Hunger Games

The Hunger Games (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the longest time I avoided the movie. What? Kids getting into fights kinda movie? I thought. But once I watched one, I realized the last time I got this excited about a movie was with the Bourne movies. Movie effects can't carry a movie. But they can help a strong plot. And there has to be a timelessness to the theme.

Technological advances will not cure the basic savagery of human nature. There are other remedies to the savagery. And The Hunger Games speak to that. With the Bourne movies it was the idea of a super soldier going to battle with a super government agency. That is the eternal tussle between the individual and the state.

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Full Length Movies On YouTube For Free

If only they had the right pricing model - I vote for $1 per movie - they might not have to take them down. The quality would be better. They'd make money.

How To Watch Full-Length Movies on YouTube for Free - But Not For Long

they’re so-called “cammed” films, which means that they were recorded illegally at a theater with a camcorder, and then uploaded ..... In the last month or so, movie piracy has taken hold of YouTube like wildfire. While the number of current releases is small, finding older films isn’t that hard. ..... YouTube enforces a 10-minute limit on uploaded videos, but users qucikly found they could simply break up longer clips into ten-minute chunks, with helpful pointers to the next clip in the series. .... In 2010, YouTube eliminated that the 10-minute limit for some trusted users, some of whom quickly used their new-found freedom to upload copyrighted clips. .... YouTube users upload 72 hours of video every minute, making the process of identifying copyrighted content even more challenging .... first, that it’s unclear who owns the copyright to a given movie, and second, that Content ID requires the copyright holder to notify Google before a movie can be pulled down .... the poor quality of the movies fooled Content ID

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Distributed Video Watching On YouTube

4,000,000,000 is 1,000 times four million. Let's say there are four million YouTube videos out there. So each of them are being watched for 1,000 hours each. But each video is only five minutes long. So that's 12,000 views per video.

12,000 views - that's not a whole lot. It's not 12 million. In TV lingo, 12,000 views are not a hit. But four billion hours worth of video watching is a lot of video watching.

This is fragmentation. This is crowd power. A hit might be harder to accomplish. But crowd needs are being met.

We Now Watch 4 Billion Hours of YouTube Videos Per Month

YouTube users upload 72 hours of content to the site every minute. In fall of 2008, users were uploading just 10 hours of video each minute

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A Smart Movie Theater Screen

People talk about the TV screen. And there the problems stand in the form of legacy companies sitting on mountains of great content they are not willing to share in new ways. The technology part is easy.

But I'd like to talk about the movie screen at the movie theater. Digital screens could still have projectors. But there would be no physical film. And the theater owner would not decide what movie to play, or even the show times.

Every movie ever made anywhere would be an option. Once a certain number of people buy tickets to that movie, it would get scheduled to play. Some places that number might be 10, some places 50, some places 100. The movie owners get their cut. The theater owners get their cut.

And you'd get to see online how close to the threshold a particular movie you desire is. You could run social media campaigns to get your friends to join you. Ticket buyers would thus help with the marketing.

No movie would ever get old. All movies would have immediate global distribution. I think the results would be surprising. Bollywood might take over the world at that point.

Seven Screens

Kick It

I just got back from an amazing event. I don't know where it was, as in I can't tell you the name of the neighborhood, but it was walking distance to me, 40 minutes one way. I am on the L line. Walking was faster than taking the train through some kind of a circuitous route, and on a day like this, I mean.

This poster was the theme poster for the event, and I did not need any more convincing. I did 1300 squats yesterday and practiced a few kicks of my own.

Blogging Works Wonders: Here's An Example

Image by Newton Free Library via FlickrSo I put out this blog post yesterday. Yes-ter-day.

Very Much Would Like To Go Into Bihar

And someone left a comment a few minutes back. Here's a team that is already doing microfinance in the part of the world that is of greatest interest to me: Mithilanchal in Bihar. Mithilanchal is two words, just like Paramendra is two words. Mithila + Anchal (Zone) = Mithilanchal. Param (The Great) + Indra (King of all the 300 million gods and goddesses in the Hindu mythology) = Paramendra.

Millions And Millions

Image via CrunchBaseSteven Carpenter

TC Teardown: 13 Ways To Get To $10 Million In Revenues (Part I)

cheap to start but expensive to achieve scale

TC Teardown: 13 Ways To Get To $10 Million In Revenues (Part II)

media, paid service, and physical commerce ..... search, gaming, social networks, and new media ..... marketplace, video, commerce, retail, subscription, music, lead generation, hardware and payments ..... Video ad rates are typically amongst the highest in online media ($15-$20 CPM) ..... audio ads are not actionable, and display ads often get ignored (music apps tend to stay open in a browser tab in the background). ..... we will see an explosion of innovative hardware companies over the next few years

Steven Carpenter has done a good job of demystifying here, perhaps too good a job. I think the money is in the mystery. A business is much more than the sum of its parts. And there is that creative part, the human element to the sauce. Each startup really is unique, although it is perfectly plausible for a Steven Carpenter to come along and box them up into a few swift categories.

"It can be done over and over again," Sam Walton said. He was talking about reinventing retailing, of course.

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eBooks: Yet Another Technology Looking For Business Models

Image via Wikipedia

CNet: New study suggests e-book piracy is on the rise

It started with music. Movies and books will not be spared, are not being spared. It is a mindfood thing. The Internet is like this vast farm custom made for the production and consumption of mindfood in its various forms.

The first instinct of the industries has been to fight the technology. It is not true that people seem to have this unbeatable thirst to steal that which comes out during the night that is the internet. People like the convenience of the digital format. In digital formats these products - books, movies, music - take no space. Your device does not count, it is not music, it is not a book, it is no movie.

Just like the pharmaceutical industry does not have the same static price globally - it charges less in the poor countries and even gives it out for free in some - the textbook industry has to be the same way.

Maybe the price of that eBook is not $9.99. Maybe the price of that song is not 99 cents. Those prices have to go down. And they have to go even further down in the Global South.

And then the industry has to make peace with the fact that there will be some leakage. Like Bill Gates said a long time ago about China, "We want them to pay for our software, but if they are going to steal it anyway, we want them to steal our software." That has to be the spirit. Have you even been to a supermarket where some guy/gal is standing outside an eatery giving away free samples? It might be just one bite, but it is good business. I get the impression even free is a business model. When you are not raking in the cash, you are giving stuff away for free and you are building your brand.

Even when people don't give you cash, they give you mindshare. The whole advertising industry revolves around that mindshare. Don't complain when you get it.

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