On Turning 50, and Other News of Interest

    August has been a month of many milestones. I turned 50 early in the month.
The technology world has been stood on its head. Steve Jobs resigns from Apple.
HP first pulled their tablet,from  the market, and then announced they are getting out of the PC business altogether.
The 800 Pound Giant in the room, Netflix has stood its ground with Starz and refused to bow to their demands about tired pricing and  let them take their content elsewhere. I won’t miss it.
    Apple, and Steve Jobs have been called one of the greatest inventors  in the 20th Century. If one dose research one will find all of the products that he made famous are products that have been made by someone else before he refined it and set a new standard. There had been portable computers before,  Apple made them usable.
    More important then the legacy of Steve Jobs, and it is very important, is the future of Apple and the entire tech industry as a whole.  Over the last few months I’ve noticed a change in the focus of many tech company, even companies as venerable as Kodak are changing their focus looking for ways to sagging sales and poor product lines. Right now there are only a very few product lines that are interesting, the top players among them being the tablet, and the king of the hill, is Apple’s IPad.  But there seems to have been a shift to a very large degree away from trying to make a better product to protecting intellectual property . ie, their  patents.  While  some concepts and ideas are pretty cut and dried, and obvious , and the patent for that should be obvious, and the company that first filled the patent for it owns it at least to start with,. However, thee are a great many patents are are far more questionable. To the point of  one questioning is there even a prototype  filed at the patent office, and did anyone even read it? The patent office has said that need access to experts to help them sort through all to the tech patents the receive to help them tell which are legit, and which ones should be rejected. Because they don’t the the personal or expertise to go over all the material.
  

    That's not even counting all of the patents the various companies have already, and are either trying to protect or sell.  In many cases the  intellectual property may be worth more then the products they make with the information or ideas, sometimes even the company.  What kind of messages  dose that send to consumers who see new reports about companies suing each other over  patent infringement or other subtleties that no lay person or many lawyers can understand. Instead of putting the efforts to helping build the economy by giving consumer better products at lower prices. and creating more jobs and products we want to buy.
All their doing is making lawyers rich, and generally making a mockery of the US patent system. A complete rebuild of the US patent system is in order, along with  the copyright  office and reevaluating the way the publishing industry works. However, I don’t see this thing happening in the foreseeable future.

    What dose it mean when Google buys a hardware company like Motorola,?
They didn’t buy a printer company, or a camera company. They bought a company that makes hardware to run their operating system. Android.  At this point Android is  powering  roughly about 50% of all the smart phones in use depending on what report you read, and what is being covered, US or world. Point is it it fast edging Apple, and is generally killing other smart phone devices. Thus the questions becomes is there a conflict of interest in Google owning the maker of its own software distributor , the Motorola versions of the  Android smart phones. Along with the the other companies who also make phones that run Android.  On the flip side, Apple owns both the hardware and the software for their phones, in fact for all of their products. The difference being they don’t licence their IOS out to other hardware builders to put IOS into and sell to the public. Apple maintains a very tight control of their product cycle and loop from development, to production, distribution to sales both on line and retail. Something no other company has ever had.
Netflix finds itself in a quandary, much of it its own making. Last month they announced a new pricing scheme, separating the Streaming and the Dvd content, into two separate billing options, and increasing streaming fees. and increasing to total if you want both streaming and DVDs. So essentially you have your choice of three prices. Streaming, is 7.99, Dvd only is 7.99 month  Nd more for both Streaming and DVD.
Netflix is expecting to lose around a million subscribers due to this new format.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/netflix-price-increase-subscriber-loss_n_964026.html
It’s  expected that after several years of a format that has essentially changed the entire video  delivery system in may ways and set new standard to make what are precised as radical changes, to a tried and true format that upsets the satus qu  will bring on a out  cry, in this case its likely to take the form of a loss of subscribers. Weather it will be as much as they predict  or not m also how long the numbers will stay low are two important questions. Balancing them out are the cost of the content . Netflix has to be in a position to pay a fair price for content, but but not let itself be bullied into doing deals like Starz wanted. I have commented several times under different  articles about the Netflix /Starz issue. One can be found here;
http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?id=3201#comment-304411031

Here:
http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?id=3215#comment-311925790


The whole landscape of on line video is going to reshaped yet again as the dust settles over Hulu, and who eventually buys it. The main goal of any content owner and provider should be essentially the same: To provide consumer with easy acces to any content they have the right to through either subscription, like Netflix, or Amazon VOD, or even Hulu, or Boxee, and Roku, including the IPad, and Android tablets. If the consumer knows they can get they’re content when and where they want it with minimal fuss, and low price, they will be less likely to go to  alternative places to get the content they want. Distributors, and content owners will both be paid and everyone will be happy.

    A side note on turning 50 this year. Its now been a about a month since my birthday.  Sometimes, 50 is a concept one has to wrap ones brain around. The idea that you’ve been alive and doing your thing, for half a century. Most days you don’t feel any different then you did at 49. Suddenly your 50 and everything is older, every tool or possessions that you bought or acquired when you where younger seems older. Events that didn’t seem that long ago suddenly seem like  ancient history when you stop and do the math as to how long ago it really was.  Getting to be 50 has been a real adventure for me. As many  of you who personally know me I’ve had heart issues since I was born, and was not expect to live,  I was sent home, they had done all they could do for me. But I survived and eventually a operation was developed in Canada, The Mustard Procedure, which essentially rebuilt the top half of my heart. I was the first one in the United States to have it and Survive.  To this day I’m setting new records. I have since gone on to do all the things everyone else dose, high school get married, and raise  4 kids, and many other things that  the little blue boy they sent home to die was never expected to. do. The Lord has seen fit to keep me around for this half century   .I’m looking forward to many more years of doing what I do best, being a tech pundit and all around geek and movie lover, Lord willing.



 

Getting Back to Basics in Business

Over the last few months much has been made of relatively new tech companies, less then, 2-5 years old coming out and announcing that they want to do a IPO, which is a Initial Public Offering. There are several questions that have been risen, such as do they have a solid business plan, and are they actually making money. While I don’t pretend to completely understand all the ins and outs, of big time money management and all of the ramifications of events to both the economy or the business itself.

There are several basic ideas that I do understand, The primary object of any business is to both make money, and give the consumer the most value for their money as possible. If you give the customer value above and beyond what they expect , and follow it it up with support and service, whatever, that might entail everything from basic hand holding, to either going and fixing or replacing the product with no hassle, and a BIG smile on your face. You’ll do far more more good for your business then any amount of advertisement can ever do. Happy customers come back, and Happy customers talk,, a lot. Word of mouth can go a long way to either building your business, or destroying it slowly. Just remember that the next time a customer is driving you crazy over something YOU think is stupid, to them its important, how you handle what they think is important, is important to them. So much for business 101.

Netflix has become the 800 pound guerrilla in the room when content and tv companies get together. No matter what else they talk about, what deals they may want to do, Netflix is in their shadow waiting to take their market share way form them. Content providers need to go back and reevaluate their core objectives.
As I mentioned in the opening segment, the object of any business, be it a small family business that sells fruit out on the side of the road, to a multi-million dollar conglomerate is to give the customer value above and beyond what they expect.
Quite simply the TV/media industry at least on the broadcast and consumer provider side, not the theatre side so much, has dropped the ball a LONG time ago.
Way back in the 1950’s at the beginning of TV, advertisers knew they had a captive audience and played it up to the max. Having corporate sponsors,and having host of talk and game shows actually plugging the product as part of the routine show, is was annoying, but far less annoying then today's commercial breaks which can last from 3-10 minutes long, and often repeat the same ad several times in a roll.

That just covers what broadcast show “live” on a daily basis to the masses.
That includes those who don’t have the technology to bend their TV to their will.
Those of us with DVRs can record,pause and rewind and generally bring the TV to its knees. And advertisers hate this. they can’t count on you seeing their ads every time you want to see your favorite show. and Appointment Viewing is long dead. That is to say if you wanted to watch a certain show you had to be in front of your TV at that exact time, or you missed it until next week. Worse yet, if there were two shows on at the same time, on different channels you had to choose which one you liked better. Advertisers loved that, it helped with getting numbers, they could tell much better what was being watched, and who commercials were being seen. Today, consumers demand to watch what they want when and where they want. The devices and platforms that media is available is constantly expanding. Content owners and providers need to embrace the new directions and come up with models that allow them to get access to the content they want, when they want.
They need allow consumers to watch their content on a variety of platforms.
The basic concept is to spread your content around as much as possible; instead of trying to do a deal to limit ones content to one venue and asking a exuberant sum for a very short year deal, try spreading it out out over several venues with less for money each deal, and make more money in the long run.
Better yet they make their content readily available to whole new audiences which might not have discovered content they didn't know about. Making content easier to access or rent, either via Netflix Amazon, any number of other places to rent or view content, doing such deals to let ` the consumers find the content and play it where they want, or need to, with out having to resort to to other means to get the content they want.
A YouTube search will yield many movies and TV shows put up in short 10-14 minute segments watching a series of 8-10 segments in a row will allow you to essentially watch the whole program. Whether this is legal is another question for another time. However, the bigger point, is the is people want to see the content, and will put it out one way or another. So content providers do yourself a favor and make you stuff easy to rent, buy or otherwise enjoy the content, and moving content from one platform to another should be seamless with a DRM issue and no issues with software formats not being capable. Everything should just work.
The notion of cord cutting that the industry pundits are taking about is probably right to a degree, However, As people get the new TVs that can connect to the web, either directly or through a computer, easiest being hooking a laptop and piping everything from the laptop to the TV, the uses for a fast connection are increased, suddenly you can fire up Netflix, on the laptop and send it to the TV and enjoy the same content from the laptop on the big TV, same for YouTube, any other web content, be it podcast, or videos etc. Suddenly the pipe from the cable provider is’nt as important as it was, However, there’s still a lot of content that only available on broadcast TV. While a large percentage will cut down on the size of the package that keep, both for budget reason, and because content is available on line and they can get it there and pipe it to the platform of choice to watch it. I don’t think its cord cutting, so much as its cord switching, and sharing, one supplementing the other.
Some content providers are making strides to make their content available on mobile platforms with limitations, while its a good start. But there’s a long way to go.
Netflix has pretty much set the standard for streaming video, and a business model that works. They have been able to get themselves placed in a wide variety pf platforms from DVD players, TVs themselves, I even read at one point, there was talk of them actually having a physical button on a remote, on some TVs, weather anything has come of it, is not important. What is important is their dominance and saturation in the video industry . They do have some big hurtles to jump, the biggest is the deals they have to make with content owners. Every time they try to do a deal the price goes up or the owners want to renegotiate a deal halfway though a contract. The point is if content owners would quit being so worried about their content and how its being used, and work to get it into as many venues as possible and not make is prohibitively expensive that small providers to get into. They would in the long run probably make more then they trying to do with the high price deals they’re doing now, only it’s be spread out over more companies, and longer terms, so if there was a loss somewhere it won't be as much as it it was in one big deal the lost.

The long and short of it content owners, and providers need to go back and reevaluate their core business model, and why they are in business. Are they in business to serve the stockholders, or the customer, aka, public? If its the customer, they need to rethink how and what kind of deals they do, to get their content out, with a minimum of constraints both on the provider and especially the end user. If the customer is is happy and willing to pay the reasonable rental fee or subscription fee, and can get what they want when and where and on what platform they want, with no issues, the profit for the stockholders will come.