Author: Philip

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Distribution Item of Interest

Cord Cutters Are Young, Educated and Employed

Cord Cutters Are Young, Educated and Employed http://tinyurl.com/2ale9dw

After the first drop in subscriber numbers ever, Comcast tried to spin it like this:

“Mr. Moffett said the image of the cord-cutter had been that of a ‘cutting-edge technologist’ who preferred to bypass cable to watch programming on computers and on an ever-proliferating array of devices. ‘The reality is it’s someone who’s 40 years old and poor and settling for a dog’s breakfast of Netflix and short-form video.”

GigOm hare only to happy to correct Mr Moffett.

Contrary to Mr. Moffett’s statement, the typical cord cutter is young, educated and employed, based on research from Strategy Analytics. The research firm surveyed 2,000 Americans, and found that 13 percent of them intended to cancel their cable subscriptions in the next 12 months. But the profile of those who said they wanted to abandon cable is what’s really interesting.

A majority of those likely to cut the cord (54 percent) are under 40, according to Strategy Analytics, and they are well-educated: a full 97 percent of those surveyed have graduated high school and more than two-thirds have pursued or are pursuing secondary education. And it’s not a lack of income that is driving them to save on cable bills — 91 percent of likely cord cutters are either employed, students or retired, and 57 percent make $50,000 a year or more.

In other words, cord cutting is real, and rife among the very people you need to have on board to keep your business going for the next generation. And they don’t seem to be doing that.

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Distribution Item of Interest

Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast

Xbox Live Now Bigger Than Comcast http://tinyurl.com/3yj6lsn

Microsoft has sold more than 42 million game consoles worldwide, but the more impressive stat is that its Xbox Live subscription service now has more than 25 million users. That’s more subscribers than Comcast, which earlier this week reported that its subscriber count had actually decreased by 275,000 over the most recent quarter, ending at less than 23 million for the first time in years. And while many Xbox Live subscribers are clearly international, with the service available in 26 countries, Microsoft clearly has some scale and a huge audience that it could leverage.

Of course, Xbox Live is mostly about inter-person game play over the network, but Xbox Live users also watch live and on-demand video an average of 40 hours a week on the service, of which an hour a day is for media watching: 7 hrs watching media; 33 playing games.

…over the past year, the amount of time those users have spent watching TV and movie content has grown 157 percent. Not just that, but Xbox already makes more money from media sales than through its Xbox Live subscription revenues.

The console currently has video content from its Zune marketplace, Netflix and ESPN3, and early next year will also have video content from Hulu’s Plus subscription service. That range of content has 42 percent of Xbox Live subscribers watching an hour of TV and movie content on average per day, or 30 hours of video per month.

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Item of Interest The Business of Production

Pirate Bay Documentary Raises $51K on Kickstarter

Pirate Bay Documentary Raises $51K on Kickstarter

While certainly not a huge budget by mainstream media measures, $51K for a documentary on The Pirate Bay isn’t bad seed money to get a show started, or even complete if it’s a lean production. That it was funded from “fan funding” via Kickstarter makes me wonder if fan-funding isn’t a viable method for the future. Kind of “pay in advance” for the content so that it actually gets made.

If this were a TV series maybe people could subscribe to the future shows in order to get them made?

The Pirate Bay documentary has received full funding throughKickstarter. They received $51,434 from 1737 backers, adding up to $29 per backer. With an initial goal of $25,000 to fund a professional editing staff and studio, the filmmaker behind the campaign exceeded all expectations by 104%. Over the course of one month, 400,000 visitors from more than 170 countries checked out the campaign. Asked why a filmmaker would want to make a film about an organization that is undercutting his future ability to make money, he responded that he believes that new ways of supporting creativity will emerge.

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HTML5 Item of Interest

Sencha and Adobe offer HTML5 Authoring Tools

Sencha Takes On Flash With HTML5 Animator http://tinyurl.com/2dq7ljd

Adobe Shows Off Flash-to-HTML5 Conversion Tool http://tinyurl.com/2vcl9fb

It’s nice to see someone working on an HTML5 authoring tool. Adobe has already previewed add-ons and beta tools for HTML5 authoring and it seems they “get” that Flash isn’t going to be dominant forever. With new stats showing about 54% of the video on the web is “HTML5 capable” that’s a sensible approach.

I’ve not tested HTmL5 Animator so I can’t comment on its relative merits to other authoring solutions. Compared with no solution or hand coding, anything is a step forward!

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously http://tinyurl.com/34586kb

It seems the problem of “book piracy” is more of an issue for scaremongers and “the sky is falling” types. In practice book sales stay constant or grow with the wider exposure unauthorized distribution can bring.

Lieber shared his findings in a blog entry, complete with fancy graphics which show that the 4Chan piracy resulted in a flood of new customers.

The picture [on the article site] shows how Lieber’s site traffic surged after the pirated scans were posted, and how 4Chan brings in more traffic than BoingBoing. But Lieber also said that the spike in sales was even more impressive.

This isn’t an isolated instance. I’ve blogged before the Corey Doctorow, who believes that widespread distribution helps more than it hurts, has always made all his books available for free for download, and yet has had many best sellers than have been translated to six languages. While every book was available for free.

David Pogue’s publishers experimented with making one of his books DRM free, which inevitable led to unauthorized distribution, but sales increased slightly.

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Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 12

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 12: The future of Final Cut Pro.

The discussion leads on from my post What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro? from last month Terence brings in his perspective.

This episode starts with discussion about a potential Adobe and Microsoft merger and its implications. Which leads into a discussion about 64 bit QuickTime.

The primary discussion revolves around a discussion on what Philip thinks Apple should be doing with Final Cut Pro.

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Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

Are Corporations back to funding creative endeavors?

Looking to a Sneaker for a Band’s Big Break http://tinyurl.com/25q3dvy

A shoe company giving away studio time might seem peculiar. But with its new project, Converse — whose sneakers have been worn by generations of bands, from the Ramones to the Strokes — wants to become a patron of the rock arts. The company is not alone: lifestyle brands are becoming the new record labels.

This is remarkably like the sort of patronage a King, Lord or Knight would make of an artist in return for the artist creating the art for the patron’s benefit.

Not long ago most youth-minded brands’ pop strategies were limited to tour sponsorships and licensing songs for TV commercials. Now they compete to offer bands the kind of services once strictly the province of record companies: money for video shoots, marketing, even distribution. Red Bull and Mountain Dew have record labels with credible rosters. Levi’s, Converse, Dr. Martens,Scion, Nike and Bacardi have all sponsored music by the kind of under-the-radar artists covered in Pitchfork and The Village Voice, and they blitz the blogosphere with promotional budgets fatter than most labels could muster.

Overall, I see this as another positive step in the direction of financing independent production. One sponsor is less intrusive than many advertisers and it’s a better deal for both audience and advertiser.

These deals certainly seem to be better for artists than traditional record labels who now want “360 degree” deals where they get a cut on every dollar earned by an artist:

Major labels’ 360 deals, he said, are “way more of a sell-out than doing a collaboration with a brand where you have full creative control and you give free content to your fans.” (Many artists on Atlantic have extended-rights contracts, but a spokeswoman said Chromeo does not.)”

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Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Models are ‘Exceptions’

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples The ‘Exception’ http://tinyurl.com/35znl9a

So often I’ve heard that new business models for music, game creation and other creative endeavors are all exceptions because the majority of money is still being made by the record labels and the successes of the new business models are not typical of the “average musician”.

Except, when you consider it carefully, so few artists ever made money from their Record Contract, that the few successes were indeed the exceptions.

Less than 10% of signed artists recoup. Take Maximo Park for example. They have by their own admission never made a penny from record sales and make their money from DJ sets in the main. An example I have first hand knowledge of, Embrace, have sold millions of albums, they were a genuinely massive band; they performed from Glastonbury main-stage to Top Of The Pops and everywhere in-between. When they split from Virgin, they owed their label three quarters of a million pounds. I guess my point is that if we promote the Trad Music Biz’s model as “The model” then the message we’d be sending is:

  • less than one percent of musical artists are part of the music business
  • only a tenth of those will recoup and make money from their record sales, and that’s good
  • an artist should be saddled with debt, the rate at which they pay that back is equivalent to a credit card with a 900% interest rate

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Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

When A Humor Site Understands the Implications of Abundance better than the “Experts”.

When A Humor Site Understands The Implications Of Abundance Better Than The ‘Experts’… http://tinyurl.com/2bn6zuv

Here’s the bottom line: you can only sell scarcity. Digital files are abundant: they can be replicated indefinitely at minimal to no cost. Yes, various attempts at creating a Forced ARTificial Scarcity or FARTS, but they only ever succeed short term.

The key point, raised at the beginning of the article, which is the point we’ve been trying (and most likely, failing) to make for years, is that this isn’t just about music and movies. Issues of abundance where there used to be scarcity is going to impact all sorts of industries, even beyond what many people expect.

If you are interested in how the next generation of creative endeavors will be funded both the Techdirt article and the original piece at Cracked.com  – 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. – are absolutely essential reading.

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

Jim Jannard asks “What is professional to you?”

Jim Jannard asks “What is professional to you” http://tinyurl.com/344nbgs

The minimum definition of “being professional” would mean “Getting paid to provide a service someone will pay for.” but there’s more too it than that. I think being professional involves an attitude to the work and an attitude toward your fellow creatives of respect and being able to do your job and do it well among those people.

But how does that translate when we’re talking about “professional gear?”