of my Mac.  My point: do not underestimate any company that is willing to listen and respond (more than once, and nicely) via a living human being to the cranky complaints of a customer over a $.99 download.

The Big Three?

My enemy's enemy?

With Facebook's recent announcements, I will repeat my armchair opinion that the three companies fighting it out for dominance in the new media (we need a better term for it because I'm not talking about what is stereotypically thought of as "new media" but rather the new world of media consumption we are beginning to see) world are Apple, Facebook and Google.  They are profiting primarily by either taking (or will be taking someday soon) a piece of media sales within their platforms or by selling user information, usually to advertisers.  Facebook looks like it will be unique in that it has no commitment to hardware, unlike Apple or Google (depending on what they do with their Motorola assets).  This is going to be a very interesting fight.

If Facebook can leverage their digital scrapbook concept later into an intelligently curated stream, they will be a very formidable force.  They do have the advantage of being somewhat more focused than the other two on this particular area.  They seem to be on the forefront now of breaking down the concept of what media is, how it is delivered and how to make money from it.  No doubt, they will be busy analyzing user behavior, perfecting algorithms that are predictive and pull in content from a much wider range of sources.  The big question with the Facebook model is whether people are going to be willing to do all of their media consumption in public.



As I've said before, I believe the future of media consumption is going to become smaller chunks, provided via algorithms that not only find the content but also reconstruct it in a way that provides a meaningful narrative to the viewer, consumed more or less constantly.  We will consume more media than ever.  However,  less and less of it will be what we consider now to be professionally produced.  Yes, the higher-level content will still exist, there may just be less of it. Unfortunately, there will be less of the low to mid-level content that provides so much employment for my friends.

State of Internet TV

 The Cloud knows what you want

This article (TV in the Cloud) is a good companion to the link I posted at the end of my last post.  That article discusses how Google is quietly becoming an online TV powerhouse by directly buying over $100M of their own content for YouTube and supposedly trying to acquire Hulu.

TV in the Cloud is one of the better summaries I've seen recently about the state of online TV recently.  And, I buy Erick Schonfeld's view of social's integration with online TV.  He believes that it will  be useful as a TV guide, showing you what people you know or respect are watching.  This is a logical, concrete and most importantly, likely to be successful step towards integrating social with TV.  But please, no clunky cable-like user interfaces.  It is also worth noting his observation that the TV Industry is still largely resistant to these changes and, importantly, don't seem to understand that online TV is about more than how content is distributed.

If you want to read how that resistance is affecting what you can watch, read this very good article from the Above the Crowd blog about why Netflix changed its pricing structure.  Netflix cracked the code about how to make money with online streaming content when everyone said it was impossible.  Now, everyone (understandably) wants a piece of the pie, even though many of them do not really seem to still understand how to make it work.  What does that mean?  Get used to fracturing in the delivering of content, that is, for the immediate future it seems like you will be looking more places (and paying more providers) for the same type of content you found in one or two portals making it more expensive and more difficult to locate.

Netflix, The Innovator's Dilemma and the Golden Egg

What's New Is Old

Project Runway 3000: Inter-Galactic Social Edition

Is it just me, or is new media and certain aspects of social starting to feel old (as opposed to mature)? Facebook, Twitter, to me they are feeling tired and too time consuming.  Quora, very interesting if you belong to the church of the startup.  Google Plus?  It seems even key Google execs have stopped posting. Google is finally getting ready to make it open for "everyone."  I haven't exactly heard a wave of excitement from the masses.

What is the payoff to hundreds of millions of people broadcasting unedited and often incoherent bites, aside from contributing to our understanding of truly newsworthy events like the recent Arab revolutions?  Yes, there is also some interesting work being done on meta-analysis of these streams of information, say to track the spread of influenza. However, it seems that most of it is self-broadasting as a means of personal marketing. Who really thinks that people who subscribe to 300 plus Twitter streams are doing anything other than trying to get those people somehow interested in themselves?  Who has the time to monitor that many streams and to what benefit?  Social media seem to be a net-sum game: time spent on Twitter is time not spent on Facebook, etc. How much self-marketing is really healthy and how far do people really need to go down the road to developing personal brands?  Ultimately, whether you represent a large corporation or yourself, social media is only effective if you are providing useful, timely information.

I have been through quite a few apps meant to make some kind of coherent personalized narrative out of social and/or news and they all have all failed, either as businesses or in their functionality.   I've given apps permission to interpret my Facebook, Twitter, RSS and pretty much anything else to which I subscribe and ended up with nothing but nearly generic results.  They were definitely much worse than manually scanning RSS feeds or Twitter streams. Believe me, I am a true believer: whoever gets the next step right, curating content automatically and in a way that tells a story to the recipient combining news, video, social, etc., will be the next Big Winner.  I want it to happen. And yet,  I am coming closer to the opinion of a good friend, in explaining how they use their Facebook account: "Facebook is the perfect delivery platform for baby pictures."  That may explain why Facebook is the largest online image hosting platform, I'm guessing larger than almost all the others combined.

How long will  the idea that "social television" is a clunky TV interface tied to chat rooms, or check-ins to your favorite shows or tweets from show stars hold sway?  Someone, please help me understand how any of this is an interesting way forward?

The most interesting aspect, at least for me, is that the mid-1990's promise of interactive media is quietly coming to fruition without CD's or DVD's.

The future of media: it's in your hands

I do want to talk about Google soon, and how they are silently changing the way content will be delivered.  Now, if they only could implement super fast broadband nationwide.......

Update

I am now tweeting, mostly about technology and the future of media consumption: @cmieritz.

Also, here is an interesting article that clearly explains how Facebook and Google have become direct competitors (include Apple on the list as well).  Essentially, it is a battle to see which company will become your everything.  I am guessing that Facebook has replaced the Trilateral Commission in the paranoids' minds-eye by now.

O.K., back to my Amazon trip preparations.

I Want My (3D) YouTube TV

Come with us on a trip to the 3D future!

Zowza.  It's starting to look like the early 90's all over again.  Sony has just announced that they will be supporting 3D YouTube video on the PS3.  Why is this like the early 90's?  Well, they are supporting Flash and promoting that as a 3D video player, lining up Sony, Google and Adobe against Apple.  The stars are aligning again for another battle of a generally inferior technological standard (Flash) promoted by "PC" against the upstart technologically superior HTML 5.0 (at least in non-3D, I need to research HTML 5.0 and 3D) being promoted by Apple.  I wonder where Microsoft stands in this battle.  Frankly, I liked the world a lot better when Google was lined up with, and not against, Apple.

This whole 3D thing is either going to bust open and be ubiquitous or is going to be another spectacular flameout, with dens across America littered with unused/unusable 3D televisions.  Click here for a short and interesting history of 3D film.  The most interesting fact is that prior to Avatar, the most financially successful (adjusted for inflation) 3D movie was a softcore porn flick, The Stewardesses.