More Wordless Wednesday (Saturday Edition)
(Wouldn’t porridge sound better than gruel?)
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
I just received a letter from StarHub Cable TV this week. They have wonderful news for us subscribers!
…we are pleased to present to you the new Lifestyle Basic Group and a new tier, Basic Upsize. With this new packaging, we hope to extend a wider picking of channels that you will find easy to select and enjoy.
[snip]
Henceforth, Family Plus is no longer available for subscription.
I’ll spare you the details, but in a nutshell they replaced one add-on tier (Family Plus) with a weaker version of essentially the same thing (Basic Upsize), and introduced one new Basic Group that counts towards one of your Basic Groups when you are choosing a subscription plan.
And the good news doesn’t stop there:
In addition, if you currently do not subscribe to a Value Pack or any channel/group on the Digital Add-on Tier, the monthly rental fee of $4.28 for the first digital set-top box will apply. With this and the new channels added, there will be a price revision of $3.21 from your July bill.
So the bottom line is this - Right now I’m paying $38.52 (incl. 7% GST) per month for 3 Basic Groups and the Family Plus add-on tier. After the reorganization, I now need to pay for 4 Basic Groups and the Basic Upsize add-on tier, as well as start paying $4 more for set-top box rental, and I still lose access to at least three channels! (Eurosportnews, Zone Reality, BBC Entertainment, and I think even Boomerang)
So I am paying three bucks more a month, and I still lost value.
And if I insist on paying no more than the $38.52 I’m currently paying right now per month, the way that the channels are newly packaged forces me to drop no less than 8 channels.
Yes, $tarHub is basically saying, “Screw you guys. What are you going to do, drop us for mio TV?”
There are also some sleight-of-hand dirty tricks that $tarHub is trying to screw us with:
- Eurosportnews, once part of the Family Plus tier, now moves to the uber-expensive Sports Group. %$#&!
- Pop quiz: E! Entertainment - one of the most popular channels on cable TV today talking about Hollywood - belongs in which Basic Group? Surely the “Entertainment” group with other Hollywood-related channels such as AXN, MTV, and Star World, right? Wrong! It belongs in the newly created Lifestyle (!!?) group with other obviously-related channels
such as Discovery Science, Discovery Home & Health and the Asian Food Channel. E! is basically anchoring the Lifestyle group, otherwise people will drop it faster than you can say, “money grubbers”.
And how did $tarHub come up with this brilliant new packaging?
We take several factors into account when we select channels for our new Lifestyle Basic Group and Basic Upsize Tier. These include the appeal of each channel, how it complements the others in the group, feedback from customers and our commercial negotiations with the channel provider. (emphasis mine)
Right… like I believe any customer will feedback to $tarHub asking for reduced value at a higher price.
You will never see this happen in a place like the United States or Taiwan, where multiple viable cable TV providers actually have to compete with each other for subscribers. And this is not even counting the alternatives, such as satellite service providers like DirecTV. In Taiwan, the government even puts a cap on how much cable providers can charge (550 NT$ - or about 25 SGD - based on 2006 numbers I can find). And what can you typically get with 25 Singapore bucks per month? Over 100 channels, including premium channels such as HBO, Cinemax, and for those who are interested, even pornography.
In Singapore however, where $tarHub is the only viable pay-TV provider in town and satellite dishes are banned, they can get away with this kind of stuff. Just raise your prices every year (like last year) and laugh all the way to the bank.
(On a side note: it’s as if all the monopolies in the world knows that the world will crumble into financial ruin soon, and thus everyone wants to get their last shot in grab as much money as possible. How else can you explain why despite high inflation and a looming fear of a global recession, oil prices, and now cable TV prices, are still steadily increasing?)
And why does the government allow $tarHub to operate more or less as a monopoly, and not to mention continue to disallow satellite dishes?
Well, you may get all different kinds of answers, such as, “SCV deserves it, since it spent $600 million to cable the whole island”, or, “satellite dishes are a threat to our national security.”
My guess? Well, if you have one cable TV provider, perhaps it’s much less work for MDA to enforce its censorship rules and to dole out its “financial penalties“. 
First things first: If you haven’t yet upgraded your web browser to Firefox 3, please stop reading right now and do so here. Done? OK, please continue reading.
Firefox can certainly be considered an upstart in the browser space. In a short span of less than four years, Firefox has evolved from a fledgling open source toy to the #2 web browser in the market, with almost 20% market share - behind only Windows-bundled Internet Explorer. Whether this is due to its technical superiority, strong community, or underdog status, Firefox certainly has captured the hearts of the Internet Intelligentsia, and is now an indispensable part of every web power user’s toolbox.
Mark Evans openly wonders why there isn’t a Firefox-equivalent in the search engine space. Surely if Firefox can severly put a dent in Internet Explorer’s armor, why can’t any search upstarts do the same for Google?
There is one very significant difference I believe:
If you wanted to compete in the browser space, it is very possible for you to build a competitive browser within a short amount of time which offers your users a unique value proposition (e.g. Firefox’s plug-in framework) and superior performance (e.g. Firefox is faster, more standards-compliant, and more stable) compared to the incumbent product (Internet Explorer 6, circa 2004).
If you wanted to compete in the search space, while it may still be possible to build a search engine which offers your users a unique value proposition (e.g. Mahalo’s human-powered search), but it is next to impossible to offer a product that produces superior performance (e.g. “better” search results) than Google within a short amount of time.
Search is a product that simply gets better with time. The longer your search engine has been around, the deeper and more comprehensive your index will be. And Google basically has close to a decade’s head start over everyone else. There is just no way any search startup can match the breadth and reach of Google’s search index in a short amount of time. Search is still about the long tail, and you can can crawl a lot of tail in 10 years
But unfortunately, users are a demanding bunch. Once they try your new search engine a few times and realize that you can’t provide the relevant results they need, they will hop right back to Google, regardless of your unique value proposition.
Another important difference is that Microsoft basically left Internet Explorer for dead after version 6.0 shipped in 2001. Google is not as complacent as Microsoft was, and has poured in hundreds of millions of dollars right back into the product - even long after Google has already established itself as the alpha dog of the search world. Startups also simply don’t have the millions of dollars to match.
(Ironically, the only search player left who do have gazillions of dollars to pump into its product is Microsoft. And unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what Microsoft is planning to do.)
I’m skeptical that any search engine startup can effectively chip away Google’s 70% market share anytime soon.
If you want to beat Google, you need to change the rules of the game: Move away from traditional algorithmic, machine-indexed search and into the social and human data-driven search model that Danny Sullivan envisions.
And I don’t want to sound like sheep, but I do agree with Steve Rubel (as well as most of the San Fransisco echo chamber) that FriendFeed has the best shot right now to do so.
FriendFeed is accumulating incredible amounts of social data at an alarming rate, and it cleverly disguises a search engine within it’s innocent-looking interface which is perfect for executing Danny’s Search 4.0 vision.
You have user-generated content… naturally why not have user-generated search indexes? Because every piece of data that goes into FriendFeed is some human being’s edited recommendation or commentary, the amount of frivolous or superfluous content from FriendFeed is kept at a minimum. Complement this data with a broad-based algorithmic search (Wikia, perhaps?) and you have a combination that may possibly be a formidable foe for Google.
Portable radios, walkmans and CD players used to duke it out for the consumer electronics dollar, as well as the auditory attention of the daily commuter. Apple changed the rules of the game when it introduced the iPod to us.
Even if there is no Firefox of search, I’ll rather settle for the iPod of search instead.
Veoh, the online video upstart, has been in the news quite frequently this past couple of weeks, for both reasons good and bad.
The good news is interesting for sure, but what I really want to focus on is the bad news, or the fact that recently Veoh started blocking access to their service to all except 33 countries. (Singapore, where I am based, is not one of the countries which are being blocked.)
Was this a necessary move for Veoh and was it good for them in the long run? I have my doubts.
First of all, let’s look at why they did it. The general consensus seems to be that it was because of two reasons:
- It’s difficult for a US-based company to monetize traffic coming to your service from countries outside of the US. And bandwidth usage for video sites are likely the largest cost component of a company’s operating cost. So this is basically a cost-cutting move.
- The majority of questionable and illegal copyrighted content is being posted by users outside of the US. So this is basically a move to reduce administrative overhead (for needing to police the content) and to reduce legal exposure.
I don’t buy reason #2, just for the simple argument that 33 countries are still a lot for Veoh to police, and I would guess that that the questionable content will still find it’s way onto Veoh’s network through the 33 active countries. That’s the beauty of Internet economics at work - if there is enough demand for something, it will eventually reach its intended audience.
So this is likely just a cost-cutting exercise.
Let’s also think about how does Veoh makes money. Which of the four basic monetization strategies does Veoh follow?
- Sell Technology? Possible but I doubt it at this point in time. Flash video distribution is a pretty easy thing to program, and even the largest companies today (like IBM) deal with user bases that are a magnitude less than what even small video sites like Veoh need to reach. So unlikely enterprises will need the scalable infrastructure and video distribution technology that Veoh provides.
- Sell Advertising? Absolutely. In fact Warner Brothers just announced a non-exclusive distribution deal with Veoh (among others) to run WB content on ad-supported “channels” later this year.
- Sell Content? Nope.
- Sell Services? Nope.
So you are basically trying to monetize a service solely based on advertising revenue. Advertising revenue is directly correlated with the number of users you have, and congratulations, you just alienated about 83% of the world.
Veoh, despite its reputation for technical superiority, is still fighting an uphill battle against the two behemoths of online video distribution, YouTube and BitTorrent. Veoh needs every single last user it has and all the loyalty and grassroots word-of-mouth buzz that it can get for new people to try it out.
However, for a company that was quoted to be “absolutely not” running out of cash, it decided to cut costs anyway, and in return:
- All of the positive buzz around Veoh on the Internet is now all negative. Veoh forgets that the Internet is a very powerful medium, and bad buzz travels extremely fast across borders, regardless which country you are from or which language you speak.
- Perception among industry observers and users are that Veoh is running out of cash.
- Even some of Veoh’s unblocked users are moving away from Veoh, seemingly disgusted by Veoh’s actions.
- If any of the users currently residing in a blocked country ever moves to an unblocked country (globalization makes this more and more common), do you think they will be willing to go back to Veoh after the sour taste left in their mouths?
Bottom line is that online video services are very difficult to pay for themselves, much less turn a profit, and even Veoh’s founder, Dmitry Shapiro admits that they are still in the red.
Therefore, knowing that Veoh is operating with a business model where YouTube dominates, wouldn’t it be better for Veoh to change the rules of the game and explore other potential revenue models first instead of trying to diminish their reach and generate bad PR in the name of cost-cutting? Why not give the users who are difficult to monetize a choice to remain a user?
As David Mullings, a commenter on NewTeeVee, explains:
Veoh should offer them a fee-based version for countries that are currently hard to generate revenue from - they will either generate revenue to cover the delivery costs or they will reduce the users from that country automatically due to the new barrier.
I couldn’t agree more. Netizens do not easily forgive you if you turn them away. Let them choose to leave themselves and at least you still have a chance of them saying good things about your service.
Will Veoh really become profitable next year like its founder proclaims? Imagine… today YouTube is still not profitable.
Or perhaps the cost-cutting is a short-sighted gambit for Veoh to reach profitability quickly so that it can be quickly sold off to a sugar daddy like what YouTube did in 2006? Hmm…
Boston is probably the most interesting place in the world for me this past week. Not only are the Celtics and Lakers slugging it out at the NBA Finals, but the other interesting thing happening in Boston this week is the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
The conference kicked-off with a bang, and the first session on Monday was the long-awaited social computing bake-off between IBM and Microsoft, pitching Lotus Connections and SharePoint against each other for enterprise social computing superiority.
The two IT heavyweights did their song and dance, and unsurprisingly (to me at least), Lotus Connections more or less emerged as the consensus victor. I won’t bother to offer my own analysis of what happened, since the session has already been dissected to death by both the blogosphere and press alike:
- Ed Brill: Enterprise 2.0: Round 1 to IBM Lotus Connections
- Luis Benitez: IBM wins round 1 against Microsoft!
- Scott Gavin: Reactions to SharePoint session at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference
- Susan Scrupski: “By comparison, the SharePoint presentation was, well, uninspired”
- David Hobbie: “Lotus has really built out a fully mature social networking and collaboration system”
- Stephen Collins: “No wonder people complain about SharePoint”
- CIO.com: Microsoft Lags Behind IBM in Social Software
- CMS Watch: “IBM came off looking better for various reasons”
- 451 Group: “Microsoft was showed up by IBM…thoroughly”
- Lawrence Liu (the guy from Microsoft who did the demo) conceding defeat
What I do want to comment on however, is this opinion offered by Rob James:
I had a quick look at the IBM & MS SharePoint presentations this morning, and I can’t help but wonder if these guys get it. E2.0 and W2.0 is all about being lightweight - for me, that is one of the foundational points. If it takes more than a few minutes to get a platform up and running, you don’t get it.
So to IBM and MS. Their products are heavy weight and take a lot of heavy lifting to get running. It will take more than a day to get running and, adding IT and Governance in there, and you suddenly have a 6 month project. Doesn’t sound like Web 2.0 to me????
Well, I certainly can understand where Rob is coming from, but I would suggest that:
- Being heavyweight or having a large install or complicated architecture is entirely subjective. Where do you draw the line to say whether a piece of software is heavyweight or lightweight?
- What’s more important in Web 2.0 is the lightweight perception of the application from the user’s perspective. If my social computing tool leverages all the AJAX bells and whistles and gives me an intuitive, responsive, functional, and easy-to-use user experience, do I really care how the technology is actually set up to make all this work?
- The moment one starts to deploy social computing tools in a real enterprise setting and have to figure out how to extract the company’s HR information from two Active Directory forests, an Oracle database, and a legacy HR system written 15 years ago, and figuring out how to make the whole shebang scale for 100 offices across 15 countries including poorly-connected Indonesia - that is when one will start appreciating the heavyweight nature of these tools.
The inescapable fact is that large enterprises have complicated enterprise problems that need complicated tools to resolve. Horizontal scalability, data integration, bandwidth utilization, long-term data archival, IT governance and security - these are all issues which one don’t encounter when deploying tools to small departments or companies.
You can bet an established enterprise IT vendor like IBM has aimed high and designed their software to tackle these enterprise challenges since Day 1. And if this means that you need slightly more complexity in the supporting technology and infrastructure to handle these challenges, so be it.
After all, we are talking about Enterprise 2.0, and not Department 2.0, or SMB 2.0, right?
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