What’s to come in 2010
Some thoughts and predictions for 2010:
Computers/OS:
Google’s OS and Google’s Browser Chrome will further erode Microsoft’s OS dominance.
Phones:
Google’s Nexus One is not an iPhone killer but what would be much more powerful and meaningful would be for Google to offer a ‘subsidized’ cell phone service through a carrier in exchange for watching ads – no more cell bills. That MIGHT make me give-up my iPhone habit.
TV/Cable:
TV Everywhere will dominate as cable subscribers will WANT to get what they see at home on their PC’s, phones, etc. They will want this because its only a matter of time before Hulu (and other online content aggregators) lose their premium content or require a subscription fee. (Smell Comcast here?). Boxee, Roku, Sezmi and Zillion TV will have tough sledding IF Apple TV hopefully syncs a (rumored) TV subscription service with their upcoming iTablet/iSlate. 
Apple MIGHT offer consumers an a-la-carte menu of the best of cable and network TV on their televisions through the AppleTV box, iphones and the iTablet (along with several newspaper/magazine subscriptions) for a single monthly fee. Their version of a cable ‘triple-play’ subscription. Do you remember when cable TV was “sold” as a way to escape the ads on free, OTA broadcast TV? Those were the days…
Movies/Music/Web:
iTunes will announce an iTunes web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition. Disney will move forward with their Keychest initiative and so will the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE. However, only one system will survive this year to avoid consumer confusion.
‘Live’ streaming video and UGV will replace the jpg /gif as the dominant content format of visual sharing online.
Facebook, Hulu, YouTube , Twitter, and other ‘weapons of mass distraction’ these days will be increasingly ‘filtered’ out from the workplace due to too much time by employees during work hours spent on ‘social media’ causing a huge traffic shift in several social networks most notably, Facebook.
Facebook will go public and the IPO will be a huge financial success until Facebook becomes the Borg unless it allows data portability. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as large as Google and people will confuse Facebook with “the Internet” like days of old when the internet was ‘AOL’ to many people.
And then one day…
A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from; it may be mobile and location-centric; it may focus on personal content recommendations, but it will come and the minnows will swim like fishes to the next ‘big’ new network to be seen and heard on.
We are all ‘Paparazzi’s’ and ‘Jimmy Olsen’s’ now…with the Advent of ‘live’ broadcasting apps on the iphone and android makes paparazzi’s and Jimmy Olsen’s 
(instant news ‘scoops’) out of us all further diluting the worth of major news org’s that can’t be expected to be everywhere at all times.
Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.
MySpace will try to become as important to online viewers as MTV was to cable subscribers in the 80’s.
MOG and Spotify will invade the US and give iTunes(lala) and MySpace a run for their money.
And hopefully:
Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable. Why isnt’ there a way for me to make 1 Avatar, use 1 password and login to store all this info in a central location that my ‘social networks’ and other internet related service use and fetch each time I access these services? Here is where I’d place all my photos and videos and then simply choose which services get access to which photos and videos. So, when I leave a social network, my ID and photos and videos LEAVE too. Go ahead and just try moving or populating another social network again with all of your pictures, comments and videos that you’ve uploaded at one time or another. Hard to do and time consuming beyond belief. It would be nice to able to take MY STUFF (and data preferences) with ME with 1 click.
Comments welcome.
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Sshhh!…what’s real reason why Comcast is buying NBC? TV Everywhere of course.
G.E.’s decision to sell NBC Universal reflects the shifts in fortune that are battering the media business, especially network television. The broadcast division of NBC Universal could lose big, a remarkable downturn for a network that had earned roughly $400 million in past years.
Problem: the Internet has fractured audiences and few viable business models have emerged for the distribution of content online.
What the new Comcast venture looks like: Comcast will contribute its own cable channels, which include Versus, the Golf Channel and the E Entertainment channel, and a modest amount of cash, about $5 billion, to a joint venture in which it will own 51 percent. G.E. will retain a 49 percent stake, and would likely reduce its ownership over several years and in theory, Comcast-NBC Universal will be a company separate from Comcast’s cable assets.
Some interesting possibilities could be:
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD.
It could use its power in film, with Universal Studios, to expand video-on-demand offerings by altering movie release windows to make movies available on demand the same day they are released on DVD to all active basic cable subscribers that buy HBO and SHOWTIME or purchase at least 1 on-demand film per month.
Buying Netflix: Stream movies through this service coupling subscription on cable with certain consumer benefits through Netflix, i.e. day and date with DVD or perhaps even a scheme to stream films just released in theaters 1 time only to ‘frequent flyers’ or renters of the service, but at a big ticket price on-demand.
But here is the real reason why Comcast is buying NBC: TV Everywhere. “TV Everywhere” model, which promises to give their subscribers exactly what they want: anytime, anywhere access to any TV content. They have to do this to keep their customer bases and compete. In a TV Everywhere world, the role of the multi-system operator is diminished. Your cable or satellite TV provider will no longer be your only (legal) means of watching the current episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a TV Everywhere world, Curb Your Enthusiasm will be available on literally thousands of websites and mobile apps, as long as you can authenticate yourself as a paying cable or satellite subscriber with the HBO package. Comcast risks becoming a “dumb pipe,” providing little more than bandwidth. To avoid that fate, Comcast recognizes that it needs to move upstream and own or control the content itself, thus NBC/Uni. More to the point, a consumer COULD elect to turn off his cable basic subscription and turn around and subscribe to TVE thereby allowing him to see his basic cable channels but on his PC, phone etc. Now that Comcast owns content and some of those channels it can monetize the consumer whether or not they subscribe to the cable in the house or not.
In a TV Everywhere world, it will be a terribly crowded space, with a ton of noise and websites with similar content. The sites that perform best will be the ones that create the best user experience for viewing TV content – and right now, that’s Hulu ( and who knows, maybe Clicker ?). If Comcast buys NBC, Comcast will own about 1/3 of Hulu, providing an ideal launching pad for TV Everywhere it has a very passionate and loyal audience.
This online world is a very splintered and exceedingly difficult to measure, especially when you are asked to sell advertising against the content. The real problem is a lack of tools to properly bring the right economy of scale to online which equates to buying media in a traditional way. Therefore, instead of trying to monetize a cable channel online one by one, with TVE, you can monetize the whole package in a similar way that cable already is monetized. Its a structure already understood by the consumer now. Bundle a bunch of cable channels for a small monthly fee and let consumers have access to them everywhere, including home or NOT.
The Internet while very big, does not yet command the equivalent kind of media rates and fees that Cable or Network gets today. No agreed upon means of measurement exists to give advertisers a definitive ‘rate card’ for the internet. There is no Nielsen for the web, (yet, although it was announced yesterday by Nielsen that eventually, there will be). comScore, even though they do a great job with data can’t extrapolate the data to equate to viewers ‘watching a TV set’. Making the comparison when placing an ad on a video online and the same ad on TV impossible to compare TODAY. Hulu streamed 855 million video stream last month. What does that really mean? Did all 855m viewers who watched those streams watch ALL of each stream or were many of them counted as they ‘surfed’ through Hulu clicking on various videos for a few minutes or even seconds – were they counted among the 855m? What does 855m stream equate to in Nielsen ratings/eyeballs? Does anyone really know? Nielsen despite its shortcomings has some measurable statistics for this, but its still not apples to apples.
Furthermore, Hulu still has a long way to go to prove it can monetize its audience as effectively as its parent companies can do with programs viewed on-air. Why? Its uniques are flat. Hulu’s uniques are scarcely better than they were 6 months ago. Unless the unique number jumps in the coming months (which I doubt it will), Hulu will have to meaningfully enhance its value proposition to grow its audience (can you say “Hulu to-the-TV-via-Xbox/Roku/Apple TV/etc?”) says Will Richmond of Videonuze (Nov 30th 2009). He goes on to ask “What happens to Fox’s programs on Hulu should Rupert Murdoch expand his focus beyond his newspapers’ online content going premium? What if Disney decides to launch its own subscription services? What if Google or Microsoft or Netflix (or someone else) decides to open their wallet and make a bigger play in premium online video?” And, these questions become somewhat less mysterious now that Comcast has bought NBC/Universal.TV will NEVER be the same again.
Comcast chart above courtesy of VideoNuze.com
Posted via email from williamsager’s posterous
Cloudy With NO Chance of Meatballs for $24.95
Someone over at Sony must be watching too many 3 Stooges episodes late at night to think up a promotion like this.
What a terrible value for consumers. I guess their DVD outlets complained so instead of changing their thinking they upped the 24hr. ‘rental’ price. Yes, that’s right. If you’ve got a Sony Bravia TV you too can rent ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ for the incredibly fair price of $ 24.95 for a 24 hour term. Don’t everyone rush at once. And, those renters will be proud to know that they got to see the film BEFORE their friends got it on DVD….ooooohhh. Sony thinks that there’s a rush to see THIS film 28 days before you can see it or buy it on DVD (Jan 4th, 2010) for less than $24.95 and own the plastic disc and box? I feel really sorry for the suckers who rent it on Jan. 3rd, 2010 the day before its DVD release. If they wait just 24 more hours they can OWN it for less.
Sony, why not offer consumers something of value? Netflix list of 20 Sony films for free? 3-6 month pass to EpixHD online? Something on iTunes? Anything? This is ridiculous.
Will TV last as it is today in its present form?
What’s going to happen when we can watch anything on-line we see on TV today or in the theaters instantly on-line (and that image is delivered to your living room or any TV) ? What happens to the ‘per subscriber’ guarantees that programmers pay cable ops to carry their satellite feed? And when I can get CNN for free on-line instantly via the Internet? Or Noggin? Or Lifetime? Or Disney? Right now I subscribe to Time Warner – I get about 150 channels. I think we watch the following: 3 ‘local’ channels (ABC, NBC and CBS), Lifetime (wife), Noggin and Boom (daughter) and ESPN and an occasional HBO movie. That’s 8 channels. If I pushed that I can probably include several others like Turner Classic Films, AMC and Discovery. But not too many beyond that.
Since I can remember, cable companies have controlled what I watch and when I watched it. If a cable op. didn’t like the a channel, it wouldn’t carry it and we couldn’t see it. We were in a closed, 4 wall environment. We are still in that environment, but the walls are coming down. Very slowly. And the big three TV guys are in total denial. They are programming like its still 1999.
In this new world of ‘TVnomics’, I no longer need to hope that my cable operator will carry a particular program. With the likes of Hulu, YouTube, TV.com, and a few other content aggregators, I’m no longer tethered forever to Time-Warner. Using Amazon or Netflix I can watch on-line nearly anything I can find on my Time-Warner delivered TV service. And this has only really been possible since approximately 2 yrs. and 3 months ago (May, 2008) when Hulu launched.
So we have been seeing very ‘non-traditional’ programming hawking itself as a TV show for the web. Shows on no budgets, small ones and even big one. Some of these shows are being pushed out to the web by the networks (trying to find some viewer traction), and some by independent suppliers. All of them for the most part are sub-par and relatively few advertisers have climbed aboard.
Instead, the networks think that if they tease the traditional TV audience they have with bits and snippets of content found on TV pushed onto the web, they can have TV on the web or call it ‘Web TV’. Why in the world don’t CBS, NBC or ABC stream this ‘live’ simultaneously with broadcast? Why can’t they put the same show and advertisers on-line day and date with its broadcast on TV? Won’t this substantially help grow the very business on-line they fear now? Yes, I bet it would.
And in the long run, not too much of what they can do will prevent us all from getting it on-line. Once the majority of us have fat pipes able to deliver a TV show and watch a show seamlessly (think FIOS) as if it WAS TV, then instead of their being 95 million cable homes and 200 million homes with TV’s, there will be hundreds of millions of homes with TV’s – they’ll just be connected to a fat, dumb pipe. This changing of the guard won’t take that long – figure in the 5 years or so, things will REALLY shift.
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Cable operators are OUT of room…no kidding!
Holy cow Batman!! We ran out of room?
So what’s a programming service to do when they don’t have channel space to put even their own cable offering on the air? Punt! How do you do that? Well, there’s a little under-the-radar company in San Jose that provides ‘web-infused’ TV. They produce a magic box and some magic proprietary software to the cable operator for FREE. That’s right, 100% FREE. They install it for them and maintain it for them. What does this give the operators? It gives them many more additional cable channels. What does it give the cable subscriber at home (read: you and me) ? More channels on their channel line-up. And its all seamless. It just looks like another channel. The channel or channels are controlled and surfed with the same remote that you were given when you signed up for cable. But here’s the best part. It also delivers the Internet on a channel all controlled by the same remote. You want to watch videos on YouTube, see what’s on Blip.tv? Its all there and easy to find and maneuver. No box for you to hook up, no additional NOTHING. I think this has a lot of potential for growth. They will be launching in a large system back East shortly. So, if you have a fairly robust website that you want delivered on cable TV to millions of cable TV subscribers, you can do that now. They are other pieces to actually how you get launched but its all do-able. Exciting times. I’m going to brush off some of my old cable channel concepts. They might just fly now.
Blockbuster killed the video store all by themselves
It was a lethal combination of technology, fatter pipes and morons who THOUGHT they understood this business but didn’t have a clue. That’s right. MORONS. Why do I say this? In August of 2008 when interviewed about the success NetFlix was having, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes was “baffled by his competitor’s success”. And what was even more confusing to Mr. Keyes was the emphasis on catalog size. “Why would anyone want to watch anything other than new releases”, he wondered. He goes on to say : “I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles.” This guy clearly just does not get it. He’s not a film person and why in the world any responsible and half-way intelligent person responsible for turning around a business like Blockbuster hire someone like this is beyond me. FAIL.
Blockbuster used to be the 900 lb. gorilla in this space. It was dominant. And they did nothing to extend that dominance into the 21st century. Content to rest on this 80’s-90’s business model of retail foot traffic, Blockbuster basically put its head into the sand and held its breath. For a company with the kind of cash flow it had and market power and brand awareness they simply mismanaged their business into the ground, all the time telling shareholders that their business was doing great.
And then there was the Circuit City possible acquisition for $ 1.35 billion. I guess someone figured that expanding the brick-and-mortar business was a way to increase Blockbusters business. Why you want to expand the brick-and-mortar business when over the last 18 months, Blockbuster closed 412 stores (including Gamestation stores), presumably because they were operating at a loss or weren’t terribly profitable. FAIL. But it gets even better.
In August of 2007, they acquired ‘Movielink’ for $20 million dollars. Then one year later rolled out to the general public in ‘beta’ a service for ‘downloading’ of movies online. It included 5,000 titles. The downloading prices started at $8; and rental fees started at $2. It didn’t matter that it took nearly as long to download one movie as it did to get the same one in the mail from Netflix. Nor did it matter that once you spent the $8.00 and a day to get the film, it was laced with DRM making it unwatchable anywhere else but the device you received it on and unwatchable after 24 hours. Very consumer friendly indeed. If you were an executive in the business, you knew that Movielink was already dead long before Blockbuster bought it. CinemaNow and Movielink were both dead. You had to be living under a rock to believe that Movielink with its ‘PC windows’ download client manager with DRM was the future of the online movie business. How management at Blockbuster managed to convince their board of director to use $20 million dollars of the companies funds to buy Movielink is nothing but pure stupidity and mismanagement of funds. If I were a shareholder, I would have sued them. FAIL once again.
DISCLAIMER: (I started iWatchNow.com in late November of 2003 with a partner)
Fast forward to 2006, we had started an online film and TV distribution service called iWatchNow.com. My partner knew how to sling code something wicked and I knew where and how to get the content. We were one of the very early entrants in this area, next to CinemaNow and MovieLink. Neither iTunes, Hulu, Amazon, Reeltime, Veoh, Joost, Babelgum, etc., were there yet in 2003 when we were around. But they were coming big time. We acquired over 3,000 movies and TV shows. Everything from Jack Nicholson’s ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ (the Roger Corman public domain (PD) classic) to non-public domain goodies like ‘Tunnel Vision’ with Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and the original Saturday Night Live crew. It was eclectic, fun and as irreverent as we could make it showing rarely seen and hard to find content. We gave away some content for free with advertising. Other programming cost $ .99 cents per rental/24 hrs to stream.
But there were 4 things that we felt were important; to stream instead of download, to not use a client to stream but use the browser, to make the search on the site for content lightning fast and purchases easy with as few clicks as possible. We didn’t focus on ‘new’ releases because we knew that in a short time, EVERYONE would be showing them. The advances were too big from each studio for our little company, so we focused on the ‘long tail’ and convenience.
We thought that we had created a pretty good framework for a start-up online company and launched in January 2006. Then in March I decided to call Blockbuster and invite them in to our offices to see our system for the expressed purpose of selling it to them so they could jump start their online business. So, two executives showed up at our offices; Dean Wilson and Richard Jenrud. They looked under the hood, saw the library, kicked the tires and then left. We never heard back from them. Then we heard they paid $20m for a failing ‘Movielink’ service. What I am saying here is that Blockbuster probably had not only our service to look at but many others in the fledgling marketplace, yet they chose a dinosaur to spend $20m and buy Movielink. What in the world were they thinking?
40 ‘inspirational’ movie speeches in 2 minutes.
A very well put together montage. Worth the time to watch.
TV Online – It’s NOT on TV and worse, everyone appears to be all the same.
At first, CinemaNow and MovieLink were the 2 places for online consumption of movies at first, then TV shows were added. Well intentioned but clunky and smothered with restrictions on viewing the content, it was accepted only by the most avid online enthusiast with the fastest connections to the Internet. You could download Indiana Jones ( 30-45 days AFTER its DVD release) and by the time you were done, Indi 2 was in the theaters. It was painful. But your yardstick for measuring success was simple – in the number of downloads. 
Then came the notion of streaming video just like youtube was doing (and much illegal content on youtube ) and then came a crop of youtube look-alikes, then joost appeared and a whole slew of joost-alikes came along. Once the social networks hit big, there were social networks built around content, blip TV, veoh’s, revvers, myspaceTV, etc. Somehow, someone felt that if I was online at Facebook or a MySpace member then I must also like to watch a certain genre of films or type of TV show (which is mistake # 1) and that I’d watch it online (mistake # 2). The recommendation engine ‘notion’ applied to me in this way was all wrong! 
Soon, established brands launched their own ‘branded’ version/site of online TV and movie consumption; iTunes, amazon video on demand (downloads) 
, hulu, reeltime, tidaltv, jaman, babelgum, TheWB + and more. Then we have all the set-top ‘boxes’ that arrived, X-Box downloads, Vudu, Roku/Netflix, 
the late Akimbo, TiVo, Comcast, ATT-U-Verse and the list goes on. Now, after all of this ‘launching’ and all of these press releases and all of these disparate systems, I have 2 observations to make. The FIRST is that unfortunately, EVERYONE SEEMS TO HAVE MUCH OF THE SAME MOVIES AND TV SHOWS. There is no real ‘differentiation’ other than the domain. No one ‘programs’ a service anymore. It seems depending on the service and who they have been able to strike a deal with, they simply put every single piece of content up online in mass, categorize each piece with the usual tags like ‘adventure’, ‘sci-fi’, ‘suspense’ etc. Each is advertising not hundreds, but ‘thousands’ of titles…4,500..10,000, 40,000 +. There is no ‘guide’ other than search fields embedded somewhere on each site for the consumer to ‘search’ for his or her movie or show. The SECOND is that despite all of the many services calling themselves ‘online TV’ or ‘ IPTV’, NONE OF THEM ARE ACTUALLY CARRIED ON TELEVISION. Unless you’ve hooked up your PC/MAC to your LCD, your computer bound. With the exception of a few ‘boxes’, most online TV websites require you to watch and pay to watch this content on your computer. I can see watching some of this content for free on my computer, but I have a hard time seeing myself paying for any of it, especially since most of it I can already get on my cable or satellite TV in one form or the other (and I can find it easier with the TV guide on my cable or Direct TV). So, why should I be excited to see ‘Tropic Thunder’ show up online on my 21” PC screen for $ 5.99 ? It will show-up on my 45” LCD TV set anyway on PPV for the same fee, but I can sit on my couch and watch it. 
UGC is easy to understand why its so popular. Most UGC is 2-3 minutes in length, hardly an hour and a half movie.
There are a lot of people online and yes, movies and TV shows are popular. But the reason most of us are online was not to find a movie or TV show. Initially, it was for email and for information and communication. It still is and even more so. It’s simply that our connections are that much bigger today and therefore this allows for the ‘broadcasting’ of video whereas years ago, it just was a ‘pipe’ (sorry, bad joke) dream.
Now, if one day, somehow I can get access to any movie or TV show I can think of sent directly to my TV set, (using the internet as a dumb pipe) regardless of what pay or basic cable service had the film under license… now that’s something I’d pay for or watch with commercials. I’d love to collectively watch some of Hollywood’s grandest and biggest failures that I choose like Michael Cimino’s ‘Heaven’s Gate’, ‘George Lucas’s Howard the Duck’ , Warren Beatty’s ‘Ishtar’, ‘Under the Volcano’ etc. Or, watch all of the ‘Thin Man’ films (William Powell, Mynra Loy and Asta). Ahh…maybe one day.
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