Posts by Dylan Reeve
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to David MacGregor,
The kind of content that aired on Media 7/3 could easily be made with light equipment, very low overheads, narrowcasting through the web and possibly a subscriber model. Essentially podcasting. Other revenue streams like syndication with outlets like the On-Demand channels…who knows, I don’t know the economics.
Media 3 was made with pretty light equipment - something that's only really become possible in the last few years, but that still doesn't make it cheap. Equipment is about the smallest part of the challenge. It takes people to make a show like that. Producers, writers, researchers, camera operators, reporters, editors, etc etc...
While thousands would probably say they'd pay to watch Media 3, I suspect the actual number that would do so is *much* lower, and how much would they have to pay to cover just the basic production expenses?
Of course this can work - today saw the release of the AKL DAZE Halloween special, funded entirely by viewers - the downside to this is fragmentation. The more people start to do it, the more lost in the noise they become. Look at podcasting - it used to be possible for podcasters to make a bit of money from their niche audience either through donations or outright subscriptions, but now there are so many podcasts it's almost impossible for any one to distinguish themselves and only the biggest - with hundreds of thousands of listeners - manage to make any meaningful income.
And, of course, low cost production can also "look cheap" - if we want to see Game of Thrones we need to accept that it costs a million dollars an episode to make, or whatever.
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I wish I could find it... I saw a survey, probably in the last year or so, that covered what people say they want from TV and what they actually watch.
The gist is that while many people say they want to watch good* TV, but in reality they are watching the cheap entertainment instead.
* I don't believe in the idea of "good" and "bad" TV, but you know what I mean - documentaries, and high-concept literary drama, etc etc... -
Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Paul Campbell,
yes exactly – that’s why we need public TV if we want anything more high-brow than Shortland St
It's a double-edged sword. TV is somewhat expensive to make, and, for better or worse, a lot of the "high-brow" stuff doesn't attract viewers. Then the cry from taxpayers/government/whoever is "why are we paying for stuff that no one watches"
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Fundamentally there's nothing wrong with this. The viewership numbers clearly show that people like to watch it - and in the end TV is basically an entertainment medium. If viewers are entertained by it and choose to watch it then they're clearly doing their job.
When the business model requires attracting viewers to fund the operation then there's little option but to shoot for the popular stuff that makes a profit.
But fear not - at the same time we see the rise of cable channels, and subscription-based providers like Netflix. They do not have the same demands. They can fund shows on their merit (whatever that may be) so long as their overall offering is enough to keep viewers engaged in their subscription.
While we tend to miss out on that locally at the moment, the nature of television is changing and in time there will surely come opportunities for the same model to find a way to impact on NZ production and content.
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If anyone is still interested in this - here is our Discourse Episode with Vikram, recorded on Tuesday. The first 30 minutes, roughly, are spend on this issue and associated things...
http://www.discourse.co.nz/2013/10/episode-4-32-mega-controversy/
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So based on what we've seen from those decrying MEGA, they expect MEGA to pro-actively go out, somehow search for all copyright works that may exist, find any links for those works that are hosted on MEGA and remove them...
Is that what is required?
This requires that staff of MEGA know the copyright status of every creative work in existence, spend all their time searching for all instances of all those creative works, then remove the works...
Why do we not expect this of YouTube? After all, The Nation's producers didn't raise the issue of their show being uploaded to YouTube by people other than themselves.
Once again - the notion that MEGA profits from piracy seems laughable.. When you can get 50GB of storage simply by having an email address, why would any self-respecting pirate pay for the service to get more? MEGA's revenue from downloads hosted by those free accounts? $0 as far as I can see.
The whole argument is different for MegaUpload of course, it was a very different business model. It hosted ads on download pages, encouraged downloaders to sign up for premium accounts to get faster access and more... MegaUpload gained financially from popular downloads (regardless of the content). They were operating in a legal grey area by responding to legal notices as required, but the US DoJ seems to think that grey was a little black... Maybe so. Regardless, MEGA is not a clone of MegaUpload.
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Russell Brown,
Man, that Kim Dotcom really is running a shitty pirate site. I went to mega.co.nz and there wasn't even a search box... How am I supposed to download all my favourite books now?
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Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Russell Brown,
This seems to be his best evidence for that:
https://twitter.com/samelworthy/status/393467230882525184 -
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to nzlemming,
Yup we all do that though, don't we, it's called publicity. However I rather expect the media to try and find balance in some of this - allowing the Publishers Association to come on and, unchallenged, make blanket assertions about a business on nothing more than anecdote is amazing.
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Wow - just watched the interview on The Nation (38:30 in the On Demand copy).. It is staggeringly one-sided and, at least in my opinion, almost entirely false in it's assertions.
Elworthy claims that a Google search for any book and "free download" will see "mega.co.nz in the top results" - I can't see anything remotely like that with any search I do.