While the money spent on broadcast and cable production is reducing, threatened by tighter budgets imposed by shrinking audiences in the face of more diversity in programming sources, it’s great to see that there are others stepping into the gap. Obviously Netflix, who plan on spending $2 billion a year on original programming, but there are many other original programming sources coming down the pipe.

(more…)

Deadline Hollywood has the story Hooked Digital Media Launches; Will Produce Original Filmed Content For Apps where Producer Neal Edelstein (Mulholland Dr., The Ring, The Invisible) and his Hooked Digital Media partners are producing entertainment for direct consumption on small screens via apps.

(more…)

Dan Rayburn discusses some research results from Conviva at his blog at StreamingMedia.com and they suggest that there are still problems delivering television content via Internet Streaming. Regardless, Netflix plan to use streaming to replace broadcast television.

(more…)

Northwestern Law professor Peter DiCola, has a new study entitled Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives. What’s interesting is the divided opinion among musicians on whether or not unauthorized distribution, a.k.a. piracy, helps or hurts their income.

(more…)

Adam Singolda writes a report on a CES panel he moderated covering with the topic “Who thinks ‘Gangnam Style’ is good content?” His motivation was to:

My goal was to open the discussion, asking if it’s possible to bring scale to niche content — and if so, what’s needed: Great content? Great distribution? Both? And how is it done?

(more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

We usually think of Bittorrent in terms of film, music or television “piracy”, but there are increasing legitimate uses (see The Promo Bay for example).

I’ve also noted that the secret to success is to build a connection with fans and give them something to buy. Here’s an example where the author provided a lot of high value add-ons for his book, and linked to the book’s Amazon page, and sales go nuts. (more…)

The article of the same name at Techdirt starts with:

Just a few days after Joe Karaganis posted his response to the RIAA’s favorite researcher, Russ Crupnick of NPD Group, who suggested that Karaganis must be drunk and have little knowledge of statistics to publish a study showing that pirates tend to buy more — and then revealing his own numbers that showed the exact same thing – UK regulatory body Ofcom hascome out with a study saying the same exact thing again (found via TorrentFreak).

(more…)

While the major record labels and movie studios do what they can to shutter The Pirate Bay, thousands of lesser known artists are eager to become featured on the site’s homepage. Since the start of the “Promo Bay” initiative in January, 10,000 independent artists have signed up to be promoted by the world’s largest torrent site. Those who were lucky enough to be featured have enjoyed a healthy career boost and in some cases earned thousands of dollars from file-sharing fans..

From TorrentFreak.com

Conventional wisdom is that there is no value in “free” distribution, yet 10,000 artists – probably more than signed to all labels combined currently – have taken advantage of the offer: free music for promotion.

Who’s looking out of step now? Not the artists, that’s for sure.