In that post, I discussed that user can participate to the creative world not only by authoring content, but also creating playlists of pro content (UGP – User Generated Programming) or presenting it in their own way (UDP – User Distributed Programming).

The CBC recently launched Rogers Hockey Night MashUp, where users can browse a massive gallery of NHL clips and fly them into a very Flashy online video editor.  This solution was delivered via a technology partnership between Filemobile and IndusBlue.

User-Edited Content

Using this set of tools, Joe can now assemble his favourite videos clips, add music tracks, and then publish his “creation” to a gallery, where it can be picked, panned, rated and shared by the masses.  Future versions will include the ability to add voice-overs and actual user-generated content to the timeline.

This adds an interesting balance between professional, high quality content and personalized content.  Users are engaging with the content brand as well as the sponsor, and feel compelled to share their creations on their networks.  Time-on-site is higher than anything I’ve seen, and bounce rates are rock-bottom.  Add in pre and post roll video, and you have an impression bonanza.

Since this campaign is built upon Filemobile’s Mediafactory platform, a number of “Engagement” factors can be measured, such as views, shares, digs, ratings, comments, etc…

A great article about this type of engagement, and how some are proposing to synthesize these metrics, is Terms of Engagement: Measuring the Active Consumer, by Mark Ghuneim.

One might assume, that the cream would rise to the top and the most engaging song  would indeed be the finest piece of music submitted.  I’m happy to say, that this clearly the case with Logan Aube’s opus entitled Hockey Scores. The statistics and comments speak for themselves:  Canadians have a very odd sense of humour. 

My thoughts on the news that the CBC may not renew its contract for the HNIC theme song. 

There is no doubt that the CBC would be perfectly happy maintaining the brand image of HNIC by keeping the fabled theme song. However, we don’t know why they are considering not resigning an agreement with Ms. Claman. Perhaps she is asking for an unreasonable sum for use of the song, perhaps they are low-balling her. Maybe they think that because the song is so inextricably linked to HNIC, she couldn’t sell it to anyone else, so why not offer her very little? If that was the case, she could always license it under Creative Commons for anyone to use, or hell, sell it to Molson!

If she is asking an unreasonable amount for it, then I don’t blame CBC for saying “hey its just a song”, and moving on. CBC is a PUBLIC broadcaster. If they have to choose between spending a disproportionate sum of money for the theme song, as opposed to paying a composer a few thousand bucks for a new one, then they have little choice.

Someone wants this to fail.

I was curious about the quality, pricing and experience, so I bought an episode of The Dragon’s Den. The specifications are 500MB, 45m, 640×320, 1.5Mbps (approximately).

Anyone with any experience with DIVX would expect the quality to be fantastic, but they would be wrong. I suspect the video was encoded in a single-pass instead of a two-pass, because the compression artifacts were quite apparent. Top marks for the oft-overlooked audio quality, however.

So after being somewhat under-whelmed by the video quality (and quite enjoying the show), my first reaction was that I would buy the next episode.

Then I got to thinking.

$1.99 for one episode? Or $19.90 for the 10-episode season? What a deal.

Let’s break this down.

Let’s say there was enough tolerable content on Canadian iTunes to justify watching one episode of one show per day (not even close, but bear with me).

That would cost about $60 per month, plus my Internet service.

Many of these are shows that can be captured at better quality with rabbit ears – for free (but not for long 1 and 2).

How much does it cost to deliver this content?

Taking Dragon’s Den as an example (a 45 minute programme).

Let’s say they are using Amazon S3 for storage and distribution.

Amazon charges $0.15/GB of storage and $0.20/GB for data transfer.

Therefore the cost of digitally distributing Dragon’s Den is about 17.5 cents, plus the time/cost to encode the video.

How about a 21-minute Comedy Central stand-up bit? About 8.5 cents.

Now, let’s assume (because data for video is not readily available) that the pricing model is similar to music tracks.

Needham’s Charles Wolf claims that,

“on a 99 cent single, Apple pays about $0.65.”"Apple incurs three variable expenses in delivering songs. One is the cost of servers. A second expense is bandwidth,” he says.

“The third major expense for Apple is credit card charges. Credit card companies charge 25 cents for each transaction plus 2-3 per cent of the amount charged.”

No doubt that the banks are bigger pricks than Apple, but if the video system works like a podcast, the broadcaster hosts the video and pays for delivery. Either way, the cost should be similar.

$0.25 (cc) + $0.06 (cc%) + $0.17 (storage & delivery) + $0.60 (Apple’s Cut)= $1.08

That makes CBC’s cut on an episode of Dragon’s Den $0.91.

So they make about a buck per episode. Nice margins.

If you buy the season:

$0.25 (cc) + $0.60 (cc%) + $1.70 (storage & delivery) + $5.97 (Apple’s Cut) = $8.52

That’s a sweet $11.38 for 10 episodes of Dragon’s Den. That’s free money!!! No DVD, no artwork, no shrink-wrap, no truck, no gas, driver, no warehouse dude, etc…

And the media industry wonders why people steal.

Maybe Apple is screwing the broadcasters, maybe the broadcasters are trying to screw me, but no matter how you slice it, I am not paying through the nose for low-quality shows.

I guess we’re just not there yet.

The microsite is called “Connect NOW!” and encourages fans of the show to gather and share photos, videos and “Life Lists”.

Check it out at: http://www.cbc.ca/now

My new employer is Filemobile, a social networking platform and CMS technology company that is truly Web 2.0 savvy.

FileMobile was recently featured on the highly influential tech news-maker blog, TechCrunch.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was recently described in Wired Magazine as “being among the most influential — and quite possibly the richest — business writers in Silicon Valley.”

This was a very good sign indeed for the King West Village startup whose client list includes the iconic Canadian media companies MuchMusic and CBC.

My blog will continue to focus on new media companies, ideas, trends, entertainment and all manner of things that interest me and hopefully others in and out of the media business.