I think the author misses the point. He references TV, Music, eBooks, and Movies. Those are not the only forms of content. What about user generated content (Facebook posts, etc...)? Any _data_ that can be consumed, and of interest to an individual is content. An individual's desire to consume content is the lever used by technology to generate a profit.
That depends on what the point is. The question that's being examined is how content fits into the strategic model of Google/Apple/Facebook etc., which broadly speaking is how do you stop users from switching to competing products.
An individual's desire to consume content is not a differentiator/strategic advantage for any one company. Why is it really hard to build a successful new social network, search engine or smartphone platform? Because Facebook has the network effect, Google search is a superior product as it's improved each day by its 100 of millions of users and Apple has a vertically integrated ecosystem that locks users into using an iPhone.
He also missed that content (per MIT) is the most profitable business model of all. Case in point how much engineering and R&D dollars had to go into the "Harry Potter novels" or creating a Marvel Super Hero?
Even content from one's garage that users put up on eBay or the paint splatters up for auction at Sothebys New York?
There comes a point, though, that we end up abstracting discussions out so much that they don't really mean anything any more. Facebook posts and TV shows are not really equivalent in any meaningful way except that they both use data to download and take up time to consume.
Came to the comments to say exactly the same thing. "Content is king" really refers to the service becoming invisible enough to let the users get what they want out of it.
As product owners/creators, we can easily obsess about our platform and loose sight of the needs of the users we set out to serve, then scratch our heads when users jump ships to a crappier service (in our biased judgement) which happens to have more content.
Yes, and the tech giant are the only ones with enough users to let content producers reach an audience of relevance. Think that was the point the author tried to make, describing the switch from "content" to "audience". Content producers for films, music, and other expensive pieces do not have enough power anymore to reach a large enough audience to make a profit
I'm genuinely surprised that Facebook hasn't capitalized on the social aspect of watching TV. The prevalence of "watching parties", immediate episode reviews, and instant commentary on the released episodes/shows should point to the large opportunity here. I've wanted to create a startup around this - the ability to "watch a show with your friends" remotely. The problem is that the content is often locked down via Netflix or something, so you'd need an in there. But the opportunities are huge! Imagine watching the presidential debates, or sporting events, in tandem with other people. That would be amazing. Unfortunately, locking down the content is still in the way.
Isn't this something like what's been emerging on Twitch and YouTube the last couple of years?
Eg. during The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017 (E3) in June there where multiple YouTube channels streaming with side chat, comments and what not. I think I have seen it with the recent Star Wars releases too.
Maybe it is not quite what you describe, but this seems to be a trend
Just to offer counter-perspective on your estimation that there's a "large" opportunity as you describe - I have never heard of any of my friends or family holding or attending a "watch party" for anything other than a few American football games each year.
It seems to me that this does happen, but for all I know, maybe FB considered your idea, and the idea failed market validation.
While thinking about this problem in the past, I've ended up using the phrase "participatory meta-content" to describe this kind of content that's built around the audience's participation in the viewing of a show. I agree that the opportunity here is huge, but the garden walls are high.
Twitch is the closest thing to a major player in this space that I'm aware of -- they've even gone to the point of simulating the live-chat experience while you watch an old stream, by replaying chat messages at their correct time-offsets.
Things like this for television do exist specifically for group-watching with a known set of friends, but I think the really interesting part would be stumbling into a community you didn't know about in advance, and making new friends.
Anyway, it's a shame that the licensing regimes built around the media that garners these kinds of audiences are unlikely to permit the sort of experimentation required to find the right experience here! Maybe someone will figure it out.
I've used https://www.letsgaze.com/#/ a few times which worked pretty well. Only works with files you have access to, or freely available youtube content though.
I agree that it's a neat idea. I'm sure the content problem is why there aren't more attempts at the moment.
https://www.rabb.it/ let's you do this. They advertise about letting you watch Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and anything else with your friends. It seems to be just streaming the user host's screen to anyone else in the room. I'm not sure how legal that is.
This is what sports twitter is. Yes, you have to build up the list of people you follow and interact with people to build your followers, but I would much rather that than have to share a sporting event with every fan. I would rather have the content and the discussion separate. This gets even more important when something is a global (such as a Barcelona - Real Madird game). Everyone can join the dicussion and you can curate it to your preferences. I can only imagine having a chatroom with a half-billion (or more) people in dozens of languages. Sports also has the built in advantage of being the one thing most people will consistently watch live and is (typically) broadcast live across time zones. People also expect for results to be "spoiled" if they didn't watch live and know they are responsible for actively avoiding that information. Essentially, sports are (IMO) the last form of entertainment that dictates what time you watch.
I am convinced I love twitter as much as I do because I use it primarily as a way to watch and discuss sports with other people who love that team/sport/game as much as I do. Even among my real life sports fan friends, our interest in a particular game or sport differs. Not so much those who are actively watching and commenting on the games on twitter. You are there and engaged because you want to be. Due to this, I was able to meet fans of my teams that live in multiple countries and consistently talk to them, even outside of that particular event. Especially for sports, so much of the interaction happens arounds the games (who to play, who to sign, tactics, etc.). I would hate to only interact with people in that small time frame and miss all surrounding discussion from people whose opinions I find well thought out or think in a similar manner that I do.
The short snippets of text are great for getting stats and updates directly from reporters/teams/leagues, too. Highlights are able to be immediately played via twitter and photos, gifs, and screenshots are immediately shared. The NBA has really embraced social media with its content policies (cannot use more than two consecutive minutes of broadcast footage without a license; 20 minutes of spliced highlights is fair use) that lets fans make mix tapes, instant highlights, gifs, etc, easily and without fear of copyright takedown notices. In turn, the NBA essentially gets free marketing from its fans. This is where the NFL really blew things, even locking down offical team accounts. Teams are starting to use Periscope to broadcast press conferences, interviews, and warmpus to their fan bases.
If you want to see this kind of dynamic live, check out a big game or a night with a lot of games on NBA twitter. A good-ish place to start would be the SB Nation accounts for the teams and who they are RTing and interacting with. It can be a whole lot of fun and it is easy to catch the highlights of the other games or know if someone is having a monster game you should switch over to.
To me, the wider web of people that twitter catches is much more appropriate for these types of interactions than facebook ever will be. If your goal is to have your small group of friends watch a show, I can see where you find current offerings lacking. But when you want to get involved in an existing "event" twitter is really great for that.
>Since music no longer stops people from switching between platforms, it’s gone from being a moat (especially for Apple, the one platform company that actually had a strong position)
The author might or might not be right on his general position, but this is a bizarro argument. Apple had in fact kickstarted the whole no-DRM thing.
Neither DRM nor their (meagre, since most just pirated and ripped stuff anyway) iTunes collections is what kept people to iOS / the Mac.
I think music was far more important in the early/mid 2000s in terms of getting people to buy Macs and iPods. Just anecdotal experience, plus remembering when iTunes wasn't available for Windows.
No, there was a couple of years where they had DRMed music and it was a de facto moat, even if it wasn't a strategic moat. I bought exactly one song in that period, from a Windows box, that I could play in iTunes or on my iPod. IIRC it was Amazon that used non-DRM as a differentiator, and then Jobs wrote his famous letter.
"Netflix, of course, is a TV company, in the context of this conversation - it isn’t using content for leverage for some other platform (Spotify is the same, without the commissioning). But Amazon clearly is using content for platform leverage - as something else to speed up the Prime flywheel."
I don't get this part, Netflix is producing original or buying exclusive content which it tries to distribute globally. The same is true for Amazon. Who is this not competing with the best content for its service?
He's saying that Netflix is producing content in order to sell Netflix, but Amazon is producing content as an enticement to get people to sign up for Amazon Prime and spend more money on Amazon generally.
This piece has a lot of assertions and predictions but nothing clearly quantified or falsifiable. Somehow, I doubt he's shorting Disney or any other major content company but if he were (even in a fake money portfolio) it would make for a much more interesting argument.
he works for a16z, you'll see it reflected in their investments - or not.
overall this is content marketing for a16z, right along their great podcasts, etc. attracting start-ups and good candidates to work for them.
being a visible, renowned think tank is not a bad place to be, if you have the money and patience to execute along that line. it is amazingly hard work to churn out quality content throughout the year.
"The tech industry has been trying to get onto the TV and into the living room since before the consumer internet - the ‘information superhighway’ of the early 1990s was really about interactive TV, not the web."
How was the early 90s about Interactive TV and not the web?
Because the "web" as we know it today did not exist until the mid-90's. Before then, there were a bunch of companies trying to sell their own Interactive TV offerings.
> Something similar applies to ebooks. Like Spotify, the Kindle app is on any platform, so it doesn’t stop you switching devices. Unlike music, your books are still bought (mostly: there are some subscription services but they don’t cover mainstream titles), and locked with DRM, so it’s harder to switch away from Kindle than from Spotify, but that only locks you into Kindle, not any other part of Amazon’s platform: using a Kindle app or physical Kindle e-ink device doesn’t compel you to use any other Amazon products.
This seems confused. Ultimately Amazon's primary purpose is probably not to sell the devices and the lock-in works in the sense that you have your Kindle library (even if you strip the DRM you can't keep all your notes and highlights), your recommendations, and your more or less automatic impulse to go to the Kindle store for books.
> People in tech and media have been saying that ‘content is king’ for a long time
This first sentence is just wrong. The phrase 'content is king' came up more than a decade ago, in a time when major media outlets struggled with the first wave of online tech. It was a desparate statement to play down the upcoming threat (and the media knew it). Tech never thought of content as king and media stopped saying this for a very long time.
This is about the important of access to content in the broad strategy of online content distribution platforms. Once the major platforms have access to roughly the same content, the importance of content diminishes.
However, before getting to that state, access to content was a key strategic point for those platforms.
Content is king in many aspects though. A good example of which is video game consoles, people buy Nintendo products because they want to play Nintendo games.
Is it just me and my biases, or does the author seems to have a consistently misguided view of each individual area and example described.
Perhaps this could be taken as interesting from some kind of "10th man rule" perspective? Otherwise it just seems like a lot of assertions based on causality I can't quite logically wrap my head around.
It is an interesting coincidence that this hits the front page the day after Game of Thrones opens their new season, with the associated HBO Go crash, etc.
Content IS king... but the author has a different definition apparently. He should have named it "Vendor lock-in isn't king". People have choice now. The content is what matters, not the platform.
That's what the article is about, however. That access to content isn't a key strategic lever anymore for online content distribution platforms.
Most music streaming platforms share roughly the same library, so exclusive music is not a lever these days, but merely a marketing strategy.
I did not get his point of view on ebooks however. Do most online ebook distributors share roughly the same library of titles? Or is it even important to discuss, since Amazon seemingly has a monopoly on ebook distribution? What he mentions, instead, is that DRM in ebooks lock you into the app, but not the platform, so ebook exclusivity aren't a key strategic lever for that platform. If you cancel your subscription, you get to keep your content.
And then he's wondering how the effect of on-demand distribution will affect TV/Movies. Will the major tech distribution platforms transform the TV industry and render irrelevant content exclusivity?
[+] [-] vxxzy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alavelle|8 years ago|reply
An individual's desire to consume content is not a differentiator/strategic advantage for any one company. Why is it really hard to build a successful new social network, search engine or smartphone platform? Because Facebook has the network effect, Google search is a superior product as it's improved each day by its 100 of millions of users and Apple has a vertically integrated ecosystem that locks users into using an iPhone.
[+] [-] SCAQTony|8 years ago|reply
Even content from one's garage that users put up on eBay or the paint splatters up for auction at Sothebys New York?
[+] [-] untog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|8 years ago|reply
As product owners/creators, we can easily obsess about our platform and loose sight of the needs of the users we set out to serve, then scratch our heads when users jump ships to a crappier service (in our biased judgement) which happens to have more content.
[+] [-] janemanos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] draw_down|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misterbowfinger|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thousande|8 years ago|reply
Eg. during The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017 (E3) in June there where multiple YouTube channels streaming with side chat, comments and what not. I think I have seen it with the recent Star Wars releases too. Maybe it is not quite what you describe, but this seems to be a trend
Recording, https://www.twitch.tv/videos/152047092
[+] [-] jabv|8 years ago|reply
It seems to me that this does happen, but for all I know, maybe FB considered your idea, and the idea failed market validation.
Or maybe you're dead on! (shruggie emoticon)
[+] [-] wcarss|8 years ago|reply
Twitch is the closest thing to a major player in this space that I'm aware of -- they've even gone to the point of simulating the live-chat experience while you watch an old stream, by replaying chat messages at their correct time-offsets.
Things like this for television do exist specifically for group-watching with a known set of friends, but I think the really interesting part would be stumbling into a community you didn't know about in advance, and making new friends.
Anyway, it's a shame that the licensing regimes built around the media that garners these kinds of audiences are unlikely to permit the sort of experimentation required to find the right experience here! Maybe someone will figure it out.
[+] [-] tfinch|8 years ago|reply
I agree that it's a neat idea. I'm sure the content problem is why there aren't more attempts at the moment.
[+] [-] ycombinators|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johansch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krrishd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stanleyc23|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgrath_sh|8 years ago|reply
I am convinced I love twitter as much as I do because I use it primarily as a way to watch and discuss sports with other people who love that team/sport/game as much as I do. Even among my real life sports fan friends, our interest in a particular game or sport differs. Not so much those who are actively watching and commenting on the games on twitter. You are there and engaged because you want to be. Due to this, I was able to meet fans of my teams that live in multiple countries and consistently talk to them, even outside of that particular event. Especially for sports, so much of the interaction happens arounds the games (who to play, who to sign, tactics, etc.). I would hate to only interact with people in that small time frame and miss all surrounding discussion from people whose opinions I find well thought out or think in a similar manner that I do.
The short snippets of text are great for getting stats and updates directly from reporters/teams/leagues, too. Highlights are able to be immediately played via twitter and photos, gifs, and screenshots are immediately shared. The NBA has really embraced social media with its content policies (cannot use more than two consecutive minutes of broadcast footage without a license; 20 minutes of spliced highlights is fair use) that lets fans make mix tapes, instant highlights, gifs, etc, easily and without fear of copyright takedown notices. In turn, the NBA essentially gets free marketing from its fans. This is where the NFL really blew things, even locking down offical team accounts. Teams are starting to use Periscope to broadcast press conferences, interviews, and warmpus to their fan bases.
If you want to see this kind of dynamic live, check out a big game or a night with a lot of games on NBA twitter. A good-ish place to start would be the SB Nation accounts for the teams and who they are RTing and interacting with. It can be a whole lot of fun and it is easy to catch the highlights of the other games or know if someone is having a monster game you should switch over to.
To me, the wider web of people that twitter catches is much more appropriate for these types of interactions than facebook ever will be. If your goal is to have your small group of friends watch a show, I can see where you find current offerings lacking. But when you want to get involved in an existing "event" twitter is really great for that.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
The author might or might not be right on his general position, but this is a bizarro argument. Apple had in fact kickstarted the whole no-DRM thing.
Neither DRM nor their (meagre, since most just pirated and ripped stuff anyway) iTunes collections is what kept people to iOS / the Mac.
[+] [-] mooreds|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barrkel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehabe|8 years ago|reply
I don't get this part, Netflix is producing original or buying exclusive content which it tries to distribute globally. The same is true for Amazon. Who is this not competing with the best content for its service?
[+] [-] jdminhbg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiaoma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinaceae|8 years ago|reply
overall this is content marketing for a16z, right along their great podcasts, etc. attracting start-ups and good candidates to work for them.
being a visible, renowned think tank is not a bad place to be, if you have the money and patience to execute along that line. it is amazingly hard work to churn out quality content throughout the year.
[+] [-] blakesterz|8 years ago|reply
How was the early 90s about Interactive TV and not the web?
[+] [-] jordanlev|8 years ago|reply
If you're interested in learning more about this era of internet history, I highly recommend this podcast: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/
[+] [-] colept|8 years ago|reply
Netflix, Amazon, et all - are not redefining content. They're redefining the medium.
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
This seems confused. Ultimately Amazon's primary purpose is probably not to sell the devices and the lock-in works in the sense that you have your Kindle library (even if you strip the DRM you can't keep all your notes and highlights), your recommendations, and your more or less automatic impulse to go to the Kindle store for books.
[+] [-] cluenerf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmoy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cupcakestand|8 years ago|reply
This first sentence is just wrong. The phrase 'content is king' came up more than a decade ago, in a time when major media outlets struggled with the first wave of online tech. It was a desparate statement to play down the upcoming threat (and the media knew it). Tech never thought of content as king and media stopped saying this for a very long time.
[+] [-] deburo|8 years ago|reply
This is about the important of access to content in the broad strategy of online content distribution platforms. Once the major platforms have access to roughly the same content, the importance of content diminishes.
However, before getting to that state, access to content was a key strategic point for those platforms.
[+] [-] zjaffee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucideer|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps this could be taken as interesting from some kind of "10th man rule" perspective? Otherwise it just seems like a lot of assertions based on causality I can't quite logically wrap my head around.
[+] [-] fjdlwlv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=HBO%20Go%20crash...
[+] [-] bsclifton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|8 years ago|reply
Distribution is king.
The company that controls the access to content via distribution controls pricing.
[+] [-] deburo|8 years ago|reply
Most music streaming platforms share roughly the same library, so exclusive music is not a lever these days, but merely a marketing strategy.
I did not get his point of view on ebooks however. Do most online ebook distributors share roughly the same library of titles? Or is it even important to discuss, since Amazon seemingly has a monopoly on ebook distribution? What he mentions, instead, is that DRM in ebooks lock you into the app, but not the platform, so ebook exclusivity aren't a key strategic lever for that platform. If you cancel your subscription, you get to keep your content.
And then he's wondering how the effect of on-demand distribution will affect TV/Movies. Will the major tech distribution platforms transform the TV industry and render irrelevant content exclusivity?
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pryelluw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
The content is just a means.
[+] [-] cupcakestand|8 years ago|reply
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