Media
Netflix is pushing into Latin America and the strategy is interesting: it’s trying to acquire content such as soap operas to stream them into customers’ homes. It’s good to imagine the trade-off playing in the Media companies’ strategy sessions – between the fear of cannibalizing sales and the need to partner with this strange ally now, while they’re still offering decent terms. We’re glad to sit on the sidelines.
From the “business models we must understand” series, group buying in Brazil is moving fast with two deals/ funding rounds announced in the last 2 days. We have a collection of links with these moves and to our previous posts on the subject.
There’s a wealth of good articles trying to predict the future of reading. We’ll focus on Kevin Kelly’s latest post on publishing – What Books Will Become – which tries to take the logical steps beyond the Kindle and social reading revolutions to imagine where the “book” is going (social reading here enveloping social highlighting, bookmarking, commenting, additions/corrections). We also link to “trusty Kevin Kelly reverberator” Seth Godin and to other posts.
We’ve stumbled upon a series of videos by Bloomberg Television on Game Changers, and the first episode we saw is fantastic and profiles Steve Jobs. There are many interesting moments and lessons, but one that stuck with us concerns the power of ideas and the inspiration/ motivation they bring – not just to potential customers but, in Apple’s case at a time when morale was at the lowest point, also internally. That’s when the team finally “awoke” and all that brilliance in engineering/ product design/ marketing was brought together to create, as a VC says in the video, “the greatest comeback in corporate history”.
While this is just part of the overall digital/ online content evolution, our subject today is TV. One story is a behind-the-scenes account of how Google TV came to be – and what’s at stake if and when they get it right (or when somebody else does it). The other story shows the experiments that “old-media” TV companies are running to benefit from – or to try not to get overrun by – the effects of social media as it regards TV watching. There’s a lot happening, and business models just aren’t defined yet. As we’ve said in our Q4 2010 report, “Experimenting has a cost. Failing to experiment, ditto.”
FastCompany.com has an article in its February ’11 issue about Youtube. Sure, it’s an interesting read for those interested in Youtube and Google, or in media, advertising and online services in general. But there were other good takeaways or at least building blocks that we list in the post.
Every source has its biases, but it’s fair to say that the New York Times produces top-quality content over a surprisingly wide range of topics. For instance, its DealBook section and daily emails are a very valuable source for investors, as are the many business, scientific and cultural articles that can, over time, foster different/ multidisciplinary mental models. So it’s only natural that news of a documentary called Page One, in which the film crew spends almost an year inside the NYT in the midst of the current media revolution (blogging/ socialmedia/ iPad/ Kindle/ Wikileaks/ etc.), had us pretty excited.
An article in the New York Times raises a red flag about the music industry: could digital music sales not be nearly enough to replace ever-decreasing CD revenues? This reminded us of Chris Anderson’s 2006 classic book “The Long Tail”. What if the long tail just isn’t long enough to save some industries?
We often find relevant articles related to subjects we’ve already discussed at Buysiders.com, and we post them as updates while linking to the original post(s). While each update should be interesting on its own, the idea is to read the whole “thread”, especially as time goes by and we develop a sense of history. In IP’s case, our Intranet dates back to 2003 and back then we made an effort to find older articles about companies and sectors we were studying. Being able to tap into this rich history is quite valuable and we hope to build the same wealth of links at Buysiders.com. In today’s piece we’re posting two updates about different subjects: crowdsourcing and e-publishing/ the “Web is dead” debate.
We’ve all heard about the Social Network movie, but a better time allocation is the Web2.0 Summit interview with the man himself, The Time Magazine Person of The Year, Mark Zuckerberg. Before we poke some fun at Facebook, here’s a thought: we do make fun of what’s relevant to us the more mainstream it gets, yet it doesn’t necessarily mark the end of an era. Think of Microsoft Windows, the OS we all have loved to hate for the last 25 years or so and it’s still there. The “winner takes all” aspect of the network effect in Facebook’s case is a fragile argument – what network are we talking about, and why will we have to interact with it the Facebook way? Just because we can’t see today what could topple Facebook, it doesn’t mean something – or likely a combination of “things” – won’t.
