On February 13, with both Valentine’s Day and the first major winter storm in Connecticut approaching, MCAICT and the CTFCPUG held a joint meeting at Tripeg Studios in Hamden on the subject of New Media and Distribution.

Needless to say, the subject was too large to be covered adequately in one meeting, but judging from the brisk participation of the attendees, there is a lot of interest in exploring new revenue models among the many producers who comprise both memberships. Evident from the panel discussion, though, is that no one has yet figured out a way to create a reliable revenue stream from either blogging or podcasting. What follows is a summary of comments from this august panel, gathered from coast-to-coast to share their knowledge with this overflow crowd.

Ben Williams, from J. Walter Thompson, the 4th largest ad agency in the country, is also the creator of Coded Signal, a portable media network with five media properties. He explains that his network is roughly analogous to any other TV network and that the revenue acquired will most likely accrue to the network itself rather than the shows it creates. Ben displayed a marvelously succinct summary of how to take your video “viral”, though as pointed out by the panel, going viral is nothing you really have control over, but is rather a function of what a social network can do to your video. But, as Ben points out, if you seed it correctly by creating links to your video at social networking sites such as MySpace, then posting the video itself at Google Video or a similar site can help it go viral in a very short space of time. Ben gave a 2-day old case history in which he helped a prospective program host boost her position in a competition by simply asking people at various sites to click on her video and vote for her. In a matter of hours she shot into a commanding lead. Clear from his presentation was that good humor is a powerful draw in viral marketing.

CTFCPUG’s founder and President, Keith Larsen, along with Alan Spaulding of Aspire Pictures, did a bit of skyrocketing into fame themselves, as they took Creative Cow’s moribund podcast from a viewership of 250 per month to around 250,000 per month with their “CT Production Scene”. Ironically, they proved that no prophet is without honor except in his hometown as a survey of the audience showed that only 3 people out of the 60 attendees had ever seen it. This brought up the subject of monetizing the content again, exacerbated by Apple’s effective lock-out of independent producers in its iTunes store. To add insult to injury, it appears that Apple also scrutinizes your stats, and if you start creating revenue from hosting your podcast there, they will remove you from the roster or take a larger piece of the pie. So much for the company that brought “the computer for the rest of us”. Perhaps not surprisingly, Keith announced his and Alan’s departure from Creative Cow, as they were being ordered to produce their podcasts in ways they did not like, even though they were never paid. And so the quest for the holy grail continues.

Will the grail be found by going where the eyeballs already are along with the metrics to measure them? That is the 10-year gamble being conducted by Dennis and Jackie Peters of Heavybag Media. They create content exclusively for cellphone users. Jackie explains that the content should be created by context. In other words, create content that is useful for viewers on the run. She cited time-passing games, restaurant guides, and driving directions as good examples of contextual media. The impression is that their history in this genre has shown them many good ways of not making a living. They continue to look for that homerun hit and believe it may be found, among other ways, in traditional advertising that comes at the end of a game as a click-through to the advertiser’s site.

Jackie also ran through a helpful tutorial on how to create a video podcast, from conversion to the 3GP format to creating the cellphone webpage in wml language. She pointed out that soon wml will be replaced by xhtml, thus harmonizing a popular computer-based web format with the cellphone format. Her design suggestions included placing navigation controls at the bottom of the page, using the 176 x 144 size for most cellphone screens, and keeping the URL as short as possible.

Frank Capria, (the P.Diddy of video) frequent DV Magazine contributor, President of Xprove, Inc., lecturer at Boston U., leader of the FCPUG-Boston and Emmy-winner, had some interesting words about traditional advertising. It was brought up in the meeting that traditional ads, being push media (where it is sent to you via subscription) rather than pull media (where you go to a website and download it) can’t be measured. Frank pointed out that the traditional ad industry has almost 100 years of psychological and statistical research to effectively prove whether or not a campaign is working, simply by looking at a set of numbers. He pointed out that podcasting is decades behind advertisers in proving the efficacy of their model, but did cite NPR as the currently most successful podcaster in the U.S. and described how they did it.

And while podcasting currently supplies little or no revenue to a producer, Jackie Peters cited the podcast as a way to increase your perceived expertise in any field, thus increasing your profile among your potential clients.

However, in a heroic attempt to break through the distributor lock-up, the visionary Philip Hodgetts, who joined us via iChat from L.A., announced the soon-to-be-launched ClickTab, a way for producers to monetize podcasts. Until now, there has been no technical way to monetize an RSS feed. This is simply a limitation of the medium. Hodgett’s company intends to remove Apple from the equation, opening up all kinds possibilities for producers. How is this possible? The answer is that once your podcast is subscribed to, Apple no longer has to host it. It then resides on the viewer’s hard drive. And herein lies the opportunity. Hodgetts then laid out the 4 ways of monetizing content.

He then forecast the end of traditional time limits on programs, the 30-minute and 60-minute models. When the distributor bottleneck is destroyed, there will be no need to ration programming according to the tastes of some 23-year-old executive sitting in an office in Century City. Rather, distribution will be handled by an aggregator site, where, through intelligent search technology, a viewer can get just the program she wants, exactly when she wants it and pay for it on the spot. Micro payments will be handled by ClickTab much like a bar tab. You’ll run up a bill, then pay for it at the end. Doubtless, other pay schemes will evolve to compete with this one.

But the producer, already hamstrung by rapacious studios, ripped-off by cut-throat distributors and totally locked out of monetization by Apple, is also never far from being thrown into prison, as helpfully pointed out by panelist and attorney Guy Ortoleva, of Tripeg Studios, who discussed copyright issues and briefly considered suing two of the panelists and the moderator for a satirical video they created on the ubiquitous William Shatner. The concept of authorship and the author’s rights was defined. (One media philosopher has playfully suggested that all video producers should place an ounce of their own blood on deposit with the American Bar Association as a preventative measure.)

Overall, the sense of this meeting was that content is still king. While it is simpler than ever to create a podcast, your message is still the most important factor. Lest we lose sight of the fact that any media format is nothing more than a way to communicate our messages and those of our clients effectively, remember that most of the new video messages being communicated are of interest to maybe 3 people on the planet, and Google Video and YouTube are still seen in many circles as little more than highly effective ways of stealing content from producers for the benefit of very few people.

Exploiting these new media outlets for more effective communication is going to happen eventually. When and how is still unknown. And that alone should make it very exciting for communicators who are also in business for the long term. What will the successful models be? And will one of them come from you? What an amazing concept! You still have the potential to become enormously wealthy by forecasting what the pubic might want. That has always been a traditional route to wealth. Which only proves the wisdom of the phrase, “everything old is new again”.

Respectfully Submitted,

Steven Washer
Executive Producer
MedView Media, LLC
MCAICT Member