Comments on: iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and magazines

By: Michael Roston

Michael Roston — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:45:40 +0000

Looks like your old digs is (hopefully) going another way, and a better one.

By: Steve McNally

Steve McNally — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:30:09 +0000

Agreed – the dance publishers are working is between “ceding control” and “creating something readers, writers and advertisers want.” Currently, their dance is closer to St. Vitus’ than Gene Kelly’s.

The prevailing opinion seems to be the music industry gave up too much to Apple with iTunes. They invoke how much the labels ceded to MTV during its rise. They speak ill of Amazon’s margins on Kindle content. This leaves out the fact that, left to their own, the music industry may never have created iTunes or Music Television, and publishers would not have arrived at the Kindle ecosystem.

Where being graceful and nimble is paramount, publishers seem currently to prefer (re)owning the distribution mechanism. As you note, riding atop an existing service would give them speed-to-market, cost savings and a preëxisting subscriber base; they’d have to negotiate for Control, but they’d leave less time for others to end-run them.

By: raghus

raghus — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:17:58 +0000

I think there is something to be said for the flat-rate options from Netflix. We’ve tens of thousands of Netflixers signed up at http://feedfliks.com and once they see that they are getting movies at much much less than they would at, say Blockbuster, they often tell all their friends about it. Even those that are not getting as much out of it as they could, blame themselves and not NF. With BB, the late fees are something to focus your annoyance at, but with NF, it’s pretty much up to the subscriber.

By: Michael Roston

Michael Roston — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:48:17 +0000

I think the insanity here is the notion that they should try to launch another platform, and not use something that already exists. For instance, if I could pay an extra $2 a month to Netflix to access a bevvy of content that originated in magazines, newspapers, etc., I’d probably do it. If I had to pay another $10-15/month to access those things, I probably would not. If they worked with something like Netflix, that company would probably take care of most of the backend and frontend, and they’d save a lot of money. But they can’t get over his masters of the media universe thing, so they’ll burn through a lot of cash, and then something will surprise them, and they’ll lose.

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Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:18:09 +0000

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