On Mar 31, 2020, at 03:47 , Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 23/Mar/20 22:54, Owen DeLong wrote:
That hasn’t been my observation at any of the local sports bars. I actually have little to no interest in live sport (except maybe the occasional curling match, yeah, I’m not just old, I’m odd).
I think we each need to define what we mean by "the kids" :-).
From my perspective, anyone born in this century pretty much qualifies as a kid at this point. Maybe even the last 3-4 years of the previous one.
Live sport seems quite popular among kids and millennials, at least in the US.
Yes, but as a proportion of those who drive how the Internet is re-defining traditional economies, how does that track?
Don’t know. Not a statistician, not a gatherer of demographic information. I’ll leave that to those in the business of the surveillance economy which seems to be the primary way in which the internet is redefining traditional economies. Turning consumers into products. Personally, not a fan and I think GDPR is a sure sign that there is a backlash coming. The main reason it is tolerated so far is most people aren’t aware of what it really means or even that it is actually happening.
From an African perspective, my anecdotal observation is that it is mostly really young kids (you're talking from as little as 4 - 5 years old) and women (both young and old) that are influencing this "I don't care about how it all works, just get me my value" paradigm that is the new economy. And in both cases, the majority of them don't have a penchant for sport, live or on-demand. Much of that is relegated mostly to men, from early-teen boys all the way to us geezers, a demographic that, in my observation, don't use the Internet as dynamically as "the kids" and women.
4-5 year olds don’t define the economy today and likely won’t have significant input into it for at least 10-11 years. My observation is that they are _NOT_ the ones influencing this. That rather, it is the very large corporations and their ability to leverage big data and the surveillance economy for fun and profit that are driving this. I will admit that 4-5 year olds are probably the most likely demographic to have no inkling as to what giving up their personal data means. I suppose rather like tobacco companies that getting them hooked in young does serve as a competitive advantage.
Personally, I wish I could stop paying the “fee for access to local sports” that my linear provider charges every month.
Africa's primary sports broadcaster, amazingly, includes access to all sports, games and matches (regardless of their significance) as part of the flat monthly subscription fee. Whether your poison is boxing, motor racing, football (American and soccer), basketball, the Olympics, baseball, rally cross, iron man, e.t.c., local and international. They do not have a pay-per-view concept yet. It is something they are considering as a way to keep themselves relevant in a VoD world, but for now (and since ever), all major and minor sports events come for no additional cost.
I wouldn’t know. I’m not a subscriber and not particularly interested in any of their products. As I said, I wish I could get the local $CABLECO to turn off my “access to local sports” and stop charging me a monthly fee for something I don’t want.
Nonetheless, the younger people around me supposedly driving this new economy seem very focused on their love of live sports.
Would be interesting to know what age these "younger people" are, and if they are male or female. I've found the gender does actually matter, when it comes to watching sports.
All genders seem to be relatively equally represented. Age range is probably about 7-25. Here, it seems there are as many female sports fans as male among the younger crowds.
Well, for the moment, live sports aren’t happening, at least locally, so how to televise them isn’t exactly an issue.
We all agree on that - but almost every sports event considered (until the rolling lockdowns) how they can continue their events with some combination of the Internet in play.
Sure, they’re all desperate to try and find a way to preserve their revenue stream.
The thing with sport, though, is that participants have to play. No players, no event. So even if there was a good solution to moving sports to the new economy, scenarios like the Coronavirus keeps players off the playing field. That doesn't mean that outside of these extreme cases, sports organizers aren't considering how to use the new economy, especially when those driving it will have far more influence on it, than traditional sports lovers.
Perhaps Twitch won the lottery as professional sports may be forced to move to remote competition via gaming consoles. :( I tend to doubt it as I think fans will find other things to do rather than make the migration.
I don’t think eSports will replace traditional sports,
And they were never meant to. Just like Formula-E and Formula One, it's just another avenue open to those who are interested. It's not meant to replace what the petrol heads like.
I wasn’t the one arguing that they would. Seems your trying to argue both sides of the coin here.
I think that for now, the sports organizations facing a sudden and dramatic loss of revenue and progressively more distressed fans are grasping at straws to find ways to keep their fans engaged, hoping for a near-term return to normal revenue activities. Remains to be seen how well that will work.
And that is the new economy that the Coronavirus has amplified and accelerated. Listen to your customer, engage them, and offer value (not product). Every industry is affected. No one is immune. Old, traditional models, as sensible as they seem, are going to be challenged, and a ton of them will simply disappear.
Well, I don’t see the 49ers ever offered value, or product, but that’s just my opinion, obviously. Certainly at the moment they don’t seem to be offering anything, even anything like what they previously offered. Remains to be seen whether the NFL and its ilk will survive this process or not. I have to admit, I won’t mourn their loss if they don’t make it.
For every call we make to Google Maps to get us from point A to B, there is a shop selling an atlas that is going out of business. You can't blame the Google, or the user, for that.
Uh, no… You’ve got that ratio way out of proportion and it’s not an accurate statement at all, except the last part. First, shops that sold atlases also sold other products and its unlikely that in any of those cases, the loss of atlas sales alone would be more than a blip in annual revenue. Second, an atlas is good for hundreds, if not thousands of navigation events. They aren’t single use devices, so more accurately, every thousand or so calls to google maps to get us from point A to B represents an atlas that didn’t get sold. Third, most of the shops that used to sell atlases were book stores. They got devastated by Amazon long before google maps was a thing. I don’t blame google or amazon. Just like I have no sympathy for the taxi cartels that were crying “they’re stealing our business” about Lyft and the other ride-share companies. In fact, when the taxi cartels were getting away with pressuring cities like Los Angeles to do crazy shit to stop Lyft and the others from doing airport pickups, I rather went to extremes to apply opposing pressure… For example, at LAX, I’d set my pickup location to the hotel on the opposite side of Sepulveda Blvd. as I was leaving terminal 7. In general, I’d arrive in the hotel parking lot about 1-2 minutes before my ride did. Perfect. At Las Vegas, it was a bit more complicated. You cannot walk out of McCarran airport. The only ways out at the time were shuttle bus, private car, or taxi. The shuttle buses (that would get you out of the airport) were all operated by hotels and it didn’t take them long to catch on and start checking for reservations before letting you on the bus. Finally, I discovered that there was a nice quiet neighborhood just outside the airport perimeter that was just barely over the flag-drop price in a cab. I also discovered that cabs wait in a very long line to do airport pickups. Doing so is usually lucrative because they can depend on the long haul fare to downtown. A short fare from the airport is a money-loser for them in a big way and they have no way to turn it down. So I’d get a cab to the nearest drop point in that neighborhood and then make a point of scheduling my pickup while I was in the cab. As I got out, I let the cabby know why I was doing what I was doing. If I got attitude, no tip. If they acknowledged the validity of what I was doing, they got enough of a tip to be nearly break even on the event. Capitalism — I was voting with my $$. Virtually all of those ridiculous policies have since been abandoned.
These have already been tried in a variety of ways, usually with limited success.
My advice is use the little time and money you have now to experiment with new models. 99% execution, 1% strategy; not the other way around. Don't wait until all the money and time runs out to experiment, and then you don't have any left of either.
I’m not in that position, fortunately. Old economy, new economy, either way, they still need pipes to move bits. I’ve always been mostly on the execution side of moving bits.
This idea that things can cost zero is the most frustrating part. I’m so tired of not being able to buy apps instead of rent them. I’m fed up to here with apps that come with ridiculous loads of advertising. This shift from an ownership economy to a rental economy is terrible and I wish that we could somehow educate the kids on how much more it actually costs them.
Possibly the worst artifact is the “If you’re not paying, you’re the product” and the number of millennials that view the surveillance economy with a kind of “Yeah, so what? Privacy is so 1990.” attitude.
The folk on this list understand how it all works, which is why we either don't have Alexa in our homes and seal our laptop microphones and cameras with gaffer tape. For the rest of the world, they live in the Matrix, and to them, they spend more time chasing value. Being concerned about what they are giving up for that value is counter to their thought-process.
The clever companies that know how to keep delivering that value will keep their customers hooked to "renting" it from them.
Meh… I think the most clever companies are the ones who have found ways to keep their products hooked to them while delivering their value to their true customers. Unfortunately, I think they are also among the most despicable form of parasite we’ve ever seen.
Yep… It’s also growing because as they fragment further and further (e.g. Disney launching their own and pulling content off Netflix), each one sucks just a little bit more with each transition and the price to the consumer to get everything they want keeps going up. Eventually, aggregators that can offer some form of a la carte licensing are going to spring into existence to meet that demand, but for now, the content providers aren’t ready because they haven’t lost enough customers to this frustration yet.
Agreed.
Not so sure about that. More and more people I talk to are finding less and less interesting on Netflix. Producing their own content has been Netflix’s response, but eventually, that model just turns them into yet another single-studio outlet.
You spoke too soon:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-market-cap-surpasses-disney-123801623...
But yes, I see what you mean; and for as long as VoD operators keep this as their goal, linear TV will never die.
Market cap is merely one measure. It represents the current market opinion of the legitimate sale price of the company and little else. Nonetheless, even if Netflix turns out to be a better single-studio outlet than Disney, everything I said still holds true.
If I had to wager on the last man standing in that arena, I think I’d say Disney to win, NBC/Universal to Place and tough to say who picks up the Show position.
I disagree, if your position is a global one.
Sure, Disney are very likely to challenge Netflix in the U.S., but they don't seem - to me anyway - like they have the right DNA to take their game global, in the way Netflix has, and does.
Really? Are you sure you’re accounting for all that is Disney? https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-own... ATV, RTL 2, RDS, Tele 5, Kividoo ring any bells to your non-US crowds? Yep, all of those are Disney. They also have the world wide distribution rights for Studio Ghibli (though they don’t actually own it). Source: https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-own...
Netflix have 3 very key things going for it that give it far greater global presence than any other U.S. VoD service provider:
- Their own-produced content, meaning they can release without restriction.
So can Disney, Comcast/NBC/Universal, and Time Warner.
- Their own, well-deployed network, meaning performance is always excellent.
Disney has a lot more of this than I think you realize. Not sure about the international extent of Comcast and/or Time Warner.
- Country-specific content to identify with the locals.
This may well be the one place where Netflix does, indeed, have some advantage. I have to admit that one of my favorites on Netflix has been a show from Spain about the early days of telephony in Madrid.
DIsney and many of the new VoD providers with a Hollywood background are relying on their "vast" libraries that made them wealthy decades ago to take over Netflix's market. The problem is my kids aren't interested in the "Lion King", for example. That's for you and me, the old timers; they have zero interest in trying to figure out who "Mickey Mouse" is. It's just the way they are…
This statement tells me that you CLEARLY have underestimated the vast extent of the Disney reach and don’t realize how many things you wouldn’t expect when you hear the name Disney are owned by Disney.
You enjoy. I have no actual interest in linear TV for sports and amusingly, the linear programming that I do watch is recorded by my TiVO and time shifted so I can skip the stupid commercials.
For me, it's about seeing every business squirm as they are forced to re-think old strategies. The Coronavirus caught them off guard, but it was always coming.
Again, I don’t see every business squirming. I see lots of businesses squirming. I see some businesses that were poised to take advantage of this (and yes, Netflix was one of them), and I see some businesses that have been easily adapted. I also see some businesses that have chosen to be flat out despicable in the process, among them Whole Foods and Amazon, both of whom could have chosen to be public heroes with very little effort and instead chose to be 19th century plantation owners.
The only time I watch ads is when they’re more interesting than the superbowl, which is pretty much every superbowl.
Well then, I'm sure you enjoyed Volvo's clever "interception marketing" number from 2015's superbowl:
Admittedly, 2015 was one of the years I was lucky enough to avoid the Super Bowl. Hats off to volvo for a clever bit of trickery, but I didn’t even know it happened and don’t feel like I missed anything in the process.
A perfect example of the new economy, where your competition is anyone with an Internet connection and an idea :-).
Meh. I’ve got an internet connection and lots of ideas. What I don’t have is the capital to hire the necessary additional expertise and convert them to products. Further, since I want to play in the anti-surveillance economy with products that are directly opposed to those in the surveillance economy, it’s unlikely I can get funding or that the products I would like to make would actually win in the market place. Owen