One Person is Speaking Their Mind

1. Matty Says:

   November 5th, 2009 at 12:12 pm

   I have been closely folllowing ZillionTV since their inception.

   ZillionTV has its act together in a very tough market. Their exec team is a class act, and they are extremely bright and well-aware of the challenges ahead. I trust them to be good enough entrepreneurs to get this right.

   This guy is a disgruntled ex-employee, and the less we focus on his particular scorned-lover attacks, and the less “voice” we give him, the better.

   More in the spirit of your blog:
   Better to focus on what ZillionTV is doing to disrupt some of the old assumptions about consumers and entertainment, and what they’re doing to help monetize in an era in which consumer control and consumer benefits are being challenged by such ideas as “authentication,” “TV Everywhere,” etc.

   If we (as an industry) can’t figure out how to boost ad rates (by boosting viewer response to ads with spectacular viewing experiences — like ZillionTV and others), we will see the end of the grand experiment of ad-supported entertainment content via the Web. It will devolve back into the same few players.

   Look at what Comcast just signaled with their NBC deal. By getting into the content business they may diversify enough to survive the coming disintermediation and impeding competition with everyone, including by the way, AT&T, Verizon, Deutche Telekom and others.

   Is this another TimeWarner-AOL frankenstein deal, or is it the future? Will all content owners have to have distribution arms in order for both to thrive? Who really controls distribution, and what if 4G wireless broadband and ubiquitous (& free) Wi-Fi makes wires and cables and satellites less important for consumers in their entertainment consumption? Interesting questions, and ones I hope to see explored in more WebTVWire articles.

   IPTV makes the whole game different. Granular content selection, discovery as pre-eminent, blowing-up of old carriage arrangements and bundled content-ad deals. Every bit of content or viewer experience will now have to support itself. The innovations in the next 3 years may be more around having a consumer-managed menu online (instead of the impossible-to-understand bundles that are burdened with old-world carriage and ad package deals)….

   Apple signals a trial consumer package at $30. We will certainly see more of the evolution of “a-la-carte” packages that make sense both for consumers and for content owners. The carriage guys may be the ones who take it in the shorts. And really, if they become less relevant (see comment about 4G and Wi-Fi), then that is their fault for failing to move over to those conduits. Unless of course they really become part of the content owner stack, in which case they’ll just sunset the old business and focus on the new distribution pipes and deals that make most economic sense to them (as content owners, not as distribution guys).

   We’re in the analytics business, and we work exclusively in online ad measurement, predictive targeting and benchmarking
   Let’s look at ZillionTV as one of those brilliant experiments in consumer control, content owner support, and reasonable collaboration with Telco.

   This is why I love reading your blog.

   I could frankly care less about what an ex-employee has to say, except if he / she is pointing out something *positive* that we can all learn from. This person was clearly mis-cast in a startup. If ZillionTV did anything wrong, it was making a mistake in hiring someone who doesn’t “get” that startups are supposed to make lots of small mistakes as they figure out how to get to market with a compelling offering that will scale.

   I trust the ZilllionTV guys to get it right. Welcome to start-up land!

   Keep up the great work!

   Matty

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