BBC moves to file-sharing sites
Hundreds of episodes of BBC programmes will be made available (legally) on a file-sharing network for the first time, the corporation has announced.
The move follows a deal between the commercial arm of the organisation, BBC Worldwide, and technology BitTorrent firm Azureus through their Zudeo service.
This is really great news. People all over the world have enjoyed BBC programming but its sometimes hard to get it. In the US BBC television is mostly available through public television. And more recently through file sharing. Its great to see the BBC recognize the value of global distribution made possible using BitTorrent.
I’ve been involved with BitTorrent since 1999, my business partner The Shad0w created BitTornado, a BitTorrent client, to enhance the protocol. Many of BitTornado’s enhancements have been accepted as standards to the protocol.
The original reason we got involved in BitTorrent was to create alternative business models to allow artists to get paid for their work. We realized that file sharing was the natural state and trying to stop it was impossible. So how can artists get paid if making copies is free? We tried to help performers get concert gigs and built a web site that allowed you to audition performers online and then book them for performances. We found paying for bandwidth was too expensive at the time; this led Shad0w to work on the BitTorrent open source project and became one of the major contributors to the technology.
I continued working on business models, and discovered there are four basic types of business models for information. The key factors are:
| Paid Before Creation | Paid After Creation | |
| Paid By Consumer |
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| Paid By Another Person |
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Copyrights focus on paying after creation or publication. By focusing on business models the pay the artist before creation or publication sharing isn’t a problem, and in general is helpful.
Advertising benefits from file sharing. I spent a lot of time promoting integrated advertising also known as branded entertainment. The Apprentice was one of the biggest successes of branded entertainment. I was unable to get the idea to widely catch on. Oddly enough it wasn’t people rejecting the idea, it was because companies didn’t know how to purchase it. The advertising world is based around the idea of empty space. You buy empty space and place your ad in the empty space. Since branded entertainment is the content there isn’t an empty space to fill with a 30 second spot. The big companies didn’t know which department should handle it. And is the case with most innovations, if its disruptive they ignore it.
We have seen an interim solution with such companies as Revver.com. They tack an ad on the end of videos. So far this is missing the important content targeting to make the ad beneficial to the viewer. Viewers HATE commercials. The post roll approach used by Revver is better than others because the ad is at the end so there is no interruption but advertisers don’t want to pay for something that isn’t seen. There isn’t a strong win-win-win feedback loop.
Patronage and charity are very similar but patronage is more interesting. A patron gains benefit from having the work created. And now that copying and sharing is free groups of people can be patrons of an artist and everyone get a copy of the work. A method of doing this is The Street Performer Protocol. I believe this is the next big innovation, its already being used and I’ll discuss it more in future posts. I’m currently working on a service to make patronage easy and reliable. This will allow consumers to directly fund new movies, books, music, and software that can then be released with a Creative Commons license. No ads, total artistic freedom and consumers choose what is made.
After seeing Zudeo and the ability deliver HD content with an easy to use interface it is one of the outlets we will use for distribution.
Action Items
- Visit Zudeo and try the Azureus client to download high quality video.
- Visit Inagada.com, read about the project and sign up for the newsletter to stay informed of the progress.
Attention Economy
Economics is defined as the study of production, distribution, and consumption of scarce resources. The key word is scarce. In the ever-increasing information age we are finding that scarcity is a fiction. Even when we look at physical items there is no practical limit and when we consider non-physical items broadly classified as intellectual property there is absolutely no limit. In fact intellectual property becomes more valuable as it is consumed and more people have it. It operates exactly the opposite of scarcity.
As the amount of information increases exponentially we are discovering another phenomenon. Instead of a shortage we have information overload, too much information. As copies of information are made it leads to discovery of new information and the cycle increases even faster.
The overload of information points to something that does have a natural scarcity, attention. Each of us has limited amount of ability to pay attention to any thing. Since we only live for a maximum of 120 years that sets a cap on the total amount of attention any one of us has to give
Hopefully you see that the total amount of attention is unlimited as long as there are more people. But at any given point in time and for each individual attention is a scarce commodity. And since scarcity leads to increased demand attention is becoming realized as the item of value.
In an Attention Economy the people that become rich are those that can efficiently attract and maintain attention. In the past that meant controlling the information distribution systems such as print, then radio and television. Now that the Internet exists no one controls the information distribution system. The playing field is equalized in that regard. There still are some physical barriers such as bandwidth and server capacity but even those have been conquered with technologies such as BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer systems.
To compete in an Attention Economy you must provide the desired information in the most efficient manner. Allowing and encouraging people to share and copy is an essential tool. Providing formats that are easily converted to other languages, media or methods of distribution increases the attention you receive.
All of that flies in the face of the scarcity model, and that is the point. If you want to do well in the Attention Economy you need to operate by different rules. But those rules have always existed. Give and you shall receive.
Action Items
- Note how many sources of information you look at before feeling its enough or even too much.
- Notice the types of media you prefer to get information through such as radio, television, Internet, newspapers, person to person.
- Ask other people which types of media they prefer and why.
$1000 Rechargeable Cordless Razor. How Much Are You Worth?
If I told you I bought a $1000 rechargeable cordless razor you would probably say I was nuts. There was a time when I would have said so as well. And no, I never paid $1000 for a razor. But I did discover just how valuable such small items can be.
When I was a consultant in Silicon Valley during the 1990’s I had 3 contracts at a time. In the morning I would drive into San Francisco from Sunnyvale where I lived. I would work for my financial clients until 5 pm, then I continued my clockwise trip around the bay to Oakland where I had a second contract designing and developing the virtual reality engine used in many video games including Top Gun and Falcon 4.0. I would work there until 10 pm or 11 pm then finish my circle of the bay by driving back home to Sunnyvale. On the weekends I wouldn’t have to drive because I worked out of my house on smaller projects.
As you can imagine I did a whole lot of driving. A little over and hour and half each day. The work plus driving schedule didn’t leave me much time for anything else. Why was I working so much? Because I was 26 years old and making over $250,000 a year. That wasn’t stock options that was cash in my hand.
One day while getting ready in the morning I thought about my hourly rate and what the 10 minutes a day I spent shaving was worth. At my average hourly rate I was spending $12 each morning to shave. WOW. I would never pay someone $12 to shave my face. A little multiplication and I discovered I was wasting $262 every month just on shaving. I immediately went out and bought a rechargeable cordless electric razor. The razor cost $79, an amount that I previously had thought was extravagant. So instead of wasting time in the bathroom I would shave while I was driving and that razor paid for itself in the first week. So now I consider that I paid $79 for a $1000 rechargeable cordless razor.
After that I looked at my whole life and found many ways to put my time to the best use. Now what ever I do I’m calculating “is this something that I would be better off paying to have done?” And the more times I find that is true the more pleased I am at my success. It means my value is increasing. How Much Are You Worth?
Action Items:
- Figure out what your time is worth
- Find repetitive tasks that could be shortened or eliminated
- Determine if its cheaper for someone else to do the task
- Remember time to do things you enjoy, life is just as valuable as work.
Predictive Innovation Training
Predictive Innovation: Core Skills Book
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