Buried in recent news has been the revelation that Universal Music has stopped supplying music videos to MTV and is to instead feature them on their own Vevo internet video platform.
There is a real dichotomy here: music videos were long seen as a promotional piece, a kind of advert, for the music. But that has, of course, changed. Also, MTV has very little to do with music any more. However, the exposure that the label will get from dropping such distribution in favour of building its own service shows that content owners have a clear choice.

They have to become wholesalers or they need to be retailers – being both at the same time is an increasingly difficult position to maintain.

Meanwhile, the $1bn dollar deal between Netflix and Epix (a Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate JV), along with a recent similar announcement from BSKyB with HBO in the UK, shows the stakes involved and why it is so difficult for any new entrant into this market to gain a foothold.

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The Content Dichotomy

Adaptive streaming is all the rage. Lots of clients are asking for it, and why not ? The idea that you can have a stream that ‘adapts’ itself to the viewer’s bandwidth seems attractive, and is hardly new. Real had it in the the nineties and Microsoft in the naughties.

Now there’s Apple’s version, and Microsoft’ latest surestream in Silverlight.

But the reality is that it is almost impossible to get this technology to work. First of all, support from CDNs is patchy, then the implementation seems fickle. Sky seems to use surestream for their service, so all you see are weird ghost images the whole time, and TVCatchup seem to suffer from a similar problem with their iPad service.

At Narrowstep we developed a multi stream service that did not try to dynamically adapt. I still believe that this is the best approach, especially when deployed with an intelligent player.

The trouble is most web based video players are dumb as hell, and whilst load of investment has gone into video management systems, the real need is for better and more intelligent players.

And not just on web tv players – TVs will soon need this intelligence just to compete.

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Here is the original post:
Adapting To Conditions

The very sad news reached me yesterday that my former business partner Paul Robinson had passed away after a brief fight with the big C.

It is very unlikely that there will ever be anyone quite like Paul again.

I first met him when running Interactive1 and he came to sell the monitoring system produced by his company Jyra to our clients, which included Shell and PwC. I thought he was a salesman, it turned out he was the Chairman of NASDAQ’s most traded small cap company. It was 2000 and the height of the dot com boom.

A couple of years later, just after I left i1, Paul approached me with an idea for a streaming media company. By this point I had already formed Narrowstep Ltd, and we went on to form Narrowstep Inc together. Paul was a master fundraiser (read: salesman) but had a dereliction for detail.

Narrowstep was largely conceived and built around several rounds in the Toucan Bar round the corner from our first offices in an attic in Queen Anne St in central London. I never had so much fun establishing and building a company.

Paul’s background was as colourful as his character. From what he told me (and remember, Paul was a salesman first and foremost), he grew up in Ireland the son of a senior exec at EMI; he went to St Columba, which he hated, and then found his way to England, via Trinity College, Dublin, to a career in the nascent IT industry. He was variously a very early employee for Cisco, ran the Singapore office for Prime Computers and made and spent a small fortune. There are various hazy stories such as the Porsche he wrote off on the day he bought it, resulting in a hefty driving ban and the tax bill for several tens of millions for stock options in Cisco he had long sold at a meagre strike price. There was always something a bit rock and roll about Paul.

After building a number of companies and taking them public, including Jyra, Narrowstep and Mobestar, Paul moved back to the Far East, married a Thai lady and started a recording studio (or so he said).

When this all fell apart towards the end of 2009 he turned up at my business club in London dressed all in black with six guitars and three enormous suitcases, drunk as a skunk off the first class flight from Bangkok. Everyone thought he was an aging rock star. Naturally, we had a few more jars and I found him a hotel for the night.

A few months later I heard from him again. He was recovering from his first round of kemo and we discussed some new deals. I set up a day of meetings for him with some likely companies and we stalked around town like the old days.

But he looked frail and was wearing a dapper three piece suit and mackintosh in the Spring heatwave.

So, Paul, it seems that you have made your last sale (or is there another one to come at the Pearly Gates ?). It was great knowing you, mate. You made life interesting.

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Excerpted from:
Death Of A Salesman

Last weekend I spent my time in a field in the East End of London (I think they prefer the term ‘Victoria Park’) along with forty or so thousand other middle aged men with our beer bellies, greying and receding hair, leather jackets, Journey ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ t-shirts (yes, we were there the first time around) and long neglected air guitar graces.

We are the baby boomers, and I can reasonably confidently calculate that the net worth of those headbangers exceeded that of the ten times bigger Glastonbury crowd (indeed, most of us had been at Glastonbury when there were only 40k people there) by some distance (taking out the hedge fund managers in their VIP yurts, of course – but hopefully they will be taxed to extinction by the next Festival).

The marketing industry (and the TV business to boot) has totally missed the point of the demographic timegap. Apple hasn’t. It seems that the iPad is mostly bought by us bloated has beens. It’s quite expensive for a toy and embarrassing to carry around with you for a teenager). And because we’re used to buying stuff and not stealing it off the internet, we buy even more stuff from iTunes because of it. After all, we can’t afford to buy bigger houses any more (and for many the kids have left home), but we do have decent disposable income and we love our toys.

Sky is being hugely successful due to its sports, but its technology probably leaves most of us peeved.

Brands, and therefore TV, have long been obsessed with cultivating their next generation of consumers. So, for the past two decades Gen X and Gen Y were everything. But these are relatively small demographics, and thanks to their student debts and the housing market, they’re really quite poor. The kind of people who will pay for Sky Movies and order in Pizza Hut and only go down a pub on a Saturday (or a Friday after payday). The withered demographic now entering their twenties are going to bring no growth to any market, therefore companies and brand have to rethink their strategies totally.

What an opportunity exists out there to bring premium services and products to the world’s first real eGadget generation.

And back to the fans of UFO, Marillion, Foreigner and the other bands who now regularly play in backrooms in Llandudno. There isn’t a radio station in London for us. There isn’t any coverage on TV. There’s a massive back catalogue. As ever, there’s just a magazine catering for this industry.

If a market isn’t satisfied, it seems, it dies.

I’m sitting here listening to UFO (bad name for SEO, guys) and wondering what the hack happened to narrowscasting ? But also hatching plans for the future.

This blog is dedicated to one of the greatest rock and roll legends in my book, the somewhat unwell Mr Pete Way.

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Read the original:
Whatever Happened To The Headbangers ?

Like many genres that were once ghettoised by broadcasters, business has become mainstream; from Dragon’s Den to The Apprentice, the drama of building, running and trying to make a business succeed has been turned into entertainment, for better or for worst.

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No Business For TV