It seems to me that something like Wordcamp should be done in the UK. The techies have their BarCamp. Why not something around content? And it doesn’t have to be just about WordPress skills…. (I use Drupal for instance).
Perhaps someone could provide a venue? People can showcase their skills/services. And I can learn how to be a better blogger!
I dare say there are a few other people we could bring together to make something happen…
Email me on mike at mbites dot com if you are interested.
Jaman, California-based company that offers full length movies for either downloads or rental via a P2P client is planning to launch a European arm. The move is prior to an expansion of its programme of buying up rights to “mid-tail” independent and niche films.
Unlike Joost, which is really aimed at TV viewers, Jaman is going for audiences who want successful independent film (the kind of thing “Trainspotting” was once before it hit the big time) which they can’t get in their local cinema. (You might think that would mean that there would be a lot of Bollywood movies and Asian or Latin American cinema on it as a result. There is indeed much of this content, but so far 60% of Jaman’s content is actually English language based).
Babelgum is closest to Jaman’s model, with it’s emphasis on independent professionally produced video content, but unlike both of the aforementioned, Jaman is about downloading high quality HD film to rent or keep, rather than P2P streaming.
Jaman’s player works on Windows XP, Vista and Mac. Jaman has also developed an unofficial plug-in for the AppleTV device which syncs content downloaded via the Jaman player (they have their own proprietary DRM player which, like Apple’s Fairplay DRM, allows the sharing of the content across 5 devices) to Apple’s box. They’re lead engineer on the project actually came from Apple, in fact.
Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon previously co-founded Informatica in 1992, which IPO’d in 1999. Jaman is not short of friends in high places. Backers include Hearst Corporation.
Although Jaman’s video downloads to a PC, evidently they expect people to hook up the PC to a proper HD-capable TV and watch it in all its glory there. Any user creating an account – the sites is on an open Beta right now – will get three free film downloads before they have to shell out any money.
So far Jaman has aggregated over 1,500 international movies, and plans to acquire more content after its series A funding round, which should be completed this Autumn.
I met with British-born Faisal Galaria, recently appointed General manager EMEA, who was at one point a European director of Skype…
[continued]
“Jaman is about attracting the cognoscenti. It’s about the ‘fat belly’ of the Long Tail,” he says. “According to Screen Digest 99% of films made do not get theatrical distribution, which leaves a lot of great films unseen by the public.” Jaman is able to offer those rights holders distribution in return for a revenue share.
What’s the share? It’s 30/70 in Jaman’s favour. That sounds possibly on the high side, but if you think about it, all a film maker or rights holder has to do is allow their content to appear on the Jaman system from then on they need do nothing, since Jaman handles all the bandwidth and distribution.
Galaria says it’s taken $7.5m to develop Jaman over the last two years and it was launched in Beta in March.
Right now he is over in London talking to rights holders of libraries of content. Part of the Jaman strategy is also to strike deals with ISPs and portals to gain distribution and be a value-added service. In other words, “Sign up to our ISP and get movie downloads of independent cinema and TV”.
Downloading HD movies sounds like something of a nightmare. In reality the ‘weight’ is about 1 hour to one Gigabyte on an average broadband connections. So a 2.5 hour movie would be 2.5 hours long to download. At $2 to rent for a week and $5 to buy, that doesn’t sound too onerous, especially if its HD-quality content which you would just never see at your local cinema because the audience is too niche.
The downloading process is also “progressive” meaning that you can start watching the film before its finished downloading. A trailer appears in Flash on the site so you can ‘taste’ the movie prior to download.
Much of this would be impressive enough were it not for the fact that Jaman is ALSO a social network around independent cinema.
“We also have social networking built in for people to recommend movies and share lists – they can use it for content discvery. We think of it as ‘iTunes for Movies meets LastFM’ ” says Galaria.
This social element even extends to watching the film. It’s possible to watch the movie in ‘interactive’ mode where you can see comments other users have made in the time-line of the movie. Say the leading man punches the bad guy, someone might have said “That looks very fake” at that point – so that comment appears exactly as that scene flashes up.
Although Jaman is not strictly “UGC” – independent film makers can upload their own content using the “Open Cine” function. The community votes on it, and if it gets sufficient backing then Jaman flips the content into it’s main network and then will do a revenue share with the rights holder. No porn has appeared as yet – says Galaria – because the community can easily vote it down for deletion – plus its probably just not worth any pornographer’s while!
Jaman could also be fairly immune to competition from the likes of Joost of Babelgum, which rely on streaming to deliver their content.
As Galaria points out: “Joosta and Babalgum are streaming-based and standard defintion. We’re high definition and download. What happens if YouTube takes off their 10 minute limit on video? They have 100m users already. That’s hard to beat. Our approach is different in that it’s a compelling HD experience. So DRM and HD and community is a barrier to entry. A lot of our content is hard to get hold of. It’s not replicating Cable or satellite TV where there are 500 channels of crap. Thus is great quality content you can’t get it at the cinema. It’s not MTV or Daily motion. Again it’s quality. Hence why people pay to download it.”
Personally I should think documentary film is going to be one of the more compelling aspects of this service. There are plenty of niche documentaries released – especially at events like the Sundance Film festival – which here in Britain we never get to see unless Channel 4 or the BBC buy them up, and then months or years after they have aired elsewhere.
It’ll be interesting to see what content Jaman manages to acquire here in Europe as they ramp up, and how the European audience takes to their offering. I can also see a few TV channels will start to sweat a little more…
Here are a few camphone snaps I took at the recent New Statesman New Media Awards. It was hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent. It was held in some rather lovely gardens next to Westminster Cathedral which I daresay not that many people get to see. The guys getting their pictures taken are MySociety who won a couple of well-deserved awards, and at the bottom you can see the red trousers belonging to Guido Fawkes, the political blogger. Much fun was had by all, especially at the pub afterwards. I was a judge on the awards, ran the dedicated blog and wrote much of the awards supplement.
In July 2004 I wrote a piece called Confessions of a social software addict. In the current wave of interest about social networking (or social software as we called it then) I thought it might be instructive to see that the same issues – like having to register on several sites to be part of all the networks – have not gone away, even as they get worse today. I am posting it here because today SoFlow.com says it is closing. RIP guys.
The so-called Social Software world grew even more crowded this week, with the launch of SoFlow.com. I have decided to go into therapy for hyper-connectedness. Here’s my confession.
I’m a 35 year old man and I am a social software addict. Well, I must be.
For research purposes (famous last words, I know) I’ve registered on just about every online networking web there is. The latest to appear this week was SoFlow.com, the Friends-Reunited-meets-Friendster-meets-LinkedIn site.
Its backed by former Clickz.com founder Andy Bourland, and headed-up by dotcom veteran of these parts Robert Loch.
SoFlow wants to “create the most effective networking service in the world.”
I wish them well. But they are going to have to join the queue.
I, along with all the other addicts, am already registered on LinkedIn.com, Friendster.com, Everyonesconnected.com, Ecademy.com, Tribe.net, Ryze.com, Plink.com and the Google-backed Orkut.com.
Hyper-connectedness is a diverting pastime. But, like most addictions, it’s getting a little tiresome.
Online networking / dating / Friends-Reunited-nostalgia-hunting, whatever you want to call it, is clearly of huge fascination to people.
Why? Because people are interested in people. It’s in our DNA.
The Web has managed to revolutionise a number of areas since it’s invention, and to some at least, online networking looks set to be the next big thing.
Yesterday, the tech news site Netimperative ran a sector seminar on e-tail at which delegates heard how e-tailing is changing retailing on the high street.
A similar paradigm shift is happening with online networking versus real-world networking.
What it has started to do is interesting enough. We’ve all read the stories in the newspapers about the divorces resulting from Friends Reunited members getting re-acquainted.
The Social Software area remains an academic debate, and many a blogger’s favourite topic. And there are high hopes for its role in re-connecting communities, atomised by the modern destruction of the nuclear family and a mobile population.
But from a business perspective, social software sometimes seems more like a solution in search of a problem.
The business models of some of the latest social software start-ups remain a curiosity.
LinkedIn.com will (eventually) be a subscription service allowing users to input and manage their contacts and to search for connections. Right now it is quite grey and business-like. To some this has been an advantage, along with its relatively closed system of networking. But the jury is still out on how big a business this is.
Spoke.com is a deeply integrated enterprise solution which extracts contact data from enterprise applications (such as Outlook) to establish what connections you do have. There are more, like VisiblePath, Contact Network and SocialText, digitally mapping the relationships inside and outside corporations. These tools try to leverage connections, often through email traffic.
There are the beginnings of a useful sales contact tool here. Possibly. Though most sales people already know who their best contacts are.
ZeroDegrees is an Outlook plug-in and related service which inputs, manages, prioritises and searches your connections on email. If you like that sort of thing.
Then there are the online SocSoft businesses which vary from dating services to friends of friends sites, like Ryze.com, perhaps the original networker’s paradise.
There’s an online social network to suit anyone and everyone’s taste.
But register on them and what happens. Usually very little. You invite your friends and contacts. You email friends using the system, with messages you would have sent on normal email anyway. You get testimonials from people you know you’d get testimonials from. Everyone slaps each other on the back and then what?
A few month later your registered profile is out of date, you’ve made a bunch of contacts who aren’t on the system anyway and you’re now being spammed by multi-level marketers who’ve found your profile and want to sell you something you don’t need or want.
Outside of re-connecting with the odd contact you’d lost touch with, it all feels a little incestuous.
Worst of all, you get approached for connections by link-whores, trying to impress others with the size of their network.
Last week I had to contact LinkedIn.com direct because their system didn’t allow me to break my connection with a prominent networking guru. This individual has over 2,000 connections in their personal network, a staggering number of contacts, which implies that a network so indiscriminate is actually pretty useless.
But after deleting him from my network, the emails started again in earnest: “Hi. I noticed that you are also using LinkedIn. I’d be happy to recommend you to the people I know. If you feel the same, please accept my invitation to connect networks. I’ll only pass requests on to you from people I trust, and I hope you’ll do the same for me.”
Can this guy not take a hint?
His sheer connectedness suggests that the people who have chosen not to connect with him, are far more discriminating than those who have. (And that’s how you insult 2,000 people in one stroke, BTW. OK, make that 2,001).
There are probably a few more, but I can think of two main avenues for business-oriented social software from here on.
The first is recruitment advertising. Knight-ridder, the US-based newspaper network has already made a strategic investment in Tribe.net. This was a canny move. They have realised that some day classified recruitment ads will start disappearing into SocSoft applications. They already are in an informal sense, with subscription services effectively replacing the classified model.
RealContacts.com, for instance, is a New Zealand-based company focused purely on allowing people to pass around information about jobs through friends of friends. It’s model could have implications for recruitment advertising publishers such as newspapers and magazines.
Have you noticed the number of recruitment firm personnel registering on these services? I rest my case.
My networking guru’s example suggests a second path.
It’s wonderful to be able to see who the contacts are of my contacts. Oh, to surf other people’s address books. Privacy? What’s that?
But surely the really valuable people either won’t go onto these systems, or will lock down their profile so hard, they’ll be practically invisible.
History tells us that the most powerful networking communities have always been closed, not open. Have you ever seen the Mason’s throw open-house drinks parties?
However, as I said. I’m an addict. So I will be registering on SoFlow.com.
See you in The Priory.
I’ve been kinda busy with other things lately (like, having a personal life) so it’s good to get back to some blogging on mbites (going since 2002, don’t you know?). Here’s a random list of things I’ve encountered recently.
• There’s a good article from Business Week on blogging, but you realise it’s written by an intern (it actually says this at the bottom) when they fail to check that TechCrunch UK is not running right now and implies Pete Cashmore’s Mashable makes all its money from advertising, when quite blatantly – and to be fair this is made quite clear – it is a front for his consulting services, which I dare say earns a tonne more money than the ads.
• Good piece from Last 100 on Microsoft’s future TV strategy: “There’s a reason Microsoft chose Mediaroom as the brand instead of simply Microsoft TV: they are looking to the future of entertainment, where TV is just one piece of the puzzle. Don’t be surprised if they eventually change “all your media in once place” to “all your media with you everywhere you go” because that’s where they are headed.”
• Marketers are abandoning Second Life. Why? Because inside the game they are purchasing genitalia but not, for instance the shoes that Reebok markets inside the world. Linden Labs claims it has eight million members but actual visitors to the world clock in at about 40,000 *regular* playing members. And many of those are members who do not pay a dime to SL. Meanwhile stores like American Apparel have been attacks by members. Not fun for marketers. The alternatives are going into worlds like There and Entropia Universe which are a great deal more structured than SL and don’t allow the sale of body parts. There is a long article investigating the whole issue over at The LA Times.
• This piece over at the NY Times seems to suggest Twitter is the new thing for marketers, but only today I’ve been reading about Twitter starting to struggle against Facbeook status updates. Conclusion? The market is in flux right now and there are no clear winners yet, especially in the realm of “expressive presence”.
• Content targeting is what Google has built its business on with AdSense contextual advertising. So by working out how to capture TV sound on a PC, Google can identify the TV show being watched and use that information to immediately return personalized Internet content to the viewer. This project is still in very early R&D stages but it is almost certain to happen. Does the TV industry have ANYTHING in response to this either via traditional broadcast network or IPTV? I doubt it. And it turns out ad-skipping could actually help TV networks to improve getting their ads in front of people who actually want to view them. Who knew?
• London is the Facebook capital of the moment, with more people here on the social networking site than in any other city. But without realising it most are now being unwittingly locked into a system that is going to be very hard to leave. Facebook’s locked-down approach is profoundly anti-Web 2.0 and utterly against the open standards the Web was heading towards. But as I keep telling people who wail about this stuff, this is exactly what works for the Average Joe. In just the same way Apple made digital music easy by instituting its own DRM (Fairplay) and eco-system (iTunes, iPod, Mac), Facebook is locking us all into its own application-friendly system. And we’re all biting. Facebook is now a Black Hole, sucking data into its inner core. Watch and learn.
Live blogging from Mashup, "TV 2.0"
Introducing the event Simon Grice of etribes and Mashup says sites like TV-Links.co.uk and Joox.net are the reason he hasn't watched live TV for 6 months. And hasn't rented a video for 6 months…
Tom Weiss, CEO of TV Genius, is Chair.
John Varney
Sturart Prebble, launch CEO of On Digital, said digital TV is about turning 1 audience of 20 million into 20m audiences of 1.
But with no backchannel they could only create lots of channels that weren't very good.
The shift towards IPTV (BT Vision, YouTube, Titan TV, Aattoo, Jaman, Babelgum) headed towards 1 billions audience of 1. The entire Net population.
Is this TV 2.0? No. It's TV delivered by other means.
The events of 9/11 was the last event covered by major TV networks. The rest have begun to be covered by ordinary people with mobile phones like 7/7 or the Bali bombings. They gave this coverage to broadcasters. But the trend is towards user generated content, especially for major events. Future events go straight online not straight to the big broadcasters. This indicates a big change in only 4 years. Broadcasters are in effect helpless.
It doesn't mean IPTV will be irrelevant but it does mean that it will fail if it doesn't take account of the community of viewers and users.
TV: 15 mins of fames
YouTube: 15 secs of fame
Twitter: 15 characters of fame
Summary: It's not about TV 2.0, it's about version 1.0 of 'something else'. The web becoming a media in its own right. The winners will use content as a community experience, broadcasting every single life to billions of people. The losers will just put TV onto the web.
Mike Short, 02 and Mobile Data Association
Policy from government is not helping paid-for content.
He says Brussels announcement's preference for DVB-H is not helpful.
The mobile is the "fourth screen" and it's not just TV, but messaging, downloads you name it. By the end of next there will be 100m GPS enabled mobiles in the world. So maps and applications anywhere anytime is heading to a visual world.
Video capability of handsets is not great. BUt the mass market fourth screen needs to be more imaginative than just TV.
We need to think about personalisation of content and interactivity. Premium rate mobile means that you are partly more in control of getting involved in TV shows, but it has to evolve.
We also have to think about advertising. So the transaction basis may not continue… so a Mobile Sky or sponsored advertising. Adverts where you can influence the outcome on the screen.
1 billion phones shipped a year. 4bn phones by 2012. We need to plan for this. Some innovation will come from Asia, not just Europe.
Nick Brown, Cube.tv part of a2a Groupl PLC
(Inventor of the Red Button on Sky)
How do we generate cash out of this fragmented audience. We all have cameras now but who cares? Where's the revenue? Audience? How do we fund it till we answer these questions? How to drive and retain viewers?
In the next 8-10 years while there is a shift to watching OUT of home, there is also a stable revenue stream for watching IN home.
Trainers Eye is a new channel he is working on. It's a niche products, – trainer stables for horse racing. Why not buy a channel like toy buy a magazine in the newsagent? Move it into pubs and clubs and outdoor screens
Idea is to push meaningful content to outdoor screens, instead of BBC News 24 but comedy with SMS interactivity.
They want to launch a 'red button for outdoor'. Want to switch interactivity from the phone into the email in-box, which will be a TV mail. Supported by ads and driving audiences into and out of content. TV in your email basically, possibly using a Flash player.
All of the content ITV has only 15% were hitting on-demand button. Most people still want linear lean back TV.
What do viewers want. There is 3/4 bns of pounds spent on TV? So where's the cash?
PANEL DISCUSSION
Existing speakers joined by….
Peter Miles, Sub.tv
Richard Griffith, BT Vision, Strategy dir.
Mateo Berlucchi, LiveStation – Microsoft's Joost Killer) (Sign up for it and mention Mashup to get a beta invite)
Mateo: Old TV model based on lack of choice. People have become a lot more time-poor and the audience is now fragmented. But the Red Button never took off. So people now want real interactivity and that's what the web delivers.
Richard: In theory we could do a lot more interactivity because we will have a broadband backchannel. But we have to be smart. Ordering a pizza via digital TV is torturous. The remote control is not the right device. So doing interactivity right is really important.
Peter: IPTV is just more clever TV. Yes, return path and interactivity. But TV 2.0 is a lot more about integrating messages and people can consume it in different ways. Young people don;t really use email now they use IM, so it's that kind of leap. It's about finding a community and delivering content that relates to them to a niche audience where people want it and they can in turn create content for the community.
The BBC and ITV are losing young audiences they.
Richard: Young people are going to get jobs and old and people get home form work and want to watch stuff on the big screen and sometimes on demand. But it's not just about what young people do.
John: Every study over the last 15 years shows that 30-45 year olds are not the same as their parents who now just watch Newsnight.
Question:
Paul Cleghorn, tioti.com: People under 40 are watching TV while doing something else like doing email.
Peter: Youth are great at filtering out ad messages because they are multi-tasking and consume media in a different way. They are digital natives, not immigrants.
A guy from Three: We run TV through DVB-H and TV on demand and have done it for three years. People's interest can be satisfied by a small as well as a big screen interest. In Australia where we run live TV over the mobile. We see drop in mobile voice. People switch on mobiles to see BB when the ads come on the TV. So it's about understanding what individuals want at any one time. Choice drives a lot of it.
Matteo: Broadcasters will have an upper hand because they still are in the market for broadcasting fantastic content. A guy with a Web cam still won't be able to compete with CNN.
Nick: Youth don't spend money. Their choice is to find content without paying any money.
Richard: Joost is not the death of BT Vision. Great pictures if you are on a PC but not great for TV. Apple TV has an advantage as it gets to the TV. Both have the same problem which is content. Wither you own the right or you are a firm like BT where you are buying content rights. You need money to play in that game and the problem with a lot of companies
Nick: Joost does not work well with UK broadband networks. Quality will go down and as they try to scale they will hit products. They have great marketing and hype. BT Vision and Apple – the bar is already set at Sky Plus. With has 2.5 units in the market. Apart from a few issues you have
My problem with BT vision and Ale is how to you sin-post non-linear TV. Watch more o to E4?
Peter: Is Joost disrupting? Yes. Kill TV ? No. People want to watch rugby on 42inch plasma screen not PC. We show student sports on Wednesday afternoon as we know student groups are watch TV. So they can send messages to eachother.
John: There is room for Joost and ITV and Channel 4. The question is what is the percentage that moves online away
from the networks.
Nick: Will be more like the original Sky model. Before Sky it was The Big Match etc. People predicted the death of live Football when Sky came on but the opposite happened. So Joost and other players will bring in gross numbers of niche players, like fishing or chess. There is going to be a space for them.
TechTV. John Robinson: We're still looking at broadcasters if we want to watch a movie. We're not looking at values in packets. The value is in the technology not TV. TV is just a way of gathering people to sue the technology. americans can build these networks because they have a very big market. So it's best to devise a device where you can track the audience. The tech is there, we have to find the way the advertiser wants to pay for it.
Peter Daw (Dawe Vision): Will users cease to distinguish between PC and TV screen? Is the concept of TV of lean back only one of four other ways.
Mike: Interactivity still has to be built around rights. In the digital world we need rights that can flow across platforms. Mobiles are becoming projectors not just small screen.
Question: Most channels are rubbish on digital. Interactivity is not what will save niche channels.
Peter: Most UGC TV is crap but even there there is an audience however small.
Q: What about data?
Mike: Media on demand rather than video on demand is where I start. It's all about the personal experience. Place, time and personalisation.
Matteo: 1.1m subscribers . 1 pay per movie per month and fill up their DVR and the rest is linear TV because they can't be arseed.
Simon Grice: All the historic content created like classic TV shows means there is a lot of stuff to watch online and TV is not needed as much.
Q: Can discovery be generated ?
Answer (my interpretation): Social networks help with discovery of long tail TV.
RAN OUT OF LAPTOP BATTERY AT THIS POINT…
Check out the TV 2.0 event in London this week. Blog coverage to follow……
I never thought I’d see the day, but the Police are getting into spamming videos from their mobiles.
West Yorkshire Police has launched 999tv.org showcasing video features and advice from a number of the region’s police officers, as well as the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service.
The first video shows how Police are using mobile phones to literally spam any Bluetooth device in the vicinity with a “Crime Prevention Advice” video. It’s like something out of Minority Report.
Stop me if I’m wrong but the average person is going to think “Hell, I’m being spammed with a virus onto my mobile!” and immediately delete the thing, thus negating any positive effect of this initiative.
There are some fascinating lessons to be learned from the closure of BackFence.com in the US. I think the most salient come in the comments to this story, namely that:
• “Hyper-local is about utility and networks of people, not citizen journalism”
• “they approached the problem from the top down rather than working to organize and shape existing natural local networks and chatter”
• “See the existing 72,000+ public ‘neighborhood’ Yahoo Groups (and who knows how many private groups) and the fast growing Facebook Regional networks as proof points of scalable hyper-local models…and the focus of these services isn’t even hyper-local!”
It’s clear to me, having watched the debates about citizen journalism (effectively ordinary people acting like reporters) on the one hand and social media (like MySpace, Facebook, even YahooGroups) on the other, that in every scenario social media wins. Why? Because of time. The simple fact is most people don’t have time to create content around their local area. Believe me, I’ve done it (professionally as a local newspaper journalist, and privately as a local activist). It’s a pain!
The only thing that makes it easier is being able to do it in “gulps” as in “Here’s the local phone number for this service” or “here’s where you sign up for this”. That’s it. Most people can’t do much more and those that could don’t have the time. Microblogging and Facebook status updates are literally a gift from heaven in this scenario.
That’s why social networks which give local people the tools to connect and create knowledge selfish/selflessley will win in this game. That’s also why local newspapers are potentially screwed.
It looks like 02 has swiped the Apple iPhone from the clutches of Vodafone, according to breaking news reports. Although 02 itself is denying it. For now…
UPDATE: A well placed tbites source at a rival network with no interest in spinning the story tells us the iPhone has “definitely” gone to 02 in the UK. What everyone is not sure about yet is if this is just going to be the US / 2.5G version, or which operator will get the license for the 3G version of the iPhone which is due to appear at the end of this year/beginning of next. What is also puzzling some industry observers is why 02 wants the iPhone when it is already the leading UK network, and is therefore not in as much need of an extra 500,000 customers (as were attracted to AT&T in the US). The plot thickens…
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