Last week, Netflix announced new pricing structure to split online streaming and DVD delivery into separate plans. So instead of paying a minimum $10 per month for both, users will pay at least $8 per plan, for a total of $16 to keep both plans. Netflix’s 60% price increase has sent shock waves through its user community. To date, there are over 5000 comments on Netflix’s official blog, over 70000 comments (including multiple comments from same users) on its Facebook page, with plenty of complaints going around.

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The Seattle Times has a couple of niche sports apps on the market right now and both are doing very well. As a newspaper guy, this is exciting. There is likely a future here for newspapers and plenty of money to be made. Identify a niche audience (that you already write for) and develop an app that caters to their interests. I’d pay lots of money for these Seattle Times apps, they are that good.

I have a journalism degree and daily newspaper experience, but I’m also a digital media nut and a huge Husky football fan. Imagine my euphoria when I first saw the Seattle Times was launching a Husky football app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Their Husky football blog is like the Bible to me, and an iPhone app sounded too good to be true.

But how useful would it be? Would I trust the content? How about the functionality? I didn’t want this to be a giant advertisement for the Seattle Times.  I wanted it to be all Huskies all the time. One season in, I’m happy to report this is purple and gold nirvana. It’s the most immersive, accessible and, of course, portable Husky football experience I have ever known. Thank you, Seattle Times!

OK, OK. Enough gushing.

I respect this app. It’s a big step for journalism and the newspaper industry in general. Readership is down across the country. Revenue is shrinking, and newspapers are struggling to reach new audiences in a digital age that crippled their business model long ago. Enter the niche app. This is a new dawn for newspapers.

I could already find the information and stories featured in this app on my iPhone using mobile Safari. But I don’t always want to tap dance through various bookmarks and zoom in to the content I want to read. The app puts it all in one place. It costs $2.99 for a one-time download, but I would pay $2.99 a month for this. I’m not the only one, either. Managing Editor Heidi de Laubenfels told Lost Remote the app reached “20 percent of our total expected sales in the first two days and continues to do quite well.” The Times’ latest app, one for the Husky men’s basketball season, currently ranks on the iTunes list for top paid sports apps.

My question initially was whether or not I would trust a similar app released by a non-objective news source. The UW Athletic Department did just this, releasing a Coach Sark app not long after the Seattle Times released its football app. The content, not surprisingly, was not as deep. The interface was wonky, and it wasn’t objective in the slightest. Not even the fact that proceeds from the $2.99 purchase went to charity could rescue this app from the bottom of the league standings.

Time and trust are in limited supply these days. The Seattle Times is an organization I trust and provides me with content I believe in. Newspapers everywhere should take notice of this endeavor. Find a market—foodies, concertgoers, American Idol-lovers—and meet them where they are. Smartphones are growing exponentially and apps such as this are, hopefully, a sign of things to come.

I love free stuff, but this is the kind of content I want and will pay for. Are you listening, newspaper executives? I would pay for this. I would pay monthly. And I would pay a lot more than $2.99.

It’s funny how pleased I am that I face yet another high-profile opportunity to have people watch the content that I create for free.  Snagfilms.com is currently featuring Independent America: Rising from Ruins on its homepage, and will distribute it through a number of other channels, including Hulu and hopefully Netflix at some point (my first film “The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop” is already on Hulu, and is heading for iTunes).  Sure, you can still push for more money via a broadcast TV license, but at least as an indie filmmaker, those are getting harder to find, and they’re paying less.  So we content ourselves with the “digital pennies” as the “analog dollars” slip away, with the sheer hope that online, multiple-channel exposure leads to benefits in other ways (i.e. keep your day job, build your own personal brand).

The world of content — especially professional content — continues to shift beneath our feet.  Three years ago, I used my first class as a digital media professor at the University of Washington to understand just what I had produced with that first “amateur” film of mine (I had been a professional journalist, but I had never filmed my own feature-length documentary before).  The title of the class?  “Selling the Message: The Business of User-Generated Content.”  The “business” then, was under threat from pseudo-amateurs like me, with the explosion of digital media capture tools (aka, cheap cameras) and distribution platforms (aka, YouTube).  The established, institutional studio system seemed to be under attack as this proliferation in new “voices” transformed media into yet another commodity.

But interestingly, despite this commoditization, apparent amateurization, and the uncertainty of the economy, somehow the increased availability of media online has also produced more demand for “professional” content.  Witness Steve Jobs’ remarks this week as as he introduced Apple TV: Read more…

After turning off all site comments on Tuesday, AOL-owned Engadget today flipped the comment switch back on, ending a two-day hiatus resulting from its editors seeing too many comments that were “mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations.”

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us. Read more…

I watch amazed as the events in Iran unfold. Who knows how this will turn out. More often than not, the common people do not fair well when they stand opposed to a tyrannical regime but I have hope. The eyes of the world are upon them. My eyes are upon them. These are not my enemies. The people of Iran look all too human to me. They do not appear to be the ghastly nuclear bomb building “other”. When I see the pictures and look in their faces, I see my neighbors, my family. Their expressions of fear, hope, and defiance bind me to them. I am empathetic. I hope for their safety and well being. I yearn for their freedom. Read more…

“In the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will merge into one super time wasting Web site called YouTweetFace.” -Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien

This prediction came this week on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. While “YouTweetFace” is a quite humorous interpretation of the multitude of social media platforms available, this was not the part of O’Brien’s statement that most caught my attention.  

“Time wasting” seemed to be the underlying message. The degree of ridiculousness put behind all of these new media tools would certainly come to mind for outsiders not familiar with the impact of digital media. According to comScore, Twitter grew 3,000 percent over the past year. Businesses are rapidly tapping into this market to promote their messages and to find new customers.

While it may be a waste of time for some, those interested in profiting from the social media wave are finding the time invested in it to be worthwhile. At many organizations today, there are full time social media experts on staff. Marketing and PR companies have entire departments dedicated to using such online tools. The proof is in the pudding – or the YouTweetFace platforms. Bottom line: companies are willing to pay for these experts. This shows that businesses perceive a value in the digital media Web sites that O’Brien lightheartedly jokes about. 

For anyone looking to join the social media space, YouTweetFace.com is no longer an available domain name. However, there are many other options: YouTweetFaceNow.com, YouTweetFaceStore.com and YouTweetFaceToday.com. Endless possibilities to waste time.

Ace Team, a video game company in Chile in the effort to fight piracy is using the P2P model: “All the games are there to be pirated.  We were not going to be the exception.  Once we saw the game being distributed by BitTorrent, we started to post comments in these pages appealing to those who downloaded the games” Stated a member of Ace Team.  The statement they post on this pages says that they cannot do anything to stop piracy, but if who ever is downloading the game likes to test the game and likes it, they encourage them to buy the game.

This may sound crazy, but it is actually working according to Ace Team. P2P members are posting messages stating that they have bought the game, and that they do it because of Ace Team attitude!

Would this be a new marketing model in the internet for video games, e-books, movies and music?

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video. We’re big fans of New Influencers/Secrets of Social Media Marketing author Paul Gillin here in the MCDM.  So we’re pleased to present his Skype Chat in my COM 581 Social Production and Digital Distribution class.

I’ve also received a bit of attention recently (“Plugged In: UW is Tweeting Its Way Into a New Social Media Ecosystem”) on my encouraging students to distract themselves with open laptops and Twitter while in class.  Here’s how we use hashtag conversations such as #mcdm581 to enhance the in-class conversation while Gillin was chatting with us:

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