Tongal Year End iPad Reward
As the Holidays approach, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Tongal community for your continued participation and hard work. To show our appreciation, we’re rewarding some of our best creators by giving away some pretty spectacular gifts. READ MORE
Heard Outside the Tongal Window….
Today, we’re introducing a new series for the Tongal Blongal called “Heard Outside the Tongal Window.”
Tongal HQ sits on the corner of Bay Street and Nielsen in Santa Monica. While we’re close to the beach and in Southern California, the location may seem glamorous, but in reality, we’re dealing with growing as a business and being in the top floor of a historic building* with bad windows and a lot of noise. READ MORE
Dear Hollywood…is it “broke” and should you fix it?
Toda
y’s LA Times featured an article by “Big Picture” reporter Patrick Goldstein suggesting that Hollywood may be immune to technology, and that the Industry as a whole is maintaining an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude towards technology and distribution. What the Industry leadership doesn’t want to admit is that is that it is broke, and the days are numbered.
Goldstein’s case lies in increased box office gross this summer (though overall attendance is down again), so the age old attitude in Hollywood that if you make a product scarce enough, people will come out in droves to see it. The argument that scarcity is producing demand is as outdated as Hollywood’s dismissive attitude towards technology. It’s naive to think that Hollywood is immune because box office gross is up. How does that relate to profitability? How many Princes of Persias and Sorcer’s Apprentices does it take to make one Inception? Every sign is clearly pointing towards the movie business looking like the music industry pre-ipod, except for the fact that the iPad already exists and is an incredible movie watching device that’s only going to get better.
By believing (or grasping on to) the flawed and outdated idea that scarcity creates demand, all the movie business has done is leave money on the table. In an on-demand age, I want what I want, when I want it, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. I’ve seen four movies this year. I’ve on-demanded about 40. I’d pay a premium to have movies that Hollywood has paid to market to me, available to watch at home on the day they are released.
I guess that at the top of the Hollywood food-chain, it doesn’t matter, if it is “broke” no one is going to be foregoing a trip to St. Barth’s anytime soon because any particular studio may collapse on itself in the coming years. It’ll be too late for anyone to care.
All that really matters to me as a consumer is the content, Hollywood shouldn’t care where or how I see it. They should take a cue from iTunes and make the content available for convenient, easy purchase and download. The complete irony of the situation is that if movie studios are too dumb, too complex, too afraid to make their product available to me and make money off of it…someone else will.
Grateful Dead, Social Media Geniuses
If you haven’t seen this, it’s pretty interesting. It’s a video talking about how the Grateful Dead used alot of forward thinking marketing techniques to keep their audience engaged and find new fans.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/08/marketing-lessons-from-the-grateful-dead.html
White Paper on Online Video
Here is a recent whitepaper from Brightcove re the world of online video. ”It’s only just begun.”
http://files.brightcove.com/brightcove-whitepaper-online-video-and-media-industry.pdf
