Skip to main content

media myopia

I am a big science fiction fan, as a kid I spent hours watching shows of the late 70's and early 80's. From the original Battle Star Galactica to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, being a baby of the 70's. I was just old enough to be absolutely awed by the new age of sci fi films ushered in by George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg and then to have a front seat for the many block busters of the 80's. Most of my viewing came from tv, cable (remember WHT?) and then VHS. Today, the internet has made many of the shows from the 80's and 90's a stones throw away IF the media companies that own them would only get wize to the possibilities. Just a minute ago I was at tv.com , watching episodes of Star Trek, what I noticed was that the episodes available are only a subset of the show's total run. Why? Why are the media companies blind to the potential of allowing anyone , anywhere to watch the complete series online? The conventional explanation is that they are unable to extract sufficient revenue from ads to support this, but how can they know this if they don't try? More important, is the fact, that it seems their analysis seems to be valuing the potential of each series at a time, rather than looking at the potential for all their properties online to produce ad revenue. Think about it, the Star Trek series is something that on cable , can ONLY be watched during specific intervals of time when they show (syndicated in various countries) happens to be on the local schedules of those areas. If we assume that at any given moment , 50 syndicated episodes of Star Trek are being shown somewhere in the world (and that is a generous number in my view) , the media company can at most only be showing 50 different episodes from the series over 100 episode run. Additionally, in each area , there is a display of usually one episode per 24 hour period. So those that want to watch the show, needs to tune in at the precisely right time to find it. The ad revenue potentially derived from the spots placed between the segments of such episodes are thus wasted if those individuals miss the episode for at least 24 hours.

Now contrast this to what could be possible online, if Star Trek was available, every episode of the entire season, people could watch it when they wanted to. They would not have to tune in to a specific time and would not have to wait 24 hours since they would never "miss" episodes they can queue up at any time. Additionally, by interspersing the online episodes with single commercials, the potential number of viewers of all the displays of the ads across all of the possible episodes being displayed 24 hours a day could easily swamp the impressions made across all the areas on tv. They would be making ad revenue continuously throughout the day instead of at specific intervals in the day, they would be able to satisfy the desire for viewers to watch the show at the time of their choosing, be able to take advantage of repeat viewings by enabling people to watch mult-part episode arcs and season open/close finale sets without season breaks. Finally, and probably most lucrative, would be the ability to watch episodes in places that make tv viewing impossible. Viewers with laptops and smart phones could watch from and to work or vacation. The ability to gain an impression would no longer be restricted to the living rooms of people's homes but would go with them where ever they went. These would allow users watching to stay on the site as they watch, at the same time, the site could be used to mine the viewership of precisely the type of shows they are interested in, they could mind series for particular times of the year to see if there is a correlation with the type of show, they can use this data to inform their new series production directions. Ultimately, putting the old series online would allow them to better target newer series to a much wider audience. As they begin to reap the rewards of this open series concept they would see the potential of being really bold and doing the same for currently running series. Why should the latest episode of CSI only be available online at hulu.com , the day after it originally airs? Why isn't available at the same time? The people who watch it on tv, will do so, the people who watch it online will do so, but giving the option , allows the tv viewers to catch an episode they missed online at any time they wish. The broadcaster would again be able to mine the metrics of the episodes in a much better way than is currently by buying analysis data from companies like Neilsen, with their own sites they could mine their own data and wouldn't have to pay for a third party for the analysis.

I think the media companies are still trying to make sense of what the internet means, the devastation that availability of mp3's made to the music media companies is only going to repeat itself in video IF the companies don't take the reigns and control distribution of their media online instead of letting the pirates do it for them. Already, signs are in place that some of the companies get it, but it is not bold enough a move, with only partial lists of episodes for many series that first aired 20 years ago. It's not an issue of encoding either, original shows could be encoded to HD quality video for online streaming in very short time using an average pc. The media companies have some other motive for restricting their set of options but they are only ultimately , restricting their ability to derive revenue from their archives while missing out on the chance of being THE online destination for watching cherished shows from the past, at any time desired for the small fee of suffering 4 or 5 30 or 60 second spots between the episode segments.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert