More Stuff We Admire

And not just the thong. Belatedly I worked out how to get this photo to the site from e-mail, and at no great cost in bandwidth. This is a publicity still for The Strand (see last post), made by the Blair Witch Project people.

Two Great IP TV Publishers

I found these two over at Brightcove. One is from Brian Storm the other Daniel Myrick, co-creator of the Blair Witch Project. 

Myrick now runs Gearhead picture, producers of The Strand (see below). They have a new movie in production and to find out more go here or visit the blog.

THE STRAND is one of the first live-action, independently produced; narrative episodic shows intended specifically for the web – well at least from a renowened cinema figure. The pilot webisode can be viewed at www.strandvenice.com , free of charge. Audiences will be able to watch subsequent webisodes at $.99 each. Myrick fillmed 50 hours of video in 9 days on Venice Beach, and made a web series out of it. This is one of cinema's great innovators so well worth a look.

Mediastorm is a multiproject site hosted by Brightcove.  Never Coming Home is about losing loved ones in Iraq, Chernobyl Legacy about children and their long term suffering in Chernobyl, It Ain't Television…. It's Brain Surgery, is about an operation for Parkinson's Disease. This is old fashioned issue programming, the kind we thought we might not see much of in future, available on a PC near you.

Will Internet TV/Ip TV work Without Affiliate Programmes?

One of the great unpublicised areas of the web is how well affiliate marketing (as well as viral marketing of course) has helped build online brands. EBay for example runs one of the biggest affiliate programes on the web (paying up to 70% of revenue in commissions). I was surprise to find out that there are companies earning in excess of $200,000 per month from well conceived affiliate programmes.

Now it’s the case, according to Jeremy Allaire, that around $150 billion a year is spent on audio-visual content but to get people to spend a portion of that online or through IP TV pay-per-view, is it possible without affiliate programmes on the scale of Amazon? And when IP TV professionals complain that, yes it wil be hard to find content, that’s also the case with the world’s great online book stores, so they’ve created lists and recommendations. Right now there’s precious little incentive for people to get involved in an IP TV equivalent.

Content evolves

And so do we. This is a site we're putting together on Squarespace, to give a better impression of our thinking.

Work we admire

Work we admire,
originally uploaded by media_angle.

This is one of those images that captures changing times. It's the Pink Lounge at the G In Galway designed by Philip Treacy, most famous for hat designs. What the G says is luxury is out. Glamour is in.

Our view is that as the world becomes more visual, we'll all be upgrading from luxury to glamour. Luxury is all around us. Glamour is still rare but it will become more common. Philip even designed the door handles at the G in the shape of a woman's back. A hat designer designing door handles?

People in the content business have to learn a new visual language.

Do We Know How Dramatic the Changes Will Be?

A couple of things need figuring out on the road to the new media landscape.

The first is that plenty of companies are gearing up to launch their own TV channels on IP networks, or on the internet. "Brand advertising is definitely changing dramtically, and many brands are launching their own Internet TV channels to reach consumers who are spending more time online and less time watching traditional television," Samatha Stone of Maven Networks wrote to me recently. Maven are at the forefront of those developments.

The second is the nature of content.

As companies begin their lives as content producers in direct contact with their audiences, so their audiences are gaining experience in content production through blogs and video/audio casting.

The previous lives of companies, when advertising agencies organised and designed their communications with the public, revolved around illusion. Blogs and podcasting revolve around honesty and personal testimony.

So a value-shift is needed. But that's not all. The content business is an unforgiving one. Errors, misjudgements, arrogance are all penalised by audiences that will happily turn elsewhere. This is the trick that corporate TV channels have to pull off: engage honestly, engage on a personal level, be error free or admit errors quickly, and avoid arrogance. Misjudgements on the other hand seem inevitable and will need to be explained in public.

Companies that go into internet TV or IP TV will have to become content experts and will have to account for their decisions to the public they succeed in attracting. It's a very different future. 

Will More Media Bring More Creative Opportunities

The question is worth asking because hundreds of thousands of people work in creative industries and millions more wish they could. Understanding creative urges will help us understand where niche media is headed.

Creativity has to be about difficult truths.

A few days back I sat with Julian Castagna, winemaker. Julian used to shoot adverts for TV. He worked with James Garrett, one of the most influential advertising guru’s in post-war advertising. Briefly in the 1980s I worked with his son Stephen Garrett, who now runs Kudos, producers of spy series Spook for the BBC.

Julian has pedigree. This is why he gave up making ads. “Every meeting I went into it became an issue of the politics of getting the film done, not the film itself. I didn’t enjoy it anymore.”

He’s an advocate of doing things because you love it, because you have passion. That’s different from getting a high or a kick from doing things.

Most people in the media world have given into a different process: sticking in there, making the profits, getting the film out, getting the paper through the door. I don’t say they submit to these processes for egotistical reasons. But they are not creative processes. A creative process begins with an intractable problem or a breakthrough opportunity. You have to be dealing win the near impossible, the near unsayable.

Routine, however varied, doesn’t invite these intractables. As much as people at the top of the media tree believe they work in creative environments, in reality they work on a production line, second guessing audiences. That was a real surprise to me – the extent to which all decisions are guided by attempts to second guess what an audience will watch and how an audience will think. That’s why I say it is a production line. Making wallpaper and chairs is also about second guessing audiences.

My one anxiety for niche media is that it’s more of a production line.

What Kind of Blog is This?

To explore further where the media industry is going I started this blog. I work in the media industry. I’m not convinced that mainstream media does the good job it claims to. In fact my own  experience of it has been a story of moral compromise. I only came back into journalism and TV three years ago, after a twelve year stint in industry. I’m surprised by what I see. People prepared to work for nothing, people forced to work for very little, people prepared to treat the creative process as a production line.

Last year I completed a film that drew an audience of 3 million on the BBC, and my press articles are read by an audience of half a million, then they get circulated around the web.

So far this blog has had 36 visitors. In terms of exposure to an audience it is the worst investment of time I could make. On the other hand it gets me asking questions about why I write and what I’m trying to achieve. I know I’m a net gainer by writing it, but have yet to work out exactly how.

New Award for Next Generation Ads

Just an addendum to the previous post, Comcast set up this award for creatives who are taking risks with the next generation of advert. It runs from June to end August. Worth keeping an eye on.

Long Tail Content

Chris Anderson is doing a great job of raising awareness of co-created content in the Long Tail - that’s the zillion small producers who will pack the IP TV and Internet TV space with great content for smaller audiences.

A couple of days back I made contact with Jenni Moyers of Comcast, the cable operator, trying to tease out where consumer-produced content  is headed. I got the nod on Comcast’s work with next generation media from Jim Sheehan over at SeaChange, so many thanks Jim.

Consumer produced content is now becoming an integral part of COMCAST’s offer to the 10 million American homes that subscribe to its digital services.

Senior Director of Corporate Communications Jenni Moyer says the comany’s Get Local services are turning out to be hugely popular. They range from locally produced video of a High School football game to local on-demand dating services. Comcast’s on-demand services are showcasing at www.selectondemand.com.

They include the apparently absurd Pets on Demand which is in fact a service for animal welfare organisations to publicise the animals they care for that could become pets for viewers, Karaoke on Demand (explanation enough I think), Guitar lessons, and even movie intermission ads.

“Since early 2004 we’ve had about 2 billion on-demand views,” says Jenni, adding: That’s from a base of 10 million homes who have digital access”.

Like Josh Goldman (see interview), Jenni sees evidence of a sizeable shift and it’s not so much in the way people behave but in their fundamental attitudes. The figures, she says are “a big endorsement of people consuming TV on their own terms.”

It’s also giving Comcast scope to experiment with advertising. Comcast Spotlight, the group’s ad sales division, is experimenting with long form ads, as well as classifieds on demand. The momentum towards an I, Creative community is hotting up.

Allaire Says

In an interview with StreamingMedia.com Jeremy Allaire head of online distributor Brightcove said last week that Internet television will come to look like the Internet today, a radically diverse medium with hundreds of thousands of programming entities supplying content. He also pointed out that like the Internet today, Internet TV will draw on the consumer. The consumer has a role. Virally sharing content that's of interest, in recommending and helping people to find content, these will be central to the future TV experience.

These are radical changes that the existing distribution channels need to take account of and the people I've been interviewing suggest that only a minority of the brand managers out there are aware of this change. When the light goes on ….

From Streaming Media East

ROO, one of the world’s largest online broadcast networks and a global leader in online video solutions, and Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, a leading radio broadcasting company in the United States, today entered into an agreement for ROO to become the online video partner for the Citadel Broadcasting Company (NYSE: CDL).

Under the agreement ROO will provide Citadel with a turn key video solution including online video content across a number of genres including news, music, business and fashion and the tools to sell online advertising targeted by demographic and location, for the Citadel Interactive network. Citadel will, in turn, significantly increase the reach of the ROO network and supply a variety of exclusive specialized content and events to run across the ROO network.

Citadel Broadcasting currently owns and operates 222 radio stations and their associated websites in 49 markets located in 24 states across the United States.

Citadel will work with ROO to expand its online presence to include broadband video offerings to its audience. In particular, Citadel will engage ROO to develop a compelling online video experience for its RightNowRadio.com internet radio initiative, which is to launch in the summer of 2006.

News from Streaming Media East

Internet TV pioneer Brightcove and Limelight Networks, the world's leading Internet content delivery network for digital media, today announced a strategic partnership to bring advanced services and next-generation business models to the growing Internet TV industry. Read about it here.

This is the nub of it:

"Brightcove's vision for the future of TV–where consumers can watch and interact with millions of on-demand broadband channels delivered through the Internet and content creators can reach global audiences with a truly open distribution platform–is driving innovation across the media industry," said Bill Rinehart, chief executive officer at Limelight Networks. "To make their vision a reality, we are working together to give media companies access to our content delivery platform, which provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to distribute massively large video and music files across multiple platforms to audiences of any size."

Manners

I’m trying to catch up with Tim Manners, an exponent of the idea that  all companies need to be thought leaders, that they need to participate in the content game and be good at it. In a creative economy what Manners says makes perfect sense. The future of content belongs to all of us, with honesty and intelligence at a premium. So a prerequisite for companies is to recognise they are in the content space and make sure they look smart. Tim’s insights are summarised here.

A Little Insight Courtesy of 3Vision

A list of VoD insights dropped into my e-mail box this morning courtesy of 3Vision. The Bath, England-based company consults on content issues in cable, IP TV, mobile and other advanced media environments.

The list strikes me as a primer for companies in the triple pay business. Yet the game is heading towards quad-play. Systems that allow “buddy” interaction, for example allowing people in different houses to co-watch a programme, sharing notes, showing rewinds, and being virtual.

Mediangle is not here to criticise. Nothing wrong with being on top of the  world we live in rather than the one we will be occupying. Here’s insight number ten.

10 – Focus on Consumer Benefit
To maximise the effectiveness of VOD as a customer acquisition tool you will need to make VOD central to your overall TV proposition, focussing on the benefits to the consumer rather than the technology.