Social web strategist, speaker and blogger Stowe Boyd and
futurist, speaker & author Gerd Leonhard are delighted to present
this 60-minute, free webinar based on a white paper jointly developed by
Stowe Boyd and TheFuturesAgency entitled 'social TV and the second
screen'.
You can read more about here (and
download it via the link or directly, here )
"The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity
for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in
these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent
and many-to-many society"
Stowe and Gerd will briefly present some select slides and updates
on the topic of the future of television (10-15 minutes each), followed
by a Q&A session with the participants.
The emphasis of this event is on allowing plenty of time for
questions and discussion; both via chat as well as via audio (upon
individual invitation only).
THIS EVENT IS LIMITED TO 100 PARTICIPANTS. Please sign up early and
be sure to show up at least 30 minute prior to the starting time to
avoid disappointment.
Stowe and Gerd are both members of The Futures Agency network and
often work together holding seminars and think-tank events for media and
technology companies, around the globe see
http://www.thefuturesagency.com/about
Find our more about Stowe Boyd
http://worktalk.ly/about_stowe/
https://twitter.com/stoweboyd/
http://www.thefuturesagency.com/stoweb
Find our more about Gerd Leonhard:
http://www.thefuturesagency.com/gerd
http://www.gerdfuturist.com
Blog: http://www.mediafuturist.com/
Mobile apps: http://road.ie/futurist
The Future of Business blog http://www.futureof.biz/
Videos: http://www.youtube.com/gleonhard
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/gleonhard
More links: http://about.me/mediafuturist
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Please note: this video is in GERMAN language. It's the entire closing keynote of Future Media Day at TPC in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 24, 2012 see http://emedia.tpcag.ch/?page_id=162 Topics: the future of TV, social TV, OTT & mobile TV, future of content, advertising and content consumption. If you want the PDF please ping me via http://twitter.com/#!/gleonhard
Thanks to TPCMedia for booking me for this really cool event, and for making this video available to me.
Today is a very big day for me. My new Kindle book "The Future of Content" just went online at Amazon, and is already gaining a lot of traction. You can view a very short video greeting about the book on my GerdTube channel (Youtube:)
Of course I would be very happy if you would consider buying the book for yourself (only $3.90, Kindle-only) but beyond that it would be really great if you could help me spread the word via rating and / or 'liking' the book on the Amazon.com page, tweeting about it or just forwarding this mail to some friends that may be interested.
This review is from: The Future of Content (Kindle Edition)
"I challenge you to expand your brain and read this book. What Gerd Leonhard is always doing is informing the global brain (or the collective brain) in ways that help us all get where we're trying to go. He builds the buildings in front of us.
This collection points toward several compelling answers for content creators. As a writer who is already swimming in the changing currents of "content," I found it intensely informative. Leonhard shores up my courage to continue embracing a digital world without DRM, and ebook prices "for the masses." He makes the all-important concept of curation crystal clear. If you are providing any kind of content in print or on the web, it's relevant. If you want to stay on the front edge of content creation and publishing, it's basic. I'm making this book mandatory reading for my epublishing circles"
ABOUT "THE FUTURE OF CONTENT" Futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the future of content i.e. music, film, TV, books, newspapers, games etc, since 1998. He has published 4 books on this topic, 2 of them on music (The Future of Music, with David Kusek, and Music 2.0). For the past 10 years Leonhard has been deeply involved with many clients in various sectors of the content industry, in something like 17 countries, and it’s been a great experience, he says. “I have learned a lot, I have listened a lot, I have talked even more (most likely:) and I think I have grown to really understand the issues that face the content industries - and the creators, themselves - in the switch from physical to digital media.”
This Kindle book is a highly curated collection of the most important essays and blog posts Leonhard has written on this topic, and even though some of it was written as far back as 2007 - “I believe it still holds water years later. I have tried to only include the pieces that have real teeth. Please note that the original date of each piece is shown here in order to allow for contextual orientation.” Leonhard’s intent to publish this via the amazing Amazon Kindle platform, exclusively, and at a very low price, is to make these ideas and concepts as widely available as possible while still trying to be an example of what digital, paperless distribution can look like, going forward.
We certainly live in challenging and exciting times. Disruption is a constant companion; permanent beta the default. Tablets, now-ness, social commerce, alternative currencies, multi-platform story-telling, augmented reality - every week something new may end up remixing our business plans.
Globally, telecoms and mobile operators are moving up the food-chain into media and advertising (someone coined this development 'TeleMedia':)), and social networks are quickly becoming the next global broadcasters – but without owning the cables or the satellites.
Soon, most of the world's Internet traffic will be generated by a huge variety of mobile devices instead of computers, and 'the other 3 billion' users aka consumers in the BRIC countries are coming online at a very fast pace. Remember: 10% more broadband and / or wireless equates to 1% growth in GDP – but also a 1000% percent increase in disruption:)
Give it another 3-5 years and it's very likely that almost 5 billion people will be connected with fast and very cheap (if not free) mobile devices - and they will not 'consume' media and so-called content in the same way that we did when renting a movie still meant getting a piece of plastic that embodied it, or becoming a faithful and constant visitor to the quite beautiful but nevertheless super-walled iTunes garden.
Most importantly, these digital natives, those pesky millennials, the inadvertent micro-pirates of our cherished digital files, are people of the screen, not people of the book, as Kevin Kelly right summa-rises. To them, the world looks and feels different and many pre-screen, pre-networked rules seem hopelessly antiquated - they won't buy if we don't change how we sell.
To add to Kevin's meme, I think 'people of the screen' are people that increasingly prefer access (i.e. not copies); they are people who want total and unfettered control over when and how they use their media and who they share it with, and they are people who often co-create and participate, as well.
We must embrace the reality that we are at the beginning of a global shift from copy to access: many of us will be happy with just having access to content, anytime, anywhere, on the best screen available, rather than wanting to 'own' (i.e. download) it. If 'the cloud' proves that it works we will make the switch - just like we switched from printed maps to navigation devices. Sure, it may take longer if you don't live in a major urban centre, but we are going from broadcast to broadband - or better, plus- broadband, from wired to / plus mobile, from 'the network' to / plus 'the networked' - and our world is no longer linear, it's not yes or no, it's… an ‘it depends’ world. Fragmentation, aggregation, curation - but not mere distribution.
This shift is impacting all media, starting with music (see Spotify, Simfy, Rdio etc), movies and TV shows (see Netflix, Amazon, Youview etc), to books, newspapers, magazines, games and software. This 'from ownership to access' trend is even visible in the physical domain of ‘stuff’ such as in the rise of car-sharing, home-swapping and 3D printing: if we can use it why do we need a copy of it, for ourselves? I believe that the switch from 'owning to accessing' will be an extremely lucrative turn of events for creators and their various middlemen and industries.
Once we have overcome the need to package media in expensive physical formats we will see tremendous growth here. In a digital world, our costs will be much lower, marketing will be done via those that love what we do and are yearning to tell others, and many new revenues will be generated via many new combinations of I Pay, You Pay, They Pay (to quote Shelly Palmer). We just need to allow it.
Be ready: value is shifting from distribution to attention, and while this is happening we are also swiftly moving into a complete reboot of advertising, i.e. to with-vertising not @vertising, to engagement rather than interruption, to conversation rather than yelling. I predict that between 30 - 40 % of the entire global advertising, marketing, PR and promotion budget (currently approximately $1 trillion) will merge to digital, mobile and interactive means of reaching consumers: advertising and marketing (and selling!) are being reinvented along with media. Exciting times.
In a totally networked and always-on society, skills, creativity, curation, filtering and expert-ship will be more important than ever before - and if we keep our eyes on what the 'people formerly known as consumers' really want rather than follow our own assumptions and outmoded orthodoxies, the media business has a great future.
TNN will be bigger than CNN, including video and audio on Twitter, produced by the masses with rich filtering
One of the key differences between TNN and CNN is the filtering – there is none on Twitter whereas CNN has editors and verification.
In the decade of the reputation economy we will have more ways to assess news validity, though we will also need more finely tuned senses on what is or might be correct.
Twitter is an ocean whereas mainstream news is a dripfeed so it is more manageable. It is the role of the ecosystem around Twitter to filter the news firehose. Flipboard, paper.li, Twittertim.es, Geneio and so on are seeking to filter Twitter and social media.
One of Twitter’s revenue models is charging companies significant amounts for access to the full Twitter firehose, but the ‘Spritzer’ feed of 2% of the firehose is available for free.
In a world of information overload, Twitter is one of the most useful information sources if you know how to use it well.
For the most current insights and trends in the living networks, follow @rossdawson and @gleonhard on Twitter!
I just ran across this video of my 2010 talk at USI (Paris) and I think it's still quite relevant, so check it out, below. The topic of my talk and presentation is TeleMedia, one of my most popular memes and speaking topics - see the links below. From the USI event page:
"Fast and powerful mobile internet devices, social media, real-time search and location-based services are bringing major changes to how we communicate, connect, interact, share, consume, buy and sell, and learn. The disruption has only just started. Telecoms are poised to move up the food-chain, into content, services and experiences, while TV is quickly and totally converging with the web, and mobile devices will become the way most people will experience the Internet. Soon, data is the new oil, and 'the cloud' is the oil-well.
The traditional EGOsystems are becoming ECOsystems and the big Networks must now deal with 'The Networked'. Where is the future going, where are the biggest opportunities (and for whom, and where), and how can we start to adapt to the future, today? Futurist Gerd Leonhard will present the key trends and foresights as well as the most likely scenarios in technology, media / content, communications and advertising, for the next 3 years..." You download the PDF with my slides here, btw.
It didn't take long for the TedX NewStreet (London) people to put the videos online at the TedX Youtube channel - great! Unfortunately my own talk got started while the wireless microphone was still on 'mute' so for the first minute or so (while I am doing my introduction) the audio recording was quite bad.
Therefore, I edited the video and scrubbed those 60 seconds; the result is below (using my own GerdTube / Blip.TV channel *you can get the iTunes podcast feed here). The original TedX Youtube version is below, as well, as is the slideshow, from my previous post. I think I really touched on some very important issues here, and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on them. Fire away via Twitter, or Facebook, or comment below. And spread the word. Thanks.
Very cool tool - simple and useful. Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag. A great way to stay on top of all that is shared by the people you follow - even if you are not connected 24/7 !
This is the complete, 75-minute video of my appearance on Brazil's most popular talk show on Public TV, called Roda Viva (on the TV Cultura channel). I was delighted to be invited to the show, and really enjoyed being 'grilled' by the super-smart journalists and Brazilian media experts in the studio. We could have talked forever! The show was originally broadcast on April 26 (on Brazilian TV as well as online, see the Twitter buzz here) but unfortunately the webcast did not work very well so this is the first time I have seen the video, myself, and thanks to Roda Viva / TV Cultura I am delighted to be able to share this recording with you, as well.
More information about the show is here. Duda Groisman made some great photos during the recording of this show, embedded below. Related activities on this trip include: my presentation for NBS Brazil "The Future of Communications and Business", and my presentation at Fundacao Dom Cabral (one of Brazil's best business schools) on "The Open Network Economy". Please note: the video is half Portuguese (the questions) and half English (my replies)
8 months ago, I was interviewed by the House of Radon people for a movie called PressPausePlay, a really promising film that is presented by Ericsson and is scheduled for release some time later this year. I have embedded the trailer below (yes, it includes my 15 seconds of micro-fame) and really look forward to seeing the whole thing when it's ready.
Kudos to Ericsson for sponsoring a very powerful film about the huge changes in production, distribution and consumption of creative works - this is a crucial topic that is, of course, very close to my own work (see here, here, here and here). Eric Wahlforss (SoundCloud's Founder) is involved, as well, btw.
From the film's web-site: "A new generation of global creators and artists are emerging,
equipped with other points of reference and other tools. The teachers
arenʼt certified schools anymore - itʼs web sites, discussion forums and a
“learn by doing”-mentality. We see the children of a digital age,
unspoiled or uneducated depending on who you ask. Collaboration over
hierarchy, digital over analog - a change in the way we produce,
distribute and consume creative works. PressPausePlay is the first film to capture this new ecosystem.
We meet the creatives at the frontier of production, the technical
enablers of collaboration and distribution, the artists, the pop stars,
the film makers, the business men, the visionaries and the ones left
behind. Itʼs a story from the smallest molecule to the largest
corporation. Itʼs a snapshot of today, but at the same time predictions
of a near future.
Weʼre not creating a documentary in the classical sense of
shaky cameras, bad lighting and unbearable sound. Although we have a
small budget, we got big aspirations. The film will in itself be a proof
of the evolution story weʼre telling, shot in digital 4K and finished at
the end of 2010. Ready for both the big (cinema) and the small (mobile)
screen. We will release rough edits and interviews as well as the final
film free for anyone to use, broadcast and distribute. PressPausePlay will be an observation, a testimony and a
tribute"
Last month, Mike Masnick invited me to do a guest-post on Techdirt.com one of my favorite online destinations. It went live last night and is getting quite a few comments - check it out here. Comments and discussion is here. Retweets are here.
If I received a dollar
every time I get a question along the lines of "how can the content
industries compete with FREE?" -- I would be traveling first class
everywhere I go. Underneath this question I often find my favorite toxic
assumption: "less control over distribution means less money."
This belief is as tired
as it is poisonous: enforcing control (when trust is really what's
needed) will yield instant disengagement, which swiftly and surely will
translate into dwindling revenues -- as the music industry keeps proving
again and again. If you believe in control rather than value and trust,
the content business of the future is not a good hunting ground for
you.
Take eBooks: despite
clear and present proof that DRM has proven disastrous in selling
digital
music (and now is pretty much history), technical protection measures
are still being looked at to 'secure distribution'. When will
they ever learn?
The thinking that the
digital distribution of content must be controlled to achieve any kind
of reasonable payment is fundamentally flawed because of this
not-so-futuristic
realization: in our open, mobile, social and digitally networked
economy,
content publishers need to offer their goods in a way that no longer
centers on the distribution of units (digital or physical) as the key
revenue factor. The idea of just selling copies is toast - selling
(i.e. offering) access is where the money is. Kevin Kelly said it years
ago: we must sell what can't
be copied, what's scarce, not what is ubiquitous.
The irrefutable trend
is that the window of opportunity of 'selling copies' (be it iTunes,
eMusic, the Kindle or the iPad) is rapidly closing. The real
opportunity,
the TeleMedia
Future, is in selling access
and presenting a constant stream of up-sells (i.e. added values and
offering
content-related experiences). Remember, as Mark McLaughlin so
righly pointed
out in the HuffingtonPost recently, consumers have never really
paid for content - they
paid for distribution! And now, distribution means Attention and Access.
Imagine when buying access
to eBooks, you wouldn't just pay for the authorized enjoyment of the
authors' words, but you would also gain instant access to highly curated
and socially-networked commentary, a fire-hose of meta-content provided
by your most important peers and friends that may also be reading these
books, and their ratings, explanations, slide-shows, images, links,
videos, cross-references -- and maybe even some direct connections with
the author or the publisher.
In an access-based, bundled
and cloud-centric content ecology, being a legitimate and authorized
user enables engagement, conversation, relevance, personalization,
meaning...
i.e. it unlocks really valuable benefits for the user. Connect
with
Fans + Reasons to Buy (as has been mentioned on this blog a few
times,
before, I believe) - that's where the money is.
In music, streaming-on-demand
will without a doubt be available 'for free' (i.e. bundled and packaged
by 3rd parties) or advertising supported, while many added values above
and beyond the mere reproduction of music will not - no matter
whether WMG's
CEO Edgar Bronfman thinks
it's a good idea 'for the industry' or not.
Just imagine where an
access-to-the-cloud model could go next: if I want a high-definition
version of my favorite opera or that Blue Note Jazz Club concert from
last night I could buy a premium package that provides it. If I want
to share my personal play-lists, ratings and comments with my Facebook
friends, and get access to their content, as well, I can add the 'social
network option' to my package. If the price is right
(micro-transactions,
anyone...?), I'll buy - because I am already hooked on the music.
The music industry needs
to ask itself this question: if a permanent, unprotected download of
a song would cost only $0.10, or if an ad-supported version of a
on-demand,
all-you-can-eat music service would be seamlessly bundled into your
mobile phone subscription - would anyone still bother to scour the web
to find badly ripped, virus-laced tracks for free? Would we need
3-Strikes
or HADOPI or Digital Economy Bills?
Yes, I know, that price
point sounds ridiculous for those record label CEOs that used to sell
CDs for 15-25 Euros a piece, but hang on a second: if they can get 95%
of the users to buy access at a much lower price (and almost
zero cost of duplication and distribution!), and in that process really
engage with them, the fans would also do the marketing for them - i.e.
share the links. Sounds like a great model to me. But of course:
selling
access at a much lower (or feels-like-free) price to quite literally everyone
only makes
sense if it actually connects directly and smoothly to a multitude of
up-selling possibilities, such as interactive versions of eBooks,
high-definition
versions of online radio shows, albums or concerts, in-depth analysis
and audio/video commentary for news, etc.
Now, content storage
is starting to move from my own computer or my hard-drives into the
cloud - and I think this is very good news for content creators,
publishers
and rights-holders because it makes it even easier to engage and up-sell
to those new
generatives. Crucially, the
answer to the constant quest of monetization is also in the cloud: I
believe most people will soon stop sharing the actual media files (since
they are getting increasingly larger and larger, and therefore more
unwieldy) and will share only the links, the bookmarks, the metadata
or the tags, and that should be a boon for the content industries.
The perfect test bed
for 'Media as a Service' (MaaS) may unfold soon, with Apple's new
iPad or Google's Tablet (hopefully). Extending the concepts mentioned
above, rather than blocking my wife or my kids from sharing an eBook
with me it would be much more logical if I could easily read her book,
as well; but beyond the 'copy of the words' all else would not be
available without a micro-transaction on my part, i.e. I would not have
instant access to the cool video clips, the updated links, the
footnotes,
the ratings, etc; i.e. all that valuable context that will make eBooks
so much more powerful would be out of my reach until I validate my own
access.
The bottom line: content
sharing isn't the real problem: high price points, outmoded, pre-web
toll-booth concepts, broken relationships and processes, low values
for high prices, bad technology and service, and utter lack of
conversation
and engagement are.
Here is my message to
publishers and content owners: lower the prices for access to your
content
to the point of unanimous excitement, use open standards and technology
platforms that work for everyone, everywhere; bundle and package as
attractively as you can (then: repeat). Team up with ISPs, mobile
operators,
advertisers and device makers.
Remove all the reasons
that your users may have to avoid your new toll-booths and skip the
desired conversion to 'paid' - the lower the hurdle for legitimate usage
and paid engagement, the higher the added values, the less you will
have to worry about 'competing with free'.
This slide-show is the public version of a presentation I gave for the pan-European football association yesterday, in Cyprus. Football (and most other sports businesses) needs to embrace the web as a platform for going directly to their target markets - in parallel to their traditional broadcasting deals - and help the players connect with their fans and followers, in every aspect of the game, and its production, marketing and distribution. It's no longer just The Networks that matter - it's also The Networked - and guess which one is shrinking in size, viewership and future relevance?
Mobile, social, real-time is where it's going; control fades as the top concern while trust becomes tantamount. Who owns the relationship with the fan and user fka 'the consumer' - the broadcaster or the football club...or the players, themselves? TV is completely converging with the Internet, and a lot of branding and advertising funds will shift towards digital, social, video and interactive in the next 2-3 years -so what does this mean for a the football ecosystem? Where is the new money? Why is selling the experience - in any and all its shapes, including augmented / virtual reality - more important than controlling the flow of 'copies' and raw content on the web? How to protect a club's intellectual property, content and media?
Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist
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