AOL is slated to announce that it has joined with Warner Brothers (both are owned by Time Warner) to offer TV reruns on a new service called In2TV, according to this article by the Washington Post. The service is slated to offer 100 shows including oldies no longer in wide circulation such as “Chico and the Man” and “Welcome Back Kotter.”
The shows will become available on AOL.com starting in January and the online giant hopes to generate ad revenue from the shows. AOL, like Yahoo and Google, is increasingly turning to video for its eyeball-attracting content, and entertainment programs traditionally aired on TV are inching their way online by virtue of these giants’ influence. It’s not likely that Chico and the Man alone, or even AOL alone, will break any business models, but boy oh boy, a lot of television is turning up online.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:41 PM | Print | Comments (0)
In my last post I expressed hope that more broadband pipes might be built to lessen the economic friction caused by a duopoly market structure. Here’s one new approach recently added to the list of possibilities: Broadband-in-Gas (no potty jokes, please). Marguerite Reardon reports at News.com:
It may sound nuts today, but a San Diego company called Nethercomm is developing a way to use ultra wideband wireless signals to transmit data at broadband speeds through natural-gas pipes. The company claims its technology will be able to offer 100 megabits per second to every home, which is more than enough to provide voice, video and high-speed Internet access.
Nethercomm’s web site has more information, including a 51-page “proof of principal” paper.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 8:01 PM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times’ Richard Siklos raises some interesting questions about where the content distribution industry is headed. After citing the unexpected success of ring tones and DVD compilations of TV shows, and the more recent success of Apple’s sales of iPod videos at $1.99 apiece, Siklos says:
TWO lessons are apparent in all these attempts to revamp media business models. One is that the limits of what people will pay for personalization - getting what they want, when they want it - have yet to be tested. The other is that consumers are not nearly as pragmatic as they may imagine themselves.
I agree with Siklos on his first point, but think he overstates the future significance of his second. To support it, he cites the fact that Blockbuster made a lot of money from late fees paid by people who didn’t return their videos on time. But what seems more significant today about the Blockbuster example is that competition from the likes of Internet-enabled Netflix have forced Blockbuster to drop its late fees.
The broader point is that new technologies, especially those linked to the Internet, are providing users with increasingly convenient control over their media use, even as our lives get busier. Yes, there are bumps in the road (e.g., more hardware and software learning curves than I’d prefer), but it seems increasingly unlikely that any player in the media distribution business will in the future be able to maintain fat margins from longstanding user inconvenience the way Blockbuster was able to do for years with its late fees.
Siklos’ piece—which also considered the viability of services such as those envisioned by the CBS/Comcast and NBC/DirecTV deals—got me thinking about another aspect of the media industry’s accelerating evolution.
As I considered the various examples he cited, I was struck by the potential value of media distribution platforms that provide both producers and consumers with user-friendly flexibility in terms of packaging, pricing, revenue models (e.g., advertising vs. user-fees) and distribution models (e.g., streaming or download, syndication). One example that comes to mind is the platform being developed by BrightCove, the producer-end of which company founder Jeremy Allaire demonstrated to Cynthia and me last month.
The more flexible and frictionless are the transactions between producers and consumers, the more control both will have in terms of maximizing the value they extract from these transactions, which I guess is what free markets are supposed to be about.
The role of pipe owners in the equation is less clear, and seems largely dependent on how much gatekeeper control they are able to retain. This, in turn, is largely a function of whether additional pipes can be built and cost-justified, and the laws and regulation that emerge from Congress and the FCC.
While duopoly markets tend not to be especially frictionless, a strong argument can be made that politicians and regulators are more likely to add rather than subtract friction from the markets they try to regulate.
And while some believe the prospect of more facilities-based competition is either a techie pipe-dream or a political smokescreen, there are signs that Earthlink, Google and others disagree. And while building and financing access networks is a lot different than designing search and advertising algorithms, the prospects of Google—which seems hell-bent on disrupting friction-filled media models—or other entities finding ways to deploy more pipes does not seem out of the question.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:02 PM | Print | Comments (0)
According to a new ITU study (via the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newsblog), the U.S. ranks 5th in terms of the percentage of the population using 3G technologies, although it ranks number one in terms of absolute number of 3G users.
Approximately 16.7% of U.S. inhabitants use 3G technologies, compared to 57.4% of residents in the Republic of Korea, the perennial high technology top dog. Also ranked ahead of the U.S. is Israel (27.8%), Canada (23.3%) and Japan (20.1%).
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing has an amusing item about how Fox is recommending that its viewers get taped copies of programs from their friends. A section on the company’s website states, in Q and A format, that Fox doesn’t make individual programs available on CD or other portable viewing medium, but suggests that viewers obtain copies of programs from friends, co-workers or family members who have have taped the original programs.
It sounds like Fox is all in favor of P2P, so long as real human peers, in person, and not technological platforms, are the intermediaries.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:18 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A story in today’s Washington Post by David Vise serves as a nice companion piece to the Business 2.0 article on Yahoo cited in my previous post.
The soul of the Google machine is a passion for disruptive innovation…[Its] friendly features belie Google’s disdain for the status quo and its voracious appetite for aggressively pursuing initiatives to bring about radical change. Google is testing the boundaries in so many ways, and so purposefully, it’s likely to wind up at the center of a variety of legal battles with landmark significance.
Consider the wide-ranging implications of the activities now underway at the Googleplex…Google is compiling a genetic and biological database using the vast power of its search engines; scanning millions of books without traditional regard for copyright laws; tracing online searches to individual Internet users and storing them indefinitely; demanding cell phone numbers in exchange for free e-mail accounts (known as Gmail) as it begins to build the first global cell phone directory; saving Gmails forever on its own servers, making them a tempting target for law enforcement abuse; inserting ads for the first time in e-mails; making hundreds of thousands of cheap personal computers to serve as cogs in powerful global networks…”They run the largest computer system in the world,” said John Hennessy, a member of Google’s board of directors, a computer scientist and president of Stanford University. “I don’t think there is even anything close.”
With [Sergey] Brin and [Larry] Page setting the tone, Google’s distinctive DNA makes it an employer of choice for the world’s smartest technologists because they feel empowered to change the world. And despite its growing head count of more than 4,000 employees worldwide, Google maintains the pace of innovation in ways contrary to other corporations by continuing to work in small teams of three to five, no matter how big the undertaking.
And, speaking of DNA:
The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google’s immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world’s information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as “Googling Your Genes.”
As Vise notes, Google’s grand ambitions and relentless challenges to the status quo raise the question of whether hubris and overreaching will eventually cause it serious problems:
Supremely confident, the biggest risk that Brin, Page and Google face is that they will be unable to avoid the arrogance that typically accompanies extraordinary success. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos jokes that Brin and Page are so sure of themselves, they wouldn’t hesitate to argue with a divine presence.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:09 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Business 2.0 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld has written a long article entitled “The Flickrization of Yahoo.” The thrust of the piece is that Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr has “helped ignite a larger strategy” in which “Yahoo is starting to see how user-generated content, or “social media,” is a key weapon in its war against Google.”
It’s a strategy that comes right from the top. Social media “is going to be a gigantic piece of what we do,” says Yahoo CEO Terry Semel…”Yahoo has done the best job of the large guys of getting the concept,” says tech guru Esther Dyson, who was an early investor in Flickr.
Semel may get it, but if you want to see this revolution in action, you have to talk to the young guns he’s been hiring. Many of the champions of social media inside Yahoo — including Flickr’s [Stewart] Butterfield and [Caterina] Fake, senior technologist Bradley Horowitz, and the head of Yahoo’s developer network, Toni Schneider — are former startup founders recently acquired or hired. These entrepreneurs are sprinkling their social-media DNA all over the company, in a process some insiders are calling the “Flickrization” of Yahoo.
The Flickrizers’ most ambitious goal is to turn Web searching itself into a social event — the idea being that you can find what you’re looking for faster if you first see pages saved and tagged by people you know and trust. Done well, it could play as the triumph of the humans over Google’s cold mechanical approach.
If social search pans out, it could give Yahoo a much-needed edge over Google…”It is not who has the bigger index,” Horowitz says, taking a swipe at his rival. “We hear a lot about efforts to index all the artifacts of human knowledge, but the actual bulk of human knowledge lives in people’s heads.”
But the jury is still out on Yahoo’s plan to create “better search through people”, says Schonfeld:
In practice, however, tagging search results and bookmarks may still be too geeky an activity for Yahoo’s average Joe. Thus far, [Yahoo’s] My Web has seen tepid growth in the number of pages saved (about 300,000) and tags applied (fewer than 90,000). That might not seem bad for a product still in beta, but My Web is seeing little month-to-month growth. (Del.icio.us, by contrast, has 10 million saved pages and half a million tags.)
Social search requires people to change their habits, and My Web works well only if you and a bunch of your friends use Yahoo…Perhaps the largest pothole in Yahoo’s road to social media, however, is its business model. Users are encouraged to stay within the Yahoo network of pages as much as possible so they can be served more ads and sold more services…But the tricky thing about the culture of participation is that users want to choose how they participate. For example, many bloggers are setting up feeds that put Flickr photos directly on their blogs, meaning that Yahoo doesn’t get any pageviews — or ad revenues — from them. “I still think Yahoo has a heritage to overcome,” says tech book publisher and pundit Tim O’Reilly, referring to the decade-old habit of directing traffic to its site.
Schneider, the vice president in charge of Yahoo’s developer network, is trying to change that…[H]e’s encouraging programmers to create applications based on Yahoo content that will not necessarily be hosted on Yahoo. He’s doing this by opening up the company’s APIs, or application programming interfaces…And he has high hopes for a new business model based on the Yahoo Publisher Network, launched in beta last summer. YPN, as it’s known, serves up ads to small websites and blogs and pays them every time someone clicks on an ad, in much the same way Google’s AdSense does. The difference is that YPN lets websites tag themselves, Flickr-style, so as to get more relevant ads in return.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:47 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
