drinking some beers in den bosch
Pieter van Gils
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunityArchive for August, 2007
MySpace spam? Or am I just hot?
I signed up to MySpace 2 days ago to take a closer look at this social network. When I signed up I automatically had 1 friend, a dutch guy working for MySpace, nothing wrong with that.
Today I received an email from Angila, who wants to connect with me.
WOW! Only 2 days on MySpace and the girls are already interested in me. How old is she? Is she hot? Do I know here already? Is she living close to me? Will she be my future wife? As you can see I went crazy because of this new friendship.
I immediately clicked on her profile to get some more information and I was amazed. Angila is 19 years old and MySpace blocked her profile because she had some nude modeling pictures. There’s a link on her profile page that will guide me to her new website where I can see the pictures if I want to. I’m at work now and I’m pretty shure that the pictures are NSFW. When I’m at home tonight I’ll visit here website and maybe send her a message (if the pictures are nice!).
I’m really glad I have some friends now on MySpace.
My agenda for the next months: I’m a busy man
After two months of working almost every day it’s time for some changes :-).
On Sunday 9th September I go to Iceland with Daisycon (Dutch affiliate network) to meet other publishers and see the country. We are staying there for four days so I’ll be back on Wednesday 12th September. I think it’ll be a nice combination of business and pleasure.
The same week I have to get back to Schiphol airport on Sunday (16th September) to catch my flight to Barcelona. I’m staying in Barcelona for three weeks to practice my Spanish a bit more in one of the language schools. I requested to stay in the “Carrer de la Portaferrissa” apartment I visited some weeks ago. I’m really looking forward to this because I love the city Barcelona. I’ll be back from Barcelona on 7th October.
After three weeks of fun/studying I have to do some work and make my Spanish exam in the Netherlands. But don’t feel sorry for me because at the end of the month I’m making another trip. On 25th and 26th October I’ll be in London to visit the Affiliate Marketing Conference & Exhibition (a4uexpo). The combination of search engine marketing and affiliate marketing is what makes it interesting for me. I’m flying back to Amsterdam on 27th October.
I hope to start my final internship in November so I can finally get my bachelors degree. But that’s still months away, lets just focus on the next two months!
The future of Video On Demand
I’ve been working with a dutch VOD company for some time now and I can say it’s a though business. The main problem in this market is the the monopolistic position of the content owners. There are several companies in the Netherlands that have the technology to create high quality streams and they are all willing to bring you the latest movies, on demand. Why is this not happening yet?
Future of content
Content owners like Warner or Sony Pictures are asking ridiculous advanced fees for their products. You have to pay at least 250k to get a license for a few movies that are already available in the local supermarket for a few bucks. The contracts that go with these deals are really tight, the major movie companies are making all the decisions in this business (e.g. DRM, availability, pricing). Why don’t they understand that this is only encouraging illegal downloads.
I’m glad to say this is finally changing and some majors are willing to cooperate with the online distributers. In the future it will be more easy to get a deal because this is the only thing content owners can do to prevent illegal distribution.
Quality of streams
A big part of the quality is related to the bandwidth, you’ll get a better image if you send more data. In a country like the Netherlands there are a lot off cities getting their own fibreglass networks. The capabilities of these connections are great if you compare it to an old fashion ADSL or cable connection, especially for streaming content.
Besides the bandwidth it’s important to use the right encoding techniques. More companies are specializing in this and the future will give us great quality movie streams. A nice example is Best TV, a company thats using techniques developed by the Israeli army to encode movie files. Off course you’ll need a high quality source file to get the best results.
Digital Rights Management
People always complain about DRM licensing but at this moment it’s the most common way of protecting a media file. I see two options for the future on this part. The first is a major improvement in the abilities of DRM (like an online storage of the license so you can play the movie on every pc if you payed for it). The second is removing the DRM for media files, apple is playing with this right now.
I think the first option is most likely to occur in the near future. Content owners loose a lot of control if they completely remove all protection, and they won’t let this happen.
Set-top boxes vs computer
It’s great to watch low quality content like YouTube movies on your computer, but when it comes to blockbusters this is totally different. Watching a movie is better on a tv then it is on a computer. The early adopters in this world had their pc connected to a tv years ago (normally you only need one cable for this). More and more people are getting a pc to tv connection these days, but it’s still only a small percentage of the total computer owners. It would be great for the video on demand business when all people can watch streaming content on their tv.
A major change will happen when set-top boxes get more common. I have seen some great set-top boxes and in the future it will be build-in hardware in every tv. These build-in set-top boxes have different channels, including a video on demand service with all your favorite blockbusters.
