Josh Kinberg

"As we’ve often said, we see the biggest long term threat as TV Everywhere, and in particular, HBO GO, the leading implementation of TV Everywhere to date. HBO has some great content, particularly their original series, but today for most people it is locked behind a linear interface, or at best, behind a DVR interface and in all cases tethered to a linear subscription plan. As HBO GO grows and becomes the primary way that consumers experience HBO, it will become a much more effective competitor for viewing time."

From Netflix quarterly earnings report

4 days ago on Jan 26th, 2012 at 1:54 pm | Comments (View)

"While Digg is all but dead today, Reddit not only survived the social media shift but has thrived in the age of tweets. Reddit’s traffic has exploded over the last few years—in 2011, visits doubled, and in December the site recorded 2 billion pageviews. It did so by turning inward, and by becoming more than just a place that amasses links to outside sites. On most days, the most popular posts on Reddit consist of stuff that Redditors themselves created or captured to share with other Redditors: image macros, animated gifs, pictures of cats, extremely geeky cartoons, weird Photoshop memes, and Facebook found art."

Slate: The Great and Powerful Reddit

1 week ago on Jan 20th, 2012 at 11:24 am | Comments (View)

"I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions … We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren’t as well adapted to the market system and to capitalism but are nevertheless just as good citizens and are doing things that are of use in society."

Warren Buffett Ready to Take Republicans’ Tax Challenge

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/01/11/warren-buffett-to-mitch-mcconnell-put-up-or-shut-up/#ixzz1jG67vs7g

2 weeks ago on Jan 12th, 2012 at 10:35 am | Comments (View) | 3 notes

Continuations: Google Going All In

continuations:

Last July I had predicted that Google would go all in by bundling Google+ aggressively with search and that is exactly what was just announced yesterday with Search, plus Your World. The “plus Your World” part right now refers “your world on Google” as only Google+ profiles, posts and shared images are included and not content from Twitter, Facebook or others. John Batelle’s capture this well in his aptly titled “Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World.”

Also worth reading are Danny Sullivan’s excellent overview of what Search+ offers and his detailed analysis of whether or not Google could already include some Twitter content without a commercial arrangement with Twitter. Danny’s analysis has actual comments from an interview with Eric Schmidt. Finally, the most scathing reaction has come from MG Siegler who flat out titles his piece “Antitrust+.”

While it’s too early to know how all of this will play itself out over time (there has already been some public back and forth between Google and Twitter), two things seem fairly clear. First, in the near term this will be bad for end users. Second, the root of the problem are Google’s economics for search. The two point are intimately related.

On the first point, John Perry Barlow aptly tweeted:

We are becoming helpless collateral casualties in the war between Google and Facebook. bit.ly/WorldWarIII
January 10, 2012

From an enduser perspective the best web is one of little pieces loosely joined. That kind of web allows for lots of innovation and individuality. Instead, we are currently headed for big chunks of experience provided by just a couple of players. While a high degree of integration may look appealing to some under an “ease-of-use” type argument, all you have to do is look at the enterprise where a few large vendors have dominated for years (SAP, Oracle) to know how undesirable that is.

On the second point. the root cause of all of this are search economics. Google keeps one hundred percent of the search revenue from searches on Google. The explicit quid pro quo has always been that Google sends traffic to a site in return for getting to include the content among the search results. No search revenue is shared with the sources. During days when Google was just a search engine that seemed like a reasonable quid pro quo. But two things have happened to make this balance not work. First, Google has gradually entered many businesses that compete directly with providers of content and second we have seen the emergence and inclusion of many content “micro chunks” that will hardly ever generate traffic to the originating site, such as a restaurant rating from Yelp. I have argued before that some kind of revenue sharing will be required to break through this.

When Larry Page became Google’s CEO I had hoped that he would maybe pursue a vision of the web of little pieces loosely joined with Google providing a lot of that glue. It is by now amply clear that Google is going exactly in the opposite direction. That’s a shame in the near term. In the long run I agree with John Batelle that the web will find a way to route around all of this (assuming we don’t let the politicians screw it up in the meantime).

Josh says: Great post. This move by Google abuses user’s trust in the “unbiased” nature of Google’s search results. At the same time, it creates an opportunity for potential competitors to do a better job of presenting more expansive search results from “Your World” (Bing, now is your moment to shine!)

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| 2 weeks ago on Jan 11th, 2012 at 2:57 pm | Comments (View) | 10 notes

HBO Films: Game Change Tease (by HBO)

Josh says: If you liked “Recount” and “Too Big To Fail”… also, why not cast Tina Fey?

1 month ago on Dec 22nd, 2011 at 2:50 pm | Comments (View)

"If you count all the DVR, HBO GO, replay viewership, we were in the millions. That’s one of the things that’s annoyed me a little bit about the coverage of the cancellation — the numbers were not weak. We’ve done extremely well in nontraditional viewership, and we’ve had a very generous critical response. Maybe we need to change the model."

Vulture: “Bored to Death” Creator Jonathan Ames on the Show’s Cancellation

1 month ago on Dec 22nd, 2011 at 2:13 pm | Comments (View) | 20 notes

"

[Time Warner] Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes didn’t outright dismiss the possibility of [HBO] going direct to consumers with an online offering, saying the premium cable network could do so if its distribution partners don’t roll out authenticated services quickly enough. In response to an analyst asking if HBO could market its online offering direct to consumers, Bewkes said:

“[O]n the question you raised about HBO going direct, we do have the ability to do that. And it’s not something that we have decided to do today because… we have a very good relationship… [with] all the different distributors… If that doesn’t work well, or speedily enough, then we have the option of adding a direct sale of HBO.”

"

GigaOm: Could HBO ‘Go’ Direct to Consumers?

1 month ago on Dec 22nd, 2011 at 10:51 am | Comments (View)

parislemon: Dear HBO

parislemon:

First and foremost, I love your content. You’ve produced several of my favorite shows over the years, and the hits keep on coming. I’d love to watch Game of Thrones now, but I can’t. You see, the only way to get your service is to be a cable subscriber, and several months ago I cut the cord.

…

I feel your pain.

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