GoPro’s content strategy begins to unfold

“it’s like looking into the center of the earth”

This week GoPro released the first of their life in 4K series with additional pieces will be coming each Tuesday … If you watched the initial launch piece for the Hero 4K you will certainly recognize this footage as it was well covered. Having the full story now is pretty epic.

Rogers + Netflix = old media

Unless I’m missing something here, this content deal between Rogers and Netflix might as well be delivered on. Region encoded DVD. Restricting access by country for internet
streaming is remarkably traditional.

Perhaps the other deals that have been struck for Orange is the New Black and Arrested Development might also be region blocked as well actually … Are we making progress or just rebuilding the matrix again?

How to improve Google+

Google+

While I found The Verge’s post interesting and agree with their suggestions the one thing I find missing most of all is sharing INTO G+.

Right now it’s impossible essentially from any 3rd party experience. It’s 100% absent on iOS and possible only from the system share intent on Android which is great, but there’s much more … content we consume all around the web can’t easily find it’s way onto G+ from apps and extensions in the same fluid manner as, well every other social property.

More here – How to improve Google+ immediately | The Verge.

Content Shifting

I’ve had this post from Fred Wilson bookmarked since this morning and I’m finally getting back around to formalizing a few thoughts.  First the notion of content shifting is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  As someone who works on multiple devices (sometimes concurrently) keeping things (and myself actually) in sync is not so simple.  Beyond just the basics, the actual content consuption bits from my digital adventures are really the parts I’m interested in connecting as I move between locations and contexts.

While I don’t have everything sorted just yet, one thing I’ve been really keen on lately is Pinboard.  I discovered Pinboard during the del.icio.us is closing chaos and am really pleased I did because it is an incredibly powerful, yet also very simple tool.  It’s not perfect in replacing delicious sharing for me, but it’s making up for things with some new features considerably.  The best thing Pinboard does is capture all my shared links from Twitter, Google Reader, and Instapaper in addition to backing up my delicious bookmarks and of course saving any new ones.  This auto-collection process makes it dead simple for me to manage my reading and really has been awesome for making sure I know where all my links have gone.  I can call stuff up or save more from within Chrome via extension, on iPhone with Delibar or bookmarklet and on Android with PinDroid.  This is far more around my collection rather than consumption of content, though one additional feature Pindroid and instapaper manage is what’s been read vs unread.  I can’t say I use that much as I’m just happy to have a simple point of capture, but it’s worth noting …

On the media consumption side of things, Netflix is really the only service I’ve seen that enables stopping and resuming between devices on your account and this has been great for my family and our small army of iDevices.

I’ve yet to find a good music solution for resume … Rdio comes close with the browser player, but as best as I can tell, you can’t pick an album or playlist up where you left it.  Pandora definitely doesn’t work that way at all …

Kindle is pretty bulletproof for books and something I love, but there’s still a lot of room to improve across other content types.

The entertainment business just doesn’t get it

Let’s face it. It’s easy to acquire video content these days regardless of whether you subscribe to a particular tier from your cable company or even whether you live in the country. Regardless of this the content companies still do not offer a legit path to offer content direct to consumer on a broad enough scale and so piracy continues. The same basic practices occur across media whether it’s movies, music or even books. For some reason the media business still feels the need to limit who gets to see, hear or read something rather than simply enable access to content given that it’s all bits and has been for a very long time.

It’s this type of mentality that has clearly driven Hulu’s content partners to demand that Hulu prevent Boxee from distributing shows across the Boxee platform.  This is an ignornat decision based on old media thinking end of story.  When you consider that Boxee offers Hulu as is – with commercials as they were originally sold, it’s clear this is simply based on believing that the content can be controlled through the old methods.

Boxee is a free software product available to download and install on your (Mac, Windows or Linux) PC or AppleTV and has yet to charge anything more than your time to install it.  Content passes directly to you on the platform and screen of your choice and though instead of using your web browser to surf across a bunch of web sites, you get a clean 10′ UI which keeps things really simple.  Boxee also adds a social layer which lets you share what you’ve viewed or heard and even make recommendations directly to your friends.

Given that network television content remains “free” and culturally we still tend to gather among friends online or at work and socialize about the shows we watch, it’s ludicrous for the media companies to want to stop something that actually enables shared enjoyment of the very content they are trying to promote.  Hulu and Boxee together are just another outlet / channel / option for people to consume the content they want.  An important detail which I’m sure will be lost on the TV creation and distribution world is that while Hulu is working to make it from niche to mass, Boxee is still early in the technology adopter territory which makes it ripe for influential discussion and most importantly spreading the word – whether good or bad.  Ironically, when tech savvy consumers get burned or blocked on one route there always seems to be another which was there all along … still free, without commerical interruption and easily viewable on any platform.