Monthly Archives: January 2010

Apple's media strategy: There's an app for that

January 29, 2010
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It’s here. After nearly a year of carefully orchestrated speculation and hype, Apple has finally unveiled: the “iPad,” thus causing millions of women across the blogosphere, in unison, to go, “eewwww.”  (Are there no women in the marketing department at Apple?)

Among the less lunationally sensitive, the verdict has been more mixed, but the rough consensus seems to be that, at this point at least, the iPad is basically an iPod Touch on growth hormones: neat, but not quite overwhelmingly amazing, fantastical and way-cool the way the iPhone seemed when it launched.

Particularly disappointing to some, or at least puzzling, was the relative scarcity of media apps at launch for a device that was billed as revolutionizing the media industry, leading many to wonder what you’re supposed to do with the thing.

I have no doubt those apps will come, however, not only because Apple has already released an iPad SDK but because of what it offers media companies. Read more »

Another strike against three-strikes?

January 26, 2010
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More from the be careful what you wish for files: As The Media Wonk noted in a previous post, there is more to France’s three-strikes law than just three-strikes. One less-discussed provision is the strict regulation of movie release windows by the government, taking a key strategic decision out of the hands of the studios. One early victim of that provision appears to be Twentieth Century-Fox, which has scheduled the release of Avatar on Blu-ray and DVD in France for June 1–several months earlier than ordinary business considerations would dictate but necessary to comply with the law.

That provision isn’t the only booby-trap in the law for content owners, however.

The Creation and Internet law, after all, which went into effect on Jan. 1, wasn’t passed only to crack down on digital piracy. It was also intended to promote the legal availability of “multimedia” content on digital platforms. As it turned out, content owners probably should have paid more attention to that end of the deal.

In the spirit of promoting availability, France’s Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, ordered up a commission to study and make recommendations on ways to facilitate availability. To head the commission, Mitterrand named Patrick Zelnik, CEO of Naive Records, which happens to be the label for which French First Lady and pop chanteuse Carla Bruni-Sarkozy records (that’s just the way they do things in France).

The Mission Zelnik, as the commission came to be known, issued its recommendations in early January, and they included a number of surprises. Topping the list was a proposal to implement a collective rights licensing scheme for music on digital linear platforms (i.e. webcasts), in effect a compulsory license. The commission also recommended a “voluntary” collective licensing scheme for non-linear platforms (downloads and on-demand streaming), with the stipulation that if the industry can’t come up with a satisfactory “voluntary” scheme within a year the government should mandate one. Read more »

You say goodbye, I say Hello Music

January 22, 2010
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The artist & repertoire (A&R) reps at a record label are like reporters at a newspaper: a cost center performing an inherently inefficient task that generates no direct revenue of its own but is nonetheless critical to the operation of the rest of the enterprise. Without reporters to gather the news, publishers couldn’t aggregate reader eyeballs to sell to advertisers; without talent scouts, record companies couldn’t break new acts.

The two job descriptions also face similar dilemmas in the digital age: the high profit margins their enterprises once enjoyed, and that subsidized their inefficiency, have been undercut on new digital platforms. But digital technology has done nothing–or at least not enough–to make those functions any less inefficient. Both remain time and labor intensive and you sink a lot of dry holes in each.

That doesn’t necessarily mean digital technology couldn’t do more to make those functions more efficient, however. Or, if not more efficient than perhaps directly monetizable. The problem has been a lack of digital business-to-business tools to facilitate commerce and capture the value that functions like news gathering and A&R create for other enterprises, or for other parts of their own enterprises. Read more »

'Avatar' blogging blues

January 20, 2010
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My post the other day on the Blu-ray Disc release of Avatar in France generated quite a bit of traffic and commentary on other web sites (thank you Engadget HD), as well as attracting a few comments here. Alas, most of it has been critical.

While it’s always tempting to blame the critics for missing your point, as a general rule if a large number of people appear to have missed your point you probably didn’t do a very good job making it in the first place. So: mea culpa.

Let my try to clarify some issues:

Notwithstanding Ben from Engadget’s diligent research in IMDB, there really aren’t other movies comparable to Avatar. True, there have been other blockbusters in the past five years, most or all of which may have been released on DVD/Blu-ray within six months. But there haven’t been others with a $450 million negative cost and an inherently longer theatrical cume period due to the still-limited number of 3D screens. Read more »

Is DECE about to get Lala'd? (Updated)

January 19, 2010
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Updated to fix the bad link: MP3tunes CEO (and former MP3.com CEO) Michael Robertson has an interesting guest post on TechCrunch today about Apple’s emerging cloud strategy and the possible role in that strategy for Lala, the subscription music service it recently acquired. According to Robertson, the Lala acquisition does not presage the launch of a subscription iTunes service, as many have speculated. Instead, the real value of Lala to Apple is its cloud-based personal music storage service and the software for managing it:

As Apple did with the original iPods, Lala realized that any music solution must include music already possessed by the user. The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple.

An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet…After installation iTunes will push in the background their entire media library to their personal mobile iTunes area. Once loaded, users will be able to navigate and play their music, videos and playlists from their personal URL using a browser based iTunes experience. Read more »