June 3, 2005
Netflix Saves The Video Star
A Friday thought: The music companies’ chase of the DualDisc and their debate
of future formats reflects the underlying factor that people want
visual content to support their music listening. The problem with all this is
that the music business is chasing a format that the consumer no longer
cares about.
We are going through a seismic shift where consumers are finally
abandoning the need to have tangible assets associated to the music
they own. We get the concept of virtual media. We even get the idea of
our music collection being hosted somewhere virtual, not in our pocket.
What we also are doing is we’re stopping buying CDs. So, why would we
buy an HD DVD?
But what is going to engage us more is when video gets infused with
music. We want to sit on the subway with our iPod-Videos and watch
Kylie bop about and the car shunts from side to side. There’s going to
be a new demand for video.
A couple of years back I produced a few music videos for major labels
and I was shocked at the low budgets they would allocate for each promo
video. But in some ways I understood - it wasn’t the glory days of MTV
anymore, not enough people were watching the content for music
companies to invest money.
If PSP proves itself to be the ubiquitous portable video device (or
when iPod-Video comes along), then I think we will see the rebirth of the
video promo. Music companies will heavily invest again in the format. But you won’t be downloading these files from iTunes,
you’ll be downloading them from Netflix.
Netflix is the biggest video brand there is today. Think of Netflix,
the brand, not the pre-historic postal method. Netflix is carving
itself into a nice position as the video content provider. People
associate the words ‘video’ and ‘online’ with Netflix. Who better to
provide video content in our soon to be anytime, anyplace world?
Just a thought (with help from a late night discussion with video artist Mr. McElwaine)
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7 Responses to “Netflix Saves The Video Star”
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June 7th, 2005 at 5:44 pm
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July 18th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
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July 25th, 2005 at 8:28 am
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August 3rd, 2005 at 8:33 am
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