If you’re an ND nut like myself, you might want to take note that Charlie Weis released an autobiography today. Looks like it should be a good read. I trust Mike Frank.
Technorati Tags: charlie weis, notre dame, football, book
Archive for October 10th, 2006
Weis releases book
October 10, 2006President of Disney calls piracy a “business model”
October 10, 2006I found this gem from Torrentfreak:
Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC television group explained that Piracy is a business model. She told that content providers should compete, instead of fight it.
Sweeney spoke these wise words in her keynote address at the Mipcom festival
“We understand now that piracy is a business model, it exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability.”
She continued:
“This time two years ago, Disney was congratulating themselves at the end of a season that saw lost and Desperate Housewives make it big. But at the end of the meeting, the head of operations and engineering presented a high-quality, ad-free version of DH that had been put online less than 15 minutes after the show aired. That was a defining moment for the business. We we don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”
That’s some innovative thinking from “the man” if I ever heard it. The key component of that quote: “high quality, ad-free” and “online less than 15 minutes after the show aired”.
The big question is how do the networks compete with pirated material. Well, I can tell you that the solution is NOT streaming the shows online — how would I watch them in my car on the way to work? The answer is NOT charging $2.00 for an ad-less episode — I’m not paying $30+ to watch a season of a show with no ads when I already pay for cable. The answer is NOT charging for a show with crappy quality — I want good quality, of course!
I would gladly pay, say, $0.25 an episode for a good quality, DRM-free, portable format media file with no advertisements. Hey, maybe I’d even pay 50 cents. I would pay ZERO to download such a media file with ads, so long as the ads were not any more obtrusive than current TV ads are.
Another question is bandwidth. “The man” currently views bittorrent as an evil word, but at some point I think they’re going to have to adopt the technology. Look at it this way: last week, about 30,000 people were downloading the latest episode of Prison Break at any one time, and that’s just nerds like me that know how to use bittorrent. As online video continues to grow in popularity, the bandwidth costs will continue to skyrocket. Bittorrent would save the networks (and whomever else) a bunch of money so they’d be able to reduce the costs of their content to the general public.
Just my $0.02 (or 1% of an episode of Lost, however you want to put it).
Technorati Tags: bittorrent, tv, downloading, media, drm, piracy
Rumor has it…
October 10, 2006…that Sequoia Capital, a VC firm in California, invested about $11.5 million a year ago for a 30% stake in YouTube. After YouTube’s sale to Google for $1.65 billion, Sequoia will walk out of the deal with somewhere in the neighborhood of $480 million. If you do the math on that, that’s about a 3,900% IRR. That’s a pretty decent investment, I’d say.
Technorati Tags: google, youtube, acquisition, finance, investment, vc, irr
Gootube
October 10, 2006In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard, the Google/Youtube acquisition went through for $1.65 billion. Craziness.
We’ve got company
October 10, 2006It looks like there’s a Gamecock fan lurking on the blog. I love a litte controversy. Does anyone know what a Gamecock is anyway?
