Dear George,
You might have noticed that the English band Radiohead has used it's powerful brand and music to help speed the change we access music, they earn their monies directly and hopefully begin the move to the free revenue model removing the 'middlemen' record companies. Now you, have a great opportunity to change the way we all access and watch content going beyond the digital native population. You're producing Clone Wars and also a Star War TV type series and have the perfect opportunity to use your powerful brand to speed social change in the way we watch and distribute content removing the mass media middlemen and definitely earning more through branding, traditional pre-rolls and new forms of advertising. Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has started this open plea to you and I'm joining the snowballing chorus.
With the emerging online channels like youtube, brightcove, veoh, p2p sites like bitorrent, itunes, the most powerful statement you can make to the traditional networks is to give us embed codes so we, the viewers would be your free media distributors. So we can host, comment (advertise and link) and spread the content amongst our readers at virtually no cost to you. The huge (wasteful) monies that brands have to pay on a traditional TV media spend. Media is usually 90% of marketing budget when on average only 10% is spent on a creative (but that's another story). Those media monies could instead directly pay you much bigger fees and also, hopefully drive and collaborate with brands to invest in much more entertaining, better adjoining or related advertising content (use some of that media budget on better more imaginative creative) to go with either of the two new series. They could create associated offline brand advertising, to promote your series experientially, driving new audiences to these new channels. But it won't be necessary, we, the consumer would do it through WOM.
Then once it's been distributed widely throughout the net, the icing on the cake is you do a traditional TV, DVD and other old ancillary market deals worldwide. Mass media TV channels will slowly become the second division in the league of media channels. Instead of them controlling what we watch and when. We can decide for ourselves. Remember there's approximately 300 million and counting broadband connections worldwide (one billion online or 18% of the world) but of course there's billions of traditional TV viewers.
Please use the net to premiere your new content and we'll spread the message and help educate the way the world accesses, watches where they want, when they want your compelling content. As this blog post clearly articulates Content is now king. Brands have to now follow the content. We, the public are now empowered to watch whatever we like and most of the world likes Star Wars. As NeeTeeVee points out you have already changed the world, why stop now?
Please go and talk to Chris Anderson at Wired and author of The Long Tail. His new book is called FREE. I'm sure he could advise you.
Regards
Damiano Vukotic
Disclosure - I work for RSA Films developing new forms of content sometimes branded for digital and traditional channels.
it also has it's flaws. It works perfectly as a phone but once I'd loaded all my contacts into it's address book it doesn't recognize names and numbers with incoming callers. Slightly annoying. I love the fact that it joins any free wifi networks it passes and automatically downloads your emails at no expense to me from my mobile operator. This is going to kill email and browser connection through SIM/3G line. Safari works seamlessly too. Easy to download videos and music through itunes. It's all easy. Even my mother could work it out. It's completely intuitive and looks stylish too. Everyone wants to touch and feel it. Text messages take ages to load though. Still love it until it breaks.
