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Mike Lowery (Designer/Illustrator)
Posted in Visual, Art, Design, Illustration on February 12th, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.
Mike is the perfect example of how an overwhelming imagination can make a good designer stand out from the crowd. His illustrations are alive. Visit them in his online portfolio or take them home.
Steve Jobs on DRM
Posted in Music, News on February 12th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Apple is under pressure from the European Union. Norway wants Apple to open up their Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected songs so that the music they sell through their iTunes store can be played in any device, not only on the iPod. Last tuesday Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, answered in an open letter regarding Apple’s position on the issue.
Jobs summarizes the current situation and presents two possible alternatives for the future. On his summary he basically blames music labels for requiring Apple to DRM protect their songs, although he gives a thumbs up on the current situation, saying customers are well served. He then goes on to present his first alternative, a world where Apple’s DRM solution is licensed to the competition. He disregards this option on the grounds that licensing such well protected secrets would surely make them more vulnerable. Coordinating an answer to a breach on their protection system, Jobs goes on to say, would also be much harder. Finally Jobs presents a second alternative, a world without DRM. He states Apple would wholeheartedly adopt this solution, should the labels agree to it.
Almost one week later we can highlight the most interesting opinions from bloggers and the answers from some of the involved parties. Microsoft, for example, was quick to answer (Via Digg) they are happy with the current situation, and that Jobs was “irresponsible, or a the very least naïve”. Norway insisted that iTunes customers have their music locked in and that it’s Apple’s responsibility, not theirs, to put pressure on labels to make DRM disappear. The Register published (Via Digg) “The slow death of DRM” about the story of DRM and why we’re better without it.
Ricardo Galli’s opinions on the letter are among the most insightful. Because his post is in Spanish, we’ll summarize it here. He points out that: If Jobs is so willing to embrace a non DRM world he could start selling Pixar movies without DRM, and probably convince Disney to do the same. He could let external developers work on the iPod. He could publish standard API’s to be able to interact with iTunes, etc. Galli also points out how Jobs fails to mention other facts such as the whole reason of writing this letter, or that maintaining a DRM system in place is much less beneficial for Apple than selling DRM free songs, or the fact that although authors and small labels have asked Apple to let them sell their songs without DRM, Apple has answered they can’t do that because of technical problems.
One day after Jobs published his letter, Chris Anderson introduced The Anderson Switch. Maybe music is the first to make the switch?
Murdoch talks about…
Posted in Internet, News on February 12th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
It’s always interesting to hear the opinion on things such as broadband, internet targets or politics and media bias from one of the most powerful forces in media and the Internet. Journalsim.co.uk recently posted several videos of Robert Murdoch giving his opinion on these and other subjects. Here’s the link.
Will the New York Times be printed in 5 years?
Posted in Publishing on February 12th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
As the world’s oldest newspaper goes digital, the New York Times Chairman doesn’t know (and doesn’t care!) if they will be printing his newspaper in 5 years.
The New York times is doing tons of interesting things such as their Microsoft-New York Times e-reader project, TimesReader, their MyTimes website or more recently their user created video content initiative.
So will they be printing the New York Times in 5 years? As Marc Rullo puts it (commenting the Lost Remote article), probably not, they won’t be printing it. You will, if you so choose.
YouTube’s Strategy in Question
Posted in IPTV, News on February 12th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Michael Arrington explains in this TechCrunch post what we believe to be a great summary of the most current situation of Television Networks in front of the Internet Challenge. Basically, today, television networks want their contents to be on the Internet, especially on YouTube, as this has proven to increase ratings. The problem is that they also want to be able to get online revenue out of their Internet viewers. YouTube thinks alike: they want television network contents to be in YouTube, actually much of their core contents contain copyrighted materials, and they are also trying to figure out a model to get revenue out of their video contents.
As Arrington points out, the problem is the amount of revenue that can be realistically be expected out of Internet video contents, at least with current advertising strategies such as pre-roll ads. No matter how much networks may benefit from having their contents on YouTube, they are not getting even close to what they are used to get in commercial advertising per viewer on TV. The fact that YouTube could filter copyrighted materials out of their system and they don’t is also part of the problem.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is changing it’s video strategy, moving away from user generated content (where YouTube is king) to showcase professional or semi-professional, programmed, “premium” content.
Natalie Aniela Dybisz (Photographer)
Posted in Visual, Photography on February 5th, 2007. By Ona Vinyamata.
Being only 21 years old, Miss Aniela is already an outstanding Flickr Celebrity. Specialy interesting and surreal her magical multiple selves.
Abundance And Scarcity Economics Shape Media Trends
Posted in Music, Long Tail, News on February 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
The perfect example of a Long Tail industry would be the music business, as can be read in a recent article (and in it’s comments) from Chris Anderson. The article explains how abundance and scarcity economics helped some music content creators realize that giving away their music for free, while still profiting on the experience of their live shows, is not as crazy as the music labels want everyone to believe.
With time, this trend may reshape the music industry from the ground up and may catch up in other similar industries under abundance economics. For cinema, television and even the publishing industry, the equivalent of a payed, live music performance could be translated to payed (or sponsored) early/live access to contents before they reach everyone else, for free.
Ideas from the publishing industry
Posted in Publishing, News on February 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Smart Mobs recently highlighted a couple of ideas and an experiment from the publishing sector that may be applied to other areas of the media and communication industry. When imagining how to apply those ideas on to another medium, such as on TV, we can’t help but think about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail point of view, even though not everyone will agree The Long Tail can actually be applied to TV…
Past Pre-Roll Ads
Posted in IPTV, News on February 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
YouTube’s future revenue sharing model, will probably benefit from Google’s own experiments with video advertising. Just last trimester Google started adding pre-roll ads to very targeted video contents found in Google Video. It seems though this was not a great idea. Just recently, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said Google would leave this rather uninspired advertising concept for “content-sharing partnerships, contextual ads and more experimentation”. Maybe the fact that 73% of YouTube users say they would visit the site less if it included pre-roll ads before every clip (Via Digg) convinced them this is not the best way to monetize $1.65 billion worth of eyeballs. Here’s hope Mr. Schmidt applies the same logic of less is more to their video strategy.
YouTube working on a revenue share model
Posted in IPTV, News on February 4th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
YouTube’s cofounder Chad Hurdley announced last week at Davos that his company is working on a way to share advertisement revenue with video content creators. Although Hurley gave no further details on their future revenue sharing model, Revver or Metacafe are great examples of what could YouTube could come out with.
Hurley said this move will foster creativity in YouTube’s community and that they didn’t start working on a revenue share model until just recently because they wanted to make sure they built a community around video first.
Another interesting point of view on this news comes from a Digg user comment: YouTube might be interested in a revenue share model to make it easier for copyright holders and the RIAA’s of the world to track authors who break copyright. If users want to be paid they will have to identify themselves, thus loosing a layer of anonymity. On top of this, sharing revenues with millions of users is a great excuse to promote Google’s Check Out service.