Well, it’s Recap Friday again, and today we can start with the Aereo situation. The online video provider has been streaming over-the-air material in what the owner networks say is a clear violation of copyright. They asked for Aereo to be shut down, and a judge ruled they could operate while the suit progressed. That’s been claimed by many as a “victory” for OTT video and cord-cutting.
Aereo is complicated. Slingbox lets you toss your video bits to a remote viewing location. The difference with Aereo is that they do the bit-tossing on your behalf. Whether that’s enough to cut the mustard in court is up in the air (I think it probably won’t) and the judge’s refusal to shut the service down is a reasonable accommodation to the people who have subscribed, so there’s been no fight yet, much less a victory. My question is whether a win by Aereo would really be a win at all.
Does Slinging video hurt the networks, apart from the legal question? Truth is that it would be hard to prove. The same people watch, they just watch in situations where they couldn’t before. If advertisers paid for commercials on the content then as long as Aereo doesn’t drop them and substitute their own, there’s no harm financially. Maybe there’s even a benefit because again the audience might be larger. So while I think this case is probably lost for Aereo, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for the content guys. Who it hurts are the network operators, particularly the cable companies, who may lose fees from carrying material or VoD revenues and then are stuck carrying the traffic that’s disintermediating them—for incrementally zero dollars. Moral: This shows we need to think very carefully about how the Internet model and the video world collide, to be sure we don’t kill the player that’s supporting both.
Content is king in places other than entertainment video, too. A recent survey by Corporate Visions says that 80% of B2B marketing/sales types believe that their campaigns are either ineffective or partially ineffective. The largest reason is that the content isn’t compelling. The second-largest is that marketing/sales misalignment was leaves sales organizations with the heavy lifting in strategic positioning because their company creates marketing collateral that’s not about marketing at all, it’s essentially a mass-consumable version of a sales pitch.
We have a couple of presentations on this topic; they relate to the way that social media combines with traditional marketing to maximize the effectiveness, and also how to do general “trajectory management” in converting suspects to customers by using marketing and sales symbiotically. If you’d like us to do a hangout on either of these topics, open to anyone to view on Google+ or YouTube, drop me an email (hangmeout@cimicorp.com).
My final point here is about “Cloud Misconceptions”. I asked enterprises what they believed was the biggest misconception about the cloud. Answers were fit into two groups. The typical enterprise who’s still kicking cloud tires said the biggest misconception was that “the cloud always saves you money over internal IT”. The second group, who consist of the “cloud literati” who have really been pursuing the cloud, said the biggest misconception was that “the primary benefit of the cloud is saving money versus internal IT”. Interesting, huh? The smart people say that what the less literate see as a problem is actually an almost predestined outcome; that the cloud is driven by other factors.
The cloud is an alternate IT architecture, it’s kind of the Internet of Computing. The flexibility of the model and the way it change worker/IT interaction creates a new opportunity for empowerment of workers, a new set of benefit cases that could drive IT spending up considerably. This is the cloud that the elite buyers see now, that every real buyer will see eventually, and that buyers say vendors and providers have failed to take ownership of. Could that be related to the crummy B2B marketing? Sure sounds like it to me.