Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Google TV - If The Vikings Don't Deliver, The Pirates Will

The technology and media industries have been at war for the last decade. In no small part due to Google reinventing the media marketplace, or ‘f**king with the magic’, as Ken Auletta so memorably noted. Messrs Brin and Page snaffled the lunches of content kings all over the world to create a $160bn corporation. Ever since, their algorithmic tanks have been parked on the manicured lawns of global players, such as Time Warner and Vivendi. Launching salvo after salvo into their infinity swimming pools. Including sucking up vast swathes of the media industry’s treasured IP and giving it away for free, whilst collecting gazillions of Adwords dollars. In short, there’s been plenty to keep the battle raging and the legal eagles billing. With such history, the recent announcement about Google TV felt like another howitzer blast in the direction of the marketing industry’s Tuscan holiday villas. Mountain View’s last surge into the media world’s ultimate stronghold to grab its most valuable real estate. One slight change to the script is that this time Google has brought along a friend. One with bonafide Hollywood credentials. The Google TV bandwagon includes Sony (owners of MGM, Columbia and Tri-Star), which will be making the kit for the Android powered web TVs. That could help the thawing of relations between Big Media and Big Tech. Maybe a first step in recognising the reality that the geeks of San Jose will never actually produce blockbuster content. While the players of Santa Monica will never actually develop global technology platforms. However, as with all these wonderful new media possibilities, the real options are not restrained by the technology, but by the backroom double-dealings and the beancounters’ carving up the juicy new revenue streams. The world’s media markets are worth something in the order of $600bn annually. And that’s the prize that the execs of Beverley Hills and Sand Hill Road have their respective high-powered sights set upon. As a result, suspicions will remain that Google TV is looking to grab media’s ultimate mega-market. Just as Google Search absorbed the revenues of its beloved print businesses. Or, worse still, that Page & Brin plan to unbundle those pricey 500-channel cable and satellite TV packages, where must-see sports comes complete with never-to-be viewed shopping channels. And that Google TV is actually a kind of giant Hulu. But one where TV execs aren’t pulling the strings. However, a pot of gold remains within sight. Whenever Hollywood Players and Bay Area Geeks sit...

Web TV - Game On

This weekend England play a World Cup qualifying game in the Ukraine.  One notable aspect of the match will be that people in the UK will only be able to watch it via the web, on a pay-per-play basis.  It’s yet another example of the trends that are morphing TV as we know it into a new modern web-based format.  The most significant force behind this change is economic.  The match was originally planned to be shown on satellite TV by Setanta.  However, after the Irish company was credit crunched by super-high gearing and a collapse in the advertising market, the rights were picked up by Kentaro which will stream the game to one million football fans this weekend for a modest one-off fee.  It’s snack TV as opposed to the mega-banquet offered by Sky.  Just like Apple’s iTunes is for people who wish to consume their music tapas-style.  The most notable point about this new commercial offering is that it’s not new.  Football fans who can’t afford premium TV packages or Premier League tickets have long been following their beloved teams via illegal web streams.  Often putting up with terrible quality, inconsistent transmissions, tiny pop-up screens and Chinese commentary.  I'm sure many of these fans will be happy to pay a little this weekend.  As Arseblog, the popular Arsenal FC blogger puts it: 'If I could pay a couple of quid and watch the game via a stream that wasn't up and down and freezing and jumping and refreshing I'd happily do it. The same goes for league games.'  Expect plenty more such innovation in TV.  Just don’t expect the TV industry to be involved.  Incredibly, the traditional business is mirroring the plight of its musical cousin by ignoring clear signals from customers about what they want.  Just like the Big Record Labels, the Big TV Networks are falling on the wrong side of the Innovator’s Dilemma.  The plight whereby companies desperately attempt to prop up their existing revenues and fail to engage with exciting new technologies that people love.  Despite the fact that if they did embrace new kit and behaviour their tired old businesses would get a shot in the arm, instilling some faith among jaded shareholders.  But they aren't.  So a gap appears in the market and and new innovators pile in, building products in line with public demand.  And the new Web TV ecosystem begins to take shape.  All built on the fast-growing popularity of watching TV on a laptop or PC.  A distinction that will soon be redundant as devices merge.  But don't make the mistake of thinking that it will then be back to business as usual.  That's just where the fun begins as TV content becomes another web application upon which other tools can be built.  And then it's game on.

Pirate Bay Seeks NASDAQ Gold?

By any standards, the purchase of Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bittorrent tracker, by the Global Gaming Factory is an ambitious, some would say crazy, business venture. Unravelling the legal spaghetti around the site's activities looks like an impossible task.  It's hard to imagine the RIAA et al, suddenly changing their world view of the site that has been Hollywood's public enemy number one for so many years.  Particularly after continuing court action, despite the PB founders high-profile conviction earlier this year.  So today's suggestion by GGF boss, Hans Pandeya, that he expects to be able to turn the site into a business that could one day list on NASDAQ, the premier US technology stockmarket, seems incredible.  In fact, it's likely to be more pirate mischief.  Padeya's comment that, 'The Pirate Bay is a strong brand in the US and most parties who have showed interest in the project are based there,' must surely be tongue-in-cheek.  However, there is no doubt that The Pirate Bay is a powerful modern day brand around which people are keen to convene.  How many other websites have gone on to win seats in the European Parliament?  And of course, the PB service has a vast network of individuals powering the delivery of chunky media content on demand.  GGF appear to have a plan to put these assets to a genuine commercial use, which would be the most remarkable of turnaround stories.  Or maybe Mr Pandeya just believes his company is on the right side of the argument and that markets trends will eventually make the acquisition look like deal-of-the-century.  He may have a point.  Certainly, when you read about the latest RIAA victim, it's hard not to wonder who the crazy people really are.

Scary Signals

'P2P is a demand signal from the market,' says Cory Doctorow.  If that's the case, what are we to make of The Pirate Bay conviction last week?  For those who don't know, Pirate Bay is one of the world's largest Bittorrent search engines.  It allows people to search through the gazillions of TV shows, films and other entertainment that sit on the web.  This content is broken up into tiny parts and stored across distributed networks of computers, until someone makes a viewing request at which point Bittorrent or another P2P technology will draw the pieces together and put them back in the right order, ready to watch as a film or TV show.  The problem, of course, is that this distribution method is not sanctioned by the people who make and own the content, most of which appears without any advertising.  That's the advertising that pays the wages of the people who make the films and TV shows in the first place.  In the Pirate Bay case these good folk were represented by the IFPI (aka Hollywood).  So why does the world's entertainment industry persist with legal recourse, instead of listening to the 'demand signals' being sent to them through P2P?  The main reason is that P2P file-sharers have been seen as people who steal valuable IP. They must, therefore, be treated as thieves.  But that's misreading the signals.  The real driving force behind the growth of P2P is that it's convenient and gives people what they want, when they want it.  What if you don't want to wait a week to see the next episode of 24?  Or maybe a friend abroad has told you about a great new movie and you want to see it now so you can discuss it?  And, vitally, P2P is also a way for regular folk to distribute their own content and pursue the rock star dream.  Furthermore, with one third of all broadband users worldwide admitting they use P2P there's a massive network effect in place.  One that the entertainment industry will probably never be able to reverse.  However, the truth is that all of these signals are just too terrifying for people in the industry to listen to.  As Mark notes about the latest Digital Britian bashola, many executives in the entertainment industry and beyond, 'are paid to keep the current model going and just don't want to see the digital technology as anything but a means to turbo-charge the current model. It's just too scary to contemplate anything else.'  And this is why Pirate Bay is just one part of the massive bout of creative destruction occuring in our time.  After all, there are plenty of others perfectly happy to listen to the market signals if the uncumbents are too scared.  And despite this court case, Pirate Bay and others like it just keep on rolling, allowing people to create personal media platforms and services of their own design.  As Doc Searls says, 'in networked economies the demand side supplies itself'.

'Facebook Killed TV'

Paul Graham on 'Why TV Lost' : "This was the most powerful force of all.  This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers. After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another. Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words."

P2P Is TV's Wonderland

Today, the Competition Commission decided that Kangaroo, the UK web-TV platform looking to match the success of Hulu in the US, will not be allowed to move forward.  The reason being that, 'it is a threat to competition in this developing market and has to be stopped'.  What can you say?  The world of copyright, DRM, piracy debates and web legislation seems increasingly out-of-touch with the networked world.  A few years ago I saw Doc Searls make a presentation in which he noted, 'In networked environments, the demand side supplies itself'.  It’s a statement that sums up nicely what is happening in today’s TV industry - all beyond the legislators' gaze.  People aren’t satisfied with what broadcasters are offering.  So they use P2P systems running on free BitTorrent services such as Limewire, eMule, Pirate Bay and Mininova to create ‘services of their own design’.  This allows them to watch whatever they want, whenever they wish, often with the advertising stripped out.  All of which is illegal file-sharing activity of course and therefore hidden away in underground darknets. But it’s increasingly the new norm with more than one-third of broadband users admitting to downloading video content and two-thirds saying they didn’t see it as being wrong.  (Try doing a quick poll in your office about Limewire and watch the shifty glances as a few honest souls slowly raise their hands).  However, despite being largely invisible these systems have now reached a scale and sophistication which dwarfs the professional, mainstream broadcasters.  Mininova, for instance, which launched in 2005, has served more than seven billion downloads, many of which are well-known shows.  Requests for content from the file-sharing network currently runs at ten million downloads a day - almost ten times greater than the BBC's iPlayer.  And while the industry wrings its hands, the Torrents continue to grow and innovate.  An 'invisible' YouTube anyone?  P2P video is creating a vibrant, Alice-like world which is testing the normal rules of the TV industry.  But it seems that the policy wonks and lawmakers don't want to peek down the rabbit hole, in case what they see is too strange.  In the meantime, P2P TV becomes curiouser and curiouser...

[Update : The Doc adds some thoughts here: "Pretty soon the 'TV' you buy will be an Internet file and stream tuner and recorder, with 'must-carry' set-top-box features, so it can still get cable, satellite and over-the-air TV 'channels'. In the world that makes, old-fashioned TV will look as antique as the telegraph".]

How Do You Value Content?

When Channel 4's boss, Andy Duncan, writes in the FT, ‘The future must be about maximising the value of our content,’ he undoubtedly speaks for media executives around the planet.  So what’s the problem?  Why has the value of content suddenly become so newsworthy?  The answer lies in the media ratings industry and the challenges it faces from the web and digital technology.  Ratings in traditional media are vital as they allow the commercial world to work out what content they should be backing with their marketing bucks.  For example Nielsen's Television Ratings, the mother of all such services, which has reported on the TV viewing habits of 9,000 American households for more than sixty years, determines the destiny of $25bn of advertisers' cash annually.  Here in the UK the same job is done by BARB, which monitors televisual preferences in 5,100 homes.  Both are centralised systems that extrapolate trends from a relatively small group of individuals and use them to create a commercial marketplace, in which C4 and others have been able to operate successfully for many years.  However, as Duncan’s quote suggests, this marketplace is now under pressure because advertisers question the value of ratings services which have struggled to keep up with the web.  Or as one grand media fromage memorably told me: 'We know the bike is broken but it's the only one we've got.'  The difficulties arise because the concept of ‘ratings’ is very different online.  The goal is still to judge the value of content but the similarities stop there.  Online ratings services normally refer to...

'UK Online Is Nowhere' Says C4 Boss

I went to NESTA this morning to hear Andy Duncan, C4's boss, describe his vision for a Digital Britain.  Duncan said that big UK media should, 'collectively be embarrassed', about fighting each other over vested interests and consolidation while missing the impact of the web.  Rows which have been partially responsible for the UK being, 'commercially nowhere', when it comes to the global online geography.  'We are in danger of being like the US railroad operators at the end of the last century, which found themselves looking excessively inward - and then the car came along'.  The weighty speech came ahead of the long-awaited Digital Britain report from the UK Government's DCMS (which today the FT says might include Universal Broadband) and the next stage of Ofcom’s Public Service Broadcasting Review.  When considering its strategy to reignite the country's economy, said Duncan, the Government should recognise that the creative industries 'fluffy' image belies its value to UK PLC, two million jobs and sixty billion quid to be precise.  In fact, he said that the UK's media industries could replace the gap left by the country's decimated financial services sector.  But only if there is some very serious change.  In a world, 'where children don't differentiate between content they see on the web and TV', the C4 boss said, 'broadband and broadcasting' are effectively the same thing.  Now that the media ecology has changed to be no longer just content but, 'content plus tools' that allow citizens to 'create services of their own design', the UK could create a, 'digital tools industry' of great value building on its creative excellence.  As ever it comes down to the numbers.  Duncan's financial shorthand is that, 'ten years ago television advertising market in the UK peaked at over £3.5 billion'.  While online advertising didn't exist.  Today the TV market has shrunk to £3bn making it the same size as the online market.  And most of that cash goes to US companies (and one in particular) not into, 'quality British content'.  Inspiring stuff.

The Water Cooler Show Lives On...

I did something new this morning.  I watched a great BBC programme last night and was able to (legally) link out to it from Twitter today, because so much of the BBC's programming is now available through its Web TV platform - iPlayer.  So the show in question - Louis Theroux's chilling documentary about the gangs of Philadelphia - now has currency in a way that it didn't before.  Previously I could talk about it, but not curate it.  It couldn't become part of my personal media platform, the media space that I build everyday using tools that allow me to share-and-compare with my friends, contacts and the others I brush pass in the global mingle that is the modern social web.  Vitally, flagging my interest over coffee this morning didn't involve breaking into a strange locked-down fame silo called Theroux's Echo Chamber or the like.  Instead I created a tiny media byte to float off around the open web, for the heavy-lifting aggregation engines to thread together into a community on-the-fly.  One that will grow on the vine or reach its natural sell-by-date and naturally disperse.  This is what used to be known as a water-cooler moment, when people would gather together in the corner of an office and chat over their favourite lines from the previous night's TV.  So (surprise, surprise) water coolers are still very much alive, they just look different when media becomes networked.  Blogging at the LA Times, Jon Healey writes how Sling.com, the new video site from the makers of Slingbox, is working with this new legal, professional, TV environment.  "Much of Sling's most recognizable programming comes from almost two dozen networks and studios that Hulu supplies, but it supplements those feeds with content from about 100 additional cable networks, online TV channels and independent studios. It's an overwhelming amount of stuff, which is where the social layer of Sling comes in. Like Hulu, you can banter on comment boards about particular shows or episodes. But you can also create an electronic trail of commentary for others to follow."  Yes, TV is (finally) joining the party.

[UPDATE: Loved @beng's comment about Kangaroo's problems: "Who cares if Kangaroo will now not happen? I want proper, internet, on-demand, hypertextual, bookmarkable video services not cable tv."]