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Posted
by Have you noticed all the amazing great fantastic things that are happening in the media business? Seriously. There's a spirit of reinvention and change that has some of the best media start-ups energized and optimistic about the future. In order to find the optimism, think broadly about what media is becoming, not what it was, or even what it is today. In fact - a quick look at the six companies I'm going to share with you in this post suggests that we're moving toward an era of unprecedented opportunity and growth for media.
I'd propose that the five phenomenon to watch as truly new media evolves are:
1. Commerce is Content.
2. Location, Connection, and Community.
3. Teaching an old dog new tricks.
4. The rebirth of the shared viewing experience.
5. Syndication = Value Creation.
Commerce is Content
Let me start here with an anecdote. Do you know why songs in popular music run around 3 minutes or less in length? Is that some musical or creative rule? No, it turns out that the length of recorded songs has to do with the original sound recording tubes and their ability to hold 3.5 minutes of sound. So, the size of the recording device shaped a creative standard.
Television began as a medium driven by sponsors. With linear schedules and limited networks, the relationship between products and audiences was born in a world of scarcity and mass viewership. Now, that's turned upside down. There's virtually unlimited bandwidth, and audiences carved up in to tiny little slivers.
In fact, your interest in or need for a product often drives more of
your web behavior than the "channel surfing" that television enjoyed.
When you type into a Google search bar, you're expressing intent -need
• and that can be responded to with content or commerce or both.
Whose figuring this out? Well, not surprisingly - some of the upstart leaders in ecommerce are rocking the content space.
Take a look at this image:
And if you have a sec, click through on this LINK.
Look closely, because it may seem like you're reading a blog or an
editorial site. And you are, sort of. You're on Etsy - an amazingly
human community of creative makers who are sharing (and SELLING) unique
crafts and gifts. Go to Etsy's home page and you'll see big links for
Community and Blog. Spend time on the site and you'll see it's full of
faces, stories, and PEOPLE... sharing both their stories and what they
sell.
Etsy sellers talk to their customers, and the spirit of the site
makes it fun to browse, fun to buy from, and fun to share with your
friends.
Now, take a look at this video: LINK That's the folks at Zappos inviting customers who are lonely on
Valentines Day to call them for some LOVE. Really, a ecommerce company
that wants you to call them, and wants you to talk to them.
They value, and in fact encourage customer interaction. They've
created a culture where they create content around their brand that
makes their brand more engaging - and they invite their customers to
join in and make and share content as well.
Location, Connection, and Community
It used to be we all stayed put. We went to work, we came home. Now,
everyone is on the move. Changing jobs, changing cities, changing
continents. Mobility changes the nature of community - your community
isn't a place, it's a collection of people. Twitter makes your
community portable. And, in many ways, re-creates the local newspaper
in on your mobile device. But what Twitter did in a world of ubiquitous
bandwidth, was find a simple and fun way to re-connect the pieces of
our lives in a simple 140 character news burst. In addition, they
opened the platform early, allow many entrepreneurs to bolt their ideas
and extensions on to the Twitter platform. So there are many good
Twitter software extensions -and more on the way. And increasingly,
Twitter is becoming a directory service - pointing users to links that
are local, topical, and useful. For advertisers, Twitter will know
where you are, what you're asking about, what you're friends are
saying. Imagine a 'Twitter-bot' that can answer the question: "Where's
good to eat in downtown Cleveland?" I suspect the folks at Zagats are
already building it - or will soon.
Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks
Old media companies don't need to die, they just need to be re-born.
The hard thing is that it's a whole lot easier for startups to invent
things from scratch than it is for big media companies who have legacy
rules to change midstream. But it's not impossible. Just watch closely
what CNN is doing with iReport. Last night, Anderson Cooper had an hour
on the Economy, and there were audience questions recorded and uploaded
to iReport as the backbone of the coverage. Real people on CNN from
their living rooms. Brilliant. CNN is reaching out to audience members
who have the tools and the hunger to participate and giving them a way
to get their stories and their voices on the network. This is huge, and
necessary, and will change both the tenor and the content of CNN as the
CNN editorial staff turns to viewer contributions as a regular part of
their editorial product.
The Rebirth Of The Shared Viewing Experience
The common wisdom is that in our new ultra-niche world, the old
romantic notion of the family sitting 'round the TV is gone forever.
Wrongo! In fact, the reason the communal viewing experience exploded
was because TV evolved into exclusionary niches. MTV for the kids.
Nickelodeon for the young ones. HBO for adults. Like that. Everyone -
to your private screens. But companies like Boxee are building a future
media experience around the TV that brings families back together in
front of the set. Just last night, thanks to Boxee, my family ended up
round the family flat screen. We watched old videos from a trip that
was discovered on a hard drive via Boxee, then a recording of an iChat
with our older son who's away at college, and finally, a number of
really cool magic tricks on Revision 3's ScamSchool show. This morning,
we were practicing card tricks over the morning breakfast cereal.
Syndication = Value Creation
If the last big content 'movement' in the web was the creation of
portals - windows that allowed visitors to see a wide variety of
content in one place, then consider the next movement the
'de-portalization' of the web. And that means that content increasingly
needs to go more places, and do more things, in more flavors.
Syndication from content makers to content consumer sites is a fast
moving and truly significant phenomenon. And if you haven't looked at
what Mochila is doing - you're in for an exciting surprise. Mochila is
now acting as the gateway and technology solution for a wide variety of
publishers that had in the past kept all their content locked up on
their site. Now, folks like the info publishers IDG will be able to
premier content on the IDG publications and sites, and then provide a
content feed to Mochila to distribute out to a wider network of sites
and audiences.
So, I promised at the start of this journey that there was optimism on the horizon. And I hope you feel I've delivered. Now, there's plenty of change in all this. As institutions like CNN turn from being primarily 'speakers' to increasingly listeners, as commerce sites need to shift from products to stories, as the flatscreen turns from passive to interactive (finally!), and as content sharing (syndication) makes content creators stronger rather than weaker.
The road won't be straight. And there will be casualties. Don't be one of them. Try adopting my mantra and see if it makes all this seem more fun: "Engage Change."
I'm going to make buttons. Want one?
There are few people in the media business that have the perspective
that Michael Wolff does. As an early internet entrepreneur, he
chronicled the rise and fall of his own internet start up with painful
precision in the now iconic "Burn Rate." 
Since
then, he's gone on to have a wide ranging career in the magazine
business including a widely chronicled and in the end failed attempt to
buy New York Magazine. Now, as the author of the critically well
received "the Man Who Owns The News" biography of Rupert Murdoch, and his previous media baron anthology - "Autumn of the Moguls" - Wolff can lay claim to having a unique view of the media business, its past, present and perhaps its future.
Future is what is perhaps most interesting, given the current
bloodletting - so when I was able to interview him, the first question
became the subject of the entire conversation, "Curation" flash in
the pan or the future of the media universe.
"The real value in a world of infinite information is sorting and
filtering" said Wolff, when asked if there could be any future models
that didn't include some elements of aggregation and curation.
"Truth is nobody's getting it right--yet. There is no killer mass
market news brand" said Wolff who is the co-founder of news aggregator
Newser.com. "No network news replacement. No trusted online paper.
Nobody has yet to unlock the two key elements of general interest
news--an efficient and entertaining experience--and combine them with
all the new functionality of digital delivery."
Of course, lots of folks are trying new models, and some of them seem
to make professional reporters and editors uncomfortable. Should they
be? "Yes and no" says Wolff. "With more outlets there will be more
room--but at lower prices. Being a journalist (what we used to call a
reporter) was a working class profession. Well, here we are again. I
don't see less professional media. I see more. Which is why we need
more curation."
Looking out on the horizon, there are sites like The Daily Beast that
are doing magazine style journalism on the web, and Newser that are
mixing aggregation and curation.
Not surprisingly, Wolff has strong options about these two models:
"The Daily Beast is just Daily Baloney. Tina Brown is trying to smuggle
an old form into a new medium. She wants to be editing a magazine--and
thinks she can do it here. She can't." What about The New York Times?
"Times get's nothing. Nada. And, in general, I'd say there is very
little reason to assume that practitioners of an older craft, who rely
on and have grown up with, a radically different technology, can make
the transition to an entirely new system--a new way of thinking and of
working. That almost never happens." Talking about his news
aggregation site, Wolff explains: "Newser mixes machine and human. The
machine makes for a more comprehensive mix--the human makes a better
packaged and hence more interesting mix. Google News, for instance, is
a major bore."
And
off of this has a major impact on the economics and revenues of media
as well. Wolff isn't pulling punches when hey lays out the model and
metrics of news on the web in stark detail: " Technology makes
information gathering and packaging much cheaper. Then too, given the
realities of web-based advertising CPMs, you have to change your
content model for online publishing. If a dollar of traditional
advertising turns into a dime online, adjustments are going to be
required."
Is there light at the end of the tunnel for media in general, and
Journalism in particular? Author, Entrepreneur, Pundit, and
Trouble-Maker Wolff is - for him - optimistic.
Journalism, he says, has a place in the future, but... "it changes
too. Journalism has to adapt to technology--to the new tools and
distribution systems of the trade."
Why two names you've probably never heard of may hold the future of Cable TV and the Web in their hands.
Hulu. It was, before its launch called by many big name media pundits Clown
Co. But then Clown Co had a pretty good laugh - launching a content
site that seemed to 'get it' - with big name partners like NBC and
Fox. The site, named Hulu - was quick out of the box and felt
surprisingly more like a network quality version of YouTube rather than
an over-the-top promo for the Networks. And it turns out for all the
right reasons. It wasn't, after all, an NBC or a CBS entity- but rather
funded by a private equity group and run by a remarkable young CEO
named Jason Kilar.
“Clown Co” was fast the envy of big media looking toward the web.
What did they do right? First of all, they embraced the basic rules of
the web - allow sharing, allow embedding, and above all - make it
free. After all, TV was free and free over the air TV was what started
the whole broadcasting revolution. Free was what consumers want and
expect.
Meanwhile, a tiny little start up was building some neat software. The
idea was simple. Most American homes now get video from a bunch of
places - some from their camcorders, some from DVD, some from the web,
and some from sites that store and share pirated video via bit-torrent.
Well, you may not like that video comes from all over the place, and
that not all of it is paid for - but that's the reality. So the
engineers at Boxee built some lovely software that helped turn that
mess of content into a nice clean viewing and sharing experience.
So far, so good. Hulu was growing fast - very fast - with very high
quality content from NBC and Fox. But they were doing deals with others
as well.
And Boxee was getting its early alpha software ready so that users could put it on an Xbox or even an Apple TV.
Then - the cable industry stepped in and put a stop to the whole party.
Now it's war. Hulu, which was until today available on Boxee - has
been pulled off. Says Hulu's CEO that he didn't want to, but his
content partners forced him.
That's code for NBC and Fox. Meanwhile, Boxee users who are loud and
influential bunch are crying foul and promising to abandon Hulu for
good.
What's really going on here?
Well, first of all - Cable TV has always enjoyed what's called a duel
revenue stream. That means you pay your cable bill every month, and a
bunch of those dollars go to NBC for the rights to MSNBC, CNBC,
Bravo, etc. And, you watch those channels with commercial
interruptions. So the cable networks get paid twice - making their
business a good business even in a down economy.
At the same time consumers who increasingly have more and more choices
in what they watch in their living room, are looking at the monthly
cable bill - a bill that often includes broadband and often tops $100 a
month, and their saying - "hey, maybe I'd like to mix and match
content I get, and pay for it more like a chinese menu." It's called
"Ala Carte" in the cable business and it is fiercely opposed by cable
operators and cable channels alike. Consumer choice would mean much
more competitive pressure for the consumer entertainment dollar, and
would make what has been a pretty sweet business a whole lot harder
work. Heck, of the 1000 channels you get, how many of them do you
really watch? What if you could pay for just those channels.
Somehow, Boxee turned up at the wrong time. It's a David and Goliath
match up for sure. Boxee has just raised 10 million in venture capital.
Hulu has 100 million. Boxee has no revenue stream. Hulu sells ads on
The Office, Saturday Night Live, and American Idol. Hardly a fair fight.
But Boxee represents what could fast become a mainstream product that
could bring consumers an "Over The Top" access to the web’s wide world
of content without needing to pay the local cable company anything
other than for basic broadband. Don't get me wrong, I think that
consumers WILL pay for content. But with Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV
and a whole new crop of cable alternatives fast showing up on the
horizon, they better hurray.
So far, the only public comments about all this I've been able to find
is from Comcast Spokesperson Kate Noel who said: "The idea behind
(what we are calling for now) “OnDemand Online” is that consumers will
have access to the content they already pay for on more than just one
platform, and the programmers will be able to rely on a secure
distribution of their content that costs a lot of money to create."
Battle lines have been drawn. Cable doesn't want to see 'cable
exclusive' content on your TV that doesn't come through your cable
box. And yet the fast growing web content space is offering viewers
more choices in terms of what they watch, how they watch, and how they
can contribute and participate in content.
Sadly, Hulu is caught smack in the middle - with a web-centric spirit
and ownership that would like to turn back the clock and re-wall the
garden.
This is round one, so stay tuned. This battle is likely to come to your living room sooner than you might think.
The Allosphere:
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/allosphere/media.php
http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/
SIFTABLES:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/
http://tacolab.com/projects/Siftables
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbwzBBHtNGI
WINGSUITES:
http://www.gegenschatz.com/movies/index.php?mov=5
http://www.gegenschatz.com/pics/index.php?p=0&id=25&cid=5
Does that seem extreme? Ok, well - come along with me on the tour of Zappo's Corp HQ in Las Vegas and see if it make sense after then.
The Zappos Corp. HQ is in Las Vegas - and as our tour guide explained to me (yes - they have tour guides). Why Vegas? That was because they wanted to have all of their customer phone reps able to live in a 24 hour city with a good high energy fun culture. Simply put, when you call Zappos - you're not getting sent overseas or to an outsourced call center. Zappos knows that for ecommerce, your phone call is their best chance to have a positive customer service experience. The only other company that I know that gets this is Apple. Phone support IS the customer experience.
Before I went to Zappos, i'd seen some photos of popcorn machines in the lobby and fussball tables and such. But I just figured it was the old web 1.0 thing - no one really plays with the stuff, it's just there to create the impression of a cool place to hang out.
WrongO!
Once you walk into the lobby - it starts to make sense. The original powerpoint that funded the company is on display: In it, the quote: "Footwear Trends: it is likely that men and women and children will wear shoes for the foreseeable future."
Ok, that's funny. A shoe store with a sense of irony. Love that.
But the big surprise is as you 'tour' the building.
There's no fancy machines. No nifty robots or high tech gizmo's. It would be a your ordinary office park. But Zappo's turns that upside down. Every department has a 'shtick'. Decorations are creative, funny, raw, silly - but incredibly authentic. Remember the "Flair" at TGIF. Well, none of that here. Whether it's the Pirates Den, or the Executive Jungle, or the Zappos Wizard of Oz Conference Room, it's clear that these guys are having a good time selling shoes (and more than shoes too!) .
So, how did Tony and his team build this corp culture? Well, if you follow him on Twitter (http://twitter.com/zappos) you'll see that he's got a sense of humor and likes to share it. And so, by making the people of Zappos stars and important, he's made a gig at Zappos hard to get, and worth going for. Remember this is Vegas, so the town is full of outgoing people with a sense of performance. But not everyone gets to work at Zappos, In fact - after you go through their recruiting and training program, Zappos offers new hires $2,000 to quit. Yup - paid to leave. The point is: "if this place and this job isn't awesome for you, take the money and run."
My tour continued - past the woman on the phone dressed as Elvis, past the free bookshelves (employees and visitors are both encouraged to take as many as they want - and suggest one to add to the Zappos book collection) and finally - to the Zappos VIP area. Ok, pick a crown and smile for the Polaroid. Ok, I admit it - it made me feel special. :)
So - as you walk through the funhouse that is Zappos, you find that you want to snap pictures. And rather than the Zappos folks glare at you -or feel like they're on display - they clap, blow horns, even take pictures of YOU (it's all part of the vibe). But the bottom line is - they're having fun, and as the tour moves from the Kids department to Legal, to Marketing to Content (formerly known as Product) you get that these guys are on a mission. A mission to make Zappos into a community that you want to be part of , a new kind of community-based commerce.
Tony Hsieh has created a culture that is quickly becoming the envy of retailers both online and off.
He's doing it by embracing the technology and the ethos of the web 2.0 world. While most big companies are monolithic, Zappos with it's 1 billion dollars of sales last year, is surprisingly human and humble. While big companies create a wall between them and their customers, Zappos tears that wall down with video, telephone, and twitter - embracing connectivity and transparency.
At a time when lots of things that are big seem to be failing (Chicago Tribune, Circuit City, Citibank) you can peak into what a more personal, more fun, more human commerce business looks like by checking out Zappos. Step one, buy some shoes. Then it will start to make sense.
