Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: new media

  • Netflix and the global entertainment network

    Netflix and the global entertainment network

    Streaming video service Netflix is looking to launch in China reports Bloomberg Business.

    The Chinese joint venture to be run with Wasu, a company backed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, looks to increase Netflix’s global footprint.

    Netflix plans “to be nearly global by the end of 2016,” the article quotes a company spokesperson answering questions about a possible China partnership.

    The Netflix model is a major departure from the established broadcast television and movie business where studios and producers would enter distribution agreements with local TV stations and theatre chains.

    With Netflix and the streaming model, the licensing of rights to local outlets becomes largely irrelevant with the producers – which increasingly includes Netflix itself – able to cut out the local licensees.

    A similar thing is happening in sports, one of the mainstays of broadcast television, where the professional leagues are taking control of their own content and leaving the networks, at best, minor players.

    Neflix’s move is part of a shift that’s affecting many industries, including those like broadcast television that thought they were untouchable.

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  • User generated content starts getting expensive

    User generated content starts getting expensive

    Ten years after being founded YouTube is facing competition as new sites are being setup or existing video services start aggressively courting creators reports Variety magazine.

    YouTube is the poster child of the user generated content movement where it’s largely unpaid contributors who generate the material that people  watch on the service.

    This model works fine as long as it’s amateur cat videos people are watching but when as it becomes a big business the justification for not paying content creators becomes flimsy.

    Google’s management recognised this some time back and started rolling out its own partnerships with creators to add more income than the often tiny advertising revenues most earn.

    Now it turns out those popular video bloggers are being tempted over to other sites and for YouTube the cost of premium content is about to get expensive.

    For the Silicon Valley businesses is requires a change of culture as they simply don’t like paying creators; in the tech startup view of the world it’s only coders, founders and few lucky support staff who get the rewards while the bulk of people who add value to the product are treated as commodity ingredients.

    For a period it was difficult for media startups to get funding unless they had a free source of user generated content, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti revealed in 2012.

    Tech investors prefer pure platform companies because you can just focus on the tech, have the users produce the content for free, and scale the business globally without having to hire many people.

    The movie studios and record companies on the other hand have a culture of paying their artists and production staff, despite their reputation of exploitation and stinginess.

    It may well be that we’re past the golden era of user generated content and the free lunch for the sites that depend upon free materials.

    If it is, then standards on sites like YouTube can only improve even at the costs of Google’s profit.

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  • What happens when others control your traffic?

    What happens when others control your traffic?

    Quartz magazine is held up as one of the most innovative news websites and one of the models for the future of online publishing however its president Jay Lauf suggested at the Digital Media Strategies conference in London yesterday that web users are increasingly shifting towards social sites to find their content.

    This isn’t new, most sites have been dependent upon referrals from the popular social media services and companies like Buzzfeed have built their entire strategies upon traffic from Facebook.

    Lauf suggests that sites like Quartz and Buzzfeed are increasingly losing control of their own audiences which raises risks for publishers and readers as they become dependent upon the social media gatekeepers.

    Quartz’s traffic from LinkedIn is a good example of how a gatekeeper can control traffic with referrals falling away as the social site pivots into a publishing platform of its own.

    It could turn out that control of traffic backfires however as people find those services deliver less value or relevant information.

    Ultimately it may be the gatekeepers who suffer from restricting traffic as readers decide they aren’t getting the news they want.

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  • Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

    Yahoo! Directory comes to an early end

    After twenty years the Yahoo! Directory closed down five days early reports Search Engine Land.

    The rise and and fall of Yahoo!’s core product illustrates both the volatility of the web and how the underlying dynamics of the internet has changed; at the time Yahoo! Directory was launched, we were struggling the task of keeping track of all the information being posted online.

    Even in those early days it was clear that task was becoming unmanageable and this was the problem Google set out to solve and its success destroyed the directory business along with a whole range of other industries.

    Yahoo! Directories’ demise needs to be noted by today’s web and social media giants; just as these technologies are disrupting old industries, new businesses aren’t immune to those changes.

     

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  • The tension between creative and business

    The tension between creative and business

    One of the ongoing tensions in the new media landscape is that between the demands of advertisers and content creators.

    This isn’t a new thing as a 1959 interview between Mike Wallace and TV pioneer Rod Stering shows.

    Sterling describes how pressures from networks and advertisers created often weird compromises along with a fair degree of self censorship among TV writers and producers.

    Little that Sterling describes would surprise today’s online journalists, bloggers and social media influencers who find themselves subject to identical pressures today.

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