netzooid

Found an interesting presentation on Bubblegeneration discussion property rights and innovation (via Occam’s Razor). Some thoughts:

Ultimately, the negotiation for property rights must be coordinated among a huge number of actors, each of whom adds their own negotiation and enforcement cost. …[I]nnovators are using the Net to correct the coordination failure, and effectively offer massively multilateral contracts that work.

He’s talking mostly about DRM here, but there is some mention of EULA. The thing that comes to my mind is open source. The community is massively renegotiating software contracts. And there are plenty of DRM examples – Kazaa, Hymn, etc. He class this response a “gray market.”

…And that’s the point: at the same price, any bundle of property rights and goods must provide at least as much value as the good by itself. Any less, and consumers have a disincentive to consume the property rights with the good. This is why DRM systems are doomed. From an economic point of view, DRM solutions are just massively distributed copy protection.

His premise is right, but the conclusion is wrong. The thing about DRM is that with DRM the price goes down, so even though I may not be able reburn a subscribed song from Napster/Rhapsody onto a CD, it costs me a fraction of the cost to listen to it as it would to buy it (provided I listen to enough music).

I don’t believe that DRM provides negative value as he puts it. DRM’d music provides different value – convenient access via my computer with filters/recommendation engines at a cheaper prices.

For example, innovative licenses might pay dividends, might be options with expiration dates and strike prices, might offer structured, locked-in benefits via frequent-flyer program like subsidies, or might even offer terms like in the Japanese Ring trilogy – replicate this good virally…or else.

Interesting idea that licenses could provide incentives/value to the end user if they follow the license…

Umair’s also posted some new powerpoints and they are very interesting (although there are 200+ slides between the two of them…). I particularly like the idea of coordination economies. He talks about how microeconomies can only exist if you have divisible inputs. For example, the Wikipedia has inputs from many different people.

I wonder if we will start to see new versions of old things which result from divisible inputs. What about Google News applied to television? One continuous feed of remixed news content.

I’ll definitely be reading this stuff over again tomorrow when I’m more awake.

How to explode TV news in four easy steps is an absolute must read on the future of TV for anyone in the media business (via thelongtail.com). Jeff outlines several steps to succeeding in the future:

1. Slice
2. Add
3. Link
4. Listen

All of these are absolutely critical in my opinion. I really like the idea of slicing media coming in smaller chunks. It allows many more possiblities in addition to the increase in viewership Jeff mentions.

In the following post on Dan Rather he says:

…trust is still important. In fact, in this new, distributed world of ours, it is even more important. Trust is our organizing principle. Trust is what makes weblogs, Technorati, eBay, Craigs List, RSS, chat, and email work: We pay attention to those we trust; we filter out the rest. We each decide whom to trust; it’s no longer decided for all of us.

Again, I think he is dead on. But, I would like to highlight that I think this is a naive sense of trust. We listen to people because they confirm our views and hence “trust” them.

Jeff Bezos says in a Wired interview:

“About three years ago we stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising in two markets – Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis – to see how much it drove our sales. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers. So we put all that money into lower product prices and free shipping. That has significantly accelerated the growth of our business….more and more money will go into making a great customer experience, and less will go into shouting about the service. Word of mouth is becoming more powerful. If you offer a great service, people find out. ”

He’s talking about why Amazon would be a good fit for the video rental business. Now, I would just like point out some numbers which show how dead on Bezos is: Netflix, spent 16% of their net sales on marketing in the 3rd quarter of 2004. Amazon spent 2.3%.

What I want to know is what effect blogs have on a retailer like Amazon. How much does the linking drive up their sales?

I think news on the content distribution is happening faster than I can read it some days. Today, MSN lauches their video downloads service. They have partnerships with NBC, Fox, IFILM, MTF, Food Network and more. Cost: $19.95/mo. Not bad compared to cable.

Whats more is that for us Pocket PC users we’ll be able to download it right to our device. AND, if you have a smart phone or pocket pc phone you’ll be able to get content on it wirelessly. While I don’t watch TV other than the occassional Futurama rerun, this still seems pretty cool.

(via paidcontent.org)

Tivo released their TivoToGo service today. In summary, it allows you to watch shows from your (Windows) computer and burn them to DVDs.

This is very disappointing IMO. One, because you can’t stream it to other devices. Second, and more importantly, I think it’d be much better if instead they allowed you to download additional content over the web. Just like DVDs have extra features, so could TV shows. Or people could pull up information on the fly about actors by tying into IMDB. Or they could distribute original content and build their own branded channel of content. Or they could partner with one of the online movie rental providers. Or…. well, there are a lot of possibilities.

I was pointed to Yahoo’s video search engine today via Micropersuasion. At first, I was like – great, another media search engine. Then, I noticed Media RSS:

An RSS module that supplements the element capabilities of RSS 2.0 to allow for more robust media syndication.

It adds the ability to specify bitrates, thumbnails, duration, categories, transcripts, and more. I think this is really great. First, it enables a richer description of the content – making it more friendly to the end user. Second, its refreshing to see search engines using XML metadata to make search better. I’ve always wondered why search engines don’t work more on creating standard xml metadata for web content. For instance, Google doesn’t appear to be taking particular advantage of RSS/Atom. Hooray for moving forward!

I’ve been made aware of the recent appearance of rss enclosure aware (read: can find video, audio, etc) search engines from the recent Wired article Video Feeds Follow Podcasting. Currently we’ve got feedster.tv and Blogdigger.

I went to their sites and was presented with a search box. I am stuck on what I would want to search for. Searching the web is straightforward – I’m trying to find out about some particular topic. Will people do the same with video? Will I search Feedster or Blogdigger to find out about George Washington in video form?

I am suspecting not. Video is a medium which passively engages people. Whereas people are actively searching for particular things on the web, videos are usually brought to our attention through someone else. RSS/Atom seem to be the web version of video bring us content passively. This seems to work with all forms of content as well – web, audio, video, etc.

However, once you start processing video or audio content, things change. While it is passive (this does not mean non-participatory) it is time consuming. Audio/Video is being funnelled into you and thats about all you can handle. For example, I can’t listen to the latest trade secrets and browse the web (at least I’m not that good at multitasking). The other big difference is that I can’t skim video/audio content. I find this extremely frustrating as I skim just about everything to read.

All this to say that I think search engines are great when you’re actively engaging yourself in the web, looking for a particular bit of information. However, I don’t think that that works for video. Can someone show me otherwise? But maybe this depends on what type of content we are going to see. Maybe there will be micro-documentaries of George Washington that I could run across, who knows.

It was only recently that I really started to think about media and the semantic web. Altavista, Google, Yahoo and others have been doing media search for a long long time. HTML and images can be found and thats about it. Yet, we long for a bit more. Podcasting has enabled many people to start distributing content in a meaninful way. Instead of being tied to computers we listen on demand on our iPods.

Now, technology piece #2 – BlogTorrent. Through the use of bittorrent bandwidth concerns are seriously addressed. While there may not be a huge benefit there is just one person downloading from your site, once 100s of people start coming things will be a different story.

Yet customers need to get to this content. GoFish has opened my eyes to what a media search engine could look like and how online sales could be distributed. You can search for movies, ring tones, or music and they will connect you to various providers.

Will this catch on though? Their approach falls short though in several areas. How do customers become aware of the content? A search engine seems for content to be a losing proposition if you are a content maker since if no one knows about you they can’t search for you. This brings us back to RSS and bloggers. People will find media through the blogosphere network. If GoFish could integrate reviews from blogs, a recommendation engine, and a referral system there would be a much greater incentive for everyone to use GoFish Time Oren is spot on when he says:

They are the two faces of the long tail phenomenon: Low entry barriers enable the creation of diverse content by diverse people, precision in access lets readers find matches to their tastes without unendurable overhead.

The other question is how do the content makers make money? There are some people who are debating how to make money from blogs. However, media is a different ballgame altogether.

There is the often-discussed but never quite working micro-payment system. Is this profitable? Say I produce a short film for $20,000. At $0.50 I need 40,000 people to watch to recover my costs. Besides the complete lack of recognized infrastructure, the micropayment system falls short. It totally misses markets such as DVD sales or promomtional items. I suppose these could also be bought through the blog somehow?. Or maybe there is someone out there who can aggregate these concerns in such a way that makes it painless for people to create content?