Archive for the ‘Disruptive Innovation’ Category
Why crowd-sourced films are the biggest disruptive force I’ve seen in years
Warning: Severe disruption ahead
Something new for entertainment executives to stress over
Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with a mobile video app called Vyclone.
Check the site, download and play, but I urge you to play with other people who have the app in the same room. It’s really important you do, or you just won’t get it.
If you’ve ever been to a large event, videoed it, and have then been disappointed at the results, you’ll love this app. If you’ve experience of storytelling in video, the possibilities will probably charm you.
If you work for a commercial broadcaster, or in electronic distribution rights for events, it will probably stop you sleeping at night.
Vyclone finds all the other people in the same place as you, recording the same thing, and stitches their videos together into a multi-camera shoot. If you don’t like what it does automatically, you can make your own camera mix.
It’s the most disruptive, fascinating, troubling, creative, delicious, innovation I’ve seen in years. This is a game-changer.
Some perspective: 15 years ago, worried rights-owners would try to ban people bringing video cameras into their events (some still do). They had already sold the TV rights to another company and were obliged to protect that sale.
With mobile phone video, there were too many people to police, but they quickly realised it wasn’t a threat because these individuals made rubbish content. They weren’t organised and had no scale or impact. The individual YouTube stats for the uploaded videos proved that.
These elements have now irrevocably changed. A crowd-source video app offers both organisation and scale, automatically.
Let’s say I’m at Radio 1′s Hackney Weekend music festival. I’m recording Nicki Minaj performing ‘Starships’
(top chune btw). My camera only gets a general view of the stage. But at the front, two other people I don’t even know are recording the left and right sides of the stage. One might have Minaj in full close-up. Yet another person is recording the crowd and their friends further back.
The app stitches all of those shots together into a music video.
If you’re a broadcast professional, I can already hear your say “it still won’t be as good as our planned, directed TV coverage”, and you are absolutely right. But, here’s the kicker:
It’ll be good enough.
YouTube doesn’t amass millions of eyeballs a day because it’s professional. It has content that for the most part, is just good enough for the few minutes those millions want to watch.
Now, take my music festival scenario and imagine instead a riot. Or a war zone. You see how powerful this might be for news gathering?
There’s still a long way to go obviously. For now, you actually have to be recording through an installed application for the auto-mix to work. There’s a limit of 4 other cameras in a single mix. The video quality is, well, from a mobile phone. All these will improve and become less restrictive.
But even now, it’s good enough.
There are fights to come. The technology raises massive issues about whether anyone can “own” the resulting video when anyone is free to remix and share the individual parts.
Given the massive, lucrative sporting event about to engulf my home city of London, I’ll give you one last scenario to imagine the impact of a crowd-sourced, non-owned, multiple camera recording:
I wish the International Olympics Committee a good night’s sleep.
Google/Bing payments to Twitter are a double standard
If Twitter, why not the news media?
Did you spot an item just before Christmas that Twitter is now supposed to have pushed into profit?
There’s comment on whether they are actually in profile, whether this will be enough to sustain Twitter and lots more on what else it might have to do, but I want to point out just one thing.
Twitter is (possibly) profitable because Google and Bing are between them giving Twitter $25m to access data which will then go into their search indices.
The data is mostly provided free by Twitter’s millions of users.
Contrast this deal with Google taking data from newspaper websites and putting that into its search engine. But not giving the newspapers any money.
The news data comes from fairly expensive journalists who investigate stories, check facts and sometimes put their lives in danger.
Twitter, free data = $25m. News, expensive data = Zero.
Now I’m no fan of large news organisations some of whom may be confused about user behaviour on the web, but you know … this state of affairs seems a little strange.
Norwegian broadcaster backs P2P
And how!
Paidcontent have reported that the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK are setting up their own Bittorrent tracker server to enable people to search for their content and share it amongst themselves.
What this means is that they can release much higher quality versions of their programmes and it won’t cost them any extra to distribute them. It also means that their content starts to become self-organising as the viewers and listeners can link and tag and store the stuff they want.
Already dedicated viewers of some of the material released are producing their own subtitles to translate the programmes into english, known as ‘fansubbing’.
Having your own tracker is also a great idea because it allows you to be free with your content and still retain some control as the tracker server will be accruing some vital statistics about what material is shared, when, by whom and how widely.
Maybe in the future NRK won’t even need it’s own archives, as the material will all be distributed throughout the computers of the good people of Norway. (This is clearly fanciful, it will never happen!)
I can’t help thinking that someone in the BBC is thinking that they’ve been beaten to a great idea. But why not make a start by putting every BBC Schools programme broadcast last year on a P2P network, accessed by the BBC’s own torrent tracker?
Google drops old media ad sales
No print, no radio. Is new media solely where the money is?
Google said its move into print and radio ads would perk up media sales. It hasn’t happened.
In fact with the closure first of their print ad business, and now radio ad sales, Google leaves the market in a much worse state than it found it.
(Perhaps WSJ Managing Editor Robert Thomson was right when he suggested that Google ‘devalues everything it touches’?)
TV ads still seem to be on the radar, but Business Week explains why this plan might similarly struggle.
Up till three weeks ago there was speculation that Google would hang onto radio sales.
Google bought the radio automation company dMarc three years ago, agreeing a total price of over a billion US dollars, although only $102m changed hands initially.
The idea was to sell inventory quickly and easily with a much more detailed reporting structure, bringing new advertisers into a radio ad market which was already on the slide in the States.
Radio Business Report has some insight from a former dMarc customer: The original pre-Google system, while selling ads more cheaply than they could themselves, was very effective. But Google made changes to the sales method without consulting the station and revenues collapsed.
Is this just a simple development mistake? There seems to be value in these forms of selling, but only if the media owner and the advertiser can talk to one another.
Ironically, it seems as though in an online world where disintermediation is the mantra, and something Google has previously championed, the very thing which caused this failure was Google’s attempts to be the middleman.
But perhaps Google’s exit is a long-term strategic decision, rather than a short-term response to the current recession.
If so, what do they know about old media sales that we don’t?
Pirate Bay trial – live updates
The infamous bittorrent search site, The Pirate Bay, is on trial in Sweden accused of assisting copyright infringement.
There’s a good backgrounder to the case, and some live tweeting going on as well.
Firesharers small win against RIAA
Filesharing with shared computers may equal anonymity
An american judge has decided that the RIAA, who are seeking to prosecute illegal filesharers, may not have personal information from Boston University about who was using a particular computer.
There were too many people around who could have had access apparently.
So if you’re going to share files at university, make a party out of it!
