iDVD – the DVD burning part of iLife is, according to rumors, likely to be dropped from the iLife 11 package supposedly in development. In it’s place an unannounced mystery application.

Just how important is iDVD – well at the bottom of the Apple Blog article linked above, is a survey:

Daily 3.3% (20 votes)

Once a week 4.6% (28 votes)

Once a month 11.2% (68 votes)

Every few months 25.3%(154 votes)

Once a year 27.1% (165 votes)

I’ve never used it. 28.5%(173 votes)

Total of 608 votes at that point.

I wasn’t sure exactly where to place my vote. I’ve used it exactly once in five years. To do a slideshow!

By asking for donations while distributing the film The Yes Men Fix The World the Yes Men are bringing in “about $500 an hour” now.

For the Yes Men, that tipping point could actually come sooner than later. The duo has already said that it will definitely publish its next movie on file-sharing sites again to give back to people who finance its production with their donations. But Bonanno said that they could also change their mind on other distribution methods, like theatrical releases or TV deals, depending on how much money the current donation campaign will bring in.

Just shows that there are many different ways to distribute and fund a movie.

Just another data point along the way but it does seem Flash is slowly falling out of favor. Vimeo added HTML 5 support in January and pretty much every content distribution network now has support for HTML5 as well as Flash. YouTube’s owner, Google, is one of the major HTML5 proponents.

Since launching its HTML5 player, YouTube has offered a similar viewing experience on its own site, though the convenience was not carried out to embedded videos. Instead, these linked to the clip in an Adobe Flash wrapper, which mobile devices like the iPhone and Android could identify and re-route to the source clip, but browsers without that logic built-in would see nothing at all. The new code fixes that.

I also hate advertising for another reason: it’s an economic intrusion on my life. It costs me far, far more than the benefit that Hulu – or a network – gets from advertising even though they’re charging more than they would normally get from advertising.

Here’s why. Typically a major network TV show will garner 25-65c per viewer per show. Very occasionally a top-rating, network-leading show might crack 85c per viewer per show.

Now, an “hour” long TV is is 42 – 44 minutes, not 60. The other 16-18 minutes are advertising. My time to watch those ads has a finite value and it’s not an equitable one at all.

Hulu does not have anywhere near the ad load of a Network but there’s less inventory so the same ads keep repeating in a very annoying fashion. Let’s say that there are 5 x 20 second spots in each 45 minute show. At best Hulu will be getting 65c from those five ads, more likely they’ll be getting a fraction of that, but let’s be generous.

At my charge-out hourly rate, that 2.5 minutes costs me $6.25!!! At my nominal salary rather than charge-out rate that’s still $2.79!! An average plumber would have a $3.33 opportunity cost from the advertising!

So, Hulu Plus wants to charge me $10 a month and then cost me $2.79 for every show to cover my attention to the show. Every single show I watch. Since we watch very little TV, way under 2 hours a day, that’s an additional (using the extremely generous 65c per hour show figure) $78 in revenue to Hulu Plus, although given the size of Hulu’s audience I doubt they get even 20c per viewer per hour show making that closer to $24 in advertising revenue.

But that time has cost me $334.80 for the month in attention.

And that, Hulu, is why you can’t have it both ways.

And before you all start in the comments, watching any TV is an opportunity cost. I choose to do that but I choose not to watch advertising because watching the advertising adds an additional $335 in opportunity cost to watch the advertising.

The cost to me is 4.3 to 16.5 times higher than the benefit to Hulu. I guess I’ve just convinced myself that a Hulu-like service, that I can watch on my TV and covers all programming ever made, will be worth $20 a month to me. Without advertising. With advertising it’s just too expensive.

PS, the numbers supporting advertising still don’t make sense at even more modest salaries. AT $20 an hour, the five Hulu ads still “cost” 83c up against a maximum revenue at Hulu of 65c (and more likely 20c). Monthly opportunity cost at $20 an hour is $59.40 for Hulu’s $79 down to $24 in revenue.

In this example, the author put her “young adult vampire novel” on document distribution site Scribd for free and the resulting publicity helped land a traditional book deal.

Now, just giving your content away for free and praying for a return isn’t going to work, but there are – according to my How to Grow and Monetize and Audience for your Independent Project seminar – 13 or 14 ways to use free distribution of content as a way of selling something else.

The rationale is that digital content is not scarce – it’s very easily reproducible for virtually nothing – then it’s hard to sell, because classic economics is based on scarcity. There are those who have tried to create artificial scarcity for digital goods, but those have generally failed badly. Where there has been success is where the infinite digital good is distributed free in order to promote something scarce: like concert tickets, merchandise and so on.

This is not that removed from traditional Record Label deals where the band makes nothing from their music but does from touring.

From the Google blog:

Today at the VidCon 2010 conference, we announced support for videos shot in 4K (a reference resolution of 4096 x 3072), meaning that now we support original video resolution from 360p all the way up to 4096p. To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors.

Now there’s somewhere to distribute all those RED-shot movies

Needless to say, watching 4K from YouTube is going to require a darned fast Internet connection.

Oh, and here’s the backstory from the guy who made the showcase 4K movie for YouTube’s launch today.

Kara Swisher goes to meet with Hollywood Executives who are all looking for a Golden Ticket (Willy Wonka reference) so that they can charge the same monopoly rents they did when they (used to be) a monopoly.

Michael Masnick deconstructs Swisher’s reporting and parses it for us. This is a worthwhile read, even if a little long.

From music to movies to television, the biggest minds here still sound perplexed as to what will finally be the golden ticket to carry them through to the inevitable next era of digital distribution.

That single sentence basically describes the problem. These guys are sitting back and waiting for someone to hand them a golden ticket that replicates the old ways of doing things. That’s not how it works. No one gave the buggy whip makers a golden ticket that let them keep their old lines of business going.

The unnamed executives even ask why the customer always gets to be right. Yep, that’s how far removed they are from any sense of commercial reality. The customer is always right because there’s always someone else that will meet the customer need if you don’t. (Where is my “any program, any time, any device for a fair price” service again? There’s a customer demand for it but the old guard won’t deliver.)

Final words:

The role of the disruptor is not to make life easy for the disrupted. Swisher and these execs seem to be confusing the role of certain folks in the legacy industry with the overall entertainment industry itself. As noted, the entertainment industry is thriving. More movies, music and books are being created. More money is being spent. It’s just that it’s going to different players. There’s no reason to “figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future.” The opportunities and wide open path are there. The problem isn’t that tech leaders haven’t made it easy for them. They have. It’s that these guys are so myopically focused on the way they used to make money they don’t realize that the new opportunities are already there and have been embraced widely by others.

Although YouTube has been encoding to H.264 since early 2007, most distribution is via their Flash player, although they do have an HTML5 player as well. The advantages of Flash for YouTube at the moment are:

• Live Streaming (although almost nothing on YouTube is live streaming in that sense – it’s all progressive download). What Google means is control over buffering and dynamic quality of the files it serves up.
• Content protection for the “Premium Content” demanded by the content owners, despite all kinds of DRM being pointless (don’t work) and annoy the legitimate user.
• Encapsulation and Embedding. Flash is definitely easier for that and has better security.
• Fullscreen Video. Tick. HTML5 players (mostly MP4 players) do not do Fullscreen video. Not that I use it often, but it’s an important feature to have.
• Access to Camera and Microphone for interactive experiences, something not yet possible in HTML5

On the other hand, Hulu Plus kicks Hulu’s dependence on Flash for it’s iPad/iPhone application. (In fairness, you can do pretty much all of the above when you move from plug-in or native browser support to a custom application.)

While i had expected Google/YouTube to prevail because the DMCA “Safe Harbor” provisions protect YouTube, I hadn’t expected a Judge to understand well enough to send the case to summary judgement before trial: no trial necessary this is really obvious.

TechCrunch summarizes well:

The fact that the judge granted YouTube’s summary motion to dismiss the case sends a clear message to media companies: live by the Millium Copyright Act, Die by the Millenium Copyright Act. The “safe harbor” provision in that Act is what protects YouTube and other Websites from being sued for the copyright infringement of their users as long as they take down infringing material.

Of course the fact that Viacom was uploading content that other parts of Viacom were having pulled down shows that not ever Viacom knows what is infringing and what is there deliberately on YouTube. And yet they expected Google to magically work it out. Even content not uploaded by Viacom could still be Fair Use and there’s no way to know that except to sort it out in the Courts.

And that’s why the Safe Harbor provisions were put in place: as long as the hosting site does not contribute directly to the infringement (nor knows about it precisely) then it’s not the hosting site’s problem.

Techdirt’s take: Huge Victory: Court rules for YouTube Against Viacom.

First off iAds go in Apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad – or they will from early next month – and are an integral part of iOS 4. Any developer can add ads to their App simply and 60% of the revenue from ads goes to the App developer (or owner). That’s $36 million that’s going to be paid out to someone, why not your independent project?

I’ve long thought that the future of programming was Apps. An App, like a website, gives a single place for everything about your project: blog, previews, special content, upcoming events, merchandising etc. The advantage of not only having a website, but wrapping it an App is that the App will be a better fan experience, and it’s easy to add in-App purchasing of digital goods.

So, create an App for your project. This App will have:

• An area where you can read the production blog;
• Forums and chat around your project;
• The Twitter feed from your project;
• Connection into your Facebook presence;
• Previews of scenes or trailers of movies;
• The full project, with a little in-App purchasing (or not).
• Calendar for screenings, parties and other events around your project, including signup (filtered for just the geography of the fan if they want, thanks to GPS on most of the devices)

Having everything to do with your project in a mobile app on iPhone or iPad makes it much easier for your fans, friends and followers to stay involved and participate. Involvement will improve. (Connecting with Fans and giving them a reason to buy is a basic tenet of independent production in the digital era.) Plus fans will likely be clicking on some of those ads if they’re well targeted, bringing revenue to the project.

Plus, there a minor security advantage. There’s no download function in Mobile Safari and Apps can’t download very much. Plus there’s no way to actually get anything downloaded within an App out of the App to a computer. That means your finished, high quality version could be viewed in the iDevices without much risk of it being distributed without authorization. (Recognizing though, that it will get distributed unless you project just plain sucks!)

Who’s going to be the first to give it a try?