Community Team in Action at Tout...

At ‘Twitter for video’ Tout, happy celebs mean explosive growth | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.

SAN FRANCISCO–When you’re a startup trying to upend a business dominated by a powerhouse like YouTube, and adding users far faster than Twitter did during its first serious growth spurts, it’s essential that you take care of the famous people who want to come along for the ride.

So, as we launched the product this week – I thought I would provide a bit of background and the thinking behind our product and vision.

What strikes me here is the elegance of the ultimate market judo executed by Apple over just a (2003-2011) very short period of time.

Here is how it looks to me:

• 2003 In the face of a clear decline of music industry, Apple takes clunky licensing deals (although the best at the time) in launching iTUNES and selling iPODS [Everybody believes end goal is nothing but to sell more IPODS]…result people’s music experience forever changed
• 2009 AppleTV broadens the content game for APPLE as they unify the proposition of getting movies/TV shows on -demand. Terrible licensing deals again – with most people assuming selling the hardware is the ultimate goal. Result…TBD but likely the IPOD/IPAD/APPLE TV will become the ultimate home entertainment on-demand combo….once again fundamentally re-defining to consumers what is possible in terms of great experience [Again, most people assuming that hardware is the goal]
• 2011, Apple: Now that we have shown the world the best possible media experience on earth – Through our Hardware of course > we will now become the largest media company in the world (not hardware) by enabling the most efficient channel for direct distribution to the consumer (a la iphone app store)…Result…………A.) Comcast and the like are LITERALLY out of business instantly and terribly irrelevant. B.) “Democratization of media publishing”….well, now it really does happen – look at the top 20 selling Iphone Apps, question – are they from the old guard (Disney, Sony, TW, Hearst, Hachette, NBC, etc etc etc) – ok, now crank that up by 1000X.

Pretty amazing stuff – and unbelievable forethought as to how to lever technology to maneuver traditional content and indeed vice-versa – to create a 10 year plan to become the most powerful “pipes” and “content” company in the biz.

Super impressive.

MD

Apple Launches Subscriptions For Content-Publishers On The App Store.

MD: A great article summarizing Qwiki’s unique approach to delivering a visual-web experience, and an excellent example of a new application tapping into what I call the “Visual Revival” an important trend in consumer behavior and functional utility across the web. Congrats to the Qwiki team.

How few times in history you get to see true entrenched incumbents, multi-billion dollar companies on the precipice of repeating the VERY same mistakes as their brethren in related industries (who had even more of a monopoly) – and the veritable windfall that can be had from anticipating their mis-steps driven by fear, ignorance and inability to understand evolving consumer behavior. I hope all my friends in the hedge-fund world are paying attention… this will be good. Having had a front row seat to Chapter 1 of the traditional media death rattle show (The Music Industry) – Chapter 2 is destined to be even more dramatic, disruptive and potentially profitable (…for some). Here is the quick lesson, there is game of chicken going on within traditional media, it started in 1998 with the music industry and is now hitting TV/Broadcast/Cable at a faster and more much more fierce pace…I know because we created one of the first MP3 technologies that kicked off this disruption in 1998 – and i saw the early days of this trend first hand.

It sounds something like this:

- “We’ve invested billions in our current infrastructure, the [artificially] high margin is just too good for us to actually accommodate this new consumer behavior and risk the cash-cow of the traditional model”

- “We are experimenting around [insert digital distribution technology here] but feel it wont be mainstream for some time”

- “Were working with Microsoft, Intel and Blah Blah to deliver “our own” technology called [ BlueMatter, Rootkit, PressPlay, Musicnet, CinemaNow, 8trac, MoveiFlix  etc]

In truth, these executives are fighting a losing battle, and one whose “velocity of disruption” will increase dramatically every 6 months – meaning the evolving consumer behavior that they desperately want to ignore …spreads progressively further, faster, harder as months go by. As we have already seen, the strategy of “playing catch-up” once you feel you’ve drained all the margin out of “the good old business model” -and are forced to actually address new consumer behavior and technologies will never work…by that time, you have lost the trust and credibility of your customers – and inevitably other entrants will own the new role in the market.

Some rules to survive by in this battle:

1.) It’s not about technology…(such an easy scapegoat)….its about your customers and their desire for a better experience…ignore that fact at your own peril

2.) It’s not…and has never been about Piracy…Piracy is commoner’s short-hand for letting you know that  if you don’t deliver the efficient content experience that “I know is possible” I will get it from somebody else. Conversely, I will pay for convenience if you can deliver that reliably.

The best investment possibly of the last 30-40 years, would be to watch traditional media companies who are being faced with this existential problem. Those that are public represent a unique short-selling opportunity, those that are private could (if addressed early enough) be opportunities for PE groups who know what they are doing (not Guy Hands at Terra who clearly didn’t get the memo on changing consumer behavior).

And now…here is the article

Turner Chief Explains How TV Industry Will Neutralize Netflix | paidContent.

If there was ever any doubt that the animus towards Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) runs deeper throughout Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) than chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes, get a load of what one of his top lieutenants had to say at the Citigroup Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications Conference on Wednesday in Phoenix. Turner Broadcasting chairman and CEO Phil Kent talked in depth about how the TV business is circling the wagons to marginalize the upstart streaming service.

Samsung’s Now Served Up 1 Million Apps Via Its Web-Connected HDTVs, Google TV What?.

You don’t need to wait for Google or Apple to bring apps to your HDTV. Samsung’s been serving up custom-made apps via their connected HDTVs for some time now and just hit the 1 millionth downloaded app. That’s a mighty fine milestone for a platform not heavily discussed or marketed. Impressive, yes, but even so that this mark was hit with only 200 available apps, which seems to state that Samsung knows how to curate and approve quality applications. They seem to have all the big ones: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Twitter, Pandora, Blockbuster, Vudu. There’s even a fine selection of low-cost games although that doesn’t include Angry Birds.

MD

Adobe AIR 2.5 looks to open up TV environment – FierceOnlineVideo.

Congrats to Reed on a very successful transition in a very tenuous marketplace. – MD

Netflix now considers itself a “streaming company which also offers DVDs by mail,” according to CEO Reed Hastings in the management commentary that accompanies its third-quarter earnings release. According to Netflix, the company now spends more money on streaming content than on DVDs, and as a result consumers now stream more videos than they watch on DVD.

In the commentary, Hastings is quoted as saying:

We are very proud to announce that by every measure we are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail. In Q4, we’ll spend more on streaming content than DVD content, and we’ll deliver many more hours of entertainment via streaming than on DVD. More impressively, a majority of our subs will watch more content streamed from Netflix than delivered by us on DVD. DVD-by-mail shipments are still growing, but streaming for us is much larger and growing much faster.

At Monday’s IAB Mixx conference in New York, Gawker Media Founder Nick Denton took the stage with AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka to discuss the future of the blogging network — and that future is all about images and video.

“People don’t really want to read text,” Denton said. “They want videos, they want images, bigger, more lavish.” In other words, consumers are looking for online media products that more closely resemble TV and magazines.

Denton cited Gizmodo’s notorious leak of the iPhone 4 as an example, which quadrupled traffic for the blog that week. “There is a huge kind of hunger for that image, for the video we produced,” he said. “The core of that story was the image of the phone.”

Text, he contended, is more useful for providing context and explanation for more visual kinds of media, rather than serving as the primary medium itself.

Gawker’s eight media properties are currently undergoing a redesign to accommodate better delivery of image and video-based content. The current design of the blogs is “ludicrous” he said, noting that Gizmodo had to hold publication of all stories for six hours to keep its iPhone 4 story at the top of the page. (We wonder if Denton should consider implementing a “Trending Story” box in the meantime.)

The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators

I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.

So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. Or I can add my thoughts to those links, just like Techcrunch or VentureBeat do. That’s curation. Or I can do a video like Leo Laporte does and talk about those links. That’s curation. Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation. The editor who sits in a big building at New York Times or your local newspaper that chooses what content you’ll see in your newspaper is a curator. So is the page designer who decides what story is at the top of the page.

But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. That’s why I’m writing this post, to try to get the industry to see that there’s an unmet need that — if they were met — would mean all sorts of things from better scrapbooks for family photos and events to better news systems like what CNN or Huffington Post are trying to build on the Web. More on that after I get through the seven things.

As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. If you give me #7 without giving me #1 first your tool will suck and you won’t be used by curators. If you give me #1 without #7, you’ll be way ahead of some tool that gives me #7 only.

This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. First, what are info atoms? A tweet is an atom. A photo on Flickr is an atom. A conversation item on Google Buzz is an atom. A Facebook status message is an atom. A YouTube video is an atom.

Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

So, what are the seven needs of real time curators?