

Why Silicon Valley and Hollywood Don’t Get Each Other - dmor
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/11/05/why-silicon-valley-and-hollywood-dont-get-each-other-and-who-will-win-the-future/

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doctorpangloss
An aside: I work between Hollywood and tech companies in Cambridge, MA.

 _But many of our videos get predictable traffic like this Gates vs. Jobs rap
battle at 33 million views (and climbing) or my favorite Mr. T vs. Mr. Rogers
at 36 million._

He lost me at "predictable." If an audience's taste is so predictable, go get
funding for a multi-million dollar blockbuster. I think all he has shown is
that he is lucky: that anyone can bruteforce various kinds of cheap content
cheaply, but his bruteforcing just happened to hit the right tone.

 _You can A/B test your videos, your copy, your thumbnail images._

Nevermind that A/B testing is hilariously inefficient (ANOVA anyone?) and
virtually impossible for creative content (what, are you going to permute
individual lines in a ninety page script?). Hollywood _has_ statisticians.
Focus groups and audience testing has been going on for decades. Web
distribution expands your population size, but it also greatly increases the
variables to control. If it were as easy as he says, then of course there
would be truly data-driven content by now.

 _And video views now produced and managed by these 5 companies totals more
than 4 BILLION per month. With a B._

But who's paying for that content?

Hollywood looks at YouTube and says, "Ok, what does content funded by Google's
auction adwords ads look like? Oh, it looks like those link farm websites,
which is precisely exactly content paid entirely by auctioned ads."

Don't we want something cooler than literally spam?

One could point to Hulu and say, perfect platform. But there is no original
Hulu content. It is still largely funded by cable ads. And Hulu's
profitability depends entirely on how an owner like Disney values the free
broadcast licenses Disney gives Hulu. If Hulu had to pay for its shows, it
would be deep in the hole.

But I digress. Data-driven content works for Wikipedia one-line banner ads. It
isn't going to work for video longer than 30 seconds for a very, very long
time.

~~~
noelwelsh
I'm with you on A/B testing being hilariously inefficient (and have founded a
startup to do better: <http://mynaweb.com>) but I disagree you can't test
creative content. There are two things:

1\. Delivering content in movie or TV episode sized chunks is an artefact of
inefficient distribution mechanisms. Smaller units of content are easier to
test, easier to produce, and less risk if they tank.

2\. Any script contains numerous decisions. You can test the main ones. It's
viable to do this if you aren't making big bets on big chunks of contents.

~~~
doctorpangloss
I'm not sure if content chunking is an artifact of inefficient distribution
mechanisms. It would be impossible to tell the Illiad through tweets, for
example, for anything other than an intellectual exercise. But to be less
radical, consider that there don't really exist ads longer than 1 minute.

Content dictates length, not the other way around...

~~~
noelwelsh
The Iliad consists of many scenes. Each scene could probably be a five-ten
minute piece. If you read the Iliad it will probably take eight or more hours.
Movie's rarely exceed three hours and any movie based on the Iliad would be
abridged (director's cut of Troy is just over three hours). It's not clear to
me that content dictates length. It seems medium does to a large extent.

~~~
doctorpangloss
Well, to be specific, a lot of Hollywood producers looked at H+ as a test of
whether or not people really wanted to watch short episodic content. After the
first episode, few people came back. So while we can say "probably" in
abstract, in practice short episodic series are hit or miss, for reasons that
have nothing to do with length, etc. There's no formula, I guess is my point.

~~~
noelwelsh
I agree, and we find the same thing in A/B testing. There is stuff that has
worked historically for other people's products and their customers. It might
work for you and your customers but it might not. You have to test it. The
idea with A/B testing is to follow what actually works for your product and
your customers, not what you think will work. The idea of producing smaller
chunks (reducing batch size in lean startup speak) is to make testing cheap
enough to be viable.

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brianchu
I'd agree that there is a large opportunity in direct-to-online distribution
of original video content.

But I think the article is somewhat overselling the content aspect. The
article gives two examples of "hits" from Maker Studios: both are funny rap
videos that clock in at less then 3 minutes. These are great videos - viral,
easily digestible, and they've gotten tens of millions of views. But
ultimately they're just a quick diversion for me; there isn't the sort of deep
engagement that you would see with a 60 minute TV show (45 minutes with
commercials).

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allbombs
Where does your 5.3 stat come from? I've heard that number recycled, but never
confirmed the actual source of the report

~~~
shalmanese
Nielson: [http://nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-
downloads/2012/the...](http://nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-
downloads/2012/the-cross-platform-report-q4-2011.html)

~~~
allbombs
thank you

will need to dig up the latest report as that one is almost 1 year old

~~~
shalmanese
This is the latest one. It takes time to compile these reports.

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kijin
> _But here's what Silicon Valley doesn’t get about Hollywood: No matter how
> much it bothers you, people do like to entertain themselves with a "lean
> back" experience. As humans we like story telling. And we like to be
> entertained._

Spot on. I'll bookmark this and link to it every time I hear somebody claim
that books and movies are dead because gaming (or whatever interactive
technology they're currently into) is so much better.

Yes, I am fully aware that if you play a game, you can actually _be_ the hero
instead of simply following the hero, and you can actually write a story
instead of simply consuming somebody else's. But does this mean that the
future of entertainment is going to be all interactive? No, I don't feel like
blowing shit up myself tonight, I want to sit back and watch Bruce Willis blow
shit up.

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interg12
Mark Suster is one of the most compelling VCs in the business and is worth
following closely. His blog is pure substance too.

