Media Dojo

Archive for May, 2010

Next week on 27 May, I’ll be talking about media cloud computing at a bootcamp for visual journalists. The event will take place in Langley, WA—about a hour and change north of Seattle. Some top notch talent in the form of Brian Storm from Media Storm, Tom Kennedy ex-Washington Post multimedia director and now head of Kennedy Multimedia, as well as Paige West, Director of the Interactive Studio at MSNBC, will be joined by a clutch of other visual journalism practitioners to spend a day laying out the planets and then another day of hands-on multimedia production via Media Storm.

My role as the cloud guy will be to convince people to break the bias that success revolves around having the best stories on a given web site. Creating content as a function of a destination runs into the wall of the mobile, social web—just ask Yahoo! which is trying for the umpteenth time to get people to come to its site for their content. They just bought Associated Content, which has many observers shaking their heads. Content, visual or not, acts more like software to feed devices and use cases. Context rules. Content ain’t the king it used to be.

I’m beating the drum that visual storytelling will find its way into applications and services, things that will be found on computing clouds more than cable head ends or media servers. Story becoming software is a regular meme for me, one which I’ve taken to numerous audiences to present and have tempered by questions. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s still time for registering. I hope to see you there.

I signed away part of my summer yesterday. I’ll be diving into a hard-core research project on consumer media in the cloud for GigaOm Pro. It’s the kitchen sink: music, video, games, apps, docs—all wrapped in social, mobile and cloudy stuff.

After I plow through the more or less standard set-up: cloud media definition, examples, driving forces, roadblocks, who’s up and who’s down; it’ll be time to get to the more interesting questions in my opinion. To wit, who will own the interoperability of media across services, which is the best business (handling Big Data or handling meta-data?), privacy/anti-trust. Bottom line I think is that media strategy is no longer about using the web for a destination as much as using it for distribution to a boatload of devices, contexts and business models.

Anyway, that’s the raw thinking one day in. Ping me with some ideas or contacts at john.gauntt <at> media-dojo.com.

Mike Dano, Managing Editor of FierceMarkets Wireless Group, interviewed me and others about mobile cloud computing. It’s a good overview of the current state of play.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cloud-computing-quiet-requirement-mobile/2010-05-04

I’ve been sketching an outline for my next report for GigaOm Pro on cloud computing and consumer media. I’ll give a head’s up on the final version when it’s done late this month or early this month. So this thinking is still raw.

My nose tells me that the recent tiffs between Apple/FLASH, Google TV/CATV, Facebook/everyone else is indicative of a larger trend. It seems like the professional media industry is starting to say, “we’ve given this information wants to be free stuff a good 15 year run on the web. To show for it, we’ve been gutted. Going forward, we’d rather cut a deal with a Cupertino/Mountain View/Redmond devil and get a slice of a real pie.” I know this doesn’t sit well with the John Perry Barlow crowd. But then again, he had made his money being chef to the Grateful Dead before he got all cyber libertarian.

Being a media snob, I’ve been looking hard to find the multi-billion $ media content company that launched on the web. I’m still waiting. The market cap went to technology and aggregation plays, not a new media experience. To a large degree, it’s the incumbent media industry’s fault. Jeff Jarvis is tedious with his standard schtick about old media’s problems. But it doesn’t make him any less wrong. The fact is that the revolution came and instead of devouring its young, it feasted on print publishing and music. It’s licking its chops over video. That’s been the steady cycle for 15 years.

But going forward, there’s not a hell of a lot of analog transmutation left. Either the media industry (however owned) needs to start working the revenue side of the ledger with truly new experiences in storytelling, or it can continue feeding off the corpse of the old world and cede the ground to the Googles of the world entirely.

Enter cloud computing. Sure, the initial advantage rests with the technologists and device guys. But the difference this time is that the same technology DOES allow a media content start-up to scale linearly should it manage to capture lightning in a bottle. The first green shoots are being found in transmedia properties, especially the next generation ones like we’re seeing with my friend Brent Friedman’s Valemont franchise. Brent doesn’t base his business anymore just on selling copies of the story or restricting access to it. The story has become a world in which the audience can dwell and participate; a world that provides multiple avenues for monetization; and a world in which competitive advantage involves how fast and how well Brent or his users can customize the experience at the margin. Mass customization trumps mass distribution in this scenario.

This tells me that control over the *context* of a media experience is becoming more important than control over the media itself. The range of devices, situations (e.g. location awareness), and business models has bumped complexity to a level to where a cloud-based platform would be the only one flexible and scalable enough to handle it. Fundamentally, the cloud makes media itself more intelligent. In a hard media (e.g. CD/DVD) or standard web (non-mobile, non-social) world, the media player and UI was all you needed because the media was stupid. All it needed to do was PLAY. Now, media must integrate with social identity, physical location, a preferred device, a specific service plan and a configurable bundle of rights for the consumer.

It’s a switch from a ROM-based media world to a RAM-based media world. That makes RUN the most important command.