Live Internet Television

Andrew Vanacore’s interesting piece running in the Huffington Post and in the Seattle Times today about the endangered state of free TV really underscores how direly TV needs a new model, as ad revenue erodes and viewership splinters.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years.

As people discovered in ‘08 with the Beijing Olympics, it can be hard to watch what you want live online, even if it’s heavily promoted as being “live online.” To protect its TV ad revenue by keeping viewership up, NBC made sure that a lot of its live online content was not available to US customers (Silicon Alley Insider).

With the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, NBC is trying something a little different (Media Daily News):

The system, tabbed “Olympics Online Connect,” allows people to prove via an authentication process that they pay a provider for TV service. That measure opens the gate to more than 1,000 hours of live Olympic streaming and full-event replays.

“TV Everywhere” is a concept designed to prevent customers from dropping their pay TV service if the same content is available online gratis.

This is exactly the kind of mindset — in effect, keeping people from accessing the content they want by making it too expensive in a bundle — that ivi seeks to make obsolete.

“The trail may be cold, but the stories are hot!”

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

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In this series, we have seen examples of how Hollywood stardom has come to many who were willing to dream, develop world class skills, and persevere. We have also stressed that, often, the process of “becoming” a star is more rewarding than actually “arriving.”

In this article, we will acknowledge that, despite the exceptions who do indeed succeed in climbing the Everest that is Hollywood ambition, the odds are small an individual with modest personal resources (primarily contacts and money) will become a major player in motion pictures.

For perspective’s sake, one could say the same of becoming the CEO of a major US corporation…with the caveat that there are many more Fortune 500 CEOs than there are successful film stars.

With that as background, let us take a look at casting agencies, and the challenges they face, standing as they do between  ambition and big screen success.

We need to be clear. In the real world of northwest Los Angeles, equal opportunity is seldom the rule of thumb.

Why is this so? How can there be such a chasm between what prominent performers say about  social inclusion and the behavior of the industry they represent?

The answer is to be found in every Economics 101 classroom. The law of supply and demand.

For instance, in a previous article, we mentioned  that 3000 actors auditioned for the leading male role in the  TV series Moonlighting opposite Cybill Shepherd. Bruce Willis was chosen for the part, and the rest is TV history.

This number of persons may seem outsized. However, at least this many resumes are considered any time a good part in a film is opened to relatively unknown talent.

And, with technology now being used by casting agencies, the number of persons considered for each role of this kind may eventually reach the tens of thousands.

So what do casting agencies do?

On the low end of the prestige spectrum, we have agencies that primarily take orders for film extras. Those are the people you see in films crossing streets or dining in a restaurant when a staged gang hit takes place.

Then there are casting agencies established by former mid-level stars whose careers have run their course, but who wish to use their industry contacts both to make a living and also to help others obtain work, starting with extras and perhaps working up to some minor players. The hope of these agencies is to hit it big with a few performers, demonstrate their worth to noteworthy personalities, and, by word of mouth  graduate to the “big time.”

And finally, there are the big timers like the William Morris agency which serve functions somewhere between the casting agency and personal agent.  These are the kinds of agencies where newcomers need not apply unless they have serious contacts in the industry. If one is a daughter of Meryl Streep, fine. If one is the daughter of a Milwaukee bus driver, better apply to the city of Milwaukee for a driver’s license. Read the rest of this entry »

DRM is broken.

Artificially impeding the ability to share digital content makes as much sense as attempting to keep people from reading used books. Content owners should quit trying to keep people from distributing content at their own cost. Ask any content owner: They would love to have free distribution. Provided, of course, that they can monetize their content.

Copyright owners have been improperly taken down a rabbit hole by technology companies promising to protect their content the wrong way. DRM restricts the user experience which, in turn, drives users to seek pirated or illegally distributed DRM-free content.

Once we agree that DRM is not a viable solution, we’re free to look at the problem through a different lens.

First, let’s state the goal. Content owners want to control the use of their content. Usually, this means they want to be paid for it.

Second, lets discuss how we achieve it. How do we allow people to easily view and distribute content, while ensuring that content owners can control and monetize the use of that content?

Enter ivi’s Streaming Block Encryption, the right way to protect copyright.

Here is the approach:

1) Allow peer sharing

a) Shift distribution cost to consumer
b) Encourage word-of-mouth promotion

2) Support individual subscription, ppv, and rental models

a) Assign an individualized, trackable identification to each player
b) Track content and time based access for each player

3) Make it easy for the consumer

a) Users are able to say the following: “I’ve paid for it, I can view it.”
b) And “I can share it with others, as long as they’ve paid for it.”

ivi’s proprietary protection system encodes and encrypts content into the .ivi format. This format is only viewable on ivi TV, a live TV player application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Every ivi TV player is uniquely identified and is programmed to securely pull rapidly rotating decoding keys from the ivi trackers over SSL, then decrypt and decode the content to each individual viewer’s screen.

The .ivi format is encrypted data, viewable only in the ivi TV player, so it can be shared, duplicated, and distributed. However, the shared .ivi files are only viewable on ivi TV. Therefore, the ivi TV player will only allow the shared content to be viewed if it is designated as “free” or if the subsequent viewer has paid for access to that particular shared content.

This “downloadable conditional access system” component to the ivi system has elicited the following response from Stephen Dukes, former VP of Technology from TCI Cable: “ivi solved what the cable industry has spent millions of dollars trying to solve.”

Every content owner that uses the ivi system to distribute their channel, content, or programs, gets all this content protection built in. Best of all, the ivi system allows content owners to control and thereby monetize the use of their content online.

ivi is Internet TV done right.

“The trail may be cold, but the stories are hot!”

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

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Thus far in this series, we have discussed several important aspects of preparing for a film or stage career. Chief among them:

A) The need for personal maturity and perspective. Many successful performers have discovered that the journey toward stardom  is more satisfying than stardom itself. That is, many a performer has been surprised at the lack of freedom and privacy an accomplished star enjoys.

B) The importance of developing multiple performance skills (acting,  dancing, singing, playing musical instrument(s), stage combat, stunt acrobatics and others.) The more an unknown has to offer a casting director, the better the chances of being hired.

In this article, we will briefly discuss the roles played by personal managers and agents, relative to a performer’s career.

Definitions:

Managers: Show business managers tend to have few clients, sometimes a single performer. A manager’s role may include discovering opportunities, negotiating contracts, financial planning, favorable publicity, and damage control should that become necessary.

Agents: Show business agents tend to have a stable of clients and function primarily to search out and present offers to them.

Questions:

Why do newcomers find it difficult to obtain representation from managers and agents?

1) Newcomers have little box office following. That is, other than relatives and friends, few persons are likely to purchase tickets to see or hear an unknown perform. Since managers and agents are generally paid as a percentage of their clients’ incomes, representing a newcomer is unattractive financially — unless the newcomer has the personal resources to support such a manager or agent on salary.

2) Within the show business world, some managers, but especially agents, are rated (read: earn respect) based on the clients they represent.

For example, at one time or another, super-agent Sue Mengers’ stable of clients has included Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Ali McGraw, Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Directors Herb Ross, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse and writer Gore Vidal, to name a few.

Of what should a newcomer be wary relative to representation?

1) Newcomers should be wary of anyone claiming to be able to transform an unknown into a star in a short period of time. Scammers understand that newcomers are often in the position of seeing their savings (if any) dwindle rapidly. Such a precarious financial situation encourages scammers to circle.

2) It is not uncommon for a so-called manager or agent to a) Rent a small  office with a smaller waiting area, b) Hang a few touched-up photos on the walls showing the manager or agent in the company of various well-known stars, c) Let the newcomer gape at the photos in the waiting area for awhile, d) Finally, a receptionist (usually the scammer’s spouse or “close” friend) announcing, “Mr. Jones or Ms. Smith will see you now.”

Several weeks or months (and several hundreds of dollars later), after the manager or agent collects tens of thousands of dollars from dozens of unsuspecting stars-to-be, the office is vacated without notice, the photos gone. The scammer then turns up in another part of town or another community entirely under another name to start the process all over again. (Convictions for this type of representation are hard to come-by because newcomers are embarrassed they have been so easily taken, cannot afford to remain in the area to testify in court cases, and usually haven’t been swindled out of enough money to make aggressive prosecution worthwhile. In addition, a court might ask how much work the star-to-be expected for $500-$1,000 in the first place.) Read the rest of this entry »