It's a weird time to be a Mac user. With all the buzz about iPod video, you almost forget that Mac's are a tiny minority of the computer world. Then there's moments like this -


Makes sense, of course. Why would Microsoft DRM support a Mac application. But it reminds me of just why it is so ESSENTIAL that there be a DRM solution that isn't tied to an operating system. Hey, Microsoft didn't have a problem writing code for a Windows Media Player for mac... so they're more than happy to build tools that grow the WM reach onto all platforms. But that means they need to provide all the tools (DRM) not just some of them.

And for MTV to embrace the Microsoft DRM knowing that the mac community, though a minority, is among the most prolific and creative. So this means a kid with Motion, or Final Cut, can't play with Overdrive? Drag.

From Om Malik

Leichtman Research Group says that there are 40.2 million broadband connections in the US, and nearly 94% of those connections are being sold by the twenty largest cable and DSL providers. The total net adds for the 3Q 2005 were 2.6 million, with over half of that total going to DSL. Cable Companies have 23.2 million while DSL providers have 17.0 million subscribers. The momentum, apparently is shifting to DSL.

In the past year, DSL providers added 520,000 more subscribers than cable, but the top cable broadband providers maintain a 6.2 million subscriber advantage over DSL and have a 58% share of
the US residential broadband market . Net DSL adds in the quarter were 379,000 more than 3Q 2004, while cable net adds skidded 80,000 from the same quarter last year.

Bruce Leichtman, president notes, “Aggressive offers from DSL providers continue to expand the market, even as cable operators are able to add subscribers in similar numbers to a year ago, while maintaining average broadband revenue per subscriber of over $40 per month.” It would be great to study the revenues of these two groups. And a comparison of the speed would clearly put things in perspective.

Last month i paid Time Warner $100 for my cable bill (i think it was more than that).

Now, don't get me wrong. I like Time Warner fine, and i even love my Road Runner service.

But nonetheless, i want my $100 back.

Why? Because i need to pay .99 for Lost for my wife's iPod. Because my son wants to buy more songs from iTunes. Because we are getting more family movies for my younger son on VOD. Because we pay NetFlix $19.99 a month. Because we still go to Blockbuster.

Because when i look at my entertainment expenses, the largest single expense is the one that i use the least. I don't watch Fox Sports. I don't tune into Women’s Entertainment, the Military Channel, SOAP net, or most of the 1000 channels that are on the box. I can tell you what i wach. The four networks, a handful of movie channels, science, kids, and news. That's it. And i'd be happy to pay for them. two, three, even five dollars a month. But I'm pretty sure that a big chunk of my bill goes to ESPN. And that's money that i'd rather be able to send to kids programs and educational fare. In fact, i'd even throw a couple of bucks at some new channels (documentary, international, etc).

I know that the whole debate of ala carte programming freaks out cable folks. But if they don't unbundle my bill soon, and Verizon offers me more choices and less of a one-price fits all deal, then I'm going to be in the market for a new way to buy programming. And that may happen soon.

On sunday i went looking for the iPod video.

It doesn't exist. Not at the apple store anyway.

Just a brand-new iPod that plays video, music, podcasts, etc. Video isn't an 'add on' or a special model. What has been lost in all this is that from now on, all iPods will have video. period.

So that means that people will have a device that just screams - PUT VIDEO ON ME!

Of course, you can it ignore that urge. And you can stare at the text screens of your music playlists. But you won't. You'll want video. The kids will want it. Commuters will want it. Air travelers will want it. Subway riders will want it.

But - are iPod owners still a relatively small group? The total sales by the end of 2005 is reported to be 37m. Ok, video capable devices will take a while to catch up.

But on the horizon, there's another device. The phone. It's coming. 87m new cell phones will be sold next year, and 56m will be video capable.

So it's here. Individually targeted video networks, that can send a video to just you that you asked for. Network Me. And with that development, there is a powerful new opportunity to change both the kind of video that reaches people, and the financial relationship between content creators and content consumers. That is a bid deal.

What is UGC, and how can you make it work for you?

Well, it's short for User-Generated Content - a buzz word that is quickly becoming the most important central concept for magazine publishers, TV networks, on-line communities, and digital retailers alike.

Here at Magnify Media - we've been engaging first-person content creation since before it had an acronym. At the start of all this - we created and produced MTV UNfiltered. A program that invited the audience to take over TV. The series was a hit by any standard, and had a 4 year run on MTV. Along the way we made hundreds of user-generated stories. That gives us a leg up, because the tools and the environmental issues that surround UGC remain the same today.

Here are our central rules for engagement:

1. Audiences want to make content, but they need to be invited to participate.
2. No one wants to fail. Make participation fun, safe, and successful.
3. Viewers don't have lawyers. If you make them sign a document with fine print,
you'll lose the most unusual and important stories.
4. Tools matter. Make the process simple. Listen to feedback, then simplify again.
5. Invest in passion. The best stories come from the most engage members.
6. Be fair. Find a way to make contributors understand the bargain.
7. Listen. Media is used to talking. But UGC in input - and needs to be engaged.
8. Don't be afraid. Your members/readers don't want your job. They want to play in your
sandbox, but they don't want to have to do it every day.
9. Applaud Success. Make sure that great user content is celebrated and showcased.
10. Your audience isn't passive, so think about partners rather than viewers.

The team at Magnify can work with your editorial, publishing, and channel management exec's to plan some practical, measurable, and brand conscious steps into UGC. We can build or implement tools that scale, and provide multiple revenue stream scenarios for the future.

UGC is moving to the front of the media universe. Why not start exploring how it can work for you?

I've been a member of Ofoto since 2000, and have transfered all my pictures over to the New Kodak Gallery.

But like most of us whose photo collection began before digital camera's existed... we've got a huge box of family pictures. It's kind of a mess.

So when i got an email that said that Kodak had set up a temporary store in Soho and would digitize up to 250 photos, we filled a box and headed down.

The whole experience was pretty amazing. The Kodak One store at 102 Wooster is a cool high tech gallery. They've got tons of cameras, printers, and wi-fi toys to play with. And even thought there's a bunch of expensive stuff around, the staff is comfortable with kids who tend to run around and touch things. The store mirrors the new 'gallery' ads that are currently on TV.

But the most amazing thing is the scanner - which is so fast that i can hardly describe it. We scanned about 1,000 photo's in about 20 min. 300 dpi. And they handed us a DVD and a stack of little thumbnail print outs. They'll upload the photos to your Kodak Gallery account as well.

The scanner isn't the right tool for super-old torn edged images or Polaroid's. But for 4x6 pictures, of which we have THOUSANDS... it's awesome.

So now the years of 1996-2000 are scanned in. Next week i'll go back with '94 - '95. You don' t need to make an appointment, but sometimes there can be a line. I'm told weekdays are best. But this is a great chance to turn your entire family photo library digital. And it's free. Don't miss it.

BTW, Kodak is pushing its wi-fi pictures all over the city - here's a wall mural we found in the east village...

photo: Credits Max Rosenbaum

Thanks, techcrunch (via OmMalik)

interesting take on the new Amazon venture to harness, and compensate 'volunteers' for doing work that requires intelligence.

===

Amazon’s new Mechanical Turk product is brilliant because it will help application developers overcome certain types of problems (resulting in the possibility for new kinds of applications) and somewhat scary because I can’t get the Matrix-we-are-all-plugged-into-a-machine vision out of my head.

The “machine” is a web service that Amazon is calling “artificial artificial intelligence.” If you need a process completed that only humans can do given current technology (judgment calls, text drafting or editing, etc.), you can simply make a request to the service to complete the process. The machine will then complete the task with volunteers, and return the results to your software.

Volunteers are paid different amounts for each task, and money earned is deposited into their Amazon accounts. Amazon keeps a 10% margin on what the requester pays. MORE

Interesting post from Fred Wilson at AVC

I have seen the future of media and it looks like this:

Mashed Up Blog Posts at tech.memeorandum
Mashed Up Funny Videos at delicious
Mashed Up Playlists at webjay

Here is the future of media:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Leaving aside the rights issues, which I know are large, if I were a television executive right now, I'd take my content, microchunk it, put a couple calls to a video ad server in the middle of it, and let it go whereever it wants to go, safe in the knowledge that whenever the show is viewed, I'll get to run a couple 15 second spots in the middle of it (which I could change whenever I wanted to and which I could measure).

This is where media is going and its not going to be stopped.

I know that Jason Calacanis hates the really simple stealing that goes on with Engadget or Autoblog posts. But you know what? He's not going to stop it. What he should do is monetize each and every post with an ad of some sort and a tracking mechanism of some sort and let the content flow.

RSS is a new medium. It's not like the web any more than the web was like print. Remember back in the late 90s when the media execs tried to use the web to sell more papers? It doesn't work. Content wants to be consumed in the media its delivered in.

So RSS content is not going to be used to send people to the web. It's going to be consumed in the RSS medium, whatever that turns out to be.

The data is pretty clear about this. The publishers that put only an excerpt of their posts/stories in their feeds get pretty low click thru on those excerpts. Those that put the full post in get a lot more readership.

So the trick is to figure out how to monetize RSS right in the medium, not as a way to send traffic back to the web where it can be monetized with the traditional web techniques.

Why did I decide to write this post today? Because in the last week I have gotten between five and ten requests to use my RSS feed in some sort of syndicated and mashed up RSS or web service. I've told all of them to go for it.

Here is the deal with my RSS feed. Anyone is free to use my RSS feed to produce whatever content they want to produce with the following exceptions. I do not want and will not allow my content to be used in pornographic or hate related properties. And the posts must be shown in their entirety with any advertising and tracking tools that I decide to use in them. And I must be given attribution for my work.

Other than that, go for it. Take it. And build something great with it.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005
What Does the Video iPod Mean For VOD?
By Cory Treffiletti /onlineSPIN
The video iPod is a MUCH bigger deal than most of us realize.

The iPod is a cultural phenomenon. It's had at least as wide-reaching an impact as Napster did when it initially launched, if not more so. The iPod took the digital audio format and made it accessible for everyone, bringing it into the mainstream and out of the den or the computer room. The device has become omnipresent, with its little white wires reaching into the ears of almost everyone I see, transporting everyone into his or her own little world, complete with a personal soundtrack.

The video iPod has the potential to go even further, for two primary reasons. The first is that the device provides an even more engaging element than audio by bringing video into the mix. Users of the original iPod are still aware of the world around them. While listening to music, they can still observe their surroundings. But the video iPod brings users' focus to a small screen flashing in front of their eyes, taking their attention away from the world around them. This could have a negative impact on the social structure, but it's certainly one that we can expect to see as people take content with them and watch it at their leisure.

The second impact, and one that I find even more important, is the increased role that iTunes will take in providing users with single- serving content when and wherever they want it. For all the impact that the iPod has had, iTunes is 10 times stronger. iTunes became the first widely used interface for purchasing music legally online, and it has already integrated itself into the habits of many consumers. iTunes morphed to include podcasts when user demand began to increase, and now more people are listening to podcasts than are subscribing to digital satellite radio. Now iTunes is morphing again and making it easy for consumers to purchase a show the day after it airs, viewing it on their computer or their iPod. This will inevitably catch on, and has extremely wide-reaching implications.

Being able to purchase a show almost immediately will have an impact on the two largest drivers of revenue for TV shows, syndication and DVD sales. Syndication has always been how a show makes most of its money in the long run, but if a user can own the episode right away, what is the allure of syndication? Similarly, DVD sales have recently proven very fruitful for TV series, but as more shows become available through the iTunes interface, what role will DVD sales play in 5 years? Will DVDs of TV shows be outpaced by the immediacy of online delivery?

Our society is based on immediate gratification, and digital media proves and exploits this fact. As the screens get bigger on mobile devices and the experience becomes richer, we will continue to see the consumer own the interaction with content. Time-shifting will become more prevalent, as will location-shifting. Traditional broadcast is doomed to be replaced by video on demand in a format that very few people anticipated. When we think VOD, we automatically think of a TV, but it's not bound to the parameters of a TV. VOD can be mobile and available on any device that is video-enabled.

Think about the implications of this! The video iPod is big, but the impact of legally delivering television programming immediately to your computer is bigger. Some of the players may fight this, but we've seen time and time again that consumers' desires are what drive the market. Only time will tell if the market for delivering this content in this format will be accepted and encouraged by the consumer. But don't plan on examining this trend for a while. With the speed of technology adoption and development by companies like Apple, the window is closing very quickly.

It's only a matter of time.

Drazen Pantic invited me to present to the folks at the Location1 space in Soho.

It was a fun night, with some good Q&A after the talk, here's a link to the video posted by the folks at Location1. VIDEO STREAM

Open House Wednesdays
Steve Rosenbaum
The open source movement moves to media
October 26, 2005

Steve Rosenbaum
Open House Wedn...
2005

I try and make it to the New York Tech Meet Up each month, just to check on the pulse of the NYC tech community. Well if last week was any indication, the community is thriving. An overflow crowd, some great demo's, amazing new space for Seth Goldstein's new Attention Trust venture (and the actual for profit company Root Markets).

But the thing that i was most taken by were the comments of PubSub's Salim Ismail. PubSub is a cool product, and playing with you'll see why. But Salim's whole take on structure blogging was what got me thinking. If you really do own your own data, then how valuable is ebay, or even google going forward. If for example, i want to sell my car, and i post a structured blogpost that has a set of pre-determined classified variables (car maker, milage, condition, etc) then do i really need to sign up for ebay at all. Won't crawlers looking for cars 'come to me' - find my post, and direct buyers to my offering? Doesn't this idea work with content, photo's, software, basically anything the web can create a marketplace fore. And once i've posted the content on My Server (my blog) rather than their sever (ebay, etc) don't i get to say how i'll sell it, what i'll pay a third party broker, etc.

Really - in the future, the power is in the owner of the data. And we all own our own.

Pretty cool- and it seems almost inventible.

There's been plenty written about this film, and it's all pretty on target. The only thing i'd add is that it is an interesting mix of history and fiction. I wonder - as a percentage - how much of the script is taken straight from testimony, news reels, and published reports. Probably i'd guess 60% of the film is history... acted out in context.

Also, interesting to see the work that Jeff Skoll is doing with Participant, and that Mark Cuban is on board as well. It's already pulled in $7,239,225 on 272 screens LINK to indiewire BOT and Box Office Mojo pegs the budget at 7m so with dvd and foreign they'll make a bit of money.

But the larger question for socially conscious films is this: what is the appetite for this material? Can the market support one 'issue' film per month, or 2, or 10? My guess is we'll find out as films like Wallmart and Why We Fight and others start to arrive on the scene in closer proximity. It may be that the real market impact will be on adult non-issue films, but it's way to early to say.

The Producers Guild East is really coming into it's own. Last week was the debut of what promises to be an annual event for the guild - "The Night of the Producer". With the leadership and vision of East Coast Prez David Picker - this event was envisioned as a way for producers to honor their own, in particular the East Coast variety - and get a chance to hear industry greats talk about what it is they do.

There was no rubber chicken at this event. It was a half hour of schmooze with friends, and then a seat in the Surrogate’s Court. Yes, i did say court room. The even was held at The Surrogate’s Court Building (a true new york location).

The Honorees this year were Linda Ellerbee and David Brown. Ellerbee was interviewed first, and with great skill, by Shelia Nevins of HBO. Ellerbee is a rare breed in this business, a self-made woman who walked away from a career at the networks to found Lucky Duck Productions. Her comments were honest, pointed, and not always rosy. It is after a tough business. But overall - she told it straight... and seemed truly comfortable with the trade offs she's made between the Networks and cable. Nevins was pointy and insightful.

Second up - David Brown, the legendary film producer - interviewed by Picker himself. Once again, among friends and in this environment of stature... the evening shined. Brown told stories, Picker was funny and had many tales of his own. But in the end, Brown was less sanguine about the future of the business now that is' being run by MBA's.

A home run evening for all. Congrats.