In a post titled Old EMI Email Shows They Knew That Giving Away Songs For Free Leads To More Sales Mike Masnick focuses on an email between EMI employees from 2009:
 We are being told that historically the track which is offered for free like this is usually still the top selling track in digital retail.
I have a strong interest – personally and professionally – to want to automate the boring parts of post-production away from humans to computers, extending to some of the basic string-outs. This seems to infringe on the “human” role in postproduction, at least according to some of my associates. Well, lately I’ve come across a whole series of stories on how traditionally human roles, like doctors (and assistant editors), can or will be automated out of existence. That’s led me to think about what is the essential role of the human that can’t be automated? It’s not a simple question.
Pixels – those little dots that make up all our video images – are hard to encode and push down pipelines, even with ever-increasing encoding efficiency. On the other hand, vectors are small and very efficient, but so far have proved difficult to apply to video content.
Dan Rayburn, has written a provocative post titled: Streaming Video Can’t Scale At Cable TV Quality, Will Never Replace Traditional TV Distribution. Essentially he argues that there isn’t enough bandwidth for the large scale events. He’s only partly right.
One of the more interesting press releases coming  this week out of CES, was from RAMP, a company I’d not heard of before, but with some interesting technology if the press release is to be believed for automatically generated metadata. (I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!)
Traditionally a broadcast network would be a world of transmitters or cable infrastructure, but revenues and views might make YouTube a broadcast network. At least that’s Broadcast Engineering’s question although there it’s framed as a competitor.
Video Insider is a good read, and I recommend following them. Like many sites, they take a pass at Online Video Predictions for 2013. They vary from the cute:
1. The term “This is the year of online video†will be written and stated about 35% more often in 2013 than it was in 2012.
to the sly and accurate, slipping in at the end:
6. Branded content (Branded Video) production will be on the rise, but not enough to grab headlines or the kind of attention this trend will deserve.
A $100 million film fund is not to be ignored, and this one comes from the fans as outlined by Mike Masnick in $100 Million Pledged To Indie Film On Kickstarter… And 8,000 Films Made. Some of the highlights:
That’s a pretty decent film fund, and fairly successful at that.
As I’ve noted, Robert Cringley is writing a series of articles on how “Hollywood” (the studios, network broadcasters and cable companies) Â might be disrupted by “Silicon Valley” (i.e. Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, et al). He notes the exact same problem that Intel (and everyone else) in disrupting Hollywood: that incumbent content controllers don’t want to disrupt their own very profitable existing ecosystem for an uncertain future.
Yesterday Broadcast Engineer had a headline Intel set to destroy cable TV industry suggesting Intel were ready to disrupt the pay TV industry with a new set top box and a lá carte content.