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January 17, 2005
Podcaster Dinner
Tim Bourquin and his brother Emile (The Podcast Brothers) brought together a diverse group of podcasters for a dinner in Seattle at the Icon Grill. Doug Kaye, Eric Rice, Phil Torrone, Jake Ludington, Alex Williams, Rob Greenlee, Michael Geoghegan, myself and Chris Pirillo. I had a great time talking shop and making some new acquaintances. Pirillo put up a video and Rice posted some pictures from the podcast dinner.
Posted by Peter at 08:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2005
On the job hunt
I am still on the job search.
Looking for something in the area of multimedia.
Specifically, a leadership position as the field of multimedia delivery to set top devices, electronic programming guides, and P2P delivery of content. Preferably a start up that is well funded. Or at least less than 1000 employees. The stale corporate mind creeps in over a 1000 heads.
Just finished a set of 7 interviews and two trips to California with a company. I didn't get the job. They gave a laughably lame(so we don't get sued)excuse for not hiring me.
But hey, I got two free trips to Cali out of the deal.
The new tech and management resumes I just rewrote are getting me new leads.
Posted by Peter at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 06, 2005
Constitutional Crisis today?
When the joint session of Congress meets today to certify the Electoral College votes that gave President Bush his second term, several Democratic House members are expected to contest the results.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., will participate under congressional rules that would then require senators and representatives to recess to their respective chambers to debate certification.
Go Barbara!
Ok, I know this is just polical theater and the Republicans have the votes to over-ride the challege. But revolution from time to time is good.
If nothing else, it will wipe the Tsunami story off the news cycle for about a day, maybe? I hope not.
Posted by Peter at 08:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 05, 2005
WebTalk Radio show
Did a segment on Rob and Dana Greelee's WebTalk Radio show today.
Rob and Dana were interested in having me expand on my thoughts on DRM from my new years post.
We were pretty high energy on the show.
They also did an interview with the creators of the Googlezon flash presentation. If you haven't seen this your should.
Posted by Peter at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 01, 2005
Happy New Year
Here is to a wonderous new year!
Been thinking about predictions for technology and media in 2005.
Here goes:
1. Podcasting and VidCasting is going to take off this year.
Adam Curry of MTV fame started the podcasting idea but it will be embraced and co-opted by the mainstream media.
The new revolution will be the widescale adoption of RSS/BitTorrent feeds for audio and video content.
While this isn't a new idea of using RSS/BT, BroadbandReports.com
talked about it in March 2004, Podcasting is the thing that jumpstarted the movement, adoption and development of tools/applications to facilitate a RSS/BT transaction. Also, Harvard Law, explained the RSS/BT concept really well.
Enter "Vidcasting" the delivery of short and feature length video programs via RSS and BitTorrent
Couple this with a Tivo like device and bang! Instant content on demand community.
The demise of Suprnova and the pending litigation of LokiTorrent brings up my second prediction.
2. DRM will die a slow and painful death
Don't get me wrong, I think the rights holders need to be paid but the price points are outragous for digital music and movies.
The reasonable price for a music download is more like .25-49 cents per song. But that wouldn't leave any profit for the music label. Right but then they have been screwing the artist since Cole Porter and Scott Joplin has been writing music and before.
Movies are worse, DVD rental prices are at about $2.99. The cost to digitally delivery a feature length movie is about .25 cents. So the reasonable price should be about $1.00-$1.99 per movie.
So why is DRM gonna die?
Napster created an entire culture of Generation Z & Y folks that got used to not paying for content. Even though they knew it was wrong, the thinking was that this stuff was inflated in price anyway, so taking some of it for free was just leveling the scales. And besides, we all knew the record and film studios were gouging us at the retail outlets. Digital is always orders of magnitude less expensive than the analog experience.
Another reason DRM isn't gonna fly is what it costs per DRM transation. It cost content owner about .25 cents for each DRM token to be sent to the player to unlock the content. This is based on a DRM service providers pricing of 10,000 DRM transactions per month.
The final reason, Microsoft DRM. Microsoft has done a resonable job of converting a percentage of some of the film companies to embrace their DRM. In fact, I participated in a meeting with the top 4 adult entertainment companies with Microsoft in 2002 at the Internext Conference. MS did everything in their power to make sure it was as painless as possible to convert to a DRM model. So long as nobody found out that MS was helping out the porn business. Today, 75% or more of the adult entertainment online content is using MS DRM.
But the major studios are afraid of MS, so they started MovieLink with the idea an alternative to using MS technologies. But in the end started using MS DRM.
Sony Pictures hates MS. They would sooner chew off their left arm than use a MS product.
But business realities are that unless someone spends a billion or so in software development to develop something else, we stuck with the MS DRM.
Here is another business reality, unless the price points for content are low enough and the barriers to using DRM are flexible enough to the consumer. The alternative is to just download this stuff off the net for free and take the risk.
More predictions tomorrow.
Posted by Peter at 03:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack