GDAY WORLD 160 – Digital Hollywood :: Day One

by cameron | Oct 24, 2006 | Podcast

Hey Folks, Cam in LA doing a quick update from the Digital Hollywood conference. My raw notes are below if you can make any sense out of them.

Web 2.0 – The Next Iteration: How Next Generation Personalized Media is Rewiring the Web – User Generated Media, Programmable Web, Podcasting, Mashups & Blogging – Transforming and Disassembling the World of Traditional Media, Communications & Advertising
Erik Flannigan, Vice President, Programming for Moviefone, AOL Music, AOL Radio and AOL Television, AOL LLC
Dan Monahan, Global Infotainment Segment Manager, Mobility Products Group, Intel, Inc.
Kris Jacob, EVP of Business Development, Sales and Marketing, PodShow
Erik Hawkins, CEO, Pure Video
Rodger Raderman, co-founder and Chief Marketing & Product Officer, Veeker
Gilles BianRosa, CEO, Azureus
Tim Chang, Principal, Gabriel Venture Partners, Moderator

Tim Chang from Gabriel Venture Partners moderating.

Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus – says the application has been downloaded 128 million times. They are releasing a new version in a couple of weeks which will support DVD-quality movie distribution. They have signed deals with a bunch of movie studios.

Kris Jacob, EVP Sales, Podshow, says they outright own 3000 shows out of the 60,000 shows available on Podshow.

Tim Chang, the VC perspective – it’s all BS. Web2.0 is a shell game. Thinks this is definitely a bubble from an investment perspective but not a bubble from an innovation perspective.

What’s changed in the last few months apart from YouTube being acquired?

Kris – massive change in audience behaviour. Podshow is doing millions of downloads a month, more than many mainstream media companies.

The quality of consumer generated content is getting better.

How big is the window to being acquired? Longer than people think and not as long as we’d like. The GEMAIIA exit isn’t the only opportunity – there are lots of media companies out there who need to re-invent themselves.

What does the new value chain look like? Will the consumers want to download media from the operators or use some other kind of broadband access and make do from hotspot to hotspot?

You can incubate shows and talent. What’s happening to media now happened to music over the last couple of years.

Yahoo and AOL are thought of already as "old media".

Yahoo and AOL are very programming oriented. Google is building an intelligent machine that allows user to find what they want and advertisers to find the customers they want to connect to.

Is it all advertising? The same as 1999? It’s a very solid business model.

What has happened in the last ten years is that we’ve broken the bond between the hosts of mainstream media shows and the audience. Who wins? The audience. They are now creating their own programming. 80% of Podshow’s advertisers are conventional advertisers.

What does advertising 2.0 look like? It has to become more relevant to the audience.

The movie called "The Island" has more product placement than any other film out there. GM should have paid $30 million for the placement in the film. Reality TV is using product placement in a way that is insulting.

User requested ads. User generated ads.

What other innovations in terms of business models?

"Freemium" model – what are the premium aspects that are working? Flickr is a good model. But the key model today is free to the audience and supported by advertisers.

"For Pay" programming. A big move by mainstream media to Direct to consumer propositions. Now they are looking for ways to not only control the programming but ways to control the conversation around the programming around that as well. The Podsafe Music Network have had 200 million "spins" (plays of tracks in podcasts) in 12 months.

People are used to paying for things on their mobile phone. How does advertising move to the phone and how does subscription move to the web? Perhaps Web3.0 is when the PC, the network and the mobile phone all come together.

How does mobile effect Web2.0?

Intel are focused on the usage of Web2.0 and how the different user communities access their Web2.0 services. Focusing on the 15 – 35 user demographic. What are the models that are going to fly for these users? It’s only a matter of minutes before the connected iPod is out there, the Zune is coming out. What will people carry with them and how will that affect monetization? Users are frustrated with their mobile devices and aren’t surfing the web on them.

When Pure Video made their video formatted for the PSP, 24% of hits came from it straight away.

In Europe, the mobile manufacturers have more control than they do in the US. The Nokia N61 came out in Europe with inbuilt 802.11 and a podcasting application. When Cingular launched the same phone in the US recently, they turned the wi-fi off.

Podshow considers themselves an "independent media company".

What’s after YouTube? Social networks start to re-verticalize? YouTube is unstructured. Structure will come back, similar to what happened in print. People want more context, not less. Privacy might become an issue. Look at Gmail watching what you write. Employers reading kids MySpace sites before an interview. The world is going to get very interesting when you have portable devices which can record video, and be connected to communities. Lots of advertising models to play out.

Web3.0: true integration with models. better ad models. old media buyer. deeper richer segments. tastemakers become important around search.

You need to start your start-up knowing how you are going to make money. Create something of value to the user. This time around you don’t have the same capital it required in Web1.0.

It’s all about the team you have around you.

Despite the rise of social networking, are the kids of today becoming less social? Will kids get to a point when they say "hey I’ve logged 10,000 hours on YouTube watching basically the same video over and over and it hasn’t made my life any better. I’ve got 40,000 friends on MySpace and I haven’t met a single one of them in person. Stop the insanity."

Answer from the panel – no. We’re just all going to get dumber and dumber.

Session: Blogs, Mashups, Social Media, Wikis, and RSS as Mass Media – Blog Movements as Agents of Change
David Hyman, CEO and founder, MOG
Howard Kaushansky, founder and President, Umbria
Tom Gerace, CEO, gather.com
Louis Moynihan, Director of Strategy and Development, Pheedo
Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixsy Corporation
Mike Brown, Principal, Partech International
Michael Raneri, CEO, MeeVee, Inc.
Tom Merritt, Editor, CNET.com, Moderator

People edit Wikipedia without getting paid because they are passionate about the subject – we’re in an economy of passion.

Advertisers need to go where the audience is. YouTube and MySpace have reach much larger than the traditional TV networks, so the advertisers will have to move with the audience. If you can create good quality content and break it down by niche, you will be able to get advertisers.

Even most high profile independent bloggers aren’t making a living out of it yet. It’s a very, very small handful who are making a living from blogging.

If you’re an individual blogger, it’s going to be pretty challenging to make big money from advertising. It can be done but the odds are extremely slim. But they may get book deals or jobs with bigger media outlets. The demise of the resume and the rise of the personal brand.

Is anybody going to make garage sale size money? Yes, lots of people will be able to make $10 – 20 a month and already are.

With IE7 coming out last week, RSS adoption will explode over the next 6 months. The killer app (RSS) has been there for a while but most people just aren’t using it yet. Everyone is predicting RSS will explode now that it’s in IE7 and the branding has been changed to "feed".

Mashups – very cool but are they useful? They are creating fear in the hearts and minds of many companies out there. Chevy put up an online tool allowing people to make their own Chevy Tahoe ad – people made them saying Chevy was responsible for global warming and pollution. Those were the ads which were the most popular on YouTube. Another example – "Snakes On A Plane". Lots of user-generated trailers changed the actual film. Based on the popularty of the fake trailers, the producers put more sex and violence into the actual film. Red Bull put empty cans in the trash cans of popular night clubs.

Where is all this social content going? Who is going to become the gateway? Relevance and trust are big aspects of the success of social networks. If you ask your friends why they bought the last ten CDs or iTunes tracks they bought, they will tell you they were recommended by their friends as opposed to MTV. It’s about trusted voices. I threw in my ten cents during question time about whether or not search engines like Google are becoming the way people find the media they consume. Do they really need another gateway? The panel was mixed.

The best writer at the New York Times doesn’t make 1000 times the money as the worst writer at the NYT. But they should. We have an opportunity to re-distribute the funds according to who is producing the best content.

The consensus seems to be that the YouTube acquisition makes sense when you look at the revenue Google will generate through Adsense on YouTube.