Akimbo still in the game
Cisco’s throwing a pile of money at Akimbo. Recently it’s also invested in CinemaNow and MovieBeam. Both of those will go nowhere fast. MovieBeam already went dark once.
Akimbo’s different – an IPTV play that’s greatest shortcoming was that it required customers to hook up yet another set top box. We’ve already got enough boxes and gadgets hooked up to our TVs. Who do you know interested in shelling out a couple hundred more bucks plus subscription and pay per download fees for more clutter in the home theater?
But Cisco makes things interesting. Cisco owns Scientific Atlanta, a company that makes set top boxes a lot of Americans already have. Load the Akimbo software in SA boxes and IPTV gets the push it needs. Look mom, no Media Center PC! Expect Brightcove to find a way to bypass the PC in short order.
Show me some money
From Waiting for the Dough on the Web by Richard Siklos, NY Times 6/25/06:
But one could make a case that the amount of focus on — and hype about — Internet activities at media companies has some kind of inverse relationship to the amount of near-term revenue they represent for these companies.We’re still in the early innings, but given how much the Internet has already transformed the media and society, it’s surprising how little money traditional media companies make directly from it.
Not surprisingly the aggregators are making the lion’s share of the money off traditional media’s online offerings. Google News doesn’t spend a cent gathering news, vetting it, or publishing it. It just links to it. No cost beyond developing yet another algorithm to judge the popularity contest that the web has become.
Google does nothing illegal or immoral. It does what smart companies do in free markets. Find a need, meet that need. But over the long term Google’s net effect is similar to that of a virus. It weakens the host off of which it feeds. Weaken it too much and the host dies.
Jaron Lanier wrote an excellent essay, Digital Maoism, on where all this meta-ness is leading us. It’s very provactive stuff.
The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes over the feeding of curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the aggregated.
So what happens to the media landscape? Does content become faceless, lacking personality and context? Do mathematicians replace editors?
What does a free society lose when public debate is reduced to page rankings? These questions are deep. The more difficult it is to make thoughtful content, the greater the threat to the liquidity of Jefferson’s marketplace of ideas.
Niche content will largely remain under the radar, but what of mass communication? The New York Times and CNN might not be perfect, but we can attach names and reputations to the content creators. There’s accountability. The wiki world lacks this. To quote Lanier again:
Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from the results of his or her actions.
That’s exactly the power granted a wiki author. Wikipedia has its place. It’s fast, mostly accurate, and widely available, but do we want it to be a publication of record?
It’s crucial that we continue to get our most important information from people who depend on their professional reputations as journalists and writers to put food on their tables. It’s critical that old media figures out how to make a buck in new media.
Married to the Brand
With the official start of summer, I’ve officially begun my summer reading. Mostly I’m catching up on all the books I’ve been meaning to read since last summer. First off the stack was William J. McEwen’s Married to the Brand.
It’s a very quick read that tries to bridge the chasm between the traditional quantitative approach of brand valuation and the softer marketing as art not science approach.
McEwen works for Gallup, the poll people, so it’s not surprising much of the book cites primary research through customer interviews. The book presents a basic framework for evaluating a company’s brand based on customer responses to eleven very direct questions.
Don’t worry if you haven’t suffered through b-school. McEwen covers the 4 Ps and miscellaneous MBA jargon enough to keep a lay person engaged without boring him or her to tears. The lessons learned by the likes of Nike, Apple, and Southwest Airlines can be applied to small businesses and startups as well.
I borrowed it from the local library, but plan on picking up a copy for the office library.
Farewell Shake
Yesterday Apple announced the end of Shake as we know it. The retail price of Shake 4.1 has been lowered to $499 ($249 for students) for the OS X version. Linux prices remain unchanged. In the email to customers:
Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further software updates are planned as we begin work on the next generation of Shake compositing software… It has been an absolute pleasure to serve the visual effects community for the past 9 years. We are looking forward to continuing to support you and are especially looking forward to working with you again. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this new version of Shake.
It appears the “next generation of Shake” will be a hybrid of Shake and Motion to be included as part of Final Cut Studio.
If Adobe had been planning on porting Premiere Pro and the Production Suite to OS X, this announcement might give it pause. Apple is addressing Final Cut Studio’s most glaring weakness against Adobe’s Production Suite. Motion was no match for After Effects. While Audition remains superior to Soundtrack, ProTools’ commanding lead in the marketplace means few will make a purchase decision based on a bundle’s audio editing tools. This move may have kept Adobe’s NLE out of OS X for the forseeable future, and lure a few more Windows users to Mac OS X.
My Interesting Adobe Rumor is now somewhat less interesting.
Toolfarm relaunches AE Freemart
Toolfarm’s AE Freemart is another motion graphics resource. Not much there yet, but it promises to add new stuff each day.
It’s interesting how the motion graphics community has developed such a culture of sharing. Perhaps it’s that After Effects provides a better platform for sharing than other rich media creation tools. Small files such as scripts, expressions, .ffx files, etc. are easier to move around than whole Final Cut Pro files. But that’s not the whole of it. Avid has a similar architecture that allows for sharing of bins that can contain effects settings, color corrections, and title templates, but it’s just not done as frequently.
It bears noting that AE Freemart is a marketing project of of Toolfarm. It’s fueled by baser commercial motivations than AE Enhancers and Creative Workflow Hacks.
Web development is similar, but it’s more easily explained. Such an open environment makes it difficult to protect your secret recipes. This was especially true during the web’s formative years. So why bother?
Lift and let lift.
