How Not To Blog ?

The April issue of Wired talks about Marc Cuban's efforts to convert all 270 of his Landmark Theatre screens to digital.

What it neglets to mention is that Ireland's Digital Cinema Limited will convert all of the country's movie theaters (about 500) from 35mm to digital during the next twelve months.

Film studios in the US are reluctant to do the same (hence Marc Cuban) due to the initial cost of conversion and, well, they're just old farts who can't see the future for the gas.

Each theatre in the US would cost about $50-150k to upgrade. However, the movie studios would save a bundle by not shipping film in canisters to those theatres every week. Studios would be smart to split the costs with theatre owners. They could easily make up the difference in less than a year by expanding their current offerings.

Forget about upgrading ~36,000 screens. Take $200 million and try it out with 10% of that figure (50/50 split) to test the digital waters. Within 1 year you're estimated to save about $100 million in costs, not to mention probable greater consumer interest through that and expanded offerings. Hype it up.. do your thang. Heck, you could even lower ticket prices to celebrate. People would flock to theatres.

What could it mean to have a digital theatre in your neighborhood?

Wired mentions the better image quality of a digital film and the ability for movie theatres to easily balance out visitor load by shifting people to other theatres when a movie is more popular than expected. It also talks about "..high-res broadcasts or sports events, Broadway plays, fashion shows, and multiplayer electronic games". There's also the ability to show live concerts, take advantage of the Wi-Fi capabilities of Sony's PSP and similar devices, show more niche films (which are cheaper to produce and distribute digitally), nightly showings of popular television shows, and more. I think many people would purchase tickets on a frequent basis simple because the picture and sound quality would make it seem very real.

$7 for films and $3-5 for other showings. Theatres make more money from concessions, anyway. They could easily bring in more people to the theatres more of the time. They could have people coming through the doors all the time, not just at night and on weekends - older people during the day, younger people at night.

Currently, people only go to the theatre for movies. But they could be going for a whole lot more.

You knew it had to happen.

Don't get me wrong, the iPod is great, but the PSP is about to show that the iPod is played out in its current form. Apple can make some tweaks to the iPod's design, it can strip out features and make a flash player (the Shuffle), but as a music player, it's basically cooked, there isn't really anywhere to go except down in price.

What is the PSP?
-WiFi (802.11b) built-in; 100-meter range with a transfer rate of up to 2mbps
-Email
-Play MP3s
-View digital photos
-P2P file-swapping
-Instant Messaging (IM)
-Read books
-Web browser
-Bring media over from your Tivo
-Convert any video file into a PSP video file
-Download and play (mostly) illegal movie torrents

Add a keyboard

And Possibly...
VoIP (rumor)
Future PDA functionality
Camera attachment
GPS
Word processing

...all craftily disguised as a portable gaming device.

Which is cooler, someone going into a cafe and listening to music with their iPod, or someone going into a cafe and sharing photos that they're downloading in real-time with their friends from a photo website, and sending an instant message to their family, and then doing a whole lot more, including listen to music?

For now, Apple is lucky that only a 1-2GB Sony Memory Stick Duo is available. It's two totally different markets, but I think the PSP is appealing enough to Apple's future market share (or what it hoped would be its future market). The iPod still serves only 1 function.

But if I were Steve Jobs, I'd be scared shitless right about now.

"Internet TV" is a misnomer, I think.

It won't be television through the internet, it'll just be the internet.

Like the days of BBSes (before "the internet") where you didn't see any pictures and you could read the text faster that it downloaded then, gradually, images, animations, and other media came onboard, IPTV/internetTV, or rich mediacasting, is just the future of the internet.

It will be enabled by a mass adoption of broadband and the availability of cheap hardware, mobile WiFi devices like the Sony PSP, and lots of creative people.

I would imagine that a lot of blogging will be done live (internet shows), there will be collaborative live entertainment, collaborative film-making (think Flickr + film), lots of alternative news programs, rich media community sites, citizen watch groups, telemedicine, and lots more exciting stuff.

And, yes, the videophone will still be a pipedream.

Here's a new metasearch site called Oodle. Right now it handles only Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia. It's also including Craigslist listings in its results, interestingly.

The 5th largest earthquake in the world since 1900 was on December 26, 2004.

The 7th largest, on March 28.

Each, one day after a major Christian holy-day.

I can hear the religious folk already, saying "God is angry with the world!".

As the web becomes more integrated into peoples' lives, internet companies need to be able to better satisfy more of users' emotional needs than ever before.

In life, people seek out situations and experiences that are likely to fit in with their emotional patterns. A person's life experiences are, in a way, extensions of their complex personality. The web isn't much different.

The same way getting out to go shopping, going to a certain restaurant, or talking to a certain kind of stranger is an expression of one's self (and thus, emotions), people will seek out and continue to visit the websites that will most possibly fulfill their emotional requirements. A person's leisure time, it can be argued, is really time to validate their existence.

Compared to similar internet portals such as MSN, Yahoo, and even AOL, Google's range of services provide great utility without being emotionally stimulating. The longest-lasting, most successful internet-based consumer goods and services companies will make a business out of evoking, manipulating, augmenting, sharing, and extending a user's emotions. One can pretty much gauge the lifespan of an internet company (or the length of your relationship with it) by asking one simple question:

How does it make me feel?

How many consumer electronics companies or internet companies, for example, have come out with great products that were very innovative and useful but simply did not survive the marketplace? We say that those companies were "before their time". Perhaps many of them weren't before their time at all - they simply didn't know how to elicit a useful emotional response and create their own market.

Google, of course, will still say that they're not a portal and don't want to be a portal, all while being a portal but with no focus. I guess advertising revenue is good enough for them. But if people choose other sites over Google for their needs (including search), where will Google's cash come from?

People used to get very emotional over Google. It's still happening, but I think on a much less scale than before. How could one be so bold as to mess it all up? What does Google tag itself with? Will its lack of focus soon attract only schizophrenics? Google can do still do alot while maintaining focus - it just has to want to.

The marketplace isn't simply conscious. It's emotional, too.

If Yahoo! wants to maintain its family image past its purchase of Flickr, then it should do something about all the x-rated photos on the site that are easily-accessible.

Meanwhile, my photos (as a new user) are still waiting to be approved. They're checking to see if I'm posting x-rated photos and/or advertising!

Here's a nice way to browse photos on Flickr by tag.

China will leapfrog over Western countries by issuing IPTV licenses later this month (article).

Anyone with a webcam will be able to create a "TV channel" over the internet. Podcasting doesn't have anything on this. Too bad licenses will only be given out to companies that are state-owned.

We'll see how this changes China's media landscape from one that's largely government controlled to one that's more democratic (if it does). Democracy usually comes in the door with open media, so this type of technology could open the floodgates in China.

Max Blumberg talks about marketing opportunities, primarily with search:

And where is Google in all this? Controlling Internet advertising will not help if it does not have a significant stake in the new converged media.

The logical move for Google would be to control the emerging IPTV search space, and indeed Google Video may indeed be its way in. Soon, you will undoubtedly be Googling your television set for your favorite TV content (with a few adverts thrown in for luck)...