Is Google + deflating Facebook’s IPO ?
July 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
First there was usenet, arpanet, listserve and BBS’s, AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, theGlobe, Tripod, Classmates, Homepage, then Homestead, GeoCities, Friendster, Sixdegrees, mySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Facebook and now we have Google +. All of these services at one point or the other were the AlphaDog of their time. Each of them for some period of internet time shared the limelight as THE ‘hot’ spot site to be seen and heard on. I had a block in GeoCities, used many a BBS (I dreamed in green and black back then), had a HomePage not a Homestead (disclaimer: I worked at HomePage.com) threw the most ridiculous backgrounds on my mySpace page with all of the ugliest stuff I could find on the planet, used Friendster, never did try a few other the others ( Sixdegrees, Bebo or Orkut). And of course have had a Facebook page since the ‘edu’ days when I tried to get in by using my old ‘edu’ email address from the University of Wisconsin (but that didn’t work for one reason or another I can’t recall). I’m not including Twitter in this post as I don’t consider it to be a place where you have a page that you call and fashion as your own – rather it’s a fire hose of information to share.
What’s interesting to note here is that nearly all of these early services back then lacked 2 major components unlike today – the addition of the mobile phone coupled with leveraging the GPS in phones to create a location-based user experience. This component has allowed all of us to extend our online personas to outside of our homes and desks where our main computer is. And, because of this, the use of these services and the traffic they generate like Facebook wouldn’t be possible. It has been said that over 100 million people access Facebook using a mobile phone every month (http://on.fb.me/rmoDN1). And that is just today. And about 300 million access Facebook on a computer monthly (http://tcrn.ch/owiarn).
Its been just about 1 month since Google + opened their doors to a select group of people. Invites now are beginning to trickle out, and it seems that Google + has over 10 million users thus far. That’s not bad. At that rate and when the general admission doors open up, 100-200 million users should be easily possible. By years end, I think we will see just those kind of numbers. And perhaps in 2 years, double that, say 400 million or more. Flash forward to the end of this year and the impending Facebook IPO. Now if you are on the Facebook IPO train, you’ve got to look hard over your shoulder and realize that it might be very possible that a few people who now use Facebook will begin to use Google + as more and more friends try the service. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Precedent has been set already. Look what’s happening to mySpace now? People who use and who have used all of these services are like minnows or lemmings – they all flock together and this happens quite quickly. There is no ‘loyalty’ I ever had to Classmates, AOL, mySpace and other sites I used like these. And today, given the proliferation of mobile phones and the ease at which we can access these sites along with the ‘notifications’ that come along with the mobile web apps we get, interacting and trying out any new service like Google+ is easier than ever before. So that’s what get me to think that the bankers on Wall Street are all smoking crack! Is Facebook really worth $ 100 billion dollars given the fact that Google + will more than likely have half the user base Facebook now has in a short 2 years? Does that mean that Google + just added $ 50 billion to the bottom line of Google? Perhaps Facebook valuations might stick to the wall a whole lot better had Google + not just launched, but given the history of these sites and the rapid following and user base Google + has already, the only ones that will make money from the FaceBook IPO will be the underwriters and Zuck. And if you haven’t tried Google + yet, run and get an invite from someone you know – it a breath of fresh air.
Apple’s Half Approach To The ‘Clouds’
June 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
This weeks Apple announcement is not quite as cloud centric as you may think. Unlike Googles approach with having a chromebook browser with Linux running underneath and no local storage, Apple is still tethered to the device we use. It’s a world of ‘apps’.
In Google’s view, you do everything using a browser with no local storage or apps. In Apple’s world, while it has taken an elegant approach to its delivery mechanism and user experience bar none, it is still largely delivering a localized environment.
In Google’s world, chromebooks and other devices like these will still need to grapple with the unreliable world of ‘wireless’ connections – or sometimes lack of them and the consumers long time habit and behavior of wanting the content close by them, local.
With Apple’s announcement, they are positioning themselves to take full advantage of the ‘post’ PC world – that is they know that by 2013 (a scant 2 plus years away).
Gartner and others predict mobile phones and THEIR screens will be the No. 1 way we access the Internet to view the web. Here are some more rather startling mobile facts:
*82 percent of consumers have used their mobile phones in a store, 55 percent in a doctor’s office or hospital, 17 percent during a movie at the theater, 14 percent while flying on a plane and 7 percent during church service. Around 17 percent of mobile users have shown a clerk in a store a picture of a product on their mobile phone, saying in effect, “I want this please,” which is a new shopping behavior that is surprisingly being driven by men. 45 percent of users check their mobile devices first thing in the morning, according to InsightExpress.
*Research has determined that mobile advertising is four-to-five times more effective than online advertising, on average…due to various factors, including lack of clutter in mobile, typically one ad per page, and the mobile pages themselves typically do not have a lot of stuff going on—they tend to be very clean. Also, the proportion of the ad on a mobile screen is greater, so it gets more share of eyeballs.
My takeaway from these numbers is that we are steadily becoming a mobile and tablet world, not a PC one.
This is a world the Apple knows better than anyone and using iCloud, it has taken a very good shot at delivering a cloud experience with what really is a local one. Apple is extending what Apple does best, its core strengths into the cloud. And this is simply the basic integration of Apple’s hardware and software – their elegant OS. The major difference being it does not yet rely on the browser as the central driving force in the picture (Google’s chrome) rather in Apple’s view what they are giving us an elegant CMS or content delivery system that we manage. Google is betting on its browser, and they too know its coming to the small screen, therefore, that’s why we are seeing the Android store downloadable app strategy they are pushing out..
Apple which supports its web apps in the App store will have a rude awakening one day as eventually everyone but them will play on a browser using HTML5, but for now Apple’s user experience is by far the best. A good example of this is when you go to read GoogleNews on your iPhone using Safari and at the bottom of the screen a small box pops up saying ‘ if you want to access Google News, click here to put this app on your device’. If you agree, a small app-like icon gets created on your iPhone using HTML5 just as if you downloaded it through iTunes.
So, Apple IS a cloud player indeed, distributing its OS X online, supporting over the air updates, allowing iTunes to be streamed to any iOS registered device. And iTunes did something that neither Google nor Amazon has done – signed deals with the major music players for their content (video/films excluded for now). This allows us to avoid the time consuming process of uploading our music collection to iCloud (I think I have about 60gigs of files). We can purchase a subscription to Music Match for $24.99 year, and MM will mirror my music collection with the iTunes store – ALL of my music, not just iTunes purchased music. These tracks can now be streamed back to me from the cloud on any MacOS registered device.
However, unlike other pure cloud players, this isn’t a web based operation for all of this. Apple still is enabling core SDK kits (software development kits) for developers to build in access and API’s (application program interfaces) that will let developers integrate their own apps within Apple’s cloud.
To perhaps make this analogy clearer of why it is not a pure based cloud play, look at iTunes. Your music library stays right where it is, with YOU – MM provides software that identifies songs and tracks you have and purchases you made at iTunes against the vast iTunes catalog of music to support MM. All of this not really ‘cloud’ based, but still local.
For us users, the benefit is an elegant, easy intuitive way to sync our content between all of our tablets and mobile devices (Macs included). And this sync does include most other services and docs Apple’s got to offer, calendars, contacts, documents, online storage and photos. This is far different than Google that has a true cloud offering using GoogleDocs where you store the document and edit in the clouds. With Apple, you make changes locally and then those changes are synced to the cloud.
This method allows us to be far less vulnerable to the woes of the wireless world or lack of it at times. And, ultimately, it will keep us all purchasing not just apps but what Apple REALLY wants us to buy – newer iPads, newer iPhones and brand new Macs. Apple is really in the hardware business, unlike Google that wants to drive everyone to the web on inexpensive chromebooks running Linux to see more advertising or Amazon that wants to drive purchases online. It a half hearted approach but it’s a damn elegant one and one that I am particularly enjoying because everything just works!
Apple’s ‘iCloud’ Just Might Be Netflix’s Achilles Heel.
June 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Apple took a long time to get the Internet. Geeks were still installing FTP clients and web browsers for years after Apple belatedly included TCP/IP and PPP to their OS and, when Apple finally did integrate the Internet into Mac OS, it was in a very tacked on kind of way. A browser, an app for making web pages, eventually a few vertical online stores. I think that’s all about to change tomorrow a the WWDC.
The upcoming ‘iCloud’ announcement will vault Apple into the music cloud business, pitted against Amazon and Google (and a few others, but they are the 900lb. gorillas in the room). Apple has been in the business of selling movies and music for a long time now. Far longer than Google and longer than Amazon, at least digitally (no physical plastic CD). Now they will announce ‘iCloud’.
There have been many guessing at what this will look like and include, and I’ll make a few guesses too and I’m sure not all of them will be correct. But its fun nonetheless to postulate. Netflix is unquestionably the king of movie rentals by far. They have the breadth of product, elegance of delivery online and a reasonable cost/subscription plan. Apple is the king of online movie ‘purchases’. Based upon the fact that Apple has been building out a $1B data center in maiden N.C. , it is more than possible that they have infrastructure to support ‘movie’ lockers. That is, you buy a movie and can now store that film remotely in your cloud ‘locker’. This is the one thing that Netflix (at the moment) can’t replicate very easily.
First, it does not have the infrastructure in place (at the least own the facility) even though they host through Amazon’s EC2. Yes, they can build it out there, but it would be costly. Second, to my knowledge ownership is a digital right that must be negotiated and exists separately from a pure rental right with the studios. Something that is NOT easy to get from the Hollywood majors – and I know because I’ve been there before several times before. And third, Netflix core business premise is rentals – it has never been the place we turn to purchase a film thereby making it even harder to shift consumer habits that so far lie with an Amazon or iTunes.
This IMHO, could be considered an Achilles heel for Netflix. Not that they couldn’t get here, but perhaps they will get here AFTER Apple does. And first mover advantage is HUGE online and especially in the entertainment space. An storing your movies is altogether another issue – especially once you begin storing your movies in a cloud. They are NOT easy to move (file size is 750megs -1gb or more compared to a typically small 4-5mb mp3 file) nor would you want to. Right now, people are complaining about how you need to upload your MUSIC files to Google or Amazon’s music cloud offering. Imagine what they’d be saying about uploading movies? Again, this is all a guess of mine. Some other thoughts and guesses about tomorrows announcement by Apple MIGHT be:
• Your Mac, Windows, or iOS device can sync with all or part of it in the same way that your iOS devices sync with your computer’s iTunes library today because your music library exists in the cloud now.
• Continuous syncing of iOS devices in real time. The implication is never having to plug your iPhone or iPad in to your computer again. You won’t need a computer to sync anymore.
• One login using your Apple account: On any Mac, sign in as a guest using your Apple account credentials and you’ll be brought to the same desktop you get on your personal machine. Files will be downloaded from the cloud (or your home network) on demand, and you’ll have access to all the apps you’ve purchased via the Mac App Store, downloaded and installed on-demand, and removed securely, along with your data, upon log-out.
• Play music on your mac, then with a tap shift the music to your iPhone when you’re on the go. A sizable portion of the playlist will quickly transfer over so there’s no reliance on continued wi-fi access or 3G streaming. A ‘cloud’ benefit.
Lion and iOS 5 will change the playing field for many. It will be interesting to find out exactly how Apple will do this and when tomorrow at WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference). You can watch it live here on Monday, June 6th at 10am: http://www.macrumorslive.com/.
The End of An Era – Music Companies, ‘cloud’ services and the ISP’s are laughing all the way to the Bank, courtesy of you and me!
May 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Google’s BetaMusic, iTunes upcoming ‘cloud’ offering, current subscription based music ‘cloud’ services and music ‘lockers’ ( eMusic, Spotify, Rhapsody, Thumbplay Music, mSpot, MP3Tunes, and others) are all similar in many ways.
There are slight differences in the cost and the amount of storage for free that you get initially. After that, users will find the old fashioned way we now store and playback music might in fact have been the best and most cost efficient after all.
Today, we all have mp3’s or m4p’s (iTunes) stored somewhere on our computers or in an external hard drive or both. We have our iPod and other devices to playback these files. Load up a playlist and take them with you. Soon, the above mentioned services will offer us the ability to ship all or some of our music collection to what effectively is a hard drive outside our house or computer – essentially letting them live ‘over there’ or wherever that service lives, be it Amazon, Google or Apple. Load up a playlist and playback the music just as we do now.
A few things will change however that will drastically alter not how or what we listen to but what it will cost us to listen to what we now playback for free. And the changes are subtle but substantial. And these changes are all designed to generate money, a lot of it, for 3 separate entities; the music cloud service of your choice, the music companies and your local ISP.
What has been an essentially free activity for all of us (creating and playing back music on our device of choice locally), will now very quickly become an expensive one, remotely. The change has been slowly evolving – with the ISP’s like Comcast, Time-Warner and others that supply us leading the way. They have all decided to ‘cap’ and meter our bandwidth usage under various tiered plans. Just like we get our water and electricity usage metered, so will our ‘internet’ usage.
And that’s old news – I’m not telling you anything you have not already heard before. Soon, we will keenly be aware of how much data we will be using monthly. And now, the new music ‘cloud’ offerings will present us with tiered pricing plans to store our music monthly as well. You might have 10 gigs of music (which is NOT a heck of a lot, personally) today that you want to store on Google’s Beta Music Cloud Drive ( they are just being used as one example). For me, I’ve got a ton more than that and I add to that monthly. So initially, I’ll choose a plan for 10 gigs, but I am 100% sure over time, I will eventually double that.
In addition to those charges I want to turn on my ‘cloud’ player and listen to some tunes being played back at my home, through my PC piped into my speakers in the house. Well that used to be free when I loaded up my player locally on my PC. Now with my house being metered, here’s a rough idea of what I could be faced with.
1GB streamed per month = a little more than half an hour of music per day
3GB streamed per month = about 2 hours of music per day
5GB streamed per month = about 3.1 hours of music per day
For music aficionados, that is not a lot of time spent listening to my music. Now mind you, I don’t have to use a cloud service to listen locally – I can continue doing what I do now. But that also means I’ve got to keep a duplicate set of files. And it does not include any bandwidth for any other activities on the Internet during the month I engage in. If you have a iPhone or other device that plays back music, sure you can stream your collection from that same cloud service, but wait, there’s a data cap on your phone too. But wait, there’s more. The new Chrome notebook offers a plan too when you are NOT connected to WiFi – and it’s not cheap:
• Free 100MB per month (what you get with the first two years of ownership under the current plan): 1 hour and 45 minutes of music playback for an entire month
• $10 for an unlimited day pass: listen all day
• $20 for 1GB of data in a given month: a little over half hour of music per day
• $35 for 3GB of data in a given month: nearly two hours of music per day
• $50 for 5GB of data in a given month: a little over three hours of music per day
All of this cost and metering does not include monthly cloud ‘subscription’ costs. Put it all together and you might be looking at some heavy fees every month that you don’t currently pay storing and playing back your music collection locally or playing back on the road through your iPhone, etc.
Now I am a big cloud advocate – there are some big advantages clearly in storing your collection outside of your house. The biggest single advantage I can think of is a disaster – and they DO happen. Replacing a 60gig collection is not only time consuming and expensive but just go and try to remember what was in your collection of say 40,000 songs – good luck! This alone is reason enough to consider storing your collection remotely. Other disadvantages include getting the songs up there to start and you don’t want to move the collection once you are there. Ever try moving 60gigs quickly – there is no quickly. So choose your service very carefully!
While all of these new music services sound great and offer us new and improved ways to listen to our music, I can’t help wondering if one day a few years back the ISP’s and the music industry got together in one big Hotel room and figured this out as a way to get back all of the lost revenue that the ‘Napster’, ‘Kaaza’ and ‘Limewire’ era sucked out of them. Maybe they will get the last laugh after all. Here’s a better one – how would a Netflix for example, replicate a ‘cloud’ locker storage scenario for movies I might purchase? Could it? Just think of THAT cloud storage plan!! Ouch!
13 Movie Online Services is WAY too many. (PPV Part 2)
May 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Netflix 
vs. Google TV 2.0 PPV (powered by Honeycomb 3.1) 
vs. YouTube rentals 
vs. iTunes 
vs cable PPV vs 
VUDU vs. Blockbuster OnDemand 
vs 
Facebook OnDemand vs 
BigStar Movies vs CinemaNow OnDemand vs. Alphaline ( Sears/Roxio) vs. Redbox (due 2011) vs. 
Flixster via Warner Bros. vs anyone else ?
What happens when the airlines have a fare war? You know, you can fly from NY to L.A. for $xx.xx and then the next thing you know, another airline tops that price by $ 20.00? Or gives you a free bag to carry on board? All of a sudden 5 or more airlines have the same special going on. Who do you fly with? Decisions, decisions… It all begins to seem and look the same to you. You get to the same destination, same approximate times, using the same type of transportation, in the air for just about the same money. Who suffers? Ultimately the carriers do.
Meet the carriers. Not the airlines, but the carriers of movies online. I count thirteen (13) of them – eleven (11) of them are live as we speak. All boasting the same movies for the most part for the same prices. All rentable at the same time for about the same amount of time. And I’m not even counting Redbox as an online rentable service…yet. What’s a consumer to do – who do you choose? And why. Do you ‘subscribe’ to a Netflix monthly or do you pick off a film on a one-off basis from another provider. More importantly, how do all of these guys begin to differentiate themselves from each other? How and where do they market themselves? Netflix is clearly the 900lb gorilla today. I guess iTunes is # 2. But beyond them, I can’t really tell who’s in third place. But more importantly, do I really care? Do I need3 or 5 or 7 similar services? On top of all this, I have Verizon’s FIOS cable service at home with thousands of movies to choose from to watch on any given day/hour.
I have licensed movies before from each of the studios and it was no easy task. Number one, its VERY expensive. Figure an upfront fee to be paid to play, maybe between $500k-$1m. That’s just for starters. Then there are the guarantees against each title licensed. Therefore as a provider of online fare, you’ve got to re-coup that fee with a certain number of minimum rentals or turns of the gate so to speak. With nearly 13 services out there plus cable choices, I’m going to take a guess here a few will not make it. Not only must you guarantee upfront cash, you also must explain how you are going to market the studios films, how you will digitally protect them from piracy ( good luck on that one) and how you will separate yourself from the rest of the online movie ‘noise’. All of this and then compete with the new ‘premium’ $30.00 a pop cable TV onDemand offering ( not that I think that’s going to be too successful – it’s the least of these companies problems).
However, the one issue I have with all these services is this: I am unable to save ANYTHING I purchase or rent for viewing later on a rainy day. If I had a ‘digital’ locker – someplace to hold what I spend my money on to see so I can view it later (more than 24hrs later), that might sway me to use that service ALL THE TIME.
The Great Chaos Monkey!
April 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Apr 25, 2011
Working with the Chaos Monkey
Late last year, the Netflix Tech Blog wrote about five lessons they learned moving to Amazon Web Services. AWS is, of course, the preeminent provider of so-called “cloud computing”, so this can essentially be read as key advice for any website considering a move to the cloud. And it’s great advice, too. Here’s the one bit that struck me as most essential:
We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.
If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.
One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.
Which, let’s face it, seems like insane advice at first glance. I’m not sure many companies even understand why this would be a good idea, much less have the guts to attempt it. Raise your hand if where you work, someone deployed a daemon or service that randomly kills servers and processes in your server farm.
Now raise your other hand if that person is still employed by your company.
Who in their right mind would willingly choose to work with a Chaos Monkey?
Angry-monkey-family-guy
Sometimes you don’t get a choice; the Chaos Monkey chooses you. At Stack Exchange, we struggled for months with a bizarre problem. Every few days, one of the servers in the Oregon web farm would simply stop responding to all external network requests. No reason, no rationale, and no recovery except for a slow, excruciating shutdown sequence requiring the server to bluescreen before it would reboot.
We spent months — literally months — chasing this problem down. We walked the list of everything we could think of to solve it, and then some:
swapping network ports
replacing network cables
a different switch
multiple versions of the network driver
tweaking OS and driver level network settings
simplifying our network configuration and removing TProxy for more traditional X-FORWARDED-FOR
switching virtualization providers
changing our TCP/IP host model
getting Kernel hotfixes and applying them
involving high-level vendor support teams
some other stuff that I’ve now forgotten because I blacked out from the pain
At one point in this saga our team almost came to blows because we were so frustrated. (Well, as close to “blows” as a remote team can get over Skype, but you know what I mean.) Can you blame us? Every few days, one of our servers — no telling which one — would randomly wink off the network. The Chaos Monkey strikes again!
Even in our time of greatest frustration, I realized that there was a positive side to all this:
Where we had one server performing an essential function, we switched to two.
If we didn’t have a sensible fallback for something, we created one.
We removed dependencies all over the place, paring down to the absolute minimum we required to run.
We implemented workarounds to stay running at all times, even when services we previously considered essential were suddenly no longer available.
Every week that went by, we made our system a tiny bit more redundant, because we had to. Despite the ongoing pain, it became clear that Chaos Monkey was actually doing us a big favor by forcing us to become extremely resilient. Not tomorrow, not someday, not at some indeterminate “we’ll get to it eventually” point in the future, but right now where it hurts.
Now, none of this is new news; our problem is long since solved, and the Netflix Tech Blog article I’m referring to was posted last year. I’ve been meaning to write about it, but I’ve been a little busy. Maybe the timing is prophetic; AWS had a huge multi-day outage last week, which took several major websites down, along with a constellation of smaller sites.
Notably absent from that list of affected AWS sites? Netflix.
When you work with the Chaos Monkey, you quickly learn that everything happens for a reason. Except for those things which happen completely randomly. And that’s why, even though it sounds crazy, the best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.
Guest Post by Jeff Atwood
A Train Wreck Indeed!
April 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
How do you f’up the pay-per-view business? You don’t. No need to – it has been one train wreck since 1984. (Full disclosure: In 1984, I started a nationwide satellite delivered ‘A’ title Movie service called’ The People’s Choice’ alongside of Jeff Reiss’s ‘RequestTelevision’ and Scott Kurnit’s ‘Viewers Choice’). When I was in this business, Bill Mechanic (ex-CEO, Chairman of Fox, Disney, green lit ‘Titanic’) and Barry Diller were at Paramount, Jamie Kellner ( Orion Pictures who went on to run ‘The WB Network’), Hal Richardson ( President at Paramount) was at Disney/Dreamworks, Eric Frankel (President for 26yrs) and Stanley Solson along with Eddie Blier were at Warner Bros. ( close to the Steve Ross reign whom I knew well from High School days), Mike Medavoy at Tri-Star, Ned Nalle at Universal and Andy Kaplan at Sony. Most all of these people now still are around and are running their own ship BECAUSE back then, they had a some foresight and moxie. They DID agree to let the PPV at least try and get off the ground by granting PPV rights to a few nascent, early entrants in the business. At that time, there were only a few addressable homes to see the films.
Since the inception of PPV on the cable landscape, its always been a ‘promise’ business at best. Nothing really ever took off or was unbelievably successful (and I am referring to MOVIES, not the WWF, Boxing or the Adult business). Many a business and consulting firm was built around it, hardware made for it, ordering systems invented and manufactured and in the end, most went out of business. Most cable operators didn’t even understand it or what it was suppose to be, what ‘tier’ to put it on and how to promote it. Most felt it would cannibalize their existing cash cow, PAY TV.
It never cannibalized anything because it never got off the ground. No one could agree on a movie PPV ‘window’ (the timing of when a PPV movie should be allowed to be seen and ordered on PPV). Many a conference, discussion group, speech and convention sessions were had – all futile. Nothing was ever decided. The VCR’s were blamed as the culprit, then it was the movie studios, then it was theater owners, then it was Pay TV and the ‘exclusivity’ wars of the 90’s. Then the Internet crept upon us all and that was the new Darth Vadar. You can’t release a film on PPV too early because it could be copied easily and even easier become distributed by means of the internet all over the planet (meaning no more duplicating and bicycling cassettes as if my friends ever did this in mass to begin with). Now, using the Internet, movies would be all over the place, everywhere. Everyone would have a copy. Well? Do we ALL have copies of Avatar? Tootsie? As Good As It Gets? Dirty Harry? A good industry has got to know its limitations! And this one never did!
Now, theater owners are afraid of the 60 day release window. Pahleeese! Just read a few of the articles below.
Theater owners and the Hollywood creative community are livid about Premium VOD, which they perceive as paving the road to cannibalizing theatrical attendance which would in turn harm a movie’s overall economics, creating a dangerous downward spiral. In addition, there’s concern that if consumers switch to watching movies on the small screen then the creative license implicit in a big screen emphasis will get squeezed. While their concerns MAY be justified, the good news for them is that Premium VOD will be lucky to achieve even minimal success.
Why? The cost is one – $ 30.00 for a poor film or film that has not done well at the theater or is released directly to DVD (or what was once called DVD) is insane. Sorry, justification by babysitter fees and popcorn costs don’t cut it. These are niche films. Avatar and other BIG films will never see this light of day through this window. But ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ‘ will (and has already, sort of). Example – first film up is Just Go With It” starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. Ho-hum. Good cast and a flop a the box office for the most part. I’d be pissed if I paid $30.00 for this AND CAN’T EVEN KEEP A COPY IN A DIGITAL LOCKER TO SEE WHEN I WANTED AGAIN? WTF? And frankly that could be one of the keys to making this viable. Give me the ability to KEEP it as if I bought the DVD ( keep it in a ‘cloud’ locker) and I’d might buy a few films – that would help at least justify the cost.
And, as Will Richmond from VideoNuze so aptly points out, “Studios seem to believe that making movies available sooner in the home will attract demand. But the problem is that there are already so many choices for watching movies in the home – pay-TV, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, etc. etc., that it will be very hard to break through the noise, solely with a “sooner” positioning, which is more than offset by a ridiculously high price point. Consumers are savvier than ever; they’ll quickly realize that they can get the same movie for $4-5, a sixth to a seventh the price of Premium VOD, just by waiting a couple more months for it to appear on pay-TV or online VOD.”
So, theater owners who vow to ‘go to war’ are wasting their time and efforts. I guarantee them that the Movie studios and cable operators and satellite delivery services will win the war for them. Somehow, these guys think that consumers are not too smart. When are they going to wake up and smell the coffee? When are they going to realize that all of us don’t rush to ‘steal’ digital copies of films for any number of reasons (i.e., they are 700megs of data AT LEAST, cumbersome to store, less than perfect copies that lack subtitles at times and extra’s.) They are not MP3’s! Music and movies may both have a digital base as a common denominator but ultimately I’ll listen to Hotel California many more times than I can watch Avatar in my lifetime. And the pirates don’t make a bit of difference except barely on the streets of lower Manhattan or Tokyo where poorly made copies sell for $5.00 until those vendors get caught that day. And they on sell about 30 movies at that point – no MASS market like that that would ruin a $250m box office in the theaters or in any ancillary market I know of.
Theater owners should rejoice that soon this whole business will be in Netflix’s (or some other digital distributors) capable hands and not the studios. (Apologies to those friends of mine at the studios now – its not your fault, it’s just the ‘economics’ to blame and perhaps a few at the top thinking we are still in the DVD/VCR age). Make the business consumer friendly – give us a copy of what we buy and allow us to watch it whenever we want for our money that we spent. After all, I can do this with new music released, why not new movies released?
Netflix vs. YouTube and TV on the Net.
April 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Time to delve back into the world of video. Oh, and don’t forget to watch SharkTank on ABC this friday at 8pm/7pm 
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It has taken some time but Netflix and Youtube have each taken their position in the video entertainment world and I get the feeling that Youtube is not too happy about it.
On Youtube you can maybe change the world. On Youtube you can be discovered and help discover the next Justin Bieber. On Youtube, if one of your videos goes viral, you can make tens of thousands of dollars, and if you can replicate the feat of popularity, you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Those are real commission dollars .
But wait, there is more good from Youtube. Any one around the world can get Youtube to subsidize the cost of hosting their family/wedding/team/business/class/personal videos. Hopefully perpetually. These are unique, honorable,impactful and expensive roles that Youtube has chosen to under take.
But if you want to veg out and watch a TV show or movie, the vast majority of people just turn on the TV. About 11mm people turn on Netflix..
The lines of division between Youtube, Netflix and traditional TV have become crystal clear.
Traditional TV is where you get entertainment in real time. Live major sports, the latest movies on VOD, original episodes of your favorite TV shows, all in the highest, no – buffering quality available to your TV. Plus they have smartly opened the door to TV EVerywhere and in home tablet streaming so that there is a pay once, watch anywhere opportunity for their content.
Netflix is where you get streaming access to a growing library of thousands of TV shows and movies, and soon, a smattering of original content as well. Netflix has done an extraordinary job of being available easily on any and every device known to the internet. 11mm (those streaming, not all netflix users) or so users have happily paid Netflix $7.99 per month for this service and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Youtube is the counter-balance to Netflix and Traditional TV. Youtube is where you know 99pct of what is on the site is pure junk that has no relevance to you. It’s like walking through the bargain bin at Walmart hoping to find something that might interest you, knowing the price is right. Youtube is Community Access Television for the world.
Remember back in the day when Cable had A and B sides of the set top box ? You got all the good channels on the A side, and all the community access stuff was on the B side ? Youtube is the aggregation of every B side of every cable system in the world. That is not a knock on Youtube. It just ain’t what it ain’t.
The B side of cable was community driven. The B side of cable was an open door for anyone with access to a video camera. The cable company would let you schedule shows and put them on their schedule . Like Youtube, back in the day, there were shows that would break out and create mainstream opportunities.
I can’t help but include this paragraph from the history of Public Access TV in Manhattan
“Public access has a fundamental PR problem, which one producer summed up with this rhetorical question: “If anybody can do it, who would want to?” I don’t think there is any particular personality type that is drawn to public access; as with anything, it attracts good, bad, and ugly. But these people (each of whom I met by chance through the help of someone else I interviewed) have some things in common. All are creative, and all seem to have a thick skin and a high threshold for frustration. None were paid for their shows. Most actually shelled out their own money for studio time. Three admitted to suffering career setbacks later as a result of appearing on public access. They approached their work in television with a level of intensity and passion that only exists in the realm of avocations and came away with uniquely philosophical perspectives on the nature of television.”
The same thing could easily be said about Youtube producers today. And that is a business problem and social opportunity for Youtube. They have become Community Access for the Internet. That is a brilliant opportunity if you are trying to change the world or create huge communities . That is a huge challenge if you are trying to maximize earnings per share for your parent corporation. People won’t pay a subscription fee for any of it and most of it will never pay for itself with advertising because most of it will never be seen. It is the B side of the content world.
Which is exactly why I believe Youtube is channeling 1998 and gearing up to do quite a bit of live streaming. They don’t like being the third entertainment option . They don’t like being the “b or c side of content””. They are hoping live streaming can change the standings.
Offering everyone in the world the opportunity to stream whatever they want, live to the rest of the world, could actually change the world. But it won’t change the content stratification challenge Youtube is facing now. It won’t change how people see Youtube relative to traditional TV and Netflix.
The reality is that both cable/telco/sat distributors on your TV and Netflix are moving faster in terms of the introduction of technology (TV Everywhere/Remote DVR/IPad and multi device suuport) and the introduction of new and original high value content than Youtube. I think Youtube is hoping that live streaming will change that. It will be interesting to see if it does.
Personally, I’m not optimistic. But hey Youtube, call me. I’ve been there , done that and I can help you out.
Guest post by Mark Cuban. 4.12.2011 via blogmaverick.com
Apple’s App ecosystem…some notes
March 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
For those of you who don’t read these things, here are some takeaways and bullet points from the latest report from Distimo. The full report can be found here: http://www.distimo.com/
Less than two months after the launch of the Mac App Store, a top 300 Mac application already generates half the revenue of a top 300 iPad application on average.
The average selling price of the top 300 applications is seven times higher in the Mac App Store ($11.21) than on the iPhone ($1.57) and almost three times higher than on the iPad ($4.19).
The Mac App Store has 2,225 applications available in the store approximately two months post-launch. Comparatively, the Apple App Store for iPad had 8,099 applications two months post-launch.
Although on the Mac gaming has been less popular than on Windows, the Mac App Store promises a bright future for Mac gaming: there are already 646 games in this store (29%), and 39% of the most popular applications are games as well.
The proportion of free applications in the Mac App Store is lower than in any of the other application stores analyzed in this report: only 12% of the applications are free.
The 300 most popular free and 300 most popular paid applications in the three Apple application platforms (iPhone, iPad and Mac App Store) are published by 1,014 publishers in total. 173 publishers distribute applications in more than one of these stores (17%), the Mac App Store being one of these stores in 49 cases (5%).
