JaysonAmbrose.com

You won’t hear me complain about the price of a movie ticket.

At one point in my life, I was a home theatre enthusiast.  While I am an audio engineer by training and consider myself an audiophile, I now live in a small apartment with an even smaller baby, so loud in the living room is not going to happen.

Even should these circumstances change, I don’t think I would bother dropping the money on building my own system, because the AMC Enhanced Theatre Experience is on par with going out to a rock concert… almost.

Last night I went to see Star Trek.  In my opinion, the may be the most near-perfect science fiction film of all time.  I have my critiques, but this is not a movie review blog.  I do talk about media and technology, and holy crap, this movie was an earth-shaking, eye-popping, ear bleeding supernova of an event.

Check out this pic I grabbed before the trailers started:

• The surround sound was dizzyingly spacial but not distracting (credit to the mix engineer)
• There was no distortion, ever.  Even at deafening volume.  This system clearly has boom to spare.
• Super smooth low end, even an inaudible infrasonic note that shakes you in your seat.  Credit the 57,000 Watts to push this kind of power.
• The highs were never piercing.  Credit the placement of 11 speakers for not having to throw sound over a distance.
• The picture was amazing.  The $115,000, 250lb Sony 4k projector sprayed a gigantic and crystal clear picture; the contrast and colour were phenomenal.  My friend commented that he could notice the low refresh rate compared to his new 240Hz display at home.

In a world of over-promise and under-deliver, the AMC Enhanced Theatre Experience kicked my ass, and I can’t wait to go to the theatre again.

Media Technology AMC, audio, movies, Sony 4k, theatre, video

Last year, we were talking to a record label about how they could use our social media platform Media Factory to better engage fans and maybe make money again.

My gut feeling then was that the future of artist-fan relationships was in a personal subscription model. As part of my research, I joined Take This Oath, the Killswitch Engage fan club. There was no way to preview the content of the fan club site, but for $30/year I got a “free” tshirt and access to exclusive content. I was pretty disappointed to find 2 videos (not even all their videos available on their own main band site) and one blog post.

Recently, we have seen several new instances of labels letting Apple innovate for them, both in the space of artist subscriptions.

First was the self-release of the Presidents of the United States of America discography as an iphone app for $3.75CDN.

On the good side is the idea that The Presidents can send blog updates, exclusive content, concert dates, etc to their fans.

On the terrible side is the fact that you can only access the music on your iphone and only via that application! Nope, can’t get those tunes in iTunes. Add to that you can only stream the music, and we have a loser on your hands (especially if you are Canadian and don’t get all-you-can-eat data for your iPhone).

Even more recently is the launch of iTunes Pass. Basically, this a super-fancy podcast behind a transaction. Again, I think the idea of subscribing to a band is an excellent one, but this feels a bit too little, too late. Currently, there is only band, Depeche Mode (egads) offering this service, with surely more to follow if this does anything other than tank.

If I was still in a band, this is what I would do:

• Hire a very outgoing, super-fan friend to be your manager.
• Setup a decent, non-Flash site
• Sell fan club memberships for $10 per year
• Put everything ever recorded, shot on video or photo on the site
• In the case of KSE present a genealogy of all the bands the members have ever played in, post all media you have of these bands and links to their fan club sites
• Encourage fans at every show to upload their pictures and video to the fan site
• Have monthly contests for best fan media (club members only)
• Have a video contest where the winner becomes your documentarian for the next tour (club members only)
• Have that guy post a video once per day
• Use fan club data and tools like Demand to find out where you should tour
• Release a whole album of songs LAST.  Record one song every month or so, crowd-source feedback, post tracks to mix, post in-studio video.
• Pick the best 8 tracks, get them mixed by a pro and release in all formats.
• Package it with a cut DVD of all the stuff from the last year
• Make the regular content available via podcast
• Put the regular content on YouTube
• Don’t make a recording deal with a major
• If the major is LiveNation, disregard the last bullet and make a deal

Digital Music, Media Technology iphone, iTunes, PUSA

I finally got around to setting up my profile in Microsoft’s Live Spaces, and found SkyDrive.

Besides being pretty impressed with the interface and user experience, I get 25GB of free storage.

Media Technology, Social Networking live spaces, Microsoft, skydrive

This is a message for people who are concerned with their privacy after uploading pictures to Facebook:

Stop using the Internet. It is just simply not for you.  Don’t use email anymore, because any message you send is stored on your ISP’s server, the destination server, probably on a backup or two in some data center somewhere.  The message itself is readable by sinister criminals looking to steal your identity.  If you created a profile on Facebook with all your personal details, and pictures of your dog, and whatever, then your expectation of privacy is non-existent.

For those of you that are concerned that Evil Facebook is claiming to own your pictures of your dog, and your deep, dark secret status updates:

Get over yourself. Your pictures and videos are worthless, and even if Facebook had claimed sole ownership of it (which they never did), what do you think they will do with it?  Sell t-shirts with your picture on it, or sell DVDs of your birthday party, and not cut you in for at least a few points on the back end?  Understand what is Facebook’s potential business model: your participatory information.  That is, they want to know what you are doing, where you are doing it and when you are doing it.  This is the raison d’etre for Facebook Connect.  They just announced that they will sell crowd-sourced market research data to corporations.  They need you to participate.  For this to work, certain information needs to stick around, and they want to keep it.  This explicitly does not include anything you marked “private”.  If you have marked stuff private, see my first point.

If you don’t like it, close your account. Facebook is a FREE service that allows you communicate with your friends, share pictures and videos, and all kinds of other fun and useful stuff.  Close your account and go to MySpace or Linked In (who’s terms read like a non-exclusive content licensing deal, potentially in perpetuity).  Don’t enter ANY user-generated content site, who will universally claim the sole ownership of your goofy video, and WILL re-purpose it in every conceivable way.

I like Facebook.  I don’t think they are evil.  I think they have a cool product, and they can’t seem to make any money.  If I can passively provide data to help them make a buck, then all the power to them.

Just don’t represent me to my friends that I endorse schlock.

Media Technology, Social Media Facebook, licensing

Why should all publishers be looking at Facebook Connect?

There are a number of websites to find examples of the cool stuff you can do by implementing Facebook Connect (FBC) into your product. Razorfish’s Jesse Pickard posted an article for insidefacebook.com that outlined a number of interesting connected applications, AllFacebook.com has a list of the “top” Facebook Connect enabled sites, and The Facebook Developer wiki aspires to maintain an exhaustive list of connected sites.  If you are a PowerPoint freak, here is a slideshow created by social media marketing agency bigMETHOD, laying down the FBC basics.

The Facebook Connect homepage lays out the key benefits:

Enable your users to…

* Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Beyond that, they also claim:

“early results have shown that sites using Facebook Connect for login have seen as many as 2 out of 3 new registrations come via Facebook Connect, and those users have about 50% more engagement on sites.”

The enthusiasm for FBC and excitement about its potential is significant.

However, our clients (large media companies and brands) have been hesitant to adopt, or even experiment with FBC because of some early assumptions relating primarily to user data access.

I would like to try to address some of the questions I have been asked by these clients about Facebook Connect.

What user data do I get from Facebook?

What data can I keep?

What can I store in my CRM?

Will my community be limited to Facebook users?

Read more…

Media Technology, Online Advertising, Social Media CRM, Facebook API, Facebook Connect, Media Factory, publishing, social graph