Yesterday a comment I was unable to publish due to a pesonal footnote appeared in IPTVTimes’ Inbox.

It voiced two of the most common themes we hear from the industry – lack of funding and difficulty selling ads.

TV can be an expensive business and, although the internet has changed the economics, an age old formula remains at the core of the success or failure of a channel – build an audience and monetize that audience.

The former points to why fundraising is necessary, the latter to why media sales is a problem.

Looking on the bright side (which I promise to do more often after the gloom and negativity of recent posts on this blog), this means we’re all just two steps away from being moguls.

But, of course (there I go again being a cynic) these two steps are giant strides in reality.I will blog again in the near future on how these two fundamentals can be addressed.

Positive Steps

The latest term on my bullshit watch list is any term involving ‘grid’ or ‘cloud’. These terms should be used for processes that outsource processing to multiple computers on the net, but in streaming terms this generally means P2P (which strangely has become an unfashionable term of late, largely because the technology provides marginal benefit).

DigiMeld’s rather sparse public website is amongst the places you’ll find this snake oil, with totally inaccurate graphs promising incredible bandwidth and cost savings. Beware geeks bearing gifts, as they say.

Meantime, on bandwagon watch, ‘video episodic search engine’ (eh?) VideoSearch.TV can’t even spell ‘videos’… Dear me…

Here is the original post:
Reinvention

Markets were everything. They were the Gods. Everything was about making the markets efficient.

But when you have derivatives markets aren’t efficient. They are being skewed against the common interest. Middlemen are taking huge slices away from the buyers and the sellers. And the people who rule us, to their shame (especially after dreadful laws such as Sabarnes Oxley) let this go on unabated.

The debts built up by Bush (in budget deficit) and by Blair and Brown (in PFI) are horrible legacies for our futures. Our children will be paying for this legacy for the rest of their lives. There is little doubt that tax in the US and UK will need to rise by 10 – 15% before long at the same time as the value of our key assets – pensions and houses – are falling precipitously.

Don’t think this money disappeared into thin air – this went to the hedge fund and investment bank managers who made obscene money in the naughties. A lovely Thatcherite/Blairite legacy.
Unbelievably, these are the very people that all of the national newspaper took sides with when the current UK Chancellor proposed a small flat rate tax. So read their newspapers online and stop giving their apologists money. We are the turkeys who voted for Christmas.

I’m not very well off, but I still pay well over 65% of everything I earn in tax, between income, NI, VAT, duty and council tax. There are few places for us to go.

We’re entering a regressive market. This will have huge implications on the media world. People will be, for the first time, giving up their Sky subscriptions for Freeview. I am about to cancel my 8Mbps web connection for a 2Mbps web connection and drop Sky Sports and various other services to save £50 a month. The utility of these services is, frankly, marginal to me, especially as Virgin cap my service and Sky put games I want to watch on a service I cannot receive.

I’m also considering doing away with a landline – we get very few genuine calls that are not from family, who can be taught to use free VoIP.

I can’t really change my water or council tax bills, which have gone up at twice the rate of inflation and more for as long as I can remember, no matter who I vote for, but I can change my TMT bills. So, I predict that Sky will be in trouble and the clueless Virgin will become terminal. Mobile companies will reap their failure – like our current prime minister – to get their act together whilst the sun was shinning.

Like most of us, the UK TV industry is badly placed to weather this coming storm. In the oast, the entertainment industry has been a haven from the storm, but that was before the huge choice we have today.

Go here to read the rest:
Done Over

Sitting in the middle of the Internet TV industry with few axes to grind any more is an interesting place to be.

See original here:
Common Cause

The promise of mobile broadband is still a distant dream, if my experiences with 3’s dire service is anything to go by. Here’s a list of where it doesn’t work at all:

Read the original post:
Dongle Down