Capria TV

Both Apple and Avid cited the same reasons for taking a pass at this year’s NAB convention, claiming they can spend valuable marketing dollars meeting customers in smaller venues. Avid expected to spend $6 million in Vegas before pulling the plug, averaging just about $60 per attendee.

Taken at face value, the companies’ decisions make sense. Let’s face it. How many of us get any information in the booth that we can’t get online from our hotel rooms? Booth presentations are so tightly scripted that by Wednesday my colleagues and I have most of them memorized. There’s nothing to learn in the booth, and quite often the presenter knows nothing more than the script.

Those offices camouflaged within the giant set pieces throughout the booth are another story. That’s where the suits court the checkbooks. Avid’s booth attracts checkbooks. Last year Avid may not have made any groundbreaking announcements at NAB, but tumbleweeds certainly weren’t drifting through the booth either. Sell a couple of dozen Interplay installs, a hundred or so Unity Isis systems, and, more importantly, get a bunch of qualified leads for large facility installations, and that $6 million isn’t too badly spent.

Is there another reason why Avid opted out?

For Apple, the overwhelming bulk of its sales are $1,300 boxes of software, and while a goodly number of broadcast executives come to kick the tires at the Apple booth, they must driven to distraction by the ironic t-shirt, thick-framed glasses, iPod-toting crowd three deep at every station. The Apple booth at NAB in recent years looks more like the Apple Store on Black Friday than a gathering of broadcasters.

In fact, even Apple’s big Sunday press conference has taken on the personality of a rock concert. Nearly everyone attending NAB can attend the press event. It’s hard not to get invited. The place is loaded with giddy fans. Every announcement is followed by wild applause. Even features that have been in competing products for years are received like the heralding of the invention of the wheel. Don’t get me wrong. The products are worthy, it’s just the crowd often doesn’t understand why. Apple’s wildly profitable. An annual $6 million expenditure on Kool-Aid isn’t likely to get investors complaining.

So why did Apple pull the plug?

As a consumer device, Apple TV is a typical first generation technology endeavor. Basically Apple took the iPod formula and applied it to IPTV—create a basic, no frills piece of hardware in an elegant wrapper, but give it a best in class UI.

This approach worked for the iPod because an easy to use MP3 player had an easily understandable value proposition to consumers. People wanted these devices, but the market was doing a terrible job meeting those needs. The iPod swooped in and took control of the market.

There’s not a lot of pent up demand for an IPTV device because

1. No one knows what IPTV is.
2. Very few people want another set top box (STB) clutter their living rooms.
3. Video on demand (VOD) and pay per view (PPV) are doing a solid job of filling Apple TV’s niche.
4. There’s always NetFlix.

Mike Curtis did a nice review  on the latest Apple TV update, and linked to some interesting information on Apple TV as a consumer device. No need to recap that. Instead, let’s look at what Apple TV’s success or failure means to independent content creators.

IPTV can be the great equalizer for independents. It has the potential to distribution affordable for even the smallest players. Unfortunately the iTunes store is not independent-friendly. Apple’s been unwilling to adopt the Amazon and Yahoo! models of renting space to retailers. If you’re not big media, you’re not welcome in iTunes—unless you’re willing to give your content away. That means adopting an ad-based model, and that means more work for the independent producer.

Enter the Open Television Network

The recently launched Open Television Network takes care of all the e-commerce infrastructure, so independents can sell content for download. Once an Open Television account has been created, to the user, it’s just like buying through iTunes. Very elegant.

The content owner supplies his or her own storage, gets a listing in the Open Television index, and is free to market independently. To date it’s the most open, elegant, and affordable means of delivering IPTV content available to content owners. Open Television takes a very reasonable 15% cut of sales. Try getting a deal like that with a traditional distributor.

Whether Open Television becomes the dominant platform or not, it has opened up IPTV to the independent.

It seems appropriate to begin my tenure at a startup with a little advice to others embarking on a startup.

Employment in the video industry has always been a little more fluid than in the economy at large. Many of us have been freelancers, solopreneurs, permalancers, or whatever you like to call it for so long that we forget what it was like to take the leap (or get pushed). For very few has the journey gone as planned. For most of us that’s exactly what makes it impossible to imagine going back to the 9 to 5, or, more accurately, the 9 to 9 grind.

This blog will focus on the business of video. Since I’ve spent most of my career in post production there will be a lot emphasis on editing, motion graphics, delivery, and distribution. I am an entrepreneur at heart, and that bias will show. Sometimes the horizon will be more distant - pondering things like mobile video, IPTV, and participatory media. Most of the time, though, I’ll be writing in the present tense.

For those just starting out on their own, the first few months can be an emotional rollercoaster spanning the peaks of exhilaration over unbounded opportunities to the troughs of concerns over the bottom line.

To ease the period of transition I give you these bits of advice.

1. Have a business plan. Don’t even think of starting a business without one. Business Plan Pro is a great piece of software that will walk you through the process. Treat your business plan as a living document. The media industry moves fast. Even the best business plans can be outdated in a few months.

2. Don’t entertain the fantasy that you work for yourself. You work for your clients, and with luck you will have a lot of them. When you punched the clock for the man, you had one boss. Now you have many, and they don’t care about each other’s needs. Learn to manage your time and client expectations. In the long run it’s worse to overbook your business than to underbook it.

3. Control costs. You’ve heard the adage: A dollar saved is a dollar earned. It’s not. Income is taxed. In the US, a dollar saved is roughly equivalent to a $1.35 earned.

4. Cash flow is king. Until you absolutely know your equipment needs, you’re better off renting. It also frees you from the responsibility of maintenance. It’s the rare videopreneur who has a stable of clients all needing the acquisition and delivery formats. If you do need to buy, finance your purchase. Interest rates are creeping down again, and I’m starting to see business credit cards with 12 months/no interest offers again. If you can’t pay for it in 12 months, as a startup you probably have no business buying it.

5. You don’t need a fancy website. You need a simple, clean website. No splash screens. If a client wants to see your creativity, he or she will go to the portfolio page or request a reel. Everyone hates splash screens. You hate them. So why will anyone like yours? The most important thing is to have your phone number on the homepage.

6. Don’t spend a lot of time on a reel. Spend time on many reels. Get all your best work together. Compress it for the web and DVD. Create template web pages and DVD menus. When a client requests a reel, grab the three or four clips most pertinent to their needs, and build a custom web page or DVD.

7. Don’t spend a lot on fancy business structures. Sure, LLC looks really cool on a business card, but in most cases a simple subchapter-S corporation will meet your needs � shielding you from liability while passing profits and, more importantly, losses through to your taxes.

8. The first thing you’ll miss about punching the clock (aside from punching out at 5 PM) is that steady paycheck. It’s getting harder to collect net 30 invoices. Most large companies are paying invoices net 45 these days. Gauge your cash flow needs. When you need cash sooner, offer discounts to clients who pay early. A 2% discount for paying within 10 days often works.

9. Never, ever stop selling. Set aside time each week for sales calls. Existing customers are your best leads. Stay in contact. Earlier in the week is better for sales calls. Never sell on Fridays. Do you want to be called by a vendor as you’re trying to wrap up your week?

10. Stay fresh. Set aside a couple of hours of creative playtime every week. Learn new tricks. Research new technologies. We work in the coolest industry in the planet. Enjoy it. You’ll be surprised how much of what you tinker with during your mandated downtime ends up in client work.

And of course - hang out here at PVC. Chris and Trish Meyer, Adam Wilt, Mike Curtis, Mark Christiansen - all under one umbrella. How much more do you need to keep abreast and amused?

As noted nearly everywhere motion graphics artists congregate on the web, QuickTime 7.4 and After Effects don’t play nicely together. Apparently Apple’s movie rental DRM scheme is the culprit. Any QuickTime render from After Effects that requires more than 10 minutes will generate a permissions error.

There are two obvious options to address the issue:

• Downgrade to QuickTime 7.3
• Render an image sequence and then piece that sequence together in either QuickTime Pro or After Effects.

I’m not a huge fan of downgrading because you just never know if you’re going to break something in the process. If 7.4 is working for you aside from this pesky After Effects error, you might want to try this work around. It adds an extra step in After Effects, but it works. Follow these steps:

1. When it comes time to render your After Effects composition, take that composition and nest it in another composition with the same settings by dragging the composition to the New Composition icon in the Project window.
2. Select the original composition in the project window.
3. Go to the Composition menu and select Pre-Render. The original composition has now been added to your Render Queue.
4. In the Render Queue, edit the Output Module settings so that you are creating an image sequence. (I like .psd files for this because the file sizes are reasonable and the files are written quickly.)
5. Now add the new sequence with the original sequence nested in it to your Render Queue. Set its Output Module to the desired QuickTime settings. Since this sequence will render in much less than 10 minutes, you should have no problem getting a valid QT movie out of After Effects without reverting to an earlier version of QuickTime.

This adds just a couple of minutes to your total render time, and you can leave After Effects to do its thing with a long render without having to manually piece the image sequence together in QuickTime Pro.