Pardon the commercial interruption
I’ll be teaching a motion graphics workshop at the International Film & Television Workshops next week (Aug. 6 – 12). There a still a couple of openings available. The course is geared towards working professionals who want to learn a little more than the basics of designing and executing motion graphics.
Pros and YouTube
As you might have already heard YouTube has amended its user agreement. Though not quite as onerous as many of the animation agreements I’ve signed with huge media conglomerates giving up rights in this and heretofore undiscovered universes, it’s darn close. You post it. They can do what they want with it.
Cringley’s done the homework for what this means for media pros. In summary, don’t you post anything of yours on YouTube, but don’t fret too much if others post your stuff. They can’t give up rights they don’t have. Understood. Thanks Bob.
This controversy is good news for upstarts like Phanfare. Not sure if their business model will succeed in the long run, but it’s good enough to get itself bought and devoured by one of a number of big media companies.
So what’s YouTube up to? A bunch of teenagers are going to grant YouTube the rights to redistribute material the teenagers never had the rights to grant. YouTube’s desperately searching for a business model, and this latest move is likely to lead to more litigation than revenues. How will YouTube police this? How will YouTube know if the proper appearance releases have been granted?
Another disruptive technology without a valid business model. Napster all over again.
Mac humor & pop horror
Great riff on the current Mac ads. Those who actually do real work on Macs and those who do creative work on a PC will enjoy these.
MacBook Pro users: Can’t hear the audio? Must be using Audacity. It causes the Flash player to go mute. Launch Garage Band to reset the audio innards of your Mac. See, Garage Band has a purpose.
Blue oceans, red oceans
I continue to march towards my goal of completing every book on my summer reading list. (All these years on the planet and I have never once read everything I set out to read between Memorial Day and Labor Day.)
The business shelves at the library are not very different from the self-help shelves these days. Pick up a random title and the message on the jacket is “take my advice or perish.” Long before embarking on the career as an e-business consultant that led me to b-school, I was totally fascinated by The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Back in 1998 when I first read the book, DV was just making inroads in the video business. It followed Christensen’s road map of disrtuptive technologies to the letter. Nearly a decade later, the big players in professional video production have not been displaced. It’s still Sony, Panasonic, and JVC. DV was evolution, not revolution in acquisition.
The story in post is a little different in post. Isn’t it always? There DV had a profound effect. One little wire replaced all those cables, all that dedicated hardware, all that need for massive storage devices. Apple’s Final Cut Pro was a disruptive technology in the post industry – an industry that hadn’t quite digested the previous disruptor, the NLE.
What took a while for me to get was how the innovator’s dilemma applied to post, but not to acquisition. Same technology. Virtually the same adoption pattern. DV cameras were not of much use to the established, high margin customers when introduced, but eventually DV cameras’ capabilities and broadcasters’ needs converged.
Christensen argued that big, lumbering companies could not address the needs of smaller, emerging lower margin markets. Big companies needed to create smaller, independent organizations to address these needs. Apple did this with its pro applications division. Panasonic, arguably the camera company that’s gained the most from the digital revolution, didn’t do that. I guess it’s a little early to bury Porter’s Five Forces. The industry structure can explain how DV was a sustaining technology in acquisition, but a disruptive technology in post. Well, that and the whole one-wire thing.
But Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne advances the discussion of the innovator’s dilemma, and encourages entrepreneurs to look beyond Porter’s Five Forces.
Blue Oceans is a thick read with lots of frameworks illustrated by circles and boxes and arrows, but the overarching theme is compelling to both large and small businesses. It’s not about competing, but about value innovation. Create new markets. Don’t go toe to toe, feature to feature, dollar for dollar with competitors. It’s an excellent companion to Dealing with Darwin.
K & M encourage going after mass markets with compelling products affordable to the largest possible portion of potential customers. This flies in the face of the much of the common wisdom imparted in b-school lectures. Entrepreneurs can be freed from the inevitability of duking it out on the battlefield of Porter’s Five Forces.
Look at the most exciting new companies of the Web 2.0 world. YouTube, JumpCut, Basecamp, Fluxiom, Flickr, del.ico.us. No matter the revenue model… easy and inexpensive rule the day.
So how does this video entrepreneur find advantage?
Look at non-customers and previously less desirable customers. My studio’s client list and service offerings have evolved dramatically in the past two years. Previously providing post and design services to the non-fiction broadcast television market and web services for just about everyone else, we’ve become a lab that provides rapid prototyping for media companies that need to explore new distribution formats. Here’s what your podcast will look like in iTunes, how your video will look on an iPod, and how you can extend the value of your media property utilizing RSS and SMS. Disruptive technologies such as CSS, Xprove, and inexpensive HDV camcorders make this all possible.
We built the lab to meet the needs of smaller media companies that needed to test new media concepts before committing resources to them, but larger companies are taking advantage of the low cost, low risk approach as well.
Change your mantra. Don’t compete. Innovate. Look beyond the services you currently provide. Why don’t non-customers engage you? What other services are used by customers in conjunction with your services?
Mob mentality
I recently finished reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Encapsulating a book in a blog entry’s not easy and rarely useful, but I’ll try it just the same. Under the right conditions, which are far more common than we’d imagine, the collective intelligence of a group is better than that of its smartest member. Anyone caught in a traffic jam in Boston would debate this vigorously, but that’s a situation where collective intelligence shines.
So it was with much interest that I read today that a minor league baseball team in Illinois has decided to allow fans to vote on its starting lineup. This is a nearly perfect situation for Surowiecki’s theories to shine. I’m absolutely certain that over the course of the season, the voters will do better than a manager would.
From today’s Boston Globe:
The Schaumburg Flyers, an independent team west of Chicago, yesterday declared that from here on in, fans will take over managerial duties for the team.Through Internet voting, the public will decide the team’s batting order, pitching rotation, and which players to trade. Even the style of team uniforms could go up for a vote. Yesterday, fans took control of their first managerial task — deciding which nine players to start in the game — and, over the next several weeks, the team plans to give them the rest of the managerial duties as well.
How can we use this approach in our industry? Take programming and distribution platform decisions out of the hands of a few executives and open it up to a larger group of studio employees. To give everyone an incentive to take this seriously, those whose picks are correct most often are rewarded. The rewards wouldn’t have to be huge. In most organizations bragging rights alone give people enough reason to take such an exercise seriously.
The CIA got slammed for trying something similar with FutureMAP’s Policy Analysis Market in 2003. Some people found the ability of members of the public to profit from correctly predicting terrorist attacks to be somewhat distasteful. Isn’t that exactly what we pay the head of the CIA to do? Just the same, I don’t think anyone will raise objections when its the future of Two and Half Men on the table.
