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I Watch This – TV Guide recommendations on IceTV

// March 11th, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

I Watch This – TV Guide recommendations on IceTV
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Regular viewers will know I have a major jones for Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) and digital television. Early Aussie pioneer IceTV is still hanging in there despite being dragged backwards through the hedge of the courts by the unlimited resources of the interests backing Channel Nine.

Now IceTV have finally launched their recommendation feature, iwatchthis.com.au (hmm… shouldn’t that be “Youshouldwatchthis.com.au”?). Whatever it’s called, it gets you to tell it which shows are your favourites (or you can let it watch what you record) and it’ll come back with recommendations.

How well does it work? Well, my experience is limited because although I still have a login, my paid subscription to IceTV lapsed and I haven’t renewed. Unluckily for IceTV, recently I fell in love with AppleTV and buying shows from the US iTunes Store and haven’t had much time for Australian free-to-air television since then.

But my login allowed me to ‘favourite’ a few good shows in IceTV, including Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, Media Watch and Cutting Edge, just to test out the recommendations (‘cos regular readers will recall, I also have a major jones for all things recommendations).

I expected IceTV’s recommendations to be fairly good: highly engaged customers providing relatively accurate data, genre and cast relationships providing clear pointers to recommendable content, and most of all in Australia, a relative paucity of content to choose from!

So sure enough, IceTV scored a nice 5 out of 10 in terms of other shows I’d like to watch. But is that really helping me much? I mean, there’s so little on free-to-air in Australia I don’t really need recommendations at all, much less recommendations that are as likely to be wrong as right.

To really make the payoff, IceTV should be there to let me know when a new series of Top Gear is starting, because it knows I enjoyed the last series. It shouldn’t be distracted by a repeat of a previous series, or the same series being screened a second time in a different time slot. Does it do this? Dunno, not possible to tell from my exploration. 

Perhaps if IceTV offered me streaming previews, independent reviews rather than synopses, or even production stills. But the local commercial networks aren’t about to help – they still see IceTV as stripping away revenue with ad-skipping features, when really they should see IceTV as one of the few things that can help them win and retain what remains of a viable media audience. Sigh.

This morning in da house: Yorke Hinds

// March 11th, 2008 // 0 Comments // people, Products, strategy

Amazon’s international billing problem

// February 28th, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

Met Mike Culver, web services evangelist for Amazon’s S3 cloud services today on his first trip downunder. All this cool stuff about how we can base an entire startup on a pay-as-you-go storage and computing model with the same reliability and speed as Amazon itself.

Mainly technical discussion, so a lot of it way over my head but one of my questions hit home: 

If Amazon’s charging me in USD and only accepts credit card payment, the foreign currency exchange fee my bank is going to charge me is a big hit. My bank’s 3.3% for Mastercard and 3.4% for Visa foreign currency transactions is probably standardish.

Mike hadn’t come across that before but seemed serious about taking that issue back to the US to get solved.

Not as big an issue for me personally as having no amazon.com.au, but prolly enough to make such a variable cost unaffordable here.

US companies still aren’t great at the whole international product strategy.

(btw, no links or image with this post because iPhone STILL doesn’t support copy & paste grrr)

[Sent from my iPhone, still unable to copy and paste and it's 2008]

Death of social networks? Not that way, and not yet!

// February 26th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products, Social Media, strategy

Mark Jones of Filtered Media is predicting the death of social networking. I don’t think death is coming any time soon, and certainly not from Google and Gmail as Mark suggests. I think the bigger future threat for MySpace and Facebook are microblogging and social messaging layers over the top of the social networks.

Yes, social networks can’t sustain the current growth. There will be a plateau. Following the plateau will come more realistic valuations, rationalisation and acquisition by the networks.

Yes, to some extent social networks will atomise – social networking platforms are already starting to blend in the features of other web platforms via their APIs and developer platforms, and it makes sense that some of that platform functionality will bleed out into email, search, blogging and other web platforms over time.

The ‘friend spam’ we see now on Facebook is a function of the immaturity of the social network businesses themselves, which are still learning how to manage open platforms, and to some extent a learning process for users – it’s already unfashionable to be the friend who sends too much social network spam – soon, it will be social suicide.

I can’t see Mark’s ‘Email 3.0′ spelling the end of social networks. If I were an 18-25 year old, why would I need to wrangle with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail if I can use Facebook’s email to stay in touch with everyone I know? Hotmail spam vs Facebook spam? Give me the latter any day.

Why would I need to search from the Google homepage if Facebook was my homepage and I could launch a Google search from a Facebook app in my profile page?

Google’s become the default for us 30-40 year olds, and Yahoo! is the default for our parents, but Facebook and MySpace have an opportunity to be the default starting point for our kids. …if they seize the opportunity and execute well, which so far they have had trouble with.

Email is inherently a functional product – I need to have something to communicate to someone before I send an email. However social networks work best when I can use them as inspiration for finding something to say to my friends. I may not have any news myself today, but by browsing what my friends have been up to recently, there’s always something that I can comment on, criticise, debate or LOL at.

Social networks will remain a place that people go to ‘hang out’ with their friends and meet new friends online. There will be fewer of them in the future, and the big ones will probably be owned by larger networks as MySpace is now.

But just as social networks have an opportunity to steal the email, search, media sharing and buying/searching eyeballs from the incumbents, there is already a couple of threats to the social networks: social messaging businesses like bluepulse (who are more comfortable if I disclose that I’m contracting for them any time I mention their name online, bless ‘em!) and microblogging services like Twitter.

Social messaging businesses threaten social networks because they may steal away the user’s all-important ‘status message’. Without the status message being updated there’s half the value of the Facebook newsfeed gone, and the newsfeed is everything to Facebook’s business. If I can more quickly and easily update what I’m doing now from my mobile phone on bluepulse than I can on Facebook, then sure, Facebook may lose me (that’s “me the hypothetical 20 year old” not “me the 43 year old”.) Facebook’s mobile product is still lame: you can’t sign up as a Facebook user from a phone, and many of the key features are missing from the mobile product. Using MySpace’s mobile product is like travelling back in time to 2000 and back in space to Boondocks, Carolina. I don’t see any sign that Facebook or MySpace ‘get’ the importance of building a better mobile product yet.

Microblogging services like Twitter can also steal away the status message traffic and user loyalty from the social networks, by making it all about status messages, and then using the social network’s own APIs to let the user update multiple social networks from one spot, saving time and money, both very precious to 18-25 year olds.

Say goodbye to the value of your social graph

// February 2nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Social Media, strategy

Google’s released a new API that allows developers to harvest the ‘social graph’ – the relationships between people on the web – the links labelled ‘friend’, ‘colleague’, ‘mother’, between our individual online identities.

At the moment, there is no single social graph for the interweb. Instead, separate proprietary graphs exist on each of the major portals (Yahoo!, etc) and also on the major social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, etc.). To a large extent, the value of these companies is tied up with the size of users graphed, the number of connections in those graphs, and the rate of growth in users and connections.

Because of the risks vs benefits involved, it seems unlikely that Google will be able to persuade players with high-value social graphs to open their data to the API very soon. Any player with a high-value social network risks contributing more value to its competitors than it receives by opening to the API. Google might be able to gain enough leverage to bring a majority in eventually.

If the industry adopts an open API for social graphing then it must also offer better tools to allow users to explicitly control what relationships are exposed, to whom, and to what level of detail. While the social graphs remain closed and proprietary the cost of unplanned exposure is still pretty low (though I continue to have a problem with the way LinkedIn exposes which other profiles have been viewed by the people who’ve been looking at my profile.) But if we move towards one shared social graph, it’s going to be essential that you own and control it.

Can the snake swallow the elephant?

// February 2nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

Microsoft swallowing Yahoo! is either going to be fast and ugly, or slow and ineffective. And I’m being positive! Scott is even less hopeful.Good friend Goonker said it best. Referring to Steve Ballmer’s quote that he feels “putting these things (Microsoft and Yahoo!) together with a great integration should be quite an accelerant to progress.” Goonker says, “accelerant as in: flame out quickly?”I appreciate that Microsoft recognises it needs to take drastic action if it’s to get back into the game, interweb-wise.Today’s offer is a big premium on the market price on the previous day’s close and is sure to be higher than any price Microsoft may have taken to the table with Yahoo! in the past.According to Comscore, Google has 77% of the search market globally, with Yahoo! only 16% and MSN a piffling 3.7%. So an acquisition might garner Microsoft a total of less than 20% assuming no overlap. I don’t know the revenue share but I’m guessing it’s in-line with that. Ballmer suggests it could save the two companies $1B a year, but I’d bet it would be costing $100m a year over five years to smash the two vastly different companies together.Microsoft’s web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!’s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you’ve already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There’s no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone. Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is “kinda cool” but like a quiet working environment (Frank, I love you anyway man).So the only way to borg Yahoo!s products and get them running an all-Microsoft backend would be across the vacant desks of the various Yahoo! development teams, vacant because you’d either fired them or they’d beaten you to it and taken a job elsewhere. The number of senior developers with prior experience migrating global-grade FreeBSD/Apache/Perl platforms to .NET would be approaching zero. I can’t see Flickr running on .NET, ever.Yet Microsoft can hardly continue recommending its web development products to the market while running its own consumer internet business on competing products.Working for a Bay Area startup at the moment, and it’s a tough market to be hiring developers, so a flood of ex-Yahoo! developers into the market would be good news for us and the other Bay Area startups. Most of Yahoo!’s huge developerbase is here in Sunnyvale and that big silo of developers will just fall over and empty out. That should bring hiring costs and avg.-time-to-hire way down.Good point from good friend Luke: if the deal goes through it tightens the market for startups hoping to be acquired, leaving only Microhoo and Google as the big startup-buyers in town. Could we see Cisco step forward as a new force in consumer web acquisitions? Or HP, Intel or Apple? Each owns some consumer-facing web platforms already, each has a hardware business that could benefit from consumer lock-in via a compelling web product.If I still held Yahoo! shares, I’d take the money. If I still held Microsoft shares, I wouldn’t be happy about a deal happening.Because, the way I see it, Microsoft absorbing Yahoo! is either going to be fast and ugly, or slow and ineffective. 

MSFT & YHOO: can the snake swallow the elephant?

// February 2nd, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

Microsoft swallowing Yahoo! is either going to be fast and ugly, or slow and ineffective.

The wrong way up a one way street of content

// November 9th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Products, Social Media, strategy

There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they’re all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.

The wrong way up a one way street of content

// November 9th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Products, Social Media, strategy

There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they’re all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.

Ringles don’t make me tingle

// September 12th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Music, strategy

ARIA’s latest figures show a 47% decline in CD single sales year-on-year.

The only really shocking thing: that so many Australian consumers are still paying through the nose for the physical music product when the identical track is available online for about a third of the price.

Anyway, there’s nothing to wring your hands about (unless you own a CD pressing business) because sales of online digital single tracks increased by 64% in the same period, and at $8.38m in sales revenue is a little more than twice the value of physical single sales. Plenty healthy. Factor in the higher margins at almost every step in online versus physical production, distribution and delivery, and it’s a healthy business to be in, as long as you’re big enough to have a roster of successful artists and at the same time small enough to be able to keep up with the pace and true direction of change.

By “true direction” I mean where the industry is actually going, versus where some believe it can be steered. The former is entirely in the hands of the consumer, influenced by the content offerings available to them, how that content is priced and to what device it is delivered. The latter almost entirely the exclusive domain of large music labels and the industry bodies that serve them.

Evidence of a failure to keep up with the true direction of change: talk of prolonging the life of CD singles by including “ringles” – ringtone versions of the single – on the CD, along with software that will make it “easy” to transfer the ringtone version of the track to a mobile phone.

Please, don’t let’s pretend for a moment that this might have the slightest chance of widespread consumer adoption! Consider the “Sony rootkit” fiascos, and what might need to be installed on the consumer’s PC in order to deliver a ringle from CD drive to handset. Better find a way to provide technical support for Windows ’98, 2000, XP, Vista, OS X and Linux installation issues for product that retails for $5. Don’t even start about what tiny percentage of mobile consumers ever successfully connect their handset to their PC, or want to do so for any reason.

Is it even possible to deliver a software application within the constraints of CD single data storage limits that might have a chance of being compatible with the diverse community of mobile handset operating systems, ringtone file types and carrier locks out there in the marketplace? I don’t like the word “impossible” – it always seems to get me in trouble – but let’s just say I’d be flabbergasted.

The only sensible way to deliver ringtones to mobile handsets is online, and for the majority of mobile consumers, the carrier – not the label, not the handset manufacturer – owns that pipe. No CD single “ringle” is going to influence that in the slightest. Labels: work with the carriers… or maybe acquire them. Carriers are to the future of music what radio broadcasters have been in the past, plus the entire retail supply chain. Getting out of that headlock they have on you is going to take more than a “ringle” or two.