Of social networks and cable TV
This week’s Economist features a brief analysis of the social networking boom and where it all might lead. Some interesting parallels were brought to the fore. Among them:
- AOL’s acquisition of Bebo is much like Microsoft’s acquisition of Hotmail a decade ago.
- And that the network effect still holds.
Social networks as they are now constructed are walled gardens – LinkedIn users cannot communicate with Facebook users. Users typically receive invites from colleagues on multiple networks. Fragmenting a user’s network diminishes its value.
The article ends with an interesting twist – that all the social networking we need is contained in our email clients, address books, and calendars.
That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane’s; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack “work only” in his address book. Perhaps Joe’s party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.
This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr [David] Ascher [a Mozilla manager], whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimise what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.
Everywhere and nowhere. This got me thinking about cable television providers as we move into the IP-delivery era. Clinging to the walled garden approach will lessen the value of cable distribution networks. Letting viewers aggregate content from multiple sources will be more profitable. Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner need only look at last decades big walled gardens — AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy. How are they doing now?
Adobe releases DRM for Flash
In case you have any doubt Adobe is serious about dominating the web video space, this from StreamingMedia.com:
Adobe today announced the availability of its Flash Media Rights Management Server, a product that runs on Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Linux and offers content protection and business rules for playback and repurposing of offline content.
The Rights Management Server is designed to sit alongside the Flash Media Streaming Server or Flash Media Interactive Server and protect streaming content. The company is positioning Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server as a way to “protect and controls media content downloaded in FLV (Spark or VP6 codec) or MPEG4 (H.264 codec) format and played back on local desktop.
The full press release from Adobe is here. DRM for offline content isn’t new. Apple implements it with every music purchase, but Adobe’s approach gives the content holder more options. The DRM can be as restrictive as the content owner wants. Maybe reports of DRM’s demise are premature.
RED Post Workflow Resources
Two esteemed colleagues have just posted detailed and thoughtful post production resources for RED One material. Oliver Peters has a nice article in DV, and Terry Curren of Alpha Dogs and Digital Service Station fame compiled this presentation for those of us who learn better looking at the pictures.
And Mike Curtis at ProVideoCoalition.com has been chronicling his adventures with his newly delivered RED One.
