Category Archives: Technology (General)

Writings on technology that is not laptop or smartphone related.

Great Presentation By Corey Pressman On The Post-Book

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Very interesting presentation by Corey Pressman last night at Mobile Portland. He talked about the history of publishing (he’s an anthropologist by training) and how we are at an inflection point. But unlike most in the “traditional publishing” world Corey sees this as a tremendous opportunity, an amazing inflection point, a Big Bang with tons of possibilities in the publishing world.

Corey speaks for the first 38 minutes and then there is a panel on iBooks Author and eBooks in education. Well worth the time!


(or watch it here)

TV Is Broken

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TV Is Broken

Oh this little story is awesome and mimics my own experiences with my own daughters:

I say all of this to set up the fact that Beatrix has little idea of how traditional TV works and seeing her first real exposure to it was enlightening to say the least.

…

“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.

“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shrek will come back on in a few minutes” I say.

We have a television set and have basic cable but rarely ever watch it. The “basic” part gives us the local channels and Discovery channel, in essence. For the most part, we stream movies and tv shows from a hard drive to Apple TV or via Netflix, not that my girls watch much of that even.

So their exposure to commercials? Almost none.

When I was 3 years old my mom worked nights so would set me up in front of the television on Saturday mornings to play and watch cartoons. She said I would watch the commercials saying, “I want that!” to every one. Now my girls barely know what a commercial is. Funny how things have changed in 35 years.

Solving Hollywood’s Problems (While Giving Me What I Want)

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I’ve been very critical of the entertainment industry over the past few months. (See here and here and here and here and here.) But it strikes me that being critical isn’t the same thing as being constructive. So instead I am going to focus on being constructive.

Let’s start with the expectation: I expect to watch all television programs, movies and documentaries when I want to and where I want to.

From my perspective Hollywood has two problems: they are not taking care of their customers by giving them what they expect and, mostly because of this, their movies, TV shows and documentaries are being pirated.

So let’s start by taking a look at the current model. The current model of revenue generation is time-based. Let’s take movies, for example. First run movies appear in the theater, a few months later they go to DVD for purchase, then they go to Netflix for rental. The money falls off for each tier, too. A first run movie is $11-14 per person per view, a DVD starts at $20 for all viewers who can watch it as many times as they’d like, that eventually drops to $5 or $10, and then Netflix costs $8/month for all the movies you can swallow.

Let’s also say that a family of four might, on average, see five movies in the theater per year. That means 20 movies for a family of four in some combination, which would gross the movie makers about $350 per year. Let’s also assume that the average family buys five movies per year at $20 per and another five movies per year at $10 per. That’s an additional $150 per year per family. And we already know what the rental model is worth: about $15/month per Netflix subscription (DVD by-mail and streaming) or roughly $200 per year [1].

Now it seems to me, sticking with our movie situation, that we can easily figure out our price and value tiers:

  1. All movies the day they are launched: $700/ year or $65/month
  2. All movies three months after launch: $350/year or $35/month
  3. All movies six months after launch: $200/year or $20/month

Apparently the movie industry grossed $10 billion last year. That’s only 14 million customers at the $65/month tier. As a comparison, there are 104 million cable subscribers. Given the price range for cable — $30 to $90 per month — it would seem that a $20 to $65 price range to get access to all movies on demand, where I want them and when I want them, would fit right in. I know I’d consider one of the higher tiers. And at a minimum, I now have a few choices to do what I want legally and it still doesn’t preclude me from opting for a lower tier, going to see a movie every once in a while or buying a disc.

Obviously, we add in television shows and documentaries and the price per month goes up. But that’s fine. The point is I get the choice and various ways to see the content I want, when I want it, where I want it.

Hollywood, that’s all I’m asking.

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[1] My numbers could be off. That’s not the point. The point is to have a basis for discussion and I believe these numbers get us close.

[2] For the record, I worked this up before I saw Albert Wenger’s post from yesterday. It, too, is worth a read.

Cannibalism Rules Again As Cameras Die Just Like Pagers and Handhelds

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Sony, Too

John Gruber, on Daring Fireball, talking about the decline in camera sales:

Compare and contrast Sony’s approach to dealing with the decline in point-and-shoot camera sales with Apple’s approach to the decline in iPod sales. Apple is skating to where the puck is heading; Sony is skating to where the puck is at the moment.

He goes on to point out that he isn’t advocating Sony stop selling cameras. After all, Apple didn’t stop selling iPods. But it is a business in decline and the the future is clearly better cameras on phones.

This is a repeating theme in technology. A story of two companies, both coming of age at the same time. The first is a tech darling who defines the market for personal digital assistants and the second one who made pagers for a living. Both saw the coming age of smartphones and how that would decimate their existing businesses.

The first company (we’ll call it Palm) decided one random day that they would stop making and selling handhelds, laying off or reassigning everyone who worked on that business, throwing out a ton of knowledge and momentum in certain markets (like education). The second company (we’ll call it RIM) realized that it could marry its pager technology with cell phones and create addictive devices. RIM made the transition gradually; Palm did it abruptly. Palm died a horrible and ugly death while RIM, at least for a while, was the hottest smartphone company on the planet (until the market shifted on them again, this time from enterprise to consumer devices).

But at least both Palm and RIM realized the coming smartphone apocalypse would change their businesses and they’d need to adjust. Sony, Kodak, Canon and Nikon seem to have no answer to the transition at all.

Apparently I Won’t Be Watching Warner Brothers Movies

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Netflix Deal with Warner Brothers Includes Delay In Queues

In my on-going sequence of posts ridiculing Hollywood, we can add another chapter. Now you won’t even be able to add Warner Brothers movies to your Netflix queue until they have been released for purchase 28 days. Stupid.

For you movie executives who are paying attention, here is my process:

  1. Hear or read about a movie (see trailer, read Friday entertainment section of the paper, friend tells me, etc.)
  2. Add interesting movies to my Netflix queue
  3. Occasionally go to the theatre to see one of Netflix queue movies
  4. Wait for it to show up in my queue, make a buy/rent decision. If I saw it, I rate it and remove it.

My decision to buy your movie, rent your movie, even go to the theatre, is all predicated on my Netflix queue. It’s going to have to be really really really interesting for me to remember I want to go see it without it.

So, Warner Brothers, the odds of me ever seeing another one of your movies just approached zero.