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Stephen Pickering

Category: Tech

  • Why Netflix Will Become THE Global Distribution Channel for Filmed Art & Entertainment.

    House of Cards Promo(Editor’s note: I wrote this piece originally in response to this article from TheStreet.com:  Amazon vs. Netflix: Jeff Bezos Could Squash Reed Hastings Like a Bug)

    A) I’ve been an HBO subscriber since the 80’s, watched almost everything on it, and “House of Cards” is totally as good as anything that has ever been on HBO, better than most. (I’ve seen the first three episodes, and wait until you see Spacey’s mind blowing performance in #3). B) Netflix is not competing against Amazon, nor HBO. I’m a subscriber to Netflix and Amazon instant, and even together their cost is 1/10th of my DISH bill. And if HBO had a stand alone $10/mo app, I’d sub to it too, and my cost would still be way lower, but more importantly my value would be greater. Think about the power of that: Greater Value and Much Less Cost. Netflix is competing against cable & satellite TV. And they are going to crush them. C) It’s about distribution. Hollywood cares as much about distribution as it does cash money. Perhaps even more so. Netflix has 30 million subs and growing. How many “Instant” subs are there? 30 million people all seeing “House of Cards” promoted on the front page of Netflix. That’s powerful. How much is that worth? And it’s growing. And it’s Global. Being released Globally at the same time as its being released in the US. I think that is a first ever for any TV show or Motion Picture. That is very attractive to the best writers, actors, producers and directors. Netflix and it’s model are the future: Digitization, Globalization, and Urbanization, and their endgame is to be THE Global distribution channel of filmed digital arts and entertainment, and they will succeed. They’ve already entered escape velocity. 5 years from now they’ll have at least 100 million subs, but more likely closer to a quarter billion. And once again, it’s not the $8/mo from those subs that’s the real power. It’s the distribution and reach of the platform and brand.
    You see, at the end of the day, it’s all about distribution. Yahoo Finance gives you distribution for this article about Netflix. Google Finance doesn’t. Luckily, Finance is one category Yahoo does lead in. I leaned this from Dave McClure on Twitter: Business = Value + Distribution. There’s no question about Netflix’s value proposition. So, all these years it’s main focus of energy has been in building distribution, and now it has succeeded and will continue to grow massively.

  • Considering an Investment in Pandora ($P) in Light of Spotify, Rdio, and Songza

    I really fell in love with Pandora a year or two ago. I think the market cap was treading around 2 billion. I told myself that if the Market Cap hit 1.5 billion, I’d make an investment. Well, I haven’t logged it, but it seems like it must have bounced off 1.5 billion about 7 or 8 times in the last year and a half. Seems like it’s bounced between about $9.50-and $11.50 about the same many or more times during this period. From that perspective it seems it would make a great “Channeling” stock, as the traders call them.

    But then, a couple months ago, I subscribed to Spotify, and from a consumer point of view I haven’t looked back. I love it so much. I thought I might still use Pandora occasionally for “discovery” but since then Spotify has launched their own “Radio” feature. So, for myself, I literally can find no reason to use Pandora anymore.

    Still, I have Pandora (P) on my “Stock Watch” list. I still believe it’s part of the bigger paradigm of all media moving to the digital. So I still think it would probably be a good investment, just on the general paradigm itself. It’s hard for me to make an investment in a product that I don’t use, though. If, however that changes, and they launch some new features that make me want to use it again, I’m sure I’ll even be more excited.

    Being in this state of wondering whether to invest or not, I was happy to come across this GigaOm article today: Despite New Competition Pandora Grows It’s Users

    The take away is that Pandora is still growing fast in registered users and total minutes per month of listening, but the number of minutes per registered user is actually decreasing, which is weird, until I think about it: I’m a registered user, and my usage has dropped to Zero because Spotify finally picked me off. Back when I was in love with Pandora, I thought, I’d never pay a subscription, but I think seeing Spotify constantly in my Facebook Newsfeed finally wore me down. Like Ogilvy said about advertising: The first time you see an ad, you curse it. The tenth time you see it, you’re writing a check out for the product. Anyway, the GigaOm post inspired me to comment on his site, which I copy and paste here:

    “I was a big Pandora fan last year, and I told myself I’d make an investment at a 1.5 billion market cap, which it’s close to now, and has bounced off of several times, but since I’ve become a Spotify Subscriber, or actually since Spotify launched their “Radio” feature, I don’t see any need to go back to Pandora. That’s what keeps me from making an investment, myself. I don’t use it. But I do believe it will grow with the whole digital revolution, as you mention. It definitely had a head start on mobile and has brand recognition.
    Once crucial feature of Spotify and Rdio, which seems so vane and egotistical, yet very potent, is the sharing what you listen to to Facebook. I mean even if I own an album, I usually will prefer to listen to it on Spotify, to show everyone what I’m listening to, especially if the record or artist is considered “hip.” I guess Pandora has this feature, but I never see it in my feed. I constantly see Rdio and Spotify in my feed though, which obviously is also free and invaluable advertising for them too. I don’t know why Pandora doesn’t copy all of Spotify’s features (assuming they can) just as Spotify has copied one of the crucial features of Pandora: Discovery.”

  • How to Kill a Task or Force Quit an Application on the Galaxy SIII

    Coming from iPhone, everything is taking a learning curve, but less than you might imagine, as each year, Android gets better and better, and this Galaxy SIII, as I write seems to be the phone of the moment.

     

    Not that I understand the rationality behind how the pages are ordered or where they put the icons on the page or even the concept of “Widgets”, but out of the box, which is pretty much the way I’m using it now, if you “swipe” enough pages you’ll come across an icon that is “gear shaped” called “Settings.” On mine its at the bottom of the page, bottom right, to the right of “All Share Play” “S Memo” and “Gallery.”

     

    So you click settings and about half way down the page is “Application Manager,” and then that shows you all of your apps running. Click any app and you can click “Force Stop,” which will do the trick.

     

    I don’t know about you, I mean I love spotify, but there seems to be something buggy about the app, both on iOS and Android. Especially when switching between Wifi and Mobile data. It’ll just stop working. Doesn’t handle the hand off for some reason. And then it’s like you have to kill the app and re-open it. ANNOYING!

    What’s weird is, even before I learned how to “kill an app” on Android, the Spotify app would suddenly come on and go off seemingly at will, for no reason that I could think of. The bars on my Wifi would be full (I’m not 10 feet away from the wifi router) and one minute Spotify would act like there’s no connection and then 10 minutes later as I’m working on something else, having forgotten about it, it would suddenly come on. I tend to think it’s a Spotify issue, as I had similar issues even on iOS with it.

    Love Spotify though, just hope they’ll fix this bugginess soon.

    Oh, I’ll put some screen shots up of this whole process once I figure out how to do that on Android.

  • Resources For Building, Optimizing, Growing Facebook Pages

    1. The Choose Yourself Era – How to Get 100,000 Facebook Fans– James Altucher – Man, this is an incredible post by one of the Co-Founders of Buddy Media, which recently sold to Salesforce.com for 800 million. And from my understanding there business was and is about helping big brands with their marketing efforts using Facebook Pages.
    2. 7 Easy Ways to Increase Your Page’s EdgeRank – Post Rocket
    3. Facebook Timeline for Business Pages – 21 Key Points To Know – MariSmith.com – Boy this Mari seems to be the Goddess of the Facebook Fanpage! How did I find it? I needed to know that the Masthead image for a Fan Page should be 851 x 315 px, and as I thought the profile image is square and has to be at least 180 x 180. (I’ll probably make a 360 x 360 one.) But man, there is a ton of info on this page, and I get the feeling that her whole blog is about Facebook Fan Page Marketing.
    4. 12 Tips to Optimize Facebook Page for Maximum Reach and Brand Visibility – Wchingya.com
    5. A Simple 6 Step Plan for Creating a Facebook Page that Works – NetWitsThinkTank.com
    6. You’ve Got Facebook Fans, Now What? Booshaka Raises $1M to Ensure Your Posts Earn You Money – TechCrunch.com

  • How to Share a Youtube Video At a Certain Point During the Video

    This is so cool! I didn’t know you could do this. All you have to do is hit the button “Share” and below the URL link that they give you to share the video there’s a link called “Options.” If you click that it will give you the option of sharing the video to start at a certain point within the video. The time displayed is defaulted to where the playhead is at, but you can also manually enter the time. This is so useful, especially with longer and longer videos being allowed (The ‘Producer’ Accounts) because, say, there is an interesting segment within a much larger video that you find interesting or funny or both, now you can choose simply to share that segment. Very cool Google, very cool Youtube, and very useful!

  • Why Instagram Worked: Limitations Are Freeing

    There are many reasons why Instagram worked: timing, mobile centric, the ‘limitations’ (iOS only), the design and logo were/are retro, warm, and appealing.

    But I think the primary reason Instagram worked were the filters. For the first time the masses like me, who’s only knowledge about photography is how to press the button, were able to see, without opening up some complicated program, what professional and creative effects could do to their photos.  And it was one click. When you snapped a photo with Instagram you could either post it as is, or there were a row of 9 or so “filters” at the bottom, “pre-sets” if you will, that you simply selected and it would automatically apply them. These filters were imitations of what the pros spend hours doing in Photoshop. And suddenly the masses had them at the click of the button. This is the same appeal that photo editing apps for the iPhone like Camera+, Best Camera, and Camera Awesome have: Simple, easy, and fun photo editing that is merely the click of a button to get a unique effect.

    Limitations are Freeing

    I was thinking about this as I’ve begun using Garageband for the iPad. It’s much more limiting than Logic Pro or even Garageband on OSX, but I’m being a lot more productive on it and having a lot more fun. The nature of mobile is intimacy and ease, which equals in a lot of cases increased productivity.

    In Instagram’s case, it didn’t have as many filters or options as Camera+, but that limitation made it much more easy to use and much faster to use. To be fair, Camera+ wasn’t trying to be a Social Network, and the app was very successful in its own right simply selling on the App store. But in Camera+’s case and Camera Awesome, after you take a photo, the damn thing disappears! Then you have to go find the little thumb nail of it, re-open it, and then when you go choose the effects, and this is key, what you see are the pages of effects and not the photo. So then you have to apply the effect, wait while it generates, and then finally see if you like it. Whereas with Instagram the original photo is up on the screen at all times and the selections are at the bottom. You can breeze through sampling all the selections and see them immediately. It makes the whole process easy and fun. To be fair I love Camera+ and Camera Awesome and couldn’t recommend them more, but I’m just simply pointing out a couple frustrations with them, and why Instagram out paced them in use and adoption. (To be fair though, like I said, Camera+ wasn’t intending to build a Social Network.)

    Being Mobile Centric and only Mobile centric: You can’t look at photographs on the website. The only thing you can do on the website is sign up for an account, is another limitation. Some would say, frustrating, but actually that limitation, in the minds of many, was rather intriguing. If you wanted to see an old photograph, you had to search like an easter egg hunt for the link on Twitter or wherever you posted it. While the developers probably didn’t intend it, they merely were trying to save resources for their primary target, that limitation as well as the limitation of being iPhone only, created a sort of caché in the mind, especially in those of the hipsters, a lot of whom happen to be the biggest influencers on Twitter.

    To be fair timing was a key too. At the time, Twitter didn’t have it’s own photo sharing service, and the third party ones that existed just really looked awful and contrived. They were so ugly they conditioned you almost to not want to click on a photo link. So when Instagram launched with it’s beautiful design and hipster appeal, Twitter adopted it as its de-facto photo sharing service, and Instagram rode that wave to mass adoption.