I just watched a lot of film makers crying about how their movies are being “stolen” every day and seeing rogue websites monetizing on their movies.

They keep talking about how they made DVD deals that make no sense no more because people are watching their movies for free the day after the release online on pirate websites. Why on earth are you putting the financial fate of your indie film solely on a format that’s dying? hint, the people that are pirating your content aren’t doing so on DVD, they’re getting it through the internet remember?

Then you go on to say the solution to your problem without paying attention to your own words “the pirate websites are making money on advertising and we can’t do anything about it!”

Are you listening to yourselves?

The solution is doing exactly what the pirate websites are doing Make your content free and monetize it on ads YOURSELF, use your film to advertise itself and merchandise around it GLOBALLY.

Here you have the cheapest most effective content distribution tools available in history at virtually no cost and you’re not using them. Sharing your film with a Creative Commons license gives others a clear signal to share the content for you, you don’t even have to be there to give people permission when you do it in advance.

When your movie is done, give it for free on YOUR website, on BitTorrent, on youtube, put ads on it and around it, and place links for people to buy your DVD, Blu-ray, T-Shirt, Special Edition Sets, Action Figures. etc.

Make your content available through Creative Commons licenses, allow for it to be remixed, let your cultural impact reach others in ways you didn’t imagine, a Creative Commons license forces the sharer or remixer to give you attribution and incredible things can happen to your film when it reaches audiences you never intended in ways that you never intended.

Sharing your content is FREE MARKETING that can open so many business opportunities for you. And all this time you’re stuck on selling tickets and DVDs, the most expensive 2 ways to distribute your films, the worst distribution channels controlled by box office and retail mafias that will take a big cut of the sales, when all this time you could be saving so much on marketing and distribution worldwide. It’s almost unbelievable that you’re still missing out on these opportunities and saying the film industry will die when it now has a worldwide audience instantly.

Put your movie on YouTube as well and apply for monetization, you’ll get millions of viewers WORLDWIDE there too and get a great CPM rate on video advertising.

If you make it hard for people to see your movie while others are making it easy you are pushing business away, no matter what technology or law they pass, if someone really wants to see your movie and it’s not easy for them to access legally (not in theaters, not in DVD, or they just can’t afford to pay you) they are going to get it so it might as well be you spreading the content, tracking all the views, and monetizing all those free views yourself.

If it works out for the pirates, it will work 10 times better for you because you are the source of the content, you will be ranked first on search engines, and you will sell copies and merchandise, guaranteed.

You’re the only people complaining about having too many customers. Stop thinking of a scarcity based business model, you have a product that can be copied endlessly, why not make use of that amazing feature?

Update: I just want to say that I’m super happy that all this SOPA/PIPA happened, it has raised awareness not only on problems but it’s made people look at those of us who have been working for years on solutions for content creators around free based models. In this post I’ve talked about film, but all my talk doesn’t come out of thin air, it comes from the experience we’ve had working day and night with musicians, here’s more if you are interested on what we achieved in 2011 with Creative Commons, BitTorrent and open minded content creators (don’t miss the statements of singer Kellee Maize, who has come time after time back to the bittorrent community)

Update 2: I also want to clarify, that I’m not saying “drop selling and go free 100%”, I’m saying do both. Giving content for free on the internet will not affect your sales at all, if you remember it’s already being copied for free, it’s just not being done under your supervision. The people that pay to see your movie on DVD or on the movie theater are used to that experience of those form factors and they will keep doing it because they’re used to it.

Have your content easily accesible online, have both free and paid versions of it online, convenience and availability is the best antidote for piracy. Once the content is free there’s no motivation for the pirates to do anything, it’s already free and you can even use the opportunity to grow a much larger community of fans around your content, even if they don’t pay for it, they’ll love you and spread the word about it.

884,000 views in 8 days.

Adele- Rolling In The Deep (Cover)

With undeniable Talent, Good recording equipment, HD Camera, YouTube account and a vision for business the world is ready to meet a lot of content creators thanks to the enabling technology for creation and distribution of media that is leveling the playfield for more and more people. Discovering music and original has never been more exciting in history.

Forget piracy, this is what Labels are scared of, they’re slowly becoming more and more unnecessary.
No wonder they are behind legislation like #SOPA to have the power to scare everyone from doing covers like this one.

These covers are great to showcase your talents to people that wouldn’t otherwise even pay attention to you.

Do these kids deserve 5 years in jail?

Love her expression at the end of the video, she knows how good she is.

Yes, a lot of people are all about the cloud and everything should be in the browser, but the reality is that there’s a very healthy (and still growing) ecosystem of desktop software being created, and updated everyday.

More so, the browser is still limited and it seems that we’re bending over backwards (in javascript of all languages #facepalming) to be able to do what we’ve been already been able to do for years inside it. It’s like we want to throw away the powerful hardware now available on the tip of our hands (ever faster multicore technology, super duper video cards, amazing storage for almost nothing, solid state drives, you name it, we’re getting it, and it’s gonna get better in 18 months)… for the promise of the cloud (which is convenient, but you should try living without internet at home for 3 weeks, fuck the cloud).

A few moments ago I was thinking about this and about Google’s vision of “everything inside the browser” and then it hit me.

Our industry is full of disruption, who would’ve thought that web browsers would get so big and create whole new industries, can’t the same happen to the browser?

I think it’s totally possible that some new software, some new Desktop software could emerge and change the face of the internet once again. I don’t know what it could be, but after seeing how things evolve it’s plausible something like this happens.

Google shouldn’t be putting all its eggs on the browser basket.

Desktop software is here to stay, and it has all the powers today to out-innovate the browser, as crazy as it sounds.

Maybe a well done Microsoft App store would be enough to get a lot of people excited. By looking at what’s happened in such a short time for iOS and the Apple AppStore, the browser has plenty to fear.

After watching Inception I think I have an easy way to explain what complex object oriented programming can be like.

Next time someone asks “What is Programming like?” I’ll say something along these lines:

“Did you watch that movie “Inception”? Programming is similar, you build your own worlds, with your own rules (and worlds that can only exist in the abstract, sometimes very hard to explain in words), but now imagine that instead of dreaming in 4 levels (dreams inside dreams) you could be dreaming in about 12 levels down, but not only that, you could be having several dreams at once (each with several levels down), and most of the times some of these dreams have to share things with one another in order to make sense or they break.

So Programming is like Inception, but Deeper, In Parallel and Synchronized.”

Photo by Smif

Last night I saw this on my blog and other pages where I have Google Analytics installed to be let down by the amount of visitors that come from links seeded in Twitter feeds. The graphics above represent the amount of visits sent to my blog during the last 12 months from Facebook.com and Twitter.com.

What’s surprising is that I consider myself a Twitter addict (15,647 updates, 1500+ followers) and I hardly post updates on Facebook, however I’m getting 12 times more visits a year from Facebook. This has me thinking about how I should market my products and services on the social web.

Today, a reaffirming headline comes from the folks at Mashable “Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic”. Their numbers make sense against mine, Twitter only commands 8% of the Social Media Traffic.

I’m a heavy twitter user, I’m not spamming everyone, I try to tweet to be re-tweeted when it comes to links. I will only mention my products or services when I’m really proud of something or when I think something truly deserves to be shared because it’s cool.

However I think what’s obviously happenning when you look at Twitter vs Facebook is the following: In Twitter Nobody Is Listening, Everybody is Talking. In Facebook (at least someone like me) I have a circle of people that I actually know in real life, and they do care about what I say. I’ve a real life reputation and life track record in front of my peers, family and friends, and If I say something, they know I’m not spamming them, so they’re more likely to click, and recommend what I say.

The other thing that’s happening I think is that Twitter is still a small niche compared to Facebook. That 40% of the Social Media traffic means your mom and dad are on Facebook, and if they’re on Twitter they probably signed up and never used it again, they care more about their Facebook daily Gossip Dose or FarmVille addiction, which will eventually lead them to your wall, and to your links.

However, Twitter does prove to have a lot of mention to my products and services everyday (search.twitter.com), sometimes many times a day your brand could be mentioned, the question is, is anybody listening? is this bringing direct traffic that can’t be tracked? I’d like to pick your brains on the subject, I invite you to run the same reports on your Google Analytics, tell us what you find.

Not only this ad makes a stand in front of Sony and other big TV brands out there telling them “We have just advertised an Internet TV in front of 100 million viewers, you better get something out there soon or we’ll crush you”, but it also should tick you as a software developer. Now you’ll be able write software for the living room.

“VIZIO’s platform also includes support for the Adobe(R) Flash(R) Platform for the Digital Home, an optimized implementation of Flash technology that enables developers and content providers to deliver HD video, rich applications and other Web content to Internet-connected televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other devices in the digital home.”

VIZIO Internet Apps (VIA(TM)) — Connecting to the Future of Television

(Good luck on killing Flash Steve Jobs)

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This is the response to my post “iPad, iPass” by Andrew Fischler.

I’ve tried to counter some of your points here as objectively as I could. For the record, I’m a happy Apple user, but consider myself to be open minded to all platforms.
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Dear Ryan here’s my response to your piece on YouTube Users Passing on movie rentals

It’s been only 48 hours and you’re already killing it?
I didn’t even know this was up already.

You have to let the service up for a little longer to make any judgments of these sorts.

However… being Devil’s advocate I’m with you on this one, it’s not gonna fly far, not even with cool blockbuster movies.

You don’t have to be a genius to understand that $3.99 seems a little too high for “renting” a movie to watch it on your computer, specially for a crowd that’s used to come to youtube for a bunch of short free video fixes.

This business model down the line won’t be a significant source of revenue for youtube, they’ll have to revisit their strategy and copy the Netflix flat rate model; Pay every month a flat fee and stream all you want from the ever growing catalog.

The Netflix flat fee model is the best available and the markets also like it; Netflix’s market cap ($NFLX) is now over $3 billion and Blockbuster’s has been reduced to a mere ($BBI) $70 million.

From a customer’s perspective I would never rent “on demand” films at $3.99 each, not even from my cable company and I’d be watching it on a big screen sitting comfy in my living room couch.

I rather stream to my heart’s contempt all I want without having to take my wallet out every time.

Flat Rates FTW.

Beautiful device, beautiful looking software but way too expensive for the minimum storage capabilities that a multimedia/gaming device should have.

If you’re giving me a great screen for video, powerful graphic processing capabilities and only WiFI connectivity you must think I will want to have a few movies, pictures and music stored in the device for offline use. WiFI is everywhere right? Wrong, most networks out there are password protected by the owners, so the only places where you’ll have WiFI access for free will be at home, at the office, maybe at your friends or a library. In most of those cases you will have a real laptop with you, or you won’t really be there to use the device.
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Si te criaste en Latino América probablemente eres victima de las mentiras que rodean a la marihuana y probablemente tienes el cerebro híper lavado en su contra, lo cual te hace ver esta planta como algo que jamás tocaras en tu vida.

Si no has probado la marihuana (después de los 21) por miedo a todo lo que has escuchado y creído, deberías estar tan súper molesto o molesta como yo porque hemos sido victimas de viles mentiras para privarnos de uno de los placeres mas sanos de la vida.
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