I ran into Will Page a couple of weeks ago at FutureMusicCamp. Will’s not just the chief economist of PRS (and a really nice DJ). Actually, he more or less singlehandedly convinced me, that collecting societies don’t necessarily look and act like grumpy relics from the shellac age, but that their people can vividly think outside the box.
Especially one part of his keynote got me thinking. After some extensive numbers crunching, Will declared Chris Andersons Long Tail as wishful thinking. According to his numbers, the idea of the Internet opening the floodgates for a huge diversity of content to make it on the market is just wishful thinking, a mere virtual myth.
What Will did, was analyzing We7 and Spotify in the UK - and comparing this data with a Long Tail curve. Have a look at his April interview in TechDirt. There’s a nice graph right in the middle, and some good explanation on the how’s and why’s.
Now, the interesting part is this: why differ the curves of We7 and Spotify?
… We7 has a strong editorial with excellent artist promotional campaigns, whereas Spotify is editorial free and allows the consumer to graze the field at their leisure. Consequently, you can see that We7 (blue line) is more hit centric with a 90/5 rule and Spotify (green line) is more democratic with an 80/5 rule which, when you step back, is common sense made complicated but it’s nice to see the math adds up!
Right. And this most likely explains the not so long tail of the curves. It’s mostly a matter of user interfaces. Compared to any physical store, all net-based services share one thing: the depth of their catalog. Just imagine your local music dealer (if he still exists), blown up to the size of an IKEA warehouse. Anything, which can be licensed, can be bought.
The problem is: we’re not IKEA talking here, where you stroll through nicely decorated storage areas. A typical media store on the net is more the equivalent of a 20 square meter booth. Yes, there’s this giant warehouse attached. But the shelfspace is rather limited. Look at iTunes: either you know, what you are looking for, and you directly search for it. Or you rely on the best sellers and recommendations.
To unleash the long tail, you would either need a user interface, which IKEA-like unlocks the secrets of your warehouse. Or you find an affiliation model with the original rights holders, which offers curators and resellers some bit of a better cut than relying on a retailer sharing a bit of their slice with you.
Did you know that? Almost a hundred years ago, Paul Valéry invented the remote control: Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. As a reminder for the historically challenged: back then, “tele vision” was a weirdo futurist phantasy involving a Nipkow disk, placing a phone call started with cranking a bit of electricity out of a Bakelite contraption, and any HTML would have qualified as a typo.
Of course, some things didn’t change at all. Except for the pope, even back then most western men have been wearing (mostly) trousers, cars ran (mostly) on distilled dinosaur juice, and Valéry already had described the future cable ops as utilities.
With Valéry, that’s more or less how Walter Benjamin starts his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In some parts, it got a bit dusty. The Frankfurt School has seen some better days. But in very many parts, Benjamin got hyper-accelerated:
Mechanical reproduction is so 20th century, and a bit lame.
But digital reproduction unleashes the powers Benjamin describes, just as the web brings Valéry’s science fictionesque image utility to an ultimate conclusion.
Digital is merciless in its binary absolutism:
0 vs. 1, off vs. on, dead or alive.
But other things have changed, too. Benjamin lived in the magic triangle of a world between capitalism, communism, and fascism. This world was a real mess: weirdo dictators ousting weirdo kings and dapper dukes and crazy czars out of their weirdo fiefdoms (the continental breakfast), megalomanic monopolists/monarchists squeezing out the continents (the anglos saxon model), with hyper-capitalists acting as stateless dictators and crowned heads running commercial empires.
We left at least some of that behind, and good riddance. But our globalized economy, our fully commercialized western life style comes with its own pitfalls. And, coming back to Benjamin and his theme: The most important thing which happenend to The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction is not a scratch in its aura, but the economic damage towards its creator.
You still could put your hands on Benjamin’s mechanically reproduced piece. The medium was a thingy, a tradable good. But on its way into the networked Nirvana, the work lost this handle to the commercial world. A file is a file is a file. And an unlimited supply of any good means usually bad business. Selling sand in the Sahara. Ice cubes on the north pole. You name it.
Can we change that? Sure we can. We already started to melt the poles (which, for various reasons, is not an advisable approach). We tried some crazy DRM-schemes (ankle-high dikes vs. terrible tsunami). We’re messing around with civil liberties (protecting a Lady Gaga recording’s right vs. everybody else’s rights).
Again: can we really solve that conundrum? Most likely not, if we just pretend, that everything has just to stay the same. Mind you, the medium isn’t dead. But it has lost some of its commercial magic. So if you think you might need some new fairy dust pretty soonish, please crank up your Bakelite contraption and buzz me. Otherwise, you might just have to wait a bit for ionicc’s ideas on how to hedge against billions of bad boys copying your creative goods.
What’s the point of an Android-powered TV - isn’t television supposed to be kind of dead anyway? Now, let’s be realistic. Dead looks like GM’s Hummer: a broad butted relic from those merry days, when the environment was something to train your four wheel drive in.
Sure, TV as-is gets into some rough spots: economic downturns and big corp ad spending don’t go that well together. Local TV has been an almost exclusive ad playground for local car dealers. Tivos are attacking scheduling and audience flows. But, guess what: people are still watching. Because, addictions are hard to break.
Still, we tend to mix the means of delivering content (broadcasting television) with consuming this content (watching tv). For peak audience content, broadcasting is still hard to beat (just look at the half a billion Dollars big G is supposedly shelling out for streaming YouTube’s vids). But descheduling and instant access, that’s is pretty much how consumer’s want to see their future tv. That’s why the toughest competitor to network tv is not a YouTube channel, but your home network.
I really mean it: if you’re running a tv network, treat home networks as potential affiliates in a different time zone. And that’s how we’re coming back to Android. It’s just a boring operating system, currently huffing and puffing inside some halfway decent smartphones. It’s free (hardware guys like that idea) and the potential trojan horse for one of the most aggressive data driven media companies (like phone book publishers in the 20th century) in the whole world. Which is a bad metaphor, as ye olde Greeks needed their one trick pony to resolve a 10 year long siege. But the Goog needs a whole army of tiny trojans to foster new markets to prevent itself from becoming the one trick pony riders of the contextual text ad.
Now, what’s good for Google isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. If an 800 pound gorilla waltzes through the jungle, “do no evil” does not prevent massive collateral damage. But especiallly in the realm of TV and TV distribution, some creative destruction might be welcome.
I don’t believe in Android powered TVs as a home media platform. It’s bad practice to hardwire a piece of furniture (displaying device: life expectancy of roughly a decade) with a computing platform (tends to age in hyperspeed). But if my stupid Android-enabled TV talks to my Android-powered smartphone, we might be getting somewhere. Especially, if everything’s linked in the background by one mighty media company.
For developers, the beauty of a concept like Android for TV is easy: the days of the web as the all consuming platform are numbered. We’re entering a data driven world, with lots of devices and platforms, talking to API-enabled services. Look at Twitter as a poster child. Conten/data and presentation layer are not related in any kind of way.
On the other hand, the world of tv distribution and its related hardware is still a cumbersome hodgepodge of everything. It’s the old school of electric media, when radio was a humming thingy called radio, which was sitting in your living room, which you turned on to listen to: radio. Don’t expect anyone anytime soon referring to his tv or whatever device as an Android.
We’ve seen the future of iTV. And it’s purple. Seriously. Yahoo’s Intel-based Widget Channel might become the iPhone of interactive TV. Not because both are based upon a expensive platforms. But because the Widget Channel leverages formatted internet data onto a TV screen. Web surfing on a tv set is just a poor experience. Visualizing targeted data is something completely different.
It’s just like on the iPhone. I don’t browse the NY Times web site in Safari, but I read Paul Krugman on the iPhone app. Same with the Widget Channel. Mostly, I don’t want to search weather.com. I just need my local forecast now.
Chumby hooking up with Samsung leads into the same direction. Grabbing existing data and displaying them on consumer devices (digital picture frames are just bonsai-sized video displays anyway).
This sounds smart: MySpace leverages their mass of uploaded bootlegged videos (as long as they are properties of Viacom’s MTV Networks). Every uploaded video (80 000 per day) will be run through Auditude’s “fingerprinting” system. MTV content will get some ad overlays, the 3 parties involved will share the ad revenues. The “benefit” for the 4th party, the uploading MySpacer (a.k.a. the editor) seems a bit weaker: he will not get reprimanded …
Could Google dominate the browser market? Sure. And soft drinks, too. But why should they?
Controlling the high carbohydrate industry (canned Google - hear the gulp) might have an unhealthy impact on the physical state of their programmers.
Driving Microsoft into browser oblivion would be even more counterproductive.
The G point isn’t being a software merchant but running a highly successfull ad-based services business.
Dominating the browser markt would be the trophy wife gone burden. But pushing a strictly giveaway market into a frenzy of competion leads to better browsers.
Better browsers mean richer experiences. And who knows more about richness?
German pubcasters are the BBC on steroids. Moneywise, at least. Their combined annual budget dwarfs the GNP of a couple of lesser UN-members. And even hardboiled tax collectors blush at the methods of their fee collecting agency GEZ.
Don’t get me wrong. Strong and independent public broadcasting is an important asset. As seen in the US, a beggar’s banquet of impoverished do-gooders cannot counterweight a fully commercialized brainwash attack. State controlled tv is a terrific tool for thriving populists, post-imperial imperialists, and media savy dictatorships (and definitely not an option).
Still. If you want to collect billions and billions of Euros for the greater good, a well aged argumentation line from the black and white days of the tube won’t do you any good. EU commissioners want to pull the plug (commercial broadcasters will see to that). And the German publishers are finally starting to see a problem with those hidden champion media empires. Because it’s not about here’s print, there’s tv anymore. On the web, all media cats are prey.
The last political fiddlings ended with some strange solutions like this. Yes, the pubcasters can put some their video assets onto the web. But after seven days, they have to be removed. Weird. Even weirder: there are paid deals between mega publishers and mega pubcasters on video syndication. Uhum. Excuse me. Looking at organizational structures of German pubcasters, the micro money passed from WAZ to WDR most likely won’t even cover the process cost. So it’s probably all very strategic. Or maybe just helpless. Redefining public broadcasting for a networked, digital media world it isn’t. (Because, more likely, it will look more like this.)
It’s not helping anyway. Will Münchner Erklärung, the Munich Declaration of the big wigs of German publishing, kill public broadcasting? Nope. We’re more likely talking about assisted suicide anway.
3 strikes an you are out. And out means: out of net access. Just let some lobby-infested politicos go wild in Brussles, and this is what you get.
I spare you the details, but in a nutshell, it goes like this. After having been blasted out of legislation, the lobbyists of Grand Old Media sneaked their hardliner ideas into some amendements of a telecom’s bill. To be sure, Grand Old Media has quite some problems with the not anymore so new but still very digital and increasingly networked media world.
Their solution is coming straight from the Orwellian textbook. We have to monitor everything. So that naughty consumer cannot do naughty things like copying naughty music videos. The emphasis is of course on everything. Which fuels this unholy alliance of “all consumers are thieves - if you don’t stop them”-media mavens and the “all citizens are terrorists - until proven innocent”-faction of right wing hardliners.
Yes, stealing is bad (please do remember: stealing from artists is bad, too). But the 3 strikes-law are populist rubbish. Excuse me. Are convicted shoplifters banned from shopping? Of course not.
But if somebody accuses me of infringing a copyright, I should be exiled from the net? Some Eurocrats do think so.
But so it happened: Pangloss’ take on the affair:
http://blogscript.blogspot.com/2008/07/result-of-imco-vote.html
It’s not about 3 strikes anymore. Just about xraying all digital citizens.
That’s good news, isn’ it? Even with monies evaporating all over the place, converting dead loans into dead funds, VCs are still investing in online video. NewTeeVee reports some nice numbers: “This year, 29 startups have already received funding, and the average amount is on the upswing, too, to $7.5 million.“
TechCrunch has a pretty interesting write up on this. And of course, it’s not about a settop boxes at all. Think Android For TV, says Erick Schonfeld. Right. Google getting into CE hardware would make as much sense as King Midas getting into copper mining.
Still. With an Android TV, we should finally stop thinking of settop boxes. First of all: what’s an STB anyway?
Now, let’s take a step back. There’s this wonderful new HDTV set you just bought. It probably already has more computing power than NASA needed to put a man on the moon. The descrambling part, well, think CableCard 2.1. You just need a card reader, like the SIM card on a GSM phone. There’s no need for a stupid box to be attached to a smart tv.
And of course, as the history of computing teaches us, the smart tv - if you really want it to become smart - should have something like a nice, stable standardized OS as a foundation. The basics, besides handling all the standard stuff like putting moving images on a screen, would probably be something like
Now. Forget about storage and networks. The really interesting part will be the UI. Why? Well, Google is in the ad business. And the quantum theory of adverising teaches us: an ad nobody looks at does not exist.
Now look at the status quo. In one corner, we’ve got the media sales super giant with a market cap higher than the stratosphere. In the other corner, we’ve got the incumbents: cable MSOs, satellite operators, some DSL, and last but not least: the tv networks and stations. Representing the allocation of the largest piece of global media cake. Backed up with a finely interwoven network of legalese and some well greased, age old business relationships. Don’t try to push some interstitials in between their shows. Because that’s exactly the incumbent’s billion dollar business. And a well protected turf.
So. Where’s your disruptive moment? Your leverage? It’s not that the tv ad sales business is desperately looking for some streamlining.
Now think UI again. And have a look at the Electronic Programming Guides of nowadays: thick as a brick. TV means: you’ve got time to waste, but no screen real estate to do the same. And what does your run of the mill EPG? It wastes your valuable tv-time AND your screen real estate. Instead of waiting for the scrolling listings of the TV Guide on Screen (late 20th century), now (early 21st century) you click, click, click until you might find (or, most likely, not) the craved for nugget of information. Even worse: with all the computing power in your household at its (virtual) finger tips, an EPG stills treats your grandmother with the same relentless indifference as it treats you. For an EPG, The Weather Channel (TWC) comes just after TCM, because it’s spelled like that.
Current EPGs are just plain vanilla displayed data. Not even information, because this would imply some intrinsic value. How comes? It’s a structural problem: “Premium” EPGs, which are slightly better, cost you a premium.
You meaning: the operator. And the question you’re asking yourself (or your market researchers) is: is a better EPG a reason to subscribe? Would it reduce churn? Good question. Your panel won’t be able to answer that. Because they’ve never seen a really good EPG.
Or you meaning, the manufacturer. Mostly trying to keep cost down, down, down. Because if you want to ship units, it’s a really low margin business.
Or you meaning: the consumer. Yes, friends of Tivo, if you’re really good, a company might find some handfuls of consumers, paying a monthly premium. But tv is a mass market. Paying premium is not. Therefore, Tivos are the CE equivalent of a Beemer.
Now how about this. If a well known company offers you (the manufacturer) a piece of software for free (hey, no licensing fees!), which even handles most of the basics things you’re going to have to implement anyway? Maybe you’ll have to add some dollars for hardware. But at least, that’s a business you understand. And it’s still cheaper and it even gives you some leverage with your operator clients. Because it’s not just a better device. There are even some ad revenues the well known company is offering to share with the operator. But wait, there’s more: how about if you (the operator) doesn’t just get a new, incremental business. They’re even throwing in the additional incentive of lowering your cost of operations (it has been nice working with you, Gemstar). And that’s just the beginning.
Sorry. I got carried away a bit. This wouldn’t be Android TV, but Trojan TV. And maybe, you do not even need the operator that hard. As long as you are in the tv and got a net connection. What the heck. As long as your Android powered TV set chats happily ever after with your Android powered cell phone, filling iGoogle with all the behavioral data it needs to serve you the ads you deserve.