Jobs or Murdoch?
With Macworld’s announcements of the strengthening iPod and iTunes juggernauts and Steve Jobs becoming Disney’s largest individual shareholder, the digital-entertainment-is-here bandwagon has officially entered the fast lane. Analysts are tripping over themselves to declare more enthusiastically than the last that old media must embrace new models or perish. On the surface such statements seem wise, if not a bit obvious. But does a $1.99 pod-friendly episode of Dragnet really represent the future? Probably not. In fact, it’s merely the last gasp of the past that gives the white shirt and wired rimmed crowd with their freshly pressed khakis and MBAs cover. When the board asks about their digital strategy, alas they can say they have one.
Savvy boards won’t simply kick the tires and pat the whiz kids on the head. They will want to look under the hood. What’s the engine driving this strategy? Rather than a finely tuned hybrid that embraces both old and new media models during this transitionary period, they’ll find the same tired hamster running in place. Truth be told, the $1.99 episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives are nothing more than the VHS and DVD distribution model with an enviously low cost of goods sold. Nice margins mean everyone eats, everyone gets fat, and everyone falls asleep.
A couple of weeks ago, Business Week’s Jon Fine made some interesting observations about the future value of content. He described two schools of thought. The first is the old school that values only the original content itself. The latter is the new school that believes value is derived from the conversations that are generated by that content. Fine didn’t take sides, but did a great job at describing the ends of the spectrum. (The column was really about a way for traditional media to put the hurt on Google and Yahoo!)
Last week’s Economist dons a cover featuring King Kong as King Content. (I swear it’s starting to feel like 1997. Simply replace the word “internet” with “media” in the press coverage.) The Economist, in its typically low key and intelligent analysis connects takes the discussion a step further. Old media is alive and well it tells us in a leader. Surely the threat of piracy remains, but things are moving in the right direction. Even the music industry is beginning to turn around with a thriving online business.
In the same issue, a profile of News Corp. that noted its purchases of MySpace and IGN has made Murdoch’s empire a new media powerhouse ended like this:
Owning internet properties is also a way for News Corporation to establish its content online. Before the company started talking to MySpace.com, the biggest four discussion groups on the site were about three programmes made by Fox, its subsidiary—“Family Guy”, “The OC” and “The Simpsons”—and a film from Fox Searchlight Pictures, “Napoleon Dynamite”. IGN has developed technology to allow the downloading of large video files from the internet. In 2006, as a start, News Corporation will use this to distribute “Family Guy” episodes made exclusively for the internet across Fox’s websites. The company is already feeling a marketing benefit from its web communities. One of Twentieth Century Fox’s films, “Transporter 2” did far better than expected after being promoted on MySpace.com and IGN.Nevertheless, it is News Corporation’s big legacy businesses that will mostly determine whether the company can adapt to a new era for the media industry. That is why Mr Murdoch will need to keep focusing on making money from television, films and newspapers as well as his trendy new web communities.
Meet the new boss. Just the same as the old boss. The next time some kid dressed in black with narrow glasses and meticulously unkempt hair tells you, “Old media just doesn’t get it,” try not to laugh too hard.
QuickTime 7.0.4 and H.264
Buried in the fine print of the latest QuickTime update (7.0.4) is a mention of improved H.264 performance. Having heard some talk on the professional video mailing lists that the latest update can be problematic for Final Cut Pro and Avid users, I opted to use my PowerBook as a testing platform. My test file was a 10 second, 720×486 uncompressed 10-bit QuickTime file. Using QT Pro’s “Export to iPod” option in 7.0.3 , the file took an insanely long 2 minutes 12 seconds to encode to an iPod-friendly .m4v file. After upgrading to QT 7.0.4, the file encoded in 38 seconds, almost 3.5x faster. Not bad. (PowerBook is a 1 GHz G4 with 1 gigabyte of RAM.)
Is it worth upgrading? I’m still hesitant to put QuickTime 7.0.4 on production machines. I’m waiting to hear from trusted sources on Avid-L2 and FCP-L before making the leap.
Time for blog pioneers to get with the program
Not much to say about the Macworld announcements. The bloggers and the press have said what needs to be said.
- Nice Intel-based notebooks and iMacs
- iLife updates to enable better podcasting are moderately cool but appear to work only with .Mac accounts
- iPod sales figures are now as familiar to the technorati as burgers sold once was to the Mickey D’s crowd
- iTunes meets the legal definition of a monopoly with its 83% market share, but nobody, except those pesky economists, thinks monopolies are a bad thing
That’s it. Nothing more to add. If only some other bloggers could show such restraint.
I speak specifically of this entry. What was Steve Gillmor thinking? What’s the point of the blog entry? It’s nothing more than disjointed notes taken during the keynote and posted within 10 minutes of the end of the speech. It’s hard enough to understand Gillmor when he believes he’s creating complete sentences.
Think this through. Anyone with web access during the keynote could have watched it live through iTunes. If one had better things to do, just wait until the address is over and go to Apple’s site. Look! All the nifty announcements, written in English, all in one place. What value did Gillmor’s post add to the inevitable online discussions that follow every Jobs speech? Nothing. He only succeeded in further diminishing his brand.
The problem is that so many bloggers and podcasters, especially the self-proclaimed experts and pioneers, don’t realize that blogging’s gone mainstream. The revolution’s over. They won. Now it’s about content. Putting something up there in near real-time simply because you can isn’t a good enough reason to publish in 2006. The message has to be relevant to the reader. It appears Gillmor believes we should be impressed enough that he made the post via EVDO with a boost from his good firend Doc Searles. Please.
The bigger question: How does Ziff-Davis allow a contributor to diminish its brand. The ZDNet tagline is “where technology means business.” When I mean business, I mean “don’t waste my time.” If ZDNet wants to be known as a trusted source of technology information, it should spend some time curating the experience it delivers. It’s the job of an editor to put the brakes on such wastes of time and bandwidth.
Most folks download far more podcasts and subscribe to far more news feeds than they can ever consume. If you want to build an audience, you can’t waste people’s time. They’ll simply move on. You might ask, “Mr. Weasel, if Gillmor’s blogs and podcasts are so bad, why do you keep coming back?” Because like a really bad car accident, no matter how much I try to avert my eyes, morbid curiosity catches up with me. I’m amazed that this has been allowed to go on for so long. Sooner or later ZDNet has to pull the plug, doesn’t it?
Gillmor’s not the whole problem. He’s not even the worst of it. Ever check out Steve Garfield’s waste of bandwidth? Another new media darling of the old media establishment. This one let a piece of software automatically edit the video for that blog entry. (Maybe it is better than Steve could do.) A conspiracy theorist would assume that old media crowns the likes of the Steve G’s as princes of the blogosphere so that the great unwashed go to their sites and figure the whole blogging and podcasting thing is bunk if this is the best that’s out there.
If you don’t think the likes of Gillmor and Garfield and their undeserved reputations are bad for the emergence of new media, think back to the first time someone showed you web video in 1997. It looked like garbage. How many years after that did you continue to equate web video with poor quality? That’s what these guys are doing to blogging and podcasting. For years people are going equate blogs and podcasts with garbage.
Like the early days of the web, there’s a lot of crap out there. But why do so many insist on celebrating the worst of it?
Next up… a better vision for the future.
Does porn really lead?
State an opinion often enough and it gets taken as fact. The common wisdom is that porn is a technology king maker. Porn’s been credited with killing Betamax and giving birth to a commercially viable Internet. Countless video pundits during the 1990s predicted HDTV would take off once porn embraced it. Now HDTV is taking off, but is it really because of porn? I don’t think so. Porn’s not a leader. In fact, it’s not even a fast follower.
Porn is big business. It’s a crowded and highly competitive business. Turn safe search off in Google and you’ll see just how crowded. Porn floods every new distribution channel the moment the channel comes online. So once there’s a shake out and one technology prevails over another, porn’s already there. Folks are mixing up cause and effect. “Oh look, another successful technology brought to us by porn.” That is not how it works. Look at DVDs. Adult titles didn’t come out en masse until DVD players were around $300. MP3 is another example. Napster was MP3′s killer app. Porn wasn’t there. Now that the MP3 is here to stay, iPorn is born.
The same will hold true for IPTV. Porn will follow, but it won’t lead.
ITVN has been generating some buzz of late. CNET included its IPTV offering in its CES roundup last week. Forbes has written about ITVN. Ziff-Davis has heaped an Innovator of the Year of the Award upon it. Not bad for a company that lost $1.6 million on sales of $75,000 in six months. No, I didn’t miss a zero, but ITVN’s short a few.
Now ITVN’s not only about porn, but it might as well be. It’s next big launch was Lacrosse TV. IPTV is about niche content, but don’t expect to be raising serious VC funds with lacrosse. What ITVN proves is that one pornographer believes IPTV is for real. It also proves, pornographers can make bad technology picks like anyone else. Another set top box won’t be the answer.
So why all the attention to ITVN? One possibility: Journalists writing about ITVN could probably score a free box for “evaluation” purposes. With over 20,000 fetish titles ITVN should be able to score a few column inches.
CES a yawner, NAB not looking much better
There’s not much of interest for video content professionals coming out of CES this year. NAB doesn’t seem to be generating much early buzz either. By definition a consumer show, in the past CES has illuminated trends of interest to video pros.
Early NAB rumor
According to ThinkSecret, Apple is planning a major announcement for Final Cut Pro 6.
Preliminary information from sources suggests that Apple will take advantage of the April show to demonstrate Final Cut Pro 6 to the public for the first time. Even more significant, Apple will use the stage to unveil Final Cut Extreme, an extremely high-end version of its video editing software designed to grab marketshare away from rival Avid.
Priced at $10,000 per license, FCP Extreme is rumored to handle 4K files generated by the yet to be released Red camera. The price, and the size of the potential market just don’t seem to fit with Apple’s recent strategy. If Apple were to simply fix media management and update the built-in FCP color corrector, it would generate more revenue at less cost. But every time I declare a Mac rumor site wrong, I turn out being wrong.
FCP for digital intermediary work? Maybe.
The only thing that lends this rumor credibility isn’t even mentioned in the ThinkSecret piece. Apple recently hired former Avid product designer Steve Bayes as the senior product manager for Final Cut Pro. For seven years, Steve was Principal Product Designer for Media Composer, Symphony and Nitris at Avid. For my money, Steve knows more about nonlinear editing than anyone on the planet. Hiring Steve to do anything less than shoot for the highest reaches of the biz would be like engaging the Manahttan Project team for a fireworks show.
CES roundup
In the portable video world, the Toshiba Gigabit S series players look like they can give the iPod a run for its money. Lots of gadgets sport spec sheets that compare favorably to the little white player but don’t seem to catch on. It always comes down to two things. How easy is it to use? And, how cool does it look? I gleaned nothing of the former from the Engadget write-up, but the coolness factor is below room tempertaure. But five hours of video playback capability, the ability to download TiVo Series II media directly, and apparent compatibility with the Vongo service makes the device look promising.
The Mac rumor sites are reporting that the online movie subscription service Vongo (don’t bother clicking if you’re on a Mac) is making overtures to Apple. Until now Apple’s turned a cold shoulder on subscription services, but in the age of Netflix, Steve Jobs’ “people would rather own than rent” their content dogma will be challenged in the video market place.
Toshiba’s HD-DVD pricing: brilliance or desperation? Today’s NY Times features a blurb about a $499 player. Interesting. These high definition DVD players that should be able to find a spot on Wal-Mart’s shelves. With Blu-Ray players in the north of $1,000 neighborhood, Toshiba might have a survival strategy. Not too long ago it looked like the game was over for HD-DVD. What does this mean for DVD authors in 2006? Not much. Blu-Ray has a more robust feature set, but we’ll pretty much continue authoring to the lowest common denominator until one format wins over the other and gets significant penetration.
Like a vampire in a B-movie, TiVo is pronounced dead by the pundits every year, expected to perish at the hands of a new killer. This year is no different with CNET assigning the executioner’s role to the Scientific Atlanta MCP-100. It’s a sweet HD DVR with a DVD burner. Yeah, that’s going to be huge with studios and cable cartel. As TiVo’s advertising strategy continues to evolve, look for big media to embrace it as the best DVR option for it.
Two duds of the show… The Motorola ROKR E2. Taking a step in the right direction shedding Apple and iTunes, the phone still requires a USB connection to a PC to download songs. Um, Moto, a wireless device should be able receive stuff wirelessly. Alienware’s under $2,000 iMac knock off. That thing is just plain ugly. The iMac is cheaper and doesn’t scare small children.
Intel’s keynote tonight should be interesting.
