5 Forces of Media 2.0 and other Thoughts

Here is my deck from an APRA think-tank a couple of weeks ago. I’m thinking about this alot again after a post-Kazaa reboot.

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Hell’s Kitchen - Tips for Startup Growing Pains

ast week, Mick and me I spoke at Transaction 2.0 (part of CeBit). Mine was about some tips for surviving mid-stage startup growing pains.

Thanks to everyone that attended the talk in the room, and also via The Chaser, for encouraging me to swear alot and providing great feedback.

Here is the latest deck on slideshare:

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Hells Kitchen Notes on Slides.

Here is the uStream recording from The Chaser. Its a bit hard to hear so probably not a great deal of use. Hopefully CeBit will release something better because it looked like everything was filmed professionally.

I will blog each slide in more detail in the weeks to come because I think the message is important.

In the meantime, I have had a few requests for links to the tools I mentioned in the talk. When we formed Pollenizer, we invested immediately in Confluence and Jira from Atlassian. Because we made that decision we have collected all internal IP as we go in the Confluence Wiki and tracked tasks across all projects and (globally distributed) teams using Jira. It was some of the best money we have spent. Everyone has access to the information they need and there is never a question of who owns a certain task. More on this in a later post.

Mick was a total star with his Focus or Fail talk. He juggled AND managed to smash a glass in the audience as well as grabbing our interest with some important lessons he has learned working with startups.

On a final note, it was my great pleasure to meet Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley from Mahalo. Frankly Jason’s reputation had preceeded him and (like a true Australian) I had him marked as a bit full of himself. Instead, he came into Sydney like a whirlwind, inspired everyone (I actually think he did meet EVERYONE in the whole city) and left, leaving us whinging a little less and getting down to business as a community of awesome startups ready to take on the world. He encouraged us to just to get on with it!

My CeBit Presentation: Hell’s Kitchen

Next week, I am speaking at CeBit’s Transaction 2.0 Conference about some of the things I have learned working with start-ups. Here is the synopsis:

Hell’s Kitchen: Technology and Business in Start-ups

You’ve just binned your prototype, brought on a crew of five, had your first server melt down or hired a sales guy and he sold something you don’t have. Welcome to the hellish (and common) world of mid-stage-start-ups. Get ready to deal with it. Phil will present some delicious recipes from start-ups that have already burned in Hells Kitchen.

I’ve had some Twitter feedback that the ‘Hell’ theme could be a little strong. Perhaps. But it is hard in a start-up. Under the hype where we grapple to make money and keep our infant websites humming it can be… well… hell.

Here’s the presentation:

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The Liability Circle of Copyright Filtering

I feel for Microsoft and the other companies trying to integrate the co-called ‘copyright filtering’ (a term which makes it sound nice and simple like looking for naughty words in a text file) technologies.

My time at Kazaa trying to integrate these tools gave me a rich appreciation of how messy the process is.

• The problem is a hard one to solve. How does a machine know a collection of bits is copyrighted
• The technology is difficult to integrate into a real work flow because it takes a lot of CPU cycles and time to perform the filtering process. This is probably what the intrepid Craig Rubens was seeing in his testing when it took Soapbox days to filter the file. Of course Microsoft could just stop publishing files until the copyright filtering job has run, but is it a good product for people who want to upload their personal videos if it takes days for the video to show up

Of course these are just technical issues and can be solved in time.

The real problem is, these days there is a good chance you will get sued if your solution is less than perfect. And who will take that responsibility Liz Gannes’ report on NewTeeVee encountered this problem:

“We called Microsoft to ask what was going on. You should talk to Audible Magic, they said; our system is only as good as their index. We called Audible Magic, who essentially blamed Microsoft, for only implementing the audio version of its software.”

This is a technologically challenging problem that is clouded by lawyers designing the software either directly or vicariously via contracts and settlements. Everyone else is busy thinking about how to best cover there ass instead of building copyright filtering solutions that work.

Revver to Begin P2P Downloads of Video Content

Revver has made the inevitable decision to begin using P2P to for video content downloads. I suppose I have a unique perspective on this because I have both done the business planning to launch a new video content business and I was CTO of Kazaa - a humungous P2P network.

The video distribution business is a very tough one. Not only do viewers generally expect the content to be free, creators (rightfully) expect to get a cut of ad revenue. Of course, this is no different to any kind of user-generated-content business, but video is more difficult due to expensive bandwidth bills, processsing requirements (to render correct formats etc), copyright filtering, etc. Revver must be spending bucket loads of money.

Now Google Video and YouTube are united and underwritten by Google’s revenues from elsewhere, Revver needs to move towards making money and differentiate itself by offering more of a payback to content creators in the hope of attracting the best stuff.

Problems they are going to face:

1) Getting users to install a P2P application. Most video viewers are snatching a few minutes to watch something someone sent them. They will be difficult to convince to install.

2) Managing the value equation for users. Downloads are cheaper for Revver because users pay for the uploads. Will they be compensated Will uploaded MB per user have a ceiling

I’ll be interested to see if its mandatory or an optional component with some payoff for the user. e.g. get higher quality downloads if you use P2P.

Anyone know what happened to Dijjer I am pretty sure Revver originally used Dijjer as a P2P platform before YouTube went large and Revver needed to compete without problems 1 and 2 above.

Beet.TV has the scoop.

Want to Start Your Own TV Station: Answers

AIMIA has published the overflow answers to the panel discussion on the future of TV. Here they are.

Joost the Real Competition for NBC Universal / News Corp?

Techmeme is alive with comments that the new NBC/News video offering will be a YouTube killer but it seems to me that Joost is more likely in its cross-hairs. YouTube has short, 10 minute, user-generated videos. The quality is uncertain but the abundance of content is compelling. NBC/News is going for the packaged, channel-based, quality offering of video content once the sole domain of broadcast television - just like Joost.

Its like Verizon and BT getting together when Skype was in beta to create a desktop VOIP client. Looks like the media companies are learning.

Ads in Video Get Twice Click-through

Beet.tv is talking about a new eMarketer survey which finds that regular ads within video get twice the click through. This is the kind of thing Revver does to monetise the content.

Intuitive: the site has the user’s gaze on that part of the screen from watching the video so it makes sense that more click because more see the ad.

Good: Most people don’t get to the end of a video so probably the percentage of people who get to the end and click is even higher.

Bad: The video costs more than twice as much as a web page to serve so double isn’t enough. Also, a page can hold more than one ad.

Create Your Own TV Network: Report from the Panel

I had a great time last night participating in a panel discussion organised by AIMIA on creating your own TV network. Thanks to everyone that came down to the Shelbourne Hotel. We discussed how the internet is making new things possible and focussed on the opportunity to set up new video content businesses.

It was a pleasure to catch up with Mark Pesce again after more than ten years. We last saw each other in Madrid in 1996 at the Cyberconf. He’s a passionate and clever bloke and always good to hear in a debate. Last night he advocated the ability of individuals to get there stuff out there and build an audience using Ze Frank as his case study. What is the ‘value’ of Ze Frank after a year of vlogging now he’s as big as Jon Stewart Mark also questioned the internet’s ability to handle the load of a video dominated web - especially once Joost goes viral as many expect it will.

I enjoyed meeting Tom Kendall from Of The World for the first time. He’s not just talking about it, he’s actually building an internet TV network and there’s some good stuff there at oftheworld.tv. I love that the channels are presented full screen in the browser instead of the little screen that are so common. [Tom, I don't know if any of my shelved chatabox.tv thinking is of use to you ]

Ian Gardiner from VioCorp was an important component of the group because he represented the enterprise market. Unlike most of the internet video market that has to give stuff away, Ian is building a business around charging business customers for video products. He was also the most knowledgeable on the subject of large scale webcasting and talked about his experience webcasting the Mardi Gras this year as a pay-to-view offering. [Ian, this is the powerful streaming technology I refered to last night.]

As ever, Marty Wells was the voice of reason. There’s a lot of hype about forming a startup and most of it is crap. He has a talent for clearly explaining why. He spoke alot about Purepwnage.com as an example of starting small with a strong idea, and then slowly scaling the business from there. With the videos served on Brightcove there is no serving cost to worry about and its monetised with advertising and merchandise.

My big points where:

• Forget the technology, focus on the idea instead of getting lost in the options in Adobe Premiere. You can make something great for free and become famous, at no cost. i.e. you don’t even need a video camera.
• The problem with podcasts, video blogs, etc is that they are not searchable, so the content can be invisible to the normal channels of discovery. Is that where Adam Curry went as all the discussion went to audio
• Don’t try to control your content by keeping it on your own site. Accept that the internet’s nature is copying, sharing, transfering and let it go. Let the users promote your stuff for you. Find a way of deploying the monetisation with the media so this doesn’t matter.

Apparently there were quite a few tough questions via SMS that we will be answering today for publishing on the web later. Watch this space.

Invitation: Jamming the Future of TV

Friends, I am on a panel jamming the future of TV tomorrow night (Tuesday) at the Shelbourne Hotel, Sydney. Come and join the debate!

Details here.