REBECCA GREENFIELD FEB 1, 2013

With Netflix’s foray into original, high quality programming today, the streaming TV network wants to turn into the HBO of Internet TV, but can the network afford it? Putting together a big production with famous actors like House of Cards costs a lot of money—$100 million for two 13 episode seasons, to be exact—and Netflix CEO Reid Hastings says he plans on making five new shows like that per year, he told GQ‘s Nancy Hass. How can that make economic sense for a company makes all of its money off $7.99 per month subscription fees? Netflix doesn’t run any ads, nor does it benefit from a relationship with a big media conglomerate like HBO and its parent company Time Warner. But while $100 million sounds jaw-dropping, a little math shows that, if the shows are good — a big if, admittedly — spending that kind of money could be good business for the company.

Breaking Even Won’t Be That Hard: With Netflix spending a reported $100 million to produce two 13-episode seasons of House of Cards, they need 520,834 people to sign up for a $7.99 subscription for two years to break even. To do that five times every year, then, the streaming TV site would have to sign up 2.6 million more subscribers than they would have. That sounds daunting, but at the moment, Netflixhas 33.3 million subscribers, so this is an increase of less than 10 percent on their current customer base. Of course, looking at Netflix’s past growth, that represents pretty reasonable growth for the company that saw 65 percent growth from 20 million to over 33 million world-wide streaming customers. Much of that growth, however, comes from new overseas markets. But, even in the U.S., from one year ago, Netflix saw about 13 percent streaming viewer growth jumping from 24 million to 27 million. (more…)

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The quirky little start-up that once printed money by mailing you DVDs is hell-bent on morphing into the HBO—and the network, and the any-show, any-time streaming service—of tomorrow. Can Netflix and its pathologically modest founder, Reed Hastings, pull it off? Who knows? But it’s going to be fun to watch, starting this month with David Fincher’s $100 million House of Cards. The only guaranteed winner in the bloody battle for the on-demand future? You. On your couch

In the beginning, there was the tube. The cathode-ray tube, that is, and “The Tube,” that squat shiny box that ate up half the living room and all of your family’s attention. Then came cable, and videocassettes, HBO, DVDs, and the Sony PlayStation and TiVo, satellite and Blu-ray, and the ninety-six-inch flat-screen and a slew of awkward little boxes with those mysterious colored lights, all of which changed the way we entertain ourselves. But most important, there came the Internet and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings, who blew up all the old paradigms about who, what, when, where, why, and even how we watch, busting the chains that bind us to our cable boxes, to the never-ending scroll of 739 channels, to our prime-time prison.

Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, has a name for this prison and what it does to the people trapped inside it: managed dissatisfaction. “The traditional entertainment ecosystem is built on it, and it’s a totally artificial concept,” says Hastings. “The point of managed dissatisfaction is waiting. You’re supposed to wait for your show that comes on Wednesday at 8 p.m., wait for the new season, see all the ads everywhere for the new season, talk to your friends at the office about how excited you are.” If it’s a movie, he adds, you wait till the night it opens, you wait for the pay-channel window, you wait for it to come to cable. Waiting means pent-up demand, millions of people watching the same thing at the same time, preferably at night, when they’re pliant with exhaustion and ready to believe they need the stuff being hawked in all those commercials. Waiting, Hastings says, is dead. (more…)

07 Jan 2013 10:38
by Nick Farrell in Rome

Read more: http://news.techeye.net/internet/ebook-craze-is-slowing#ixzz2LeCRvm32

It is starting to look like the death of bound books has been much exaggerated. For the last few years, technology pundits have been declaring books were dead as a dodo and the world was going to read from tablets and ebooks in the future.

This has been confirmed by shedloads of statistics which show ebooks rushing past traditional book sales.

But the Wall Street Journal has been looking closely at a Pew study on the reading habits of Americans.

The report, with the catchy title, E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines, suggests the doom of Gutenberg’s dream, but there are a few stats which suggest that something else is happening. (more…)

THE ATLANTIC

DEREK THOMPSON – Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com.

JAN 7 2013

In TV Land, the dinosaurs still rule the world

Surely, you’ve heard the news: The cable business is broken, the end of TV is nigh, and it’s only a matter of time before the Internet does to television what it’s done to music and newspapers — obliterate the old business models and leave something shiny and new in their place.

As David Carr explained today in the New York Times, the two industries that make up what most people think of as the TV business — content companies (who own the shows and the channels) and cable companies (who own the infrastructure that transports the shows and channels to your TV box) — had a smashing year in 2012. Many of them outperformed the newer and nimbler companies, such as Apple, Netflix, and Google, that are supposedly destined to displace them. They owe much of their success to the very thing that was supposed to kill them — the Internet. (more…)

FORBES / TECH
Mark Fidelman, Contributor
1/01/2013

Mention Guy Kawasaki’s name and you instantly think of one of two things: Apple’s Social Evangelist or best-selling author. He’s combined both talents in his latest project, a book called APE (Author, Publisher Entrepreneur, How to Publish a Book) which is a comprehensive guide to self-publishing.

Guy Kawasaki

Do authors really need to read this book? That was the question on my mind when I reached out to Kawasaki to learn more. Kawasaki is a very busy guy, and I could detect from our interactions that he was passionate that every author be given the chance to learn the advantages of self-publishing.

From my perspective, he delivers.

“I wrote APE because I found out how hard it is to self-publish a book when I wrote What the Plus! It drove me crazy to think that people are struggling with a process that should be about creativity and the dissemination of information, not figuring out formats and reseller deals. So I wrote a book to solve this problem,” said Kawasaki. Therein lays the difficulty for most authors. Most would rather self-publish given the increased flexibility, time to market and higher royalties, but the process of creating a quality book and having it properly marketed is challenging.

“The process takes twelve to eighteen months to publish a book—Apple introduces new models of iPhones faster than that,” Kawasaki explains. In my interview with him, Kawasaki acknowledged that traditional publishers are behind, even detrimental to authors in some circumstances: “The issue is that they <publishers> are limited to the traditional way of making money: selling books printed on paper to customers who are willing to wait twelve months for a book and who use the publisher’s imprint as a proxy for quality. Those days are gone.” (more…)

21 December 2012

Noticiero Univision got record ratings during
the week of Dec. 10, 2012.

Univision is poised to end 2012 as the #4 network in the country (broadcast or cable) in the 18-34 coveted key demo. It has seen an increase in viewership among adults 18-34 to 984,000, lifting the network from 5th place a year ago.

During the week of December 10 to December 16, Univision showed record growth due to extensive coverage of Jenni Rivera’s tragic death: (more…)

Co.EXIST
January 2013

Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, crystal balls the future of social so you’re not stuck with–gasp–Twitter 101-level skills.

MARTIN LANGEVELD