I have just read one of the most thoughtful pieces about media and the internet... "The Slow Media Manifesto" (and a tip of the hat to Bruce Sterling).

Here is the pre-amble to the manifesto:


I love the idea of a slowness to the creation of content in the same way that there is a slow food movement. The idea of there being care and thought given to content and that there is originality of thought is just sensational!

I bumped into Glen A Baker yesterday at the movies.

Glen is a journalist who has written more about Australian music in the media than possibly any other person I know and has appeared on TV as the Rock Brain Of The Universe (he is a mine of information about music). 

Last year Glen had a really tough year. He had open heart surgery and his wife of 37 years left him - after having six children together.

Glen is one of those rare people who only see the good in people. So he has taken all of this in his stride and is getting on with life, albeit a little shell-shocked.

Glen came on a trip that I took in the early 90's to Moscow, when I led a Music Industry delegation to attempt to open up copyright discussions with the then Soviet Union. We went in the absolute dead of winter. That was of course before the White Revolution and the break up of the Soviet Union. Those were the bad old days of having a KGB agent watching your every move as a foreigner and where currency exchange controls meant that you had to report how much foreign cash you brought into the country and how many roubles you exchanged them for so that they could do a tally at the airport to see whether you had been selling dollars on the black market.

Glen is still doing the music industry rounds - and hopefully will continue for a long time to come!

In the last couple of weeks, the amount of spurious comments that have been posted to this blog have increased out of sight.

It used to be once in a blue moon that I would see overt spam. Now it is daily....

I wonder... Is this an increase in bots that post, or is it that Perceptric Forum is becoming more popular....

Not sure what the answer is, but if you have a view please feel free to post it here...

By the way, I do delete any comments that are obviously spam!

Ministers are flying home after negotiating the ACTA agreement, which very soon may not be required.
It would appear that there is some experimentation being conducted that very soon could moot the very reason for ACTA.

Finally, we are seeing the Content creation companies figure out how to commercialise their products on the P2P networks.

 

The No 1. TV show Globally is Heroes.

 

Here’s the Top fifty Television Program file sharing list.

 

1	Heroes Series 4
2	Lost Series 5
3	Fringe Series 2
4	House Series 6
5	Supernatural Series 5
6	True Blood Series 2 (in Hiatus until June 2010)
7	Desperate Housewives Series 6
8	Greys Anatomy Series 6
9	Star Wars: The Clone Wars Series 2
10	The Mentalist Series 2
11	The Big Bang Theory Series 3
12	Smallville Series 9
13	Californication Series 3
14	Flashforward Series 1
15	Gossip Girl Series 3
16	Stargate Universe Series 1
17	Bones Series 5
18	How I met your Mother Series 5
19	Burn Notice Series 3
20	Legend of the Seeker Series 2
21	Sanctuary Series 2
22	Merlin Series 2
23	The Vampire Diaries Series 1
24	Doctor Who Series 4 (2005)
25	Criminal Minds Series 5
26	Ugly Betty Series 4
27	Family Guy Series 8
28	Private Practice Series 3
29	Ghost Whisperer Series 5
30	Lie to Me Series 2
31	CSI Series 10
32	NCIS Series 7
33	Brothers and Sisters Series 4
34	Damages Series 2
35	90210 Series 2
36	CSI: NY Series 6
37	Scrubs Series 8
38	The Office (US Version) Series 6
39	One Tree Hill Series 7
40	V (2009) Series 1
41	Sons of Anarchy Series 2
42	American Dad Series 1
43	Glee Series 1
44	Nip/Tuck Series 6
45	Two and Half Men Series 7
46	30 Rock Series 4
47	Numbers Series 6
48	Better off Ted Series 1
49	Flashpoint Series 3
50	Castle Series 2

 

Of course, the list is heavily skewed towards American shows because after all, there are more Americans ripping content than any other country.

 

But are those Americans now including the show content creators?

 

Regular readers would be aware of the P2P scoring methodology that we developed earlier this year which takes into account several factors including the trust value, (including encoding quality), the file size, it’s availability on the network and its popularity (requests).

 

The P2P score tells us at Peceptric which are the file sharing winners and which are the losers.

Everyone knows how easy it is to remove advertisements from digital (DTV) rips. Therefore when we see "contains an advertisement". not advertisements - just a solitary advertisement, it can only be classified an experiment.

Someone distributed a copy of the current episode of Heroes with a commercial in it. (Top line of the following table).

Title	P2P Score	Size	Avail	Requests
Heroes.S0408.Once.Upon.A.Time.In.Texas.HDTV.XviD-2HD.avi  [350.30 Mb] ~has a commercial~	185,035,466	350.3	539	540
Heroes s04e08 Once Upon A Time In Texas 720P Hdtv x264-Ctu.mkv	103,904,741	1009	78	326
Heroes s04e08 Once Upon A Time In Texas Proper Hdtv Xvid-Notv.avi	61,040,045	349.92	178	190
Heroes s04e08 Once Upon A Time In Texas Hdtv 2Hd Reencoded h264 Aac.mkv	158,085	119.04	4	5

 

And, they distributed it first.

 

Result as in the table above, the version with the commercial has a higher trust value, a larger request and availability base.

 

Consequently,  51% of file sharing downloaders of this weeks episode of Heroes will be watching a commercial.

 

Voluntarily. By Choice. Because the commercial inclusive version was the first one posted.

 

Wasn’t that interesting boys and girls?

 

 

References:

Multiple file sharing sites and Perceptric Corporate Data

People have talked about the move by Comrade Murdoch to make all the News properties follow a "pay to view" model.

While this is something that is presumably designed to get the stock analysts feeling hot and sweaty about the potential for News to arrest its declining newspaper revenues, particularly from its online properties, I wonder if anyone has done any serious analysis of the kind of people who read the newspapers that Mr Murdoch and his companies publish...

While I admire his capitalist drive enormously, and would love to have a bank account like his, I am not quite so bullish about his prospects to generate much in the way of revenues from his newspapers online.

Why?

Because a large number of his "news" properties are aimed at the lowest common denominator of the population. Not to denigrate the working classes, by any means, but the people who read The News Of The World, or The Sun, or any number of his properties are surely the same slice of the population that is being put out of work by the GFC. Bottom line - they don't have any money to spare. So why would they spend their money on a newspaper on line when they can get the information on the kind of news that they are seeking free elsewhere.

The one thing that charging people does, in my experience, when they are used to getting that good or service for nothing, is motivate them to find the price that they are used to - elsewhere.

To me, beyond any of the other reasons that I could argue, this one is the big one - The News audience (not counting those who read the quality papers, rather than the rags) is made up of a substantial amount of people who just don't have the scratch to pay.

But I must admit that if I were one of his competitors I would be saying, "Go, Rupert, go. Bring it on". Because one thing is for sure - as soon as News introduces a "pay per view" model, it will push a lot of traffic to the other guys....

Here are some pictures from one of the recent US demonstrations about Health Care, who I imagine are the typical reader of News publications... They have a great way with the English language... :)

We have previously stated that P2P downloads of English movies are acting as a valuable ambassador of the English language and consumer lifestyle trends to the worlds hungriest P2P market, China.

 

Today, we will be discussing that Cable Broadcasting stalwart, the World Movie Channel.

 

Anyone who subscribes to the World Movies Channel will no doubt occasionally wonder at the preponderance of Danish and Chinese movies.

 

Whilst I don’t doubt that the Chinese represent a significant portion of the world population, one can hardly say the same about the Danes.

 

So what gives with all the Danish films on World Movies?

 

As a guess, I would hazard that the Danes are desirous of increased diplomatic relations with the world and have elected to discount their movie offerings to the World Movie Cable channel as a marketing ploy.

 

It is doubtless working, with Danish movies being about every 20^th movie being shown.

 

Why? Well, either World Movies is a Danish Corporation or has an interest in promoting Danish culture to Australia.

 

A quick look at http://www.worldmovies.net/?page=corporateinformation

 

Informs us that:

 

PAN TV Limited is an independent Australian company that was founded to produce The WORLD MOVIES Channel for the Australian subscription television market.

The WORLD MOVIES Channel began broadcasting in October 1995 coinciding with the launch of subscription TV in Australia.

PAN TV Limited is a partnership between three Australian entities, being: Australian Capital Equity, APN News and Media and Multilingual Subscriber Television Limited (a wholly owned subsidiary of SBS) The China based media company Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group is also a minority investor.

 

OK, at least we know where the Chinese content comes from.

 

But I re-iterate – why are we getting all the Danish content?

 

It’s not that I mind Danish content, but to be perfectly honest I paid the $6.95 per month for Hungarian content of which there was precious little of. Now Hungary has about the same population impact on the World so how come there arn’t as many Hungarian movies as Danish movies?

 

What was that, oh we have a Danish Princess ?

 

Oh sorry, the Danes have an Australian Princess ?

 

Ah,  an ex-pat Aussie girl is now a Danish Princess. Right. Got it. So that is why Australians pay $6.95 per month, so they can become comfortable about losing one of our own to them.

 

Good-oh. As long as we know.

 

PS: World Movies – Regardless your good intentions, If it’s called World Movies it should have a balanced representative content based approximately on the population breakdown of languages spoken at home (hint: in Australia) as per the last census.

 

Otherwise it should be renamed to Danish Movies Channel # and Other World Movies Channel ##

 

PPS: Don’t bother with the Hungarian movies. Your one Hungarian subscriber – me, has resigned his Foxtel subscription. I now get all my Hungarian content via IPTV – for free. Thanks very much.

 

I just heard some of the numbers on YouTube from Ken Rutkowski. They are utterly amazing when you think about them - but I have to say that I was predicting this kind of growth several years ago. Still not as big in Australia as in the US, but once the NBN is up and running - watch out - there is going to be so much video in Australia it will be scary.

And at that time - watch out, broadcast TV and Foxtel. This disruption is coming your way, soon. And by the way, at that time what will be interesting is that it appears that YouTube will have fully integrated ads into their offering.

So what will the content industry look like at that time?

I would figure that the word of mouth about content will just go totally over the top. Things will get extremely viral, extremely fast. As a result, in the event that content is not released day and date to all available media in all territories, what will happen is that there will be a tremendous upsurge in demand by people for content that is "hot". That will mean a massive uplift in non-legal downloads (I am going to call them non-legal rather than pirate, because I believe that there needs to be a distinction made between actions that are based on profit and actions that are made relating to getting something at a marginal cost to the consumer without any profit motive).

This in turn will mean that there will be a continued demand for storage devices and for bandwidth and for those little media gateway devices that they sell at Hardly Normal for $149 that enable you to view content of pretty much every file type on your TV (and for $199 you can get a device that enables you to play HD content).

So at this point we might consider how people are going to communicate with each other the fact that there is a piece of new hot content and where it is. We already have places like Pirate Bay that point at movies, whether they are legal or illegal.

It seems pretty obvious that there has to be an app for Face Book that will accelerate the virality of a video by making it pop up on multiple degrees of separation of friends. Now I realize that there are apps that essentially do this. But I am thinking about what you might do that is going to push the content at you in a much more visceral way.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who is working in this area and can share what they are doing with me... preferably not via the comments section. You know where to reach me.

Here are the key data points from Ken Rutkowski about video in the US.

The problem with the Internet is that it’s full of lies and misdirection.

Some of those lies emanate from Media barons, some from Politicians. Hell, some even come from Bloggers. But when the misdirection is uttered by a music artist who is worshipped by the young and naive, then I feel that I have to respond.

On September the 16^th, Lily Allen published an article on her blog that she had purported to write herself. Since then Lily’s Blog has been removed. We saved it.

The problem is, it was one of the most ridiculous and misleading manifestos on file sharing that I have ever seen.

Whether they were her words or an industry shills (which I like to believe they were) is irrelevant to the damage her words have caused on a global scale, politically.

The apparent naive utterings of young starving artist apparently scared of being sent broke by the internet file sharers.

Her stance on file sharing was of course ridiculed by critics globally, but I doubt  whether any of her claims were actually analyzed and properly individually dissected … or that the correct data was ever fed back to Lily.

After all without us old guys on the Net…. How do young ’uns know what’s right or what’s wrong?

So without more ado, my response to Lilly’s blog.

(Lily’s comments are in Blue and mine are in Black.

September 16, 2009 - Wednesday 

More Piracy Stuff, moi, Matt Bellamy and Bjorn Ulvaeus
Current mood:   focused

I've had a lot of responses back since my previous blog posting here.

You would Lily, P2P is a favourite amongst the majority of informed Internet users.

The long and short of it is, even before this economic downturn Piracy

Fist of all – lets talk about the word PIRACY.

What you’re referring to is not Piracy. Piracy is something that happens when starving Somalians’  want to hijack your boat for ransom.

File sharing is file sharing. It is not Piracy. Piracy is the removal of physical possessions.

File sharing is more like taking a picture of a physical object and showing the photo to your friends.

Think of file sharing as public relations and suddenly you’ll see that it (P2P file sharing) is actually a good thing. But hell, I don’t want to preach to you… after all, you are probably only repeating what your minders told you to say.

has been affecting all areas of entertainment, except maybe theatre.

That’s what the movie studios used to say until the Price Waterhouse report was released last year showing that their attendance records and revenues are growing annually at a compound 7.1% growth rate. Probably the largest of any legal business in the world.

CD sales, Film DVD sales, book sales , TV DVD sales, everything.

Woah, girlie. Each of those has a different reason for declining sales. Let’s break it up.

CD Sales – Old technology – nearly no-one has CD-drives in their computers, netbooks, laptops or phones. End of Technology – sort of like the 8-Track.

Film DVD Sales are actually increasing. I’m not sure where you get your statistics from, but I’m sure they don’t include the Walmart, ALDI or Woolworths numbers on the bundled catalogue titles.

Whenever I look through the DVD sale bins, in those establishments, I am never alone in my fossicking, there are usually at least a few people to see what “gems” Hollywood have demoted to deep catalogue this week. What is decreasing is the profit from each DVD, Whereas it used to be $50.00 profit per DVD it is now a more realistic 25% or about a buck.

Book Sales – well I’m afraid on this point you are undoubtedly correct. Young people don’t really read five books a week anymore because Television grew up in the eighties and started being 24 hours instead of the 5:00 pm to 10 pm event that it was in the ‘60’s.

Additionally, there are a lot more rock stars these days and a sh**load more concerts to attend than in the sixties or seventies. When I was a lad I went to every concert I could in Wellington (NZ) and that equaled a maximum of about ten per year. These days, there are five concerts a week. So yes, on book sales, I’m afraid that the younger people have grown up with more choices than just – um where’s my library card?

So obviously book sales would be damaged when there are so many competing entertainment options.

But I do have a question for you Lilly… Please give me a single meaningful statistical example of P2P downloads of books. I ask because I have been measuring P2P metrics for sometime and I promise you that whilst there are a few books on the P2P networks, most of them relate to university study material and not the latest best sellers. When compared to Music downloads, novels don’t even rate. Just as Music doesn’t rate when compared to video content.

Music Videos? Well, they’re in a separate P2P category all of their own.

TV DVD Sales That’s almost laughable.  I spoke to a DVD retailer a while ago in Adelaide who said his main DVD sales were for people in Italy, Greece and France because he had copies of the local foreign TV series DVD’s that were not available in their own country and people were phoning him from those countries pleased that they could obtain legal copies.

Lily, the problem with TV series downloads is not that they’re downloaded via P2P, it’s that the distributors are too dumb to get their act together and do a digital day/date release the day after the cable stations have purchased the content.

So, users RIP the cable content and share it with their less fortunate global peers. You know the ones – people from countries like Argentina, Ethiopia, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Kazakhstan; the countries who don’t have the benefit of  economically affordable Cable TV choice.

You see Lily, in the real world, outside of your advisor’s head, there are actually companies that don’t care what the population watches as long as the company can screw the population for the maximum with the minimum cost to themselves. And in Australia for example, the minimum cost to our one and only monopoly cable content purchaser, means that they (Foxtel) repeat everything 50 times a year.

If you had to watch repeats of everything 50 times a year, would you be satisfied Lily? I think not.

So the question should not be “Why do people download TV content for free?” But… “Why do the cable companies and content distributors force people to download content for free by not giving them any other viable options?”

One answer is laziness and habit – Content owners have sweetheart content deals that originated in the 70’s and 80’s when the cable companies had a monopoly on distribution. (This was before the days of DVD’s, Lily).

Those deals allowed the content owners to have long lunches and let their lawyers do the selling for them, who unfortunately also like to do long lunches so they limit the number of deals that they are willing to do…. so they can sell the TV series 300 times instead of 5 billion times. Yep – I think that 5 billion digital customers at $1.00 each is a far better customer base than 300 cable TV distributors at $25,000 per episode each. – Get your minder to do the math, Lily. I don’t have the inclination.

So it isn’t really that file sharers are ripping off the content companies. It’s more that the content companies are ripping off you, the artist, by limiting your exposure to potential new audiences by not making the content available ubiquitously. In other words, you’re either a member of the old school gang or you’re not. And if you’re not – it’s nearly impossible to join the gang.

Earlier today I blogged about the  panel of Media experts (which included News Limited people) when USC Annenberg put together a panel with "leading media architects" Peter Chernin and Gordon Crawford about the long view of the future of Media distribution.

In that video, “the expert” revealed that they would have “Digital Distribution” organized in about 8 years time.

Lily, you’re 24 years old. If you get busy on being a mom now, your first child will be seven years old before you can legally download a Digital copy of Fantasia or the Wizard of Oz for her/him.

You will be 32 years old.

Do you want to wait until you are 32 before being able to download the Wizard of Oz or the videos of your own music concerts so that you can show your children, legally?

I didn’t think so. And Lily, no-one else wants to wait on the dinosaur slug called the content industry either.

They (the industry) may have assisted you in “making it” but believe me, it was not for your benefit.  Like when you finally are able to download your own concert videos, I wonder how much you will have to pay to watch yourself.

Now, if people go on consuming at the rate they are and do not pay for what they are consuming, not only will the artists within all these industries be without jobs and unable to express themselves but the behind the scenes people too. Thats literally millions of jobs

Methinks someone is feeding you a line, yet again.

In Australia in 2005 there were the equivalent of 80 million 90 minute movies downloaded online via P2P. The population at that time was 21 million. So let’s round those numbers a little and say that meant four movies per person for the entire year.

I hardly think that qualifies for “millions” being put of work.

Actually Lily, I don’t even think that qualifies for one person put out of work. Please let me know if I’m wrong.

. . I know that a lot of you want to know that you're not being overcharged for a product and you want to know that your hard earned cash is going to the right places, a lot of work has to be done in order for this to happen. I think that paying 14.99 for an album is ridiculous, I'm with you on that, and that wont happen again, but piracy is not the answer.

Lets not call it piracy again, but let’s do talk about file sharing. I happen to think that file-sharing is the perfect answer, economically speaking. File sharing is forcing an industry that has been gouging artists and fans alike for decades – to revisit their pricing models and rationalise their policies to allow more people to obtain the content instantaneously (that means digitally), globally instead of day-parting the release to a ten year old formula that has been broken by the ubiquity of the Internet - and automaticall encourages file sharing.

What do you do if you need a loaf of bread and your local deli is out of bread? You go to the supermarket.

File-sharing was also the reason why so many of your fans can now listen to you on their iPods and phones. Without File sharing, Steven Jobs would never have (seconded) developed the iPod and subsequently would never have been able to start iTunes.

It's hard enough to get a job at the moment. People are being laid off in all areas and the record companies are no exception. My own label EMI laid off thousands last year. I don't care so much about the high-ups (and by the way they're always the last to go - what a surprise) but the people who are going out are the young ones, the life blood basically. They're the ones that go first, ,

Lily, this has nothing to do with file sharing. It has to do with the death of an outdated distribution model and the record companies failure to pull their heads out of the sand and see the developing trend.

I've seen it. And the same is happening in TV and film. Why do you think you are just getting Terminator 6 and Harry Potter 7 instead of exciting new voices?

Actually, I think we get Terminator and Harry Potter because they are a proven successful series. Lucky for you Lily, fans buy what they like. Your logic would tend to suggest that fans should only buy one of your albums and then buy other unknowns to expand the available artistic pool.

Um, I think you should think that one through before repeating it again. Whether you stay or go, your future revenues depend on the credibility and persona that you have built up as an artist. Every other artist that is “discovered” actually takes money from your future children’s mouths.

File sharer’s just increase recognition of you as an artist and increase the community desire to buy your T-shirts, attend your concerts or have you as the background music at their wedding.

Because the young voices are not there anymore. Do you care about that, or do you just want to watch and listen to the products of the last generation?

It’s interesting you should say that Lily. Did you know that before copyright was ever invented, people played music, wrote music and copied memes and themes from each other with no-one going broke?

In fact there are only two types of people in the world that copyright benefits. One of those is the lawyers and the other one is the people that can afford to hire the best lawyers.

So the contrary argument to “copyright assists in the creation of new talent “ is copyright destroys more new talent that it protects. (If you need an example Lily, search “Lambada”).

Or do you want a voice that is heard and can make a difference?

And that would be who Lily? I know we elect our Presidents mainly from amongst film stars, but I don’t think any musos have made it to 10 Downing Street yet. You see music is mostly irrelevant except as a small portion of our entertainment elective. Mainly listening to it whilst at the fish and chips shop, on the bus or tube with our iPods, or whilst talking to our friends at the local pub. So music is a social facilitator, just like alcohol or marijuana.

What I do know is  we have to invest in this sector of our country guys,

The people do invest Lily. Through the television licences that finance the BBC, one of the biggest creators of new and fresh content in the UK.

we are great film makers,we have incredible writers and authors, historically the best music makers, we cant throw it all away.

You’re not Lily. File sharing has done more for spreading the music, spreading the meme, than any PR exercise has ever been capable of achieving.

The internet is the most amazing thing, but it should be OUR thing, and ironically piracy is just playing into the hands of the corporations.  

Now this one is so ironic, that I could almost do a whole 20 page blog article about it.

Unfortunately, the Corporation that backed you, Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, is the company that is being hurt the most by the Internet; so this statement in the middle of everything you have had to say on this subject puzzles me.

Although it could be a psychological ruse into convincing your readers that you really are naïve. If so, it’s a clever one.

What these artists and creators do, they do for the love of it,

They may do. But I always thought that people that signed recording artist contracts did so because they wanted fame and fortune.

The people that do it for the love can be found in little café’s and bistros or in barnyard sheds or garages jamming for their friends.

Let’s face it Lily, no-one would put up with the shit that goes along with becoming a star who really didn’t want to get filthy rich.

I know its hard because money is scarce but we have to inject money back into these areas.

It (money) is (injected) every day via Youtube, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Redbox. These companies in the last year have collected more from digital sales than the entire music and film industries managed to collect in any two years combined, previously. How can you say we aren’t injecting money?

It's not fair to steal peoples material,I know it's art and it has no physical value but even Shakespeare had shares in The Globe Theatre. People will lose their jobs, you'll be watching X-factor, Simon Cowell will be getting richer, radio stations will be churning out old back catalogues from people your dad or even your grandads age (vera lynn is No 1 this week)

No Lily. That’s what copyright has managed to achieve by claiming 50-95 year copyright periods. Public domain is what you are referring to. Not reality.

Besides, I think Vera Lynn is cool – if you remix her with an interesting backbeat and Charlton Heston as Peer Gynt – Great movie – brilliant soundtrack (even if it was a pre talkie movie). However you are right. Content has no physical value.

It has a time value; a relevancy value and a personal memory value. These are what economists call “hedonic value”.

Therefore the real value of content is the hedonic value applied by the consumer to the content.

i.e.: Person A may be a Lilly Allen fan and go into orgiastic enthrallment every time they hear your music. That person would be prepared no doubt to pay 50.00 per album of your songs.

 Person B on the other hand is a 75 year old strict Methodist who would run from the “wet patch” or “f*ck you” lyrics.

This has nothing to do with file sharing. It has to do with the personal hedonic value proposition.

 and the taxpayer will have to subsidize yet more unemployment.

Sorry. There is another aspect to this. What about the dole bludger that sits at home all day, so enthralled by your melodic tunes that they can’t be bothered to go to work?

Bull*hit you say? Well we agree, but the idea that file sharing is responsible for even one person being laid off is just as ridiculous.

Please, please, please go and see a film in the cinema instead of buying it in Tesco's  car-park , buy a c.d. or album off itunes if you really like it, and god help us, keep buying books . If we do this, i really think we can make a difference.     Anyone band, writer, author, musician, actress please feel free to contact me on this matter if you feel it is important

Wonderful sentiments. So tell me Lilly. Will the DVD or CD I buy tomorrow work in the machine of the future that no longer has a DVD drive? Or what happens if the company that created the DRM has gone out of business. Because I have about 100 mixed LP’s, and cassette tapes that regardless of what I try, just wont squeeze into my DVD drive.

You see the problem with your request is that the digital copy is portable. I can take that or send it to any device that I have.

Maybe instead of entreating the consumers, you could turn your attention to the big media distributors and ask them…..

“Hey guys, this Koltai character raises some interesting questions”.

“Why will it take eight years for me to legally be able to download any movie that I want?”

And Lily – if you did decide to turn quisling, and did receive a response, I can promise you that if you published that response it would get you into 10 Downing Street; but what you’re doing now, is unfortunately doomed to failure.

P.S.: Next time you want to rant in public about file sharing – send me the draft and I’ll be happy to point out where you might have just a few facts wrong.  

By the way, I love your music Lily and if you’re happy to hire me at my hourly rate as a PhD Economist…. – I’ll be happy to buy your next album. Although I expect there’s not much use for Economists in the music business. Especially radical ones that tell the truth.

Disclaimer:  Perceptric, through one of the Directors, Chris Gilbey, has an interest in Vquence. A company that gathers statistics on Youtube metrics. – For that reason – we are omitting any analysis of Youtube in this article.

 

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There used to be a joke doing the rounds a few years ago…..

There are 365 days per year available for work. There are 52 weeks per year in which you already have 2 days off per week, leaving 261 days available for work. Since you spend 16 hours each day away from work, you have used up 170 days, leaving only 91 days available. You spend 30 minutes each day on coffee break which counts for 23 days each year, leaving only 68 days available.

With a 1 hour lunch each day, you used up another 46 days, leaving only 22 days available for work. You normally spend 2 days per year on sick leave. This leaves you only 20 days per year available for work. We are off 5 holidays per year, so your available working time is down to 15 days. We generously give 14 days vacation per year which leaves only 1 day available for work and I'll be damned if you are going to take that day off!

Well Television these days is a little like that. There’s you and there’s me, and I’m damned if I want my share full of advertising……

 

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We start with an excerpt from a report entitled:

 

Digital Future Project 2009

 

Pages 5 and 6

 

Trends in Online Media Use -- Looking at the use of online media, Internet users in the current Digital Future study reported increases in their time involved in most online media. Users reported spending the largest amount of time spent playing online video games and listening to online radio. In what could be considered evidence of the ongoing decline of printed newspapers, users reported large increases in weekly reading of online newspapers, now at the highest level thus far in the seven Digital Future studies in which this question was asked. Other peak levels for the Digital Future studies were also reported for reading online magazines, and watching online television and online movies

 

I thought I would take a look see at Australian online free to air (FTA) trends.

 

Who is looking at what?

Previously, we have covered that the average person watches 4 hours and 11 minutes of Television per day.

 

The interesting thing here is that the main ABC site is actually .net.au, but the abc.com.au website gets more hits than either channel 7 or channel 9.

(In fact the ABC.net.au website gets the  cream of Australian online attention at 700,000 plus users.)

 

But then with Channel nine – we have to be aware that ninemsn are also the default “home” on IE browsers – so we need to look at that url as well.

 

  

Yep – a 2.51% rise in visitors over the last year. (That Microsoft partnership is sure paying off big time.)

 

The online winner? Channel 10 with a 65.58% rise in online attention over the last twelve months.

 

Empirical evidence is pointing to the fact that the younger demographic (under 25) may be watching as little as 32 minutes per day whilst the 25-34 year old demographic is watching only about an hour and 38 minutes per day.

 

However, if we look at the claims of Oztam, (138% of the population – based on 4 hours 11 minutes)) and Foxtel (26% of the population based on 4 hours 11 minutes), then Australians population must actually spend 7 hours per day in front of the television as obviously no-one goes to work or uses the Internet.

 

So in 2005 no-one in Australia watched the 80,708,568 movies downloaded from the Internet.

 

Hang on Koltai, where did you get that?

 

From the submission to the House of Representatives

 

BROADCASTING SERVICES AMENDMENT
(MEDIA OWNERSHIP) BILL 2006
EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM

 

Changing patterns of media use in Australia demonstrate an increase in the use

of new sources of entertainment and information. It has been estimated that

prime-time FTA television audiences have dropped nine per cent over the

period 1995-2005, from 3.05 million to 2.77 million. Some of this shift has

been to pay television – OzTAM ratings reports from 2003 to 2006 show that

subscription television audiences grew from an average 10% share from 6am to midnight to 13%.

 

You mean even Canberra noticed that the Oztam figures were… “rubbery”.

 

We wouldn’t say they were rubbery…. We would say – hell – take a look for yourself…..

 

Sources: Various Newspapers and Blogs with OzTam top shows for the year numbers

 

And what about Foxtel?

 

Sources: Foxtel Submission to ACMA, Telstra ASX Presentation

 

And according to the Oztam ratings numbers, in 2009, no Australians actually used the 3.7 million Facebook accounts owned by Australians – or played any of the popular games on Facebook that last month had 571 million game players spending an average of 18 minutes per game session.

 

“The amount of time that Internet users spend online now surpasses an average of 17 hours per week. The study found very large differences between the online hours of heavy users and light users. Light users spent an average of 2.8 hours per week online, compared to heavy users who average 42 hours a week online.” From Digital Futures Project

 

And of course, the authors of the Digital Future Project must be wrong in the conclusions that claim that some users spend as much as 42 hours per week online. (I gotta say – personally, I agree with OzTam, those researchers were way wrong. I spend about 80 hours per week online.)

 

Lets try an experiment.

 

 

Now lets allocate one third of the population to each of the light, average and heavy categories and report the result in hours.

 

So now we can see that the average usage for Internet in Australia is 3.94 hours per day.

 

And if we say that the discretionary entertainment time that was given to television exclusively in the eighties of 4 hours and eleven minutes is still the same, then obviously, the 12,500,000 million internet users in Australia are only watching 15 minutes of total Television per day. Which if we agree that there is 22 minutes advertising per hour equals a maximum of 14 thirty second adds that watch Australian gets to watch per day.

 

Hah – Got you Koltai….. there’s 21 million people in Australia. So we still have an audience of 9 million.

 

Well, yeah, is that the audience that is either too old, too poor, too illiterate or too dumb to buy a PC?

 

Yep – that’s the advertising demographic in Australia today.

 

14 30 second adverts for the 70% of the population that don’t have an IQ box.

 

Oh. 8,750,000.

 

And about 6 million of them don’t have credit cards or even wallets yet.

 

Oh.

 

So now we have established that people in Australia have no discretionary entertainment time left.

Well they wouldn’t have time would they? Spending seven hours a day in front of the TV. My God – what a country of couch potatoes.

 

So Koltai – why do you think the Oztam figures are wrong?

 

Not for me to say really. Possibly they can’t afford to hire a real economist to do the numbers for them.

Gee you’re funny Koltai. Any other reason?

No, I can’t think why a company owned by Channel 7, channel 9 and channel 10 would want to misrepresent the popularity of Free to air TV in Australia.

 

Well, Foxtel looks like the winner then.

 

Not if you read their complaints about the lack of sales activity by Optus. Or if you closely examine the radical change in their customer offerings over the last 18 months.

 

Minimum two year contracts reduced to 12 months.

First Month Free.

Free Instalation.

Second Digital Set-top box free.

 

And the Austar guys? No contracts at all…

 

Nope, those guys are desperate.

 

Now that those two year contracts are expiring…. People are not merely jumping ship, they are leaping so hard that there is not one of them that wouldn’t qualify for the Aussie long jump team in the next Olympics.

 

Why?

 

Well it’s the advertising. 22 minutes of it on every channel except the movie channels – and of course they don’t not advertise in the movies because they’re nice guys – they’re doing it to comply with their content broadcasting license which prohibits advertising interruption in their movies. (That’s basically the differentiator between the FTA content broadcast license and the cable companies license agreement. – It ensures that Hollywood can sell the same move to both clients – FTA and cable.)

 

Last year Foxtel posted 230 million revenues from advertising.

But Koltai, in the above chart there’s only just over 900,000 eyes for  Foxtel advertising.

 

(Well less really, because 30% of Foxtel subscribers have an IQ so they just fast forward the adverts.)

 

OK, so they have 600,000 advertisement watchers.

 

With 78 channels? Who are you kidding. My two lads used to, (when we still had Foxtel) sit there with the remote control in their hands so they could channel surf with no delay when the ads came on. In fact they used to argue about who’s turn it was with the remote control and blame each other for not reacting quick enough to the ad appearance.

 

Ok so they have maybe 500,000 ad-viewers. Gee that equals an acquisition cost of 460 dollars per viewer. In other words, even with the viewers who only subscribe for the minimum $39.95 per month, Foxtel are still making their $80-$100 per month per subscriber.

 

Yep. Clever those Foxtel guys…

The advertising actually works out as the subsidy on the lost revenue on the entry level subscription plans.

 

What about all the new subscribers?

 

Hey Koltai – there’s an Australian born every minute and an immigrant arrives every minute.

 

OK cool – that means we have an additional household created every two minutes and twenty seconds.

Wow, that’s 217,639 households created per year.

 

It doesn’t mean they automatically sign up for Foxtel.

It’s a new household. They don’t have the money for Foxtel. Or a new Digital TV antenna booster.  

 

What do they have money for?

 

Well food and water and electricity I guess with some left over to possibly cover the mortgage.

 

What about petrol?

Work car.

 

And so how do they get entertained ?

Well the husband has a laptop and the company pays for his internet account.

And?

Well, there are over 300 (legal) video streaming sites on the internet.

And?

Well there are over 100 different P2P clients available.

And?

Well, just on one of those indexing sites there are over 294,633 TV show episodes available for download.

Really? And?

Well they don’t have any adverts in them.

 

Sources: Various & Australian P2P Research Server Statistics – April to August 2009.

 

So everyone is downloading their entertainment then?

 

No, not everyone. Evidence would suggest that at least 43% of Australians don’t download from the P2P networks.

 

So I guess, that’s the Audience left for Foxtel and Free to air advertisers.

 

But Koltai that’s only 9,456,363 people. Slice off 1.4 million Foxtel subs and that leaves only 8 million free to air viewers.

(Well, maybe now you understand why the Government is umming and ahhing over that DTV thing.)

 

Yep – and it seems to be the western suburbs “least able to afford it” crowd that sign up for Foxtel. (Which actually probably explains a lot of the increasing churn rate. We all know that Blacktown is the centre of Australia’s one arm bandit revenue – so it’s a little unfair to expect that Blacktown residents are also the main subscribers to cable TV services.

 

Geez you’re thick Koltai… WTF (that’s a Why and not a What) would any young couple setting up house even think of poisoning their lives with 22 minutes of hardcore advertising per hour, (and having to pay for it) when all of that free content is available on the Internet?

 

Oh you mean all that illegal P2P stuff?

 

No, actually, that is growing less relevant by the minute. I’m talking about social interaction through games.

 

Hang on – you said they had to pay for it. They don’t have to pay for Digital TV. It’s free.

 

Oh yeah? Have you priced the cost of a set-top box, a digital antenna, the signal booster and the installation guy lately?  Plus of course with all that new content being delivered in 1080P it looks awful on a standard definition TV so ya have to spring for a new plasma screen. So all up, the cost to the new household of free TV is about $1500 (or three years Foxtel subscription on the $438 minimum per month plan).

 

That’s ok Koltai, we’re going to have a couple of kids and the Government will pay for our new plasma with the baby bonus. For 10 grand I can get a 60 inch LCD with 5-1 surround sound.

 

Oh good.

 

So next week we’ll talk about the media companies turning Australia into a welfare state just so they can have more channels to advertise on.

 

On the weekend we will discuss where Australian Advertisers should spend their money to advertise to maximize bang for buck.

 

---

Some User Comments on the Introduction of Digital TV in Australia

 

• I have been using a cheap SD box for years without issue, it was just plug and play. Even with an indoor antenna it was great & external it was perfect….. but with the extra channels and HD coming online I decided to upgrade to a HD box. I expected it to be better than the SD. How wrong I was… the first day i set it up all was good… next day I had pixellating & no signal messages for CH10. Moved the cable and it came back but I lost CH9. For the last week I have had no CH9 no big deal as if I had to pick a channel to lose it would be CH9 as I mainly watch 10, SBS, ABC & sometimes 7.
  Tonight I lost it as CH10 started to pixelate right in the middle of a show. Pulled out the neatly set up HD box out of the cabinet and re set in up in a higher position and I now have full channels after 10 minutes of stuffing around although I don’t expect it to last long. Its annoying the place that I have put it as it’s difficult to use the remote and has the red, white & yellow cords hanging over the front of the unit away from the external aerial coax.
  Long story short, the HD box seems to be overly sensitive to it’s location & the slightest movement of the cables or HD box can cause pixelation or complete channel loss whereas the SD box just worked perfectly where ever it was located.

 

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2008/08/is_digital_television_a_boon_or_a_disaster/comment-page-1/#comment-2744

 

 

• I can only get 7 and SBS of the Sydney stations the others are either not there or unwatchable. Have upgraded antenna still no good. Do not bother trying to watch digital. One other problem the sound is proving difficult for a member of the family who is hearing impared to follow, there is too much difference between the soft and loud. Digital TV via the internet is OK. I appear to be in a digital black spot. What will they do before 2013? Will all of the stations be streamed on the new broadband network? Digital broadcasting by radio waves seems to have big limitations.

 

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2008/08/is_digital_television_a_boon_or_a_disaster/comment-page-1/#comment-2743

 

 

• All my viewing is ABC iView and channel BT so I don’t really care at all about the changeover. But my mum and my girlfriend both have digital and it looks and works great. We’re hardly in rural areas, though.

This is definitely something that needs to be fixed. Because people in rural areas don’t have access to good internet either, so they don’t have my option of ignoring this.

 

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2008/08/is_digital_television_a_boon_or_a_disaster/comment-page-1/#comment-2730

 

 

 

References:

2009 Digital Future Report (Summary Highlights)

http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2009_Digital_Future_Project_Release_Highlights.pdf

 

2009 Digital Future Report (Full Report – Purchase Option)

http://store.digitalcenter.org

 

Is digital television a boon or a disaster?

By Angus Kidman http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2008/08/is_digital_television_a_boon_or_a_disaster/

 

When I first signed up for a Facebook page – about 2005, I did not quite “Grok” Facebook.

Why would a user want to say what they were eating for breakfast? Better yet, who the hell would be interested?

 

I didn’t understand the sheep meme. Look at me – I can do this, you can too.

 

Which of course is the secret of the success of the various applications.

We published the top 60 applications the other day. (But don't bother taking any notes - Facebook moves at a quantum as yet unrealised by normal media analysts. It doesnt move in years, months, weeks or days. It moves in minutes, seconds and occassionally it might take a whole hour......).

Notwithstanding it's speed, there is more movement in the Facebook top 1500 applications than in the Music industries top 40.

And certainly more movement than the Mojo’s Movie Blockbuster results.

 

Here’s Box office Mojo’s estimates of opening weekend last week.

 

Rank	Title	Avg. Pred. $Millions
1	Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs	$27.60
2	The Informant!	$14.40
3	Jennifer's Body	$14.10
4	I Can Do Bad All By Myself	$10.40
5	Love Happens	$8.50
6	9	$6.20
7	Inglourious Basterds	$4.10
8	All About Steve	$3.20
9	The Final Destination	$2.60
10	Sorority Row	$2.10

 

 

So that equals nine point two million cinema goers.

Let’s compare that to that to the top ten Facebook applications……

 

Name	DAU
FarmVille	16,596,298
Facebook for iPhone	6,510,365
Mafia Wars	6,096,171
Farm Town	5,247,717
Facebook® for BlackBerry® smartphones	5,080,946
Restaurant City	4,365,948
Pet Society	4,305,343
Texas HoldEm Poker	3,841,599
YoVille	3,216,405
MindJolt Games	2,087,168
	57,347,960

 

Or five times more attention than the movies. In fact just the BlackBerry and iPhone Facebook users exceed the Hollywood movie attendance numbers.

In America, a recording artist is required to sell 500,000 albums or copies of a track for that music track or album to go “gold”. A million for platinum.

 On Facebook, an application needs to have an audience of 15,000,000 BEFORE it gets into the top ten; nine million for the top 20 and 6 million for the top thirty.

 In fact, if one only had 500,000 eyes on Facebook – you wouldn’t be number one on the charts….. you would be number 220.

Position	Name	DAU	MAU	Daily Growth
220	Gift Creator	23,428	508,544	1.76

We have blogged about this phenomenon before.

The people – that’s “the consumer” can make or break something on the internet quicker than big industry, or political parties, or media publishers.

 

And it has very little with commercial chest thumping (e.g.: “I’m a big Telco – How good am I?”)

Internet users have shown that films that Hollywood ignore, are in fact (or become) quite valuable assets – when placed on the P2P Networks.

 

From our article entitled, The Plus Side of File Sharing

AND what’s most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from being the 11,235th most popular movie, to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks (we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction film on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites

 

So the billion dollar question that should be on everyone’s lips is – but isn’t…..

 

“Koltai – What can we do to jump back onto the gravy train of attention?”

 

When companies finally realise that P2P in all it’s forms, Torrent, Emule, Facebook is the future, then they might start altering their value propositions and benefiting from “what is” and not what “We bloody well think it should be this – because we say so.”

 

Those that keep saying: “If only”:

If only - We had shutdown that horrible Internet before it started.

If only - The Geeks would show us how to filter everything…..

If only - We had bought all the ISP’s before they got too big.

If only - We could could convince all the TRIPS signatories that ACTA is a good thing.

If only - Everyone in the world sent 25% of every dollar they earned to the USA.

 

Will wind up as useless as a meaningless turd in the desert of “what could have been, if only:”

 

The Desert (old media) where even the dung beetles have moved on to greener more lucrative pastures.

Which by the way – are all on the Internet.

Rupert, here’s a freebie – Cause it’s Monday. Buy Channel Seven.

Kerry, Don’t buy Foxtel. TiVo is not a cure all for what ails that lumbering coffin looking for a burial plot.