Robbie Stamp of Stamp Bros had been closely involved in the Hitchhikers Guide across many platforms. He said:
Focus on one media and make your idea as good as possible on that media. Then think about rolling it out.
That’s exactly the opposite of what we are doing with Buried Alive and BloomBox. We think (hope?) that his advice doesn’t hold for ideas that are intrinsically multi-platform.
John Booth of Sony Entertainment said their research showed that three things consumers don’t want (on playstations or PSPs) are:
- linear media
- technology for technology’s sake
- editorial control from above
That’s more like it. That fits with the BloomBox vision.
Mark Rogers of Market Sentinel said Rupert Murdoch’s great skill as a business man is seeing the choke point. In the satellite era, his key purchase was NDS and their encryption technology. Mark asked who will dominate the new media landscape. His answer: aggregators. What was Rupert Murdoch’s first significant purchase in the internet era? MySpace.
Hallelujah! BloomBox is a tool for creating aggregators.
David Putnam’s keynote was an excellent introduction to the changing media landscape. He really gets the excitement of the internet. I thought this was interesting:
Five years ago a functioning TV studio would have cost £800,000. Now it costs approximately a quarter of that. A camcorder you can buy from Dixons today is higher resolution than anything the BBC owned in 2000.
Like many people Adam Gee from Channel 4 is not a big fan of the phrase ‘user-generated’. He loves the idea behind it though. When he made a list of 8 projects he was excited by, he realised all of them had a user-generated element. Ones he mentioned include:
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1-2-1: co-authored international blogs
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Germ: UK’s first competition for viral digital content (got good press)
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Lost generation: people can add media of all sorts
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4Docs: high-end user-generated content
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4Laughs (forthcoming): talent discovery in comedy
I was hugely impressed by Steve Cullen and the guys from someth;ng. For the festival they had created a system that allows a user to bookmark a moment in time and space via a RFID tag. It matches you with people who have gone to similar events at similar times. It’s fun, it’s cool and it might even be useful. What is more, they had built the system from scratch in 6 weeks. Great work, lads.
Over the last month a whole raft of user-generated TV initiatives have been announced. For example:
- Flextech have launched Trouble Homegrown.
- MTV have announced they’ll be launching an ‘audience-controlled channel brand’.
- Both BBC and Channel 4 announced user-generated comedy sites.
At an industry event I met a man who claimed: “Porn used to be the highest margin content in the world. User-generated content is higher.”
If this is true, it’s clear why broadcasters want to get involved… but what will distinguish the winners from the losers?
Time will tell, but here are some thoughts.
1. Make the question interesting
What motivates a user to create and upload content? There is the YouTube approach - create a giant area for all types of content.
There is also a more niche approach - combine user-generated content (UGC) with a TV show that focuses the desire for users to contribute. We believe this is a rich seam. We’ve been talking to TV producers and broadcasters as we launch BloomBox and it seems the possibilities are almost endless. UGC could well be the next wave of reality TV.
(This iMedia Connection article demonstrates five contrasting approaches to framing the question for user-generated advertising.)
2. Ease of use
Vimeo set the standard for uploading and previewing clips. YouTube gets our vote for community features, helping the user get widespread viewership of his clip. I’m yet to see a broadcaster’s UGC initiative that can match these.
3. Network effects - success breeds success
Lots of bytes have been spilt trying to explain MySpace’s success (here’s a good article). I’d wager that networks effects are the most important. Content creators want an audience. Popular sites become more popular. (To demonstrate, MySpace isn’t the social networking leader everywhere. It is trounced by Orkut in Brazil and Bebo in Ireland).
This post wasn’t supposed to be an advert but the first two factors show where BloomBox excels. BloomBox removes the technical hassle from user-generated content, freeing producers to make the question interesting. It’s ease of use, as we will be able to reveal soon, is excellent.
Get these two right and the compounding reward of network effects will kick in. You’ll be as rich as a porn king.
Extra reading: Cracking NY Times article on some of the dangers of user-generated advertising.
One of our greatest cheerleaders but also greatest critics here at Mint is one Paul Fisher. Paul has moaned about our website forever and we seemed destined never to please this discerning web connoisseur (Fisher is to websites what Michael Winner is to restaurants). Until now that is!
Paul loves the new Mint site, he is going to spend the whole weekend looking at it on his widescreen laptop.
Our next challenge: to try to get Paul enthusiastic about going to the theatre (something else he traditionally doesn’t like).
I’ll be speaking at b.TWEEN06 in Bradford on 26th May on the subject of ‘Opportunities for new media producers in the TV world’. That should be a short talk. Joke. Honest, that was a joke. There are lots of opportunities. Well, maybe ‘lots’ is a bit strong but there are some. Anyway… come along, it will be brilliant!
Mint’s site for Nudo was featured on the respected Signals vs Noise blog. These dudes are like the daddies of web design, so we were very happy to get the mention.
