Posts by Dylan Reeve
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to Gareth Ward,
Dylan – Netflix or Hulu Plus? About to go that way myself – AD etc on Netflix suggests its better, does Hulu really get any worthy tv shows that Netflix don’t?
I use both. Netflix has a pretty good range, but there are definitely things that don't end up on Netflix.
Hulu is better for "catch up" content - Netflix usually doesn't get shows until about the same time they're released on DVD. Whereas Hulu has content immediately after US airing (for many things). You can usually watch the most recent episode for free on Hulu, but anything older requries a Hulu Plus account.
Also you can't watch Hulu on devices (Roku or Apple TV for example) without a Plus account.
I'm pretty happy with the Roku we have and paying $5/mth to Unblock-US for a DNS-based service to access overseas content. Much easier than VPNs and it works with any device that's connected to our home network.
For just browser-based viewing the Firefox/Chrome addon MediaHint is pretty excellent. It works with many of the major providers and it totally free.
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to SteveH,
In case you’re not aware, you can receive FreeView via satellite using your Sky dish. You only need a decoder.
I'm aware... But DVB-S Freeview is shit. Poor(er) quality, fewer channels and no HD... Not really interested in spending the money :)
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to ceebeew,
Via the Internet? I’ve just bought an Apple TV and downloaded a movie. It ate 5Gb of my monthly broadband allowance. I wonder how much broadband a Premier League football game will take? How big a plan will users have to have to watch their favourite team play all their games? I think these guys are dreaming..
I don't have a working TV antenna at home (we only have a Sky dish and no Sky decoder). We currently watch all our "TV" via the internet. We have an Apple TV and a Roku. We subscribe to Netflix and Hulu Plus from the US. We can usually stream content directly from either service without any obvious problems and can even watch two streams at the same time (Netflix on the TV for the kids and Hulu on the laptop for example).
I'm currently on the Orcon unlimited plan and my usage is sitting at around 350GB a month.
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to anth,
It depends on how much of that content you want. For those of us who don’t care about anything on Sky except Game of Thrones the cost per episode would be absurd.
Seems unlikely to me that you never watch any other Sky content.
If you were to buy episodes on iTunes, for example, you'd pay something like $3.50 an episode. For that one series alone you're looking at $14/mth - it doesn't take many shows to start adding up.
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You’ll have to ask yourself whether you want to pay $150 per Premier League season in addition to your Sky subscription. There is a downside to the disaggregation of content monopolies, at least in the short term.
There’s the rub of direct-to-consumer IP television. As expensive as Sky is, it’s a lot cheaper than buying all that content directly (assuming you could). Networks like Sky (and in the IPTV space, Hulu and Netflix) offer an economy of scale.
While it may seem appealing to simply be able to purchase access to the content you’re interested in, whether on a per-channel or per-program basis, it quickly adds up.
It’s for this reason that I still don’t think that the TV network model we’re used to will die – it will simply diversify and the platform will change. Hopefully.
But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg game at the moment – without a large potential audience the cost of licensing and curating content is very high. And without a lot of content it’s difficult to capture an audience (how is Quickflix going?). It needs a player with deep pockets to break the market open and play the long game on getting kiwis into online content in a meaningful way.
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
I just posted this wee note on Dylan’s blog which I found fascinating. Now to catch up with the rest of this thread.
Okay, well for context then, here is the response I posted there:
Thanks Alastair,
As far as I can tell the ASA seems to be quite specific that #ad is for “paid” tweet. I’m not sure anyone is actually paying for tweets in NZ, but it’s possible I guess. In general I think as long as there isn’t a pre-arranged expectation of promotion or, especially, an agreement about the nature of that promotion this is just run of the mill PR/marketing – give things to people you think will like them and hope they talk about them.
Perhaps this is all a bit like pornography, we know it when we see it? None of the tweets I saw felt especially “addy” to me.
As for the TV show – well that would be telling, but a little Googling will probably reveal, I have done a reasonable bit of publicity around it and I’m the most prolific Dylan Reeve on the internet :)
And for completeness, the post on Cate's blog in question is on personal branding online...
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to George Darroch,
You’re being paid for the potential.
Potential. But it’s a potential that is realised with enough consistency that it can be counted on as real.
But you don’t control it. If you’re not careful it can backfire. Pick the right product for the right people. Like Paul said it’s their attention and time you’re ‘paying’ for, not specifically the end result.
I got invited to many movie previews when I was writing a widely circulated newsletter thingy – I liked going, and I appreciated the invites, but I still gave poor reviews to the shitty films. If they hadn’t invited me I’d have written nothing, but by inviting me they also risked that I’d write something that they didn’t like.
This could have gone a similar way I guess – if the recipes had been too complex or some of the ingredients not up to scratch then we’d be seeing disappointed tweets instead. The only control PR have over that is matching product to people well, and ensuring product is top quality.
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Paul Brislen,
As a note – we used to ensure we put a “Brislen travelled to Fantasy Land courtesy of Giant Conglomerate Corporation” disclaimers on every such story – that’s should go without saying but not all newspapers or TV networks are so up front about it
And that does tend to imply that some sort of editorial influence may have been exerted or that your opinions may be coloured. I think it's better without that to be honest. Assuming that the person in question has integrity.
A while ago Canon NZ spent a fair bit of money bringing video camera demigod Philip Bloom to NZ to demo their new high-end video camera to a room full of local TV and video types. He basically started off by focusing on the negatives of the product, it was pretty clear he was being honest in his assessment and it reflected really well on him and Canon, at least in my opinion.
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to Russell Brown,
It was actually pitched to Seven Sharp, but they didn’t see a story in it. Fair enough.
Oh, but we could have had a live in studio cooking demo...
"How's that lamb coming Jesse?"
"Hahaha, it's great Greg, I hope you like it rare, and by rare I mean raw"
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Hard News: My Food Bag: is it any good?, in reply to George Darroch,
Yeah, someone gives you something free, they are paying you – for the potential to market their business. You’re being paid with goods or services, and you may value those goods or services at less than their effective price.
This was the crux, mostly, of the Twitter-splosion that happened on Monday night.
Given that there was no specific obligation to Tweet at all, or in any specific way, I can't see it as being 'paid'. The core thing here is that the PR people are doing their job well by sending a good product to people who are likely to like it and are, in general, the sort who will share their thoughts in realtime about anything new and interesting in their lives.
The very same people who tweeted about their free My Food Bag also regularly tweet about services, businesses and products they pay for.
One of Drinnan's comments on Twitter was directed at Damian Christie and asked whether he was given one because of his Twittering or because he was a TVNZ personality. The clear answer is the former because giving him one on the hopes that he'd mention it on One News would be absurd.
The art of PR, in a Twitter age, is getting good products into the hands of people who'll like them and are pre-disposed to tweeting about everything they do.