This Blog Has Moved!

Come visit at http://www.smallscreens.org/

I cannot imagine this one beng updated too often from now.

Yo Ho Ho and Some Copyright Content

Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television group had this to say in an analyst call: "So we understand piracy now as a business model. It exists to serve a need in the marketplace specifically for consumers who want TV content on demand and competes for consumers the same way we do."

Combine this with YouTube's recent copyright arrangement with studios and record labels, announced the day before news of its sale to Google and you could almost say that my Golden Age of Content is at hand.

Since its beginning on the high seas, piracy has always driven innovation in every industry it affected. Ships became faster, sea lanes became safer, international maritime communications improved... You get the idea. Piracy trims fat. It serves to highlight which aspects of an industry need to be tightened -to the industry's ultimate improvement.

Pirate content really only comes to be considered 'pirated' when its original publisher is prevented from monetizing it. Almost all content producers offer at least some of their wares free of charge -it's good for brand image and it's good when profiling something new. The goal, then, for de-pirating pirate content is to provide an avenue for the products to be monetized. Witness the deal CBS has with YouTube: They will use the site's 'copyright identification' system to locate any pirated CBS content -but they won't necessarily have to pull it down. They have the option to leave it where it is and monetize it with contextual advertising. Brilliant!

Rather than fighting a losing battle with a component of the content industry that is always going to exist the big players have stepped up and acknowledged that they were under-delivering to a growing market: consumers -who were clearly fans of their product if they went online to look for it- who want content on demand. Analysts are almost universal in their belief that this is in fact the future of the television/online video industry and it is encouraging to see the Old World media companies starting to adapt their traditional business practices to suit new user behaviours rather than trying to bend, warp or threaten these new markets out of existence.

I don't think anyone has accurately estimated just how much advertising money is at the end of this rainbow. Viral video ads will ultimately provide the most-detailed, most-accurate platform for behavioural and contextual advertising. Imagine your client's TVC appearing in almost every relevant inbox across the First World with comments from trusted members of that demographic saying how great this video is? And it's content that consumers actually want. There are good times ahead.

So the next time you are walking down the street and you see a pirate -be nice. You will soon have a lot to thank him for. Maybe think about offering the parrot a cracker.

The Tip of Google's Iceberg?

A Belgian court has ordered Google to stop publishing news content. Being that I work for the largest online news publisher in New Zealand, the topic of news aggregators frequently comes up at Friday drinks.

Google is our largest referrer so most of the people I work with have no problems with it. They see this notion of copyright and the grumplings from The World Association of Newspapers as nothing short of luddite. After all, people click on the content they are interested in and are transported right to the story page of the particular publisher.

However I still think Google has a case to answer. Few people seem to be looking at the long term ramifications. Yes, publishers get a great deal of traffic from Google and Google News but I think this has the potential to erode the value of a publisher's masthead.

Seen from a marketing standpoint, users will ultimately come to associate Google News with the source of the 'best' most 'up to date' and 'relevant' news content for them. This is exactly the brand position online news publishers are scrambling to grab hold of. Google links straight to the story page -ignoring the publisher's home page. This is the crux of the Belgian case against them. Essentially Google is offering up copyrighted content under its own 'masthead'. Users will go to Google to get New Zealand Herald news rather than the New Zealand Herald itself.

While I may not agree with the position taken by the Belgian publishers, I am endlessly fascinated by the implications. I would bet money that there will be several large class actions taken against the search company in the next couple of years -especially once online publishers can prove they are losing money while Google makes it.

Google should perhaps be quite concerned by this. Newspaper companies will still have a paper to put out tomorrow. Where will Google be if it has to pay to aggregate content?

Peter Jackson Chooses Napoleon Over Bilbo

Secrets are very difficult to keep in New Zealand. After months of denying it, Peter Jackson announced that his company would indeed be re-making The Dam Busters. This was quite obvious to most of us. I was in Wellington for work a few weeks ago and we drove past his converted paint factory/academy award winning production studios and there was a large airplane propellor rotating in front of a green screen in the parking lot. I certainly don't remember that chapter in The Lovely Bones.

However, he's not going to be remaking it himself. It will be directed by one of his long-haired geekwizards from Weta; Christian Rivers. I mention this because it was announced yesterday that MGM wants Peter Jackson to direct The Hobbit. Well, who doesn't?

Now we find out that the big man himself has optioned a story about a British naval officer who trains dragons to fight Napoleon. This would be what they meant when his people said he "had a full slate."

At the moment that means he has Halo, The Dam Busters, The Lovely Bones and now the Temeraire series in various stages of development, preproduction and production. Hooray for a kiwi filmmaker's success and hooray for the New Zealand Film Industry. But I have a small concern:

The Hobbit sucks.

It's basically just a gastronomic tour of Middle Earth with too much alliteration. If someone other than Peter Jackson directs it then it will likely be appallingly lame and run the risk of tainting his flawless Lord of The Rings trilogy. He somehow managed to make the absurd parts of the LOTR novels seem dramatic and realistic. Or he cut them. (Tom Bombadil.) Someone with those skills is even more important for a film adaptation of Tolkien's first Baggins story.

We've seen that he has the ability to delegate. He's EPing for Halo, he's roped a nerd into directing The Dam Busters... Delegate some more, PJ. Delegate and come back to Middle Earth. Its fate is in your hands.

Short Form Advertainment: Bugs Bunny Style

Warner Bros is creating a short-form digital advertainment company called 'Studio 2.0'. And it looks like they are going to do it right. According to Ad Age, they have hired Rich Rosenthal from Young & Rubicon to helm it.

There has been a lot of talk around the marketing water coolers about the imminent arrival of integrated content -indeed this word gets bandied about so much it's starting to lose all meaning. What is surprising about this announcement is not that it happened but that it was a Hollywood studio that did it.

It seems so rare these days in Valenti's Hollywood for a studio to have a healthy grasp of the way the industry is moving. But here's what Warner Bros Television president Bruce Rosenblum said about it: "Since advertisers were intimately involved in the first days of television, it makes sense for them to be involved in this arena, too."

Nice. Couldn't agree more. First Tom Cruise gets dumped and now this. My Golden Age is getting closer and closer.

Free online music? iTunes shouldn't be worried

An ad-supported free music site, Spiralfrog is due to launch in September. At the moment it will only offer Universal's catalogue but apparently they are in talks with other major record companies.

The idea is that you are supposed to navigate through ninety seconds worth of ad-supported content for every song that you wish to download. Oh yeah, and the downloads won't work on your iPod and you can't play them through iTunes. There are two things that I find very disturbing about this. First the term: "navigate through content". Ninety seconds does not sound like a long time but:

a) This is subject to change and publishers will always seek to cram as much advertising as possible in front of their audience.

b) It's apparently ninety seconds per song.

If we look at the brightside we can see that this is technically a good development. It shows that the music industry is at least willing to look at options other than taking college boys to court in an effort to combat content pirates. However this current model likely has too many flaws to become a real contender. Why would I force myself to sit through a whole lot of advertising to get a song that I can't even play on an iPod? I can get the song I want, in the format I want for less than a buck.

Spiralfrog aren't the only ones getting into the game, either. AOL has relaunched its subscription music service as part of its massive repurposing effort (that makes gender reassignment look like clipping your toenails) towards becoming an online content provider. They are offering unlimited downloads for $10 or $15 a month. And you can play the files on your portable media player. This is much more like it.

Of course, it does rely on the media consumer's sense of propriety not to share the legally downloaded files once they have paid their subscriptions and got the content they were after. Clearly that's not going to be the case for every subscriber. But this is still a serviceable business model. As a general rule, people don't mind paying for things they want. Getting something for free doesn't mean I'm saving anything. Why would I want a music track that I can't play on my portable media player?

If a homeless man throws up in a paper bag and hands it to me saying "It's free and it's kinda food" I'm still not going to take it. (Probably.) The same is the case here.

Methinks the ultimate solution will end up being somewhere in the middle: readily available, ad-supported content that is actually usable and free to download -or ad-free content that I can either pay for by subscription or per download.

The first site to get this business model to work is the one that can start to take on iTunes.

Snakes on a Plane: What were they expecting, exactly?

According to USA Today, executives at New Line are scratching their heads over the comparatively little opening weekend take for Snakes on a Plane.

Exactly what were they expecting? The title is easily one of the top two best in the history of American cinema, but only people like me -people who use phrases like "history of American cinema"- are going to get it on that level. For your average moviegoer, if indeed such an animal still exists, it's going to have less appeal.

Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo is quoted in the article as saying that studios have bloated expectations of online fans. This is an understatement. As one of these online fans I actually feel vaguely insulted that they expected some kind of queue-around-the-block Star Wars cash cow that would single-handedly reverse Hollywood's downturn. They have completely missed the point of internet communities as niche audiences who -and this cannot be stressed enough- want a niche/community feel to their media or any other products they buy into. The Snakes fans feel a sense of ownership over the product... They didn't help out New Line to make them rich. It was co-creation.

Dustin Rowles is also quoted in the article. He says the best thing they (New Line) can do is to wait for DVD and make their money there. Agreed. If the fans feel a sense of ownership they will likely want to own the film. I know I will.

The fans aren't wrong. The film isn't wrong. The business model is wrong. Don't hate the player, as they say.

MySpace: The Magazine

Life's funny. I had a long drunken discussion with a visiting friend about the benefits of MySpace and the awesome leveraging power Old Man Murdoch bought when he purchased MySpace. Then I get into work and check my Mediaposts like I do every morning and low and behold: There's talk of publishing a MySpace magazine.

This is a brilliant idea. The executive quoted in the article is understandably concerned about "damaging the MySpace brand." I don't think this should be too much of a concern. Here's why: The two little words "My" and "Space" provoke hysterical reactions from parents already concerned about sexual predators. And art/design type also tend to shudder when they hear those words. Let's face it. The site is hideous -garish wallpaper, unbidden music auto-starting, poor spelling, text talk...

It's almost like Fox in a way: Massive, crude, either loved or hated and entirely unstoppable.

Of course, if they are concerned about protecting the MySpace brand there's always something else they could try: How about publishing a magazine that isn't crap? That could work.

A New Future For TV Pilots

Andrew Wallenstein writes in the Hollywood Reporter that another pilot has been illegally released over the internet. "The Adventures of Big Handsome Guy and His Little Friend" appeared on several viral video sites. At Break.com alone, it was streamed more than 250 000 times. Fox has written numerous cease and desist letters and the offending content will no doubt vanish from the web.

That's fine. Intellectual Property is all well and good but has it occurred to anyone that they are completely missing the point? Why isn't every pilot released over the internet? Viral marketing will see that the good ones get more views -meaning that the show stands a better chance of doing well- and the bad ones won't waste anymore of the network's money. For the life of me I cannot see why this doesn't become industry practice.

And it's not all bad for the creators of "Handsome". While they might have missed a spot on Fox's fall schedule the creators have apparently been asked to supply another script. Fox has extended its option to December. Good luck guys. This particular network isn't exactly known for wise choices when it comes to picking up new shows or continuing with good ones.

New York Observer Sold

I'm 25. Here are things I do:

1) Drink heavily
2) Complain about how poorly written some TV shows are
3) Work my 9-5 (7:30-7:30 actually) job

At no stage this year was buying the New York Observer on my list of things to do. But it was for Jared Kushner -also 25.

Tragically only last night I was listing off my accomplishments over the last couple of years (since moving to New Zealand) and was feeling a little bit proud of myself -not in a bad way or anything. Sadly becoming publisher of a celebrated and well-respected New York paper didn't find its way onto that list.

In my defence, Jared bought the paper for around US $10 million and I don't have that kind of money. I'm just going to say that I was looking for a publication at around the five mil mark and leave it at that. Maybe Jared can spot me the money.

Docking The Long Tail

In my opinion, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail was dealt the best body-blow I have yet to see in Lee Gomes's Wall Street Journal column. Running a close second was the success of Pirates of The Carribean II's opening weekend.

The debate over The Long Tail is heating up but it looks to me that Chris is going to have to publish some kind of errata saying that it was perhaps an overstated theory.

Note that the notion that almost all kinds of content will find an appropriate audience works in theory but in my opinion I don't think this sounds the death knell for top 20 singles or blockbuster movies. I think -and labour the point endlessly- that the function of the long tail is a sorting mechanism: niche content that is actually good will move beyond a niche audience. Hence: Golden Age of Content.

My sincere hope is that the long tail will sound the death nell for crap blockbusters -not all blockbusters. See below for evidence of this.

Wondering what the hell The Long Tail is? Check out this short film for an intro. very clever.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: The Golden Age is Coming

Being right is great. One of the earlier signs of my Golden Age of Content is repurposing tv content for the web. In essence, this is what networks have been doing with Desperate Housewives and other shows available via iTunes -making us pay for reruns. But we read today that Fox has sold syndication rights for Arrested Development to MSN. There are two reasons I am incredibly happy about this.

Reason the first: it's good content -in fact it's my favourite show by a mile. Reasons the second: It will be ad-supported/free. Here's hoping the show gets a second chance at popularity (a la Family Guy on DVD) because this will greatly increase the chances that it can come back.

Microsoft declared a few months ago that it was getting back into the content creation game. Maybe we could see Arrested Development as a web series? I'd settle for that.

Now if somebody would just buy Firefly and get that running again...

Click Fraud Update

Wow. This could be interesting if it turns out to be the case. A startling 16% of marketers are completely stopping paid search spends because of click fraud. One wonders where this sizeable chunk of online revenue is going.

Heading back to traditional media? Unlikely. TV Upfront was down and the general consensus is that that extra money is moving to other forms of media.

Gosh, I wish people would ask those marketers that are cutting their paid search where the money is going.

In This Year's Stocking: Microsoft's wireless media player

It appears Microsoft's long-rumoured media player will be available before Christmas. This could be a welcome addition to my Golden Age of Content -assuming it is done right. According to paidcontent.org, This player will allow users to download content over the air.

While this in itself is a cause for excitement, think of where this can lead. Imagine automatically receiving audio histories as you walk into a city's old quarter, or regularly updated traffic tips, or user-specific music as you go shopping (no more Bing at Christmas time!).

Time to start drafting that letter to Santa.

Click Frauds Costs USD$800 million. That's an expensive transit lounge.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article claiming that Click Fraud cost advertisers $800 million last year. Advertisers are claiming that 14.6 per cent of clicks are fraudulent and yet only 7 per cent requested a refund.

It's an interesting situation because pay-per-click looks like a great advertising model at first glance. Only it's half way there yet. The solution is not going to come from chasing fraudsters because there is no feasible way to do this effectively. The solution is going to come from monetizing the click further along the line -such as when someone actually purchases or downloads something from a client's site. This is known as CPA or Cost Per Action.

Of course, CPA is still in its infancy as far as a universal business model is concerned -in fact, odds are there won't be a universal business model for CPA. It will be up to the advertiser and the provider to work something out that is mutually beneficial and will vary from campaign to campaign.

What do we do in the meantime? Do we abandon Pay Per Click? Well, no. But we can move our money around online. According to the above article, 37% of advertisers are planning to reduce their click spend in the near future. Here's hoping they put that into some adventurous online branding: podcasts, viral video, etc. We are right up on the edge of a complete shift in how we market in an online space. All it takes is a few brave brands to beat the path.

MySpace Goes Mobile

Ooooh. This is clever and a little surprising. MySpace is rolling out a mobile service. I honestly didn't expect them to take this step before trying to properly monetize the site via advertising, etc.

But hey, shows what I know. I'm impressed. There's nothing like teenage use of cellphones to quickly fill your coffers.

We all spend so much time complaining about Newscorp fixing elections and denying human rights abuses in China and Tibet that we can sometimes forget that occasionally they do things very right.

The Napster Effect: YouTube's Last Days

Yes, YouTube has taken far too long to establish a viable business model, which is strange because the only model that they could ever make money with is a display ad-supported one. And yet people are already declaring the website terminal.

Admittedly, YouTube is facing a similar challenge that Napster faced in the late nineties, but it has a whole lot more going for it. Healther user interaction, more people, viral popularity and the potential to sell highly targeted demographics to advertisers. To say nothing of the exponential increase in broadband take up and the rampant popularity of user generated video.

The reason so few people believe advertising will work for the site is the unfiltered nature of the content. There is violent video, copyrighted content, nudity... the list goes on. However, this 'wild west' content is exactly what saw YouTube snatch around forty per cent of all video traffic. If you try to filter it in some way, the users will head straight for whatever video start-up site emerges to fill its place.

The same thing will happen if YouTube attempts to pre-roll its video. Users will leave and advertisers will start making more and more filtering demands. However, I don't see how having a small banner advertisement running underneath an emailed video posing the same problem -in fact, this is probably where YouTube's advertising power will come from. Only the funniest and most engaging advertisements are emailed and if you think logically about it: Emailed videos filter themselves. I tend to only email videos to and from my work address -to my friends work addresses. It is highly unlikely I am going to send them criminal video.

Having done a lot of research on In-Game advertising, it appears that users do not actually negatively associate a branded message with whatever violent or otherwise unseemly content they are interacting with. This makes sense when you think about it: It's not Nike's fault that I decided to shoot up a strip mall in GTA. I am willing to bet that these findings will easily transfer to YouTube. It isn't Dell's fault that I am trawling YouTube looking for video of car crashes.

I have said this before but all we need are some brave brands and some clever marketers willing to reach out to this truly huge and potentially lucrative demographic.

Make no mistake, YouTube's imminent move to monetize its success will be controversial and certainly won't please everybody. They may take a hit in their visitor numbers in the short term, but if it is managed properly this will be temporary.

Don't write them off yet. Unlike Napster, they have been compliant in handling copyright infringement and they haven't sold out at the first sniff of success. The cynic in me says this is all a moot point because someone in Big Media will ultimately by them for an absurd sum.

The Day is now.

I have mentioned often that every pre-internet medium still exists in the marketplace today. The internet has not killed newspapers, it has not killed radio and it has not killed television.

But it might be about to kick it in the groin. According to AdAge, TV Upfront could lose $600 million this year, mostly to online. And print revenue has been in steady decline for years. Online, however, is skyrocketing. In New Zealand, the online ad spend is up more than 200% Year on Year at the moment.

According to Claire Atkinson, some clients are entirely opting out of upfront spends. Big clients like Johnson and Johnson. They are taking their chances with scatter. For what it is worth, I think this is a very clever move. Having spent several years on the media selling side of things, when clients opt out of your premium products in favour of running the risk of poor placement, you tend to entice them back by placing their advertisements in the good spots anyway -especially if you have holes to fill. Hats off to J&J. Spend the extra money doing exciting things online.

Again, it is important to remember that no pre-internet mediums have died yet. In fact, the only medium that looks to disappear in the short term is the internet itself. Within ten years time it won't technically exist as a separate category in everybody's head. It will be a utility that is pumped into your house like power or water. You'll get your TV through it, you'll get your radio through it, your movies, your phones, your shopping, your print subscription renewals, your mail and so on. Makes you wonder what 'online advertising' will become then. Will it all just be 'advertising'?

Let The Games Begin! After a word from these sponsors...

RealArcade is pre-rolling streaming video advertisements as their games are being downloaded. Yep. This feels good. After being harmlessly misquoted in AdNews beside other commentators who clearly haven't grasped the potential of In-Game or Game-Related advertising, this is a happy day.

Why? RealArcade offers what are known as 'casual games'. Think backgammon. This may surprise you but the majority of people who play these games are women over thirty. That means disposable income, early adopters, internet savvy, higher than normal leisure time (they're playing games online for god's sake). What a fantastic demographic!

And it is only stage one. I am happy because RealArcade will be able to show advertisers demonstrable ROI. The success of advertising with casual games will hopefully be held up to the naysayers as proof that In-Game is not only a viable new marketing space, it is an effective one. It's all about the small steps.

Banning MP3 Players?

According to Deloitte, media companies should consider banning MP3 players from workplaces with sensitive digital content because the risk of illegal copying and file sharing is too great.

The Financial Times wrote that more than half of all media companies were the victims of computer crime in the last year. Oh, really? Because to me that seems like pretty good odds. Here's a newsflash: every company in the world that has at least one computer was likely the victim of computer crime last year. It would seem probable that media companies would be among the better prepared and thusly suffer less crime.

Of course, banning iPods and memory sticks from the workplace is a woefully ineffective solution. My cellphone -which I use at work- has storage capacity and is infrared as well as bluetooth enabled. In the coming years there will be few technological devices that won't be able to share files simply by being near each other (or even in the next building).

And even if I had left my cellphone at home, I can post the sensitive content to a free website from my workstation -unless of course media companies start restricting internet access as well.

Perhaps the most annoying part of this is the vague scent of hypocrisy. Here we are on the eve of Steve Jobs doing a massive deal with Hollywood to make feature films available on iTunes so they can be watched on iPods and there is the possibility these lucrative little devices will be banned from the workplaces that are making money off their very existence.

Banning storage devices to prevent content theft will never work. It really only leaves you with one other -equally draconian- measure. Random employee cellphone/iPod searches.

There is going to be some icky times in the lead up to my golden age.