Tag Archives: Media

Connected content – it’s nearly time!

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I’ve long preached the time when we’ll be paying a single fee that covers all our home connectivity and includes unlimited access to all the content we would ever want (music, videos, games, books and more), and all through a single joined up service provider that knows what they’re doing and where it all just works (including how I access everything and when – so a big mobile and hardware bit).

Are we there yet?  Nope, but there are some very clever interim solutions and ways to almost get some of this.

I caught up with a good friend this week who I’ve not seen for some years and we were talking about the joys of using Apple devices and in particular how good Netflix was on it.

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So far I’d resisted the Netflix move.  Just couldn’t convince myself it was worth it and that it would be that good.  But I took the plunge today and boy am I impressed.  On the Apple TV it really is as if it’s a content channel with the same great Apple usability as the Apple TV box.  And even the little Nobles can successfully navigate it.  There are box sets on there to watch, that I’ve recently bought the physical DVDs for – yes I know it’s physical but I couldn’t find digital anywhere for the right price (until now).  My DVD collection (that has been getting smaller as we move to a digital world) is now pretty much obsolete thanks to Netflix – minus Disney and Star Wars (technically though that’s also Disney).  They’ll all come I’m sure – they’re already on Lovefilm and similar.

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So my Apple TV is now looking even more appealing.  The music link is still missing – sure I can link to my iTunes library but I want more content streamed, not my library only.  Spotify can plug that gap for the music but it’s not on the Apple TV (yet).

I can only see this getting better and very quickly.  Whether we need Apple to bring out a physical TV box I’m now not sure.  Their little Apple TV box of magic does it all and plugs into any screen I want.  I can control it with my iPhone and it works.

Total connected content as I described above?  Not yet.  My broadband, phone, TV and content are all with many different (carefully) selected (good) providers – including Sky, BBC (care of the license fee), BT, O2 and now Netflix.  But thanks to good devices it’s all joined up and it won’t be long before we see some very clever services coming in that offer more or all of it in one package.

Anytime, anyhow and anywhere – IS coming soon…!

The end of content ownership?

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Following on from my earlier post on going digital and what content we’ve gone digital with , I want to go back to the thorny subject of ownership.  Do you ever own content?  Do you need to own content?  What does it matter?

Over the last few years I’ve been reading a series of books called “50 xxx Ideas You Really Need To Know.” – where the “xxx” is not something pornographic but a specific topic or area.  Like Digital, Economics, World History, Physics, Maths, Genetics, Management, Philosophy and more.  They’re all great books, at a bargain price and very very readable.  A little plug here to where you can get them on Amazon – do take a look…

One of these books is aptly titled, “50 Digital Ideas You Really Need To Know”, written by Tom Chatfield (British author, writer and commentator) and is well worth a read.  It covers all digital and technology topics in this space, including:

  • Internet service provision
  • Web 2.0
  • Blogging
  • Aggregation
  • Privacy
  • Hacking
  • Cyberwar
  • Games consoles
  • Mashups
  • Culture jamming
  • E-commerce
  • Location-based services
  • Virtual goods
  • eGovernment
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Free software movement
  • Digital distribution
  • Cloud computing
  • Net neutrality
  • Semantic web
  • Augmented reality
  • Convergence
  • The internet of things
  • Distraction

Quite an extensive list and all in nice chunks of a few pages long.  Under the section on Digital Distribution, Tom talks about the end of ownership and covers many of the points I wrote about before…

Why are we worried about ownership?  Does physical ownership matter?  No it doesn’t.  The content never really was ours and we’ve simply been granted rights to use it – through payment (by whatever means that was agreed etc).  What does physical ownership give us?  Something to put on the shelf and look pretty?  It’s more from an technical era gone by where physical media was the only way to consume the content – that’s it.  Very simple.  We’re now in the digital age and we’re making the – sometimes painful – transition from physical to digital.

It is a transition and as I said before, we’re not talking a big bang approach here where one day everything becomes digital.  No, we need to make a controlled change that suits us, when the technology is right, at the right price and when it works well (with a nice user experience to it).  Some areas aren’t ready yet (e.g. newspapers) and some have been ready for a while (e.g. music).

My on-going experiment with digital newspapers is interesting and the current front runner is the Metro (the free London morning newspaper).  It’s available in the Apple Newstand and is fantastic.  It’s not just a digital scanned version of the paper (as some other digital newspapers are) but a fully interactive version with great ads that are fun, videos, hi-res photos that you can zoom in on and scan around and lots more.  And it’s free every weekday.  Interestingly I’m not alone in my high ratings for this app – it actually won the Newspaper App of the Year Award (at the 2012 Newspaper Industry Awards).

The subject of content ownership is one that’s being actively debated and discussed online and elsewhere.  Here’s a link to an interesting article by PCMag.com from mid-2011.  A few changes since mid-2011 but still relevant…

The Future of Entertainment Summit 2012 was held this week in London, with some great speakers from across the content, entertainment, digital and broadcast space and some great discussions.  I wasn’t able to attend this year but was watching Twitter closely for the updates on what was being said.  See a few of the Tweets from the day below all around content and consumption…

It isn’t about ownership anymore and it doesn’t need to be.  It’s now about consumption and access to content, and yes now the digital consumer!  The next challenge is guaranteeing that access – keeping your internet connection (as it is now) up and running and what happens when it goes down.

How digital are you? Videos? Music? Books? Games? Newspapers?

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Having worked in the digital media, online and content space for over 10 years and being a big fan of the latest and greatest technology, I like to think that this Noble household is pretty digital.

But how digital are we when it comes to consuming content – it’s very different depending on the type of content.

Music

CDs? We don’t have many. The ones we do have, are for in the car and even those are getting used less and less, replaced by the iPhone and Bluetooth connectivity. The CDs we did have, have all been digitised into our iTunes library that neatly syncs with the other devices around the house.

Videos

VHS tapes? None. We got rid of those a few years back and moved to DVDs. I don’t think the little Nobles will even know what they are. For the home videos, we went through the painstaking process of hooking up a VCR to the pc and playing and recording digitally all the ones we wanted to keep. The quality isn’t brilliant but they’re more than watchable. DVDs? Not too many. We still have some of the classics in our library but every so often even they’re cleared out. The neat little AppleTV is the home video consumption hub for us – nice and easy to use, great selection of content and no more popping out to the local Blockbuster. Am I bothered about owning a collection of physical media? No.

HD-DVD? We tried it and yes I thought it would win the HD format war. But it’s no more. We didn’t have a big collection and we’ve sold them all now, including the player. Blu-Ray? We also tried it but found the PS3 user interface not too friendly, so gave up on that as well.

Games

We still have some console games on physical media but even they’re getting fewer. You can now download games on most consoles and it’s often cheaper and there’s no difference in the experience. And coming up fast are games as apps on smartphones and tablets, for a fraction of the price and even streamed to the TV.

Books

This is where it gets interesting. I love books and yes there is something about holding a physical book and turning the pages and reading it, and it’s not the same with digital. Sure I get how convenient digital is and in some cases cheaper (but in many cases not cheaper thanks to Amazon)and how it can be more interactive and provide a far more immersive experience. Apple’s iBooks is great, it works very well and has that usual awesome Apple experience to it. Amazon’s Kindle is also good but with no colour version in the UK still and missing apps, browsing and more, its not for me right now.

Having said that, I read something the other day about what the author of a book is trying to say – he or she is telling a story and it is all about the content. The physical book is not the content, that’s just the medium and it shouldn’t impact the experience or story that the author is trying to get across. An interesting way of thinking and it actually applies to all types of content – not just books. But digital books aren’t there yet for me, I don’t doubt it will come in time but now we have more physical books than digital ones. Maybe it’s the little Nobles who’ll help make this transition for us.

Newspapers

This is the one that made me think I’ll do a blog post about it. Up until the end of last year we had weekend newspapers and one weekday one delivered only. The rest of the week there was no time to read them, for me at least. Then through changes at work I was at home in the mornings more than normal so went for the full 7 days a week of papers. Great, with the extra time to read them in the morning and the newspapers 7 days a week then stuck. But now I’m trying an experiment and dropping back to just the weekend and one weekday physical newspapers and seeing what I can do with the iPad the other mornings and how the experiences compare. It’s only day 4 in and I’m missing the newspapers, how long can I last? Maybe it’s the Dilbert and Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strips – even though they’re still delivered to my inbox via an RSS feed.

There are apps on the iPad or in the Newsstand app for the papers we read and yes they do have the cartoons. It’s now time to test these as well as news aggregator apps that I’ve been using so far.

Why I’m missing them I’m not sure yet. Maybe it’s just part of the transition of moving to digital as with everything and it will eventually make sense. I’m not convinced about the Sunday papers though, having all those sections to read is part of a Sunday morning for me and always has been.

One thing to look at is the whole idea of “owning” content. Do we ever own it? Do we need to own it? Even on physical media – taking up shelf space – we’re simply licensed to view it and within certain guidelines (e.g. not running our own paid for home movie cinema for lots of people). Why not just pay for content as a utility when you use it? Or even – and this is a big one – content becomes part of our internet, phone etc (connectivity) bundle and is all inclusive, for you to use whenever and wherever you choose, subject of course to your particular (license) agreement.

This requires a huge shift in how we pay for content, how content creators are paid, how artists are paid and how royalties are paid, and business models around creation, distribution and storage and much more all need to change, but it’s a possible option for the future. We need to think more about new models and new ways of consuming content.

Royal Mail show us how it should be done – London Olympic tickets

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Despite the fiasco about booking tickets for the London 2012 Olympics and the lack of thought that seems to have gone into the whole way the tickets are sold to UK residents (and how user friendly the systems aren’t and how the system couldn’t handle the demand for tickets, I could go on but that’s not what this blog post is about), the tickets we did get have arrived.

A very nice package, with tickets and a bit of information about the event.  It’s for rowing, which is over in Windsor, so not London, but they’ve very kindly included 4 travelcards for us to use on the day to get to the event in London.  Hmmmmm.

And they’re standing area only but the cheapest “seats” or tickets so not too unexpected.

Don’t get me wrong, I may sound not too positive about all this but I am.  It’s going to be an awesome summer in London and as I’ve said in previous posts, this is London’s year.  Plus with the Jubilee celebrations this weekend, it really doesn’t get much better.

I was at a conference in London this week about the online Olympics and the technology behind the scenes is incredible.  Never have there been games before where the demand for online media has been so great.  Back in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics, social media services like YouTube, Twitter and even Facebook were still growing up.  In 2012 it’s a completely different story, social media is pretty much everywhere and being used in all sorts of different ways, by consumers (of all ages), brands and everyone else.  The demand on the back-end infrastructure for storage, distribution and more is going to be unprecedented.  The task of forecasting what to expect will have been no small feat, and no doubt is still changing and being fine tuned.  The plans around redundancy and how to fix problems – with the technology – will be something else.  What the BBC have planned is fantastic – their Sports page on their web-site is the centre piece and the experience you’ll get on all devices – personal computers, tablets, mobiles, smart TVs and anything else, is going to be so good that it will almost (maybe not quite) be a better more immersive experience than actually being there!  That annual license fee we pay in the UK for the BBC doesn’t look too bad.  The planned 24 live better than HD (as we know it) simultaneous video streams is impressive to say the least.  This really is the first global online digital Olympics.  Right up my street – in both ways!

The BBC have got it right, lots they’ve learnt from that amazing service that is the BBC iPlayer and other global British broadcasts they’ve done – the Royal Wedding last year for example.

But the ticket system and booking events, we’ve not got it quite right.  One shining light here though – and the subject of this post – is Royal Mail.  That amazing British institution that just works so well.  Where else in the world can you post a letter or anything for that matter and know it will arrive anywhere else in the country pretty much the next day.  Yes the prices have just gone up, but it’s still worth it.  Interestingly as well, a postman I was speaking to only this week, said it’s one of the few services you still pay for before they deliver and actual give you the service.

Having had a few e-mails from the Olympic organisers about when roughly to expect the tickets to arrive, you kind of sit back just waiting and hoping.  This morning, I got an SMS message and e-mail from Royal Mail telling me the tickets would arrive today.  They then arrived care of our very friendly local postman Mick, with a big smile on his face.  Signed for with the mobile pad he had and then literally less than one minute later another SMS message and e-mail confirming they’d been received.  Now that’s proper service and a very very good use of the latest technology.  Keep it up Royal Mail, another reason Britain is brilliant.