App Developer Happy That Piracy Doubled His Sales http://tinyurl.com/4udbx5h
Category: Business & Marketing
What’s going to happen in 2011? http://tinyurl.com/48f979s
Our longest show ever!
In this episode Terence and Philip, with Greg Huson from Secret HQ, look forward to what we can expect in 2011.  You might want to pace yourself on this one as we’ve set a new record for show length.
What will the Microsoft Kinect be used for? Who’ll be releasing new software this year – will we see new versions of Media Composer, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Creative Suite? Will Avid open up to 3rd party hardware? What will be in those releases? Is this the year Metadata (finally) takes off?
How many movies have to not make money from 3D before the fad is over? Or will 3D TV spark 3D production? Will we see RED Epic this year and will it be a success? What will develop with large sensor cameras?
How will the collapse of State Governments affect production subsidies? Will runaway production come back to LA?
When will the tipping point come when distribution breaks out of broadcast and cable channel models? Is ivi going to be ruled legal? What’s the future of Netflix? Is a social network a replacement for channel guides?
What do we wish we could predit for this year? More use of metadata for production automation and where it comes from? What if we didn’t do a first string-out manually? This leads to a discussion of the philosophy of editing.
What will be this year’s surprise? Another DSLR? Another daVinci/Smoke on Mac?
What will happen in distribution? What’s the future of DVD Extras?
What isn’t going to happen that needs to happen?
There seems to be a constant panic among Final Cut Studio users that Apple is “going to abandon professional video” because it isn’t the first thing that Apple talks about at every press conference or event. But it shouldn’t be. Pro Apps are a relatively small – but highly profitable – division within Apple. True the focus is on iOS devices, which turns out to be a great thing for professional video because that’s likely where the next (and desperately needed by Final Cut Studio and Apple’s other QuickTime-based apps) version of QuickTime is coming from.
Here’s The Truth About The Future Of The Media Industry http://tinyurl.com/2627upb
The presentation takes a very liberal view of media – essentially anything that is presented with ads beside it to support it (and I’d disagree with that definition but whatever) – but makes the point that “new media” companies are as large and important as “old media” companies.
Slide 8 of the deck shows the relative sizes (market cap) of new and old media and the companies that are included.
Slide 12 introduces the question of “the next battleground: Video” and shows that the trend to IP-delivered video entertainment is “real”.
Good stuff – hard to copy and past images of graphs but clicking through is worth the effort.
The Terence & Philip Show Episode 14: The future of PBS & Alternate Distribution. http://tinyurl.com/39am779
The discussion starts with KCET’a exit from the PBS network and the implications – including loss of revenue to PBS – does it signal the end of PBS. Will there be a PBS of the Internet?
Will direct producer-viewer connections drive the future. Remember too, that independent production is a business and needs the business model being determined before production starts. How do we fund production?
Who Needs TV Networks? Mattel Grabs Whitney Port and Goes Right to Hulu http://tinyurl.com/2ej52pz
In what I think will become the dominant trend, Mattel are creating their own programming and going public with it via Hulu. Traditionally Advertisers/Brands rented the eyeballs that Networks and Cable aggregated (in a neat bait and switch to the viewer).
But why should Brand “rent” an audience when they can buy their own? It’s generally cheaper and more effective.
The real story here is the end-around the brand is playing here, bypassing a large spend on traditional TV with a non-trivial spend sent right to an online network (Hulu) for an original web series. Hulu and other online networks like YouTube have proven they have the scale of audience to deliver on what the brand wants to reach. So why bother with bloated TV budgets? The significance of this isn’t lost on Hudsun Media’s CEO Michael Rourke.
“What we are doing with Mattel and Genuine Ken is a complete game changer, †said Rourke. We have created a wildly compelling, network-quality reality show that, for the first time, can be distributed directly to the viewer in a non-traditional but very effective way.â€
All those charts that get marched out in board meetings about how ad spending for online video is shooting up, have projects like this to thank for such lofty forecasts. With some $70 billion spent by brands on Television, the measly $1.4 billion or so in online video seems marginal, but the shift is on.
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.)”
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
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.
Selling Special Interest Videos: Sell The Sizzle, Not The Steak http://tinyurl.com/26gsbgq
It’s a good general principle in marketing: people are not interested in your product or service (The Steak), merely what it can do for them (The Sizzle). In this article, that principle is applied to selling special interest videos.
Marketing to a potential customer is not that different from marketing to a video service client. You can use all avenues, such as advertising, networking, PR, etc., but to make it the most effective you have to keep this key marketing concept in mind – you need to step into the customer’s shoes and ask, “why would I buy it?†You need to sell the benefit of watching the DVD and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?†That’s what gets people excited about buying your video.
Then goes on to give some great advice on writing copy that sells!