Inevitability of Innovation- Part 2

The U.S. news media has been getting a huge smackdown from Al Jazeera with regard to the coverage of what is happening in Egypt.  President Obama and Hilary Clinton aren't watching CNN.  Al Jazeera's website has become the primary source of information as to what is happening, and guess what, it's a free stream of their live broadcast.  Apparently, people would rather try to understand the struggle of oppressed people in a vital region more than they'd like to see Kim Kardashian be interviewed by Piers Morgan or watch John Boehner weep for the 800th time in public.

Insight: Shopping is fun

Al Jazeera, to the best of my knowledge, is not available on any U.S. cable providers, even though it is a  credible news provider and tends toward harder news, as opposed to personality journalism.

Creative destruction

The Inevitability of Innovation

This is a great interview with Steve Jobs, shortly after he got the boot from Apple.  It is almost a blueprint for his future and really shows how important of a role having strongly held principles/beliefs can  play in creating significant innovation.  My favorite quote from it is him talking about starting a new post-Apple company and possibly being a  competitor with Apple:

It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans.

Ari Emanuel Speaking about the Future Media Landscape

This is a very interesting conversation with Ari Emanuel, Hollywood super agent at the recent Web 2.0 Summit (whatever that's supposed to mean).  Some of the things that he says about the future of media are similar to points that I have been making.  Of course, the difference is that he actually knows about what he is speaking.   The future is coming quickly and for small players, the window of opportunity is getting smaller as the big players start to actually figure out what is happening.  Agility and the ability to pull together sophisticated media production and marketing quickly by leveraging technology and the incredible wealth of knowledge available to everyone with an internet connection will be as important for indies as it is for Lady Gaga.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday.  Much exciting news coming in the next couple of months.

Qwiki

I have to make this short, as I leave for a month of filming in Brazil tomorrow.  This is definitely a step in the direction to which I see media consumption moving.  Forget watching movies or shows in segregated time blocks, we will be experiencing bits of media constantly and not just from "professional" media producers.  Nightmare or dream?

For sure, the future of media consumption will be imperfect.  Funny that they coded this crazy product but couldn't get all of the video to load at the correct aspect ratio on Vimeo.  They may need to add a couple of teenagers to their marketing team.


Qwiki at TechCrunch Disrupt from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Free the Bits

Is there latency in your packet shaping, or are you just glad to see me?

It has been speculated for years that bandwidth providers (that'd be phone and cable companies) in the U.S. are slowing innovation and capacity increases on their networks.  Don't take my word for it, even the conservative Wall Street Journal is finally on board.  Why would they want to do that?  It seems mostly like a waiting game, trying to put off the day when entertainment users can download content as easily as music lovers were able to download mp3's back in the day.   These companies fear the day that their lucrative (and in the case of cable companies, local monopolies) businesses models that have served them so well are changed.   The companies that own the pipelines and distribution are increasingly the companies that own the content,  say NBC/Comcast or Time Warner.

What does that mean, besides the fact the people pay huge cable bills and still cannot pick (and only pay for) exactly what content they want delivered?  Now there's a radical idea, not paying for the Golf Channel because you don't want it.   For one thing, it means that innovation in new media forms are being stifled.  There are people out there with ideas out there that cannot be tried because they just are not feasible given data constraints.  It is in the interest of these companies to keep you passively watching cable TV and at best letting you DVR it so you can watch it on your schedule.  Forget interactivity, forget mob-sourcing, forget just about anything that isn't pretty much just a sickly derivative of the same stuff that's we've been watching for the past 60 years.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, especially with regard to decreased innovation.  Why is this important?  Culture is big business in the U.S.  It is a huge export product as well as being a political tool.  Will Hollywood become like GM and lose it's market share and profitability to other foreign producers through willfully slowing innovation and clinging to dying business models in order to control (slowly dwindling) profits?  Remember, in the 1960's it seemed inconceivable that Japanese cars were anything other than oddities to American consumers.   People laughed at the cars, their size and their quality.  With the democratization of media production, isn't there a whole world full of people out there now with their own media creation dreams?

The U.S. currently ranks #28 in Internet access speed and and "is not making significant progress in building a faster network."  The average download speed in Korea is four times faster than it is in the U.S.  And upload speeds, key for interactive media, those are even slower, usually by an order of 2-3X.  How long will consumers raised on interactivity and the belief that they are all media creators be willing to live with that?  And given the recent performance of U.S. mobile broadband providers like AT&T, will the future be more of the same?