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.

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Two recent reports suggest that ‘piracy’ is not the problem some parts of the legacy industries seem to want us to believe. The Institute for Prospective Technological StudiesDigital Economy Working Paper 2013/04 studies Digital Music Consumption on the Internet:Evidence from Clickstream Data found that overall, piracy has a positive effect on music sales.

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo has just announced that not only is the huge piracy [of Game of Thrones] a compliment, but the phenomenon hasn’t hurt DVD sales at all. A couple of months earlier the show’s director, David Petrarca, said that unauthorized downloads actually do more good than harm. Petrarca explains that the show needs “cultural buzz” to thrive and survive, and this buzz is being generated in part by pirates.

Mmm.

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.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_inevitable_disruption_of_t.html

Television as we know it is not going away any time soon, but it is going to be disrupted at some time: all industries are.

But even the largest industries enter periods of transformation — think of once-dominant railroads, wired phone lines, the postal service. The fact of the matter is that periodically, technologies or business model innovations allow start-ups to enter industries offering services that are generally cheaper and more accessible, but of far lower quality. Initially, these innovations are adopted only by the least demanding industry consumers or those who couldn’t afford to participate in existing markets (like the college students who use Reddit to find entertaining Youtube videos instead of paying for HBO). However, over time, these start-ups tend to invest in performance improvements in such a way that allows them to displace industry incumbents (the professionals who are cutting the proverbial cord in favor of Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant Video). This is the essence of what we call “disruptive innovation.” It’s transformed a number of industries and is starting to do the same in the world of television.

Read how Maxwell Wessell cut the cord and transformed his Television viewing.

Video Metadata Practices to Boost SEO http://t.co/gBng5lRG

Video metadata has been read by search engines for some time but now there are more options: (more…)

Vimeo creates new tools to support and pay video makers. http://t.co/2tgrZtCz

For those who want to go down the direct payment for their work route, Vimeo are adding services to professional accounts to bring those features. (more…)

Amanda Palmer And Steve Albini On ‘Piracy’: It Only Helps Musicians http://t.co/WBptNZZF Those actually making music weigh in. (more…)

Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He’s Not Monetizing http://t.co/XdKRKnam

It must be the day for delusional old media executives but this one is completely nutso. (more…)

Former NBC Entertainment Chief Discovers Watching TV With Commercials Really Sucks! http://t.co/UeXidppc So out of touch it’s unbelievable.

I’ve long hated commercials and want a reasonably priced alternative. By reasonably priced I mean that the price I pay is about the same as the revenue from advertising (25-65c per person per program) not the usurious prices through available outlets.

After watching earlier seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix, iTunes and recorded on his DVR he caught up and watched an episode live and had this reaction:

“We watched that live,” he said. “It was not nearly as good. The commercials broke the tension. We had watched the other episodes with blankets over our heads. I hate to say this to the AMC executives and everybody else in the business, but I will never watch ‘Walking Dead’ live again.”

So, when you’re running the entertainment business for an ad supported broadcast network, ads are just fine! But when you’re a viewer, they’re not?

Connecting With Fans Means More Than Talking About Your Latest Work http://t.co/ScZsyhwM

I’ve long agreed with Techdirt that connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy something (at a reasonable price) is the model for indie financing of project.

For years, we’ve talked about this concept of Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy (CwF + RtB), and too frequently have assumed that the really difficult part is the RtB side of the equation. But it’s really amazing just how many artists have trouble with CwF as well. And this is a great explanation of why. We often hear from artists who say, “well, I have a Twitter and a Facebook feed, but it doesn’t work.” And then you go and look at the feed, and all it is is them announcing, “I just released this work,” or “I’m performing at such-and-such on December 10th,” or whatever. It’s not just that there’s little interaction, but that there’s little that’s interesting.

It wasn’t until I found a way to use Twitter to share news items I found interesting (which, btw, get reproduced back here, where I write more) that I even got on Twitter.