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Phil Gyford's in the Guardian...

Much-loved weblogger, ex-colleague, dim-sum consuming, ultra-tall super-geek Phil Gyford got a well-deserved high-five today from the Guardian today in the online supplement (M an of the Moment). Much deserved, old chap! You are the r0X0r!

"It hadn't really bothered me until it launched and everyone kept telling me what a big commitment it was," he says. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference last year, Clay Shirky, the respected web expert, said that he realised weblogs had a future because of Gyford's 10-year commitment to the Pepys site. He seems taken aback that others might look to him as a shining example as what is good about the internet, but his admirers are legion. "Phil's one of the few people in this industry who produces much more than he promises; the complete opposite of the loud new media bullshitter," says one friend. "He not only has the savvy to understand and build complex projects ... but the motivation to see them through and keep them going for years."

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Insane Phil Remix

Good luck Phil

Saw Phil this weekend at Planetwork.  Got so hungup in giving Reid Hoffman a hard time that Phil didn't get time to spiel himself.

Good luck to Phil - sounds like a fun summer!

Phil's summer of F2F - Part 1. Dear Phil -
Why should we conference in person when the virtual has been so enriched?

• The virtual's not that rich.
• The virtual's mainly broadcast.
• And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundra ising, Chairs , Media Relations, Visibi lity and GOTV, and Writer s. We're having our first Speake r Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oaklan d A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamori nda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems. 

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall? [a klog apart]

Ted Koppel, Anchor Provocateur; "Big
loser tonight: Koppel," said Kucinich
spokesman Jeff Cohen. 12/11

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Phil Spector out weirds Jacko

Phil Torrone raps out NetFlix 2.0

This is brilliant.... I sure hope Chris Darner is listening. This is exactly what I was telling Chris the other day (well my version of it - but Phil hits it right on the head!)

And thanks to Engadget for providing this to us!

Netflix, Open up or die…

Posted Jul 19, 2004, 4:43 AM ET by Phillip Torrone
Related entries: Features

For the gadget lover, the DVD is often the end result of what we do with these super-light laptops, LCD TV screens, brushed metal- translucent exteriors and one of the main reasons companies continually push the capabilities of devices, to watch movies. Since 1999 I have been a member of Netflix in some way, and I am worried, I am worried Netflix isn’t going to make it.

Now, this isn’t an article about Netflix going out of business, this is about Netflix “making it” and by that I mean, making a platform and community, something Blockbuster and Walmart can’t do.

Netflix backgrounder…

Netlfix started in 1999, and according to their fact sheet page, they reached 2 million subscribers faster than AOL.

For $21.99 a month, you can rent as many DVDs as you want via the website, keeping 3 out at a time. The benefits are:

- no late fees, no due dates and you have access to around 20,000 titles.
- The DVDs are sent out via Postal Mail, usually
get to you in a day or so and when your done, you put it in the same envelope it was sent in, bang- you’re done.

Two giants enter

Well, after 5 years of Netflix humming along, Blockbuster and Walmart jumped in to the online movie rental biz.

Wal-mart, the world’s largest retailer, offers 3 DVDs out for $18.76. They don’t have as big of a selection of DVD as Netflix, and of course, it’s Wal-mart, the same Wal-mart that has banned selling certain CDs being sold in their stores and “offensive” magazine like Rollingstone and Cosmopolitan. For now, Wal-mart won’t make a big deal out of having some “questionable “movies, after all- they need to build a subscriber base, but once they have that, expect to see them not carry certain DVD titles that they deem offensive. In fact Wal-Mart who has over 10% of the domestic CD sales even gets publishers to make a special “sanitized” version for their megastores, a “Wal-mart cut” of a movie
might be coming soon.

Next up is Blockbuster, they just released their “public beta” site earlier this month.
Blockbuster has about 48 million members for their over 8,500 physical stores, they rent DVDs, videos and game titles. Blockbuster’s pricing is $19.99 for 3 titles, with a selection of 25,000 (according to their website) and as a bonus 2 free in-store rentals per month. Anyone can sign up now during this public
beta.

The 2 in-store rental thing is a big deal, there are lots of time when you don’t front load your Netflix playlist and just want to rent something that just a came out. Also, Blockbuster has video game rentals in-store, it’s only a matter of time until they use their online video rental site to rent out video game titles. There is a service now called gamefly which does that now, Blockbuster might be hanging back to see how they do.

Blockbuster has also had some controversy with censoring what movies can be rented, there’s even a “Boycott Blockbuster” movement that come and goes every so often.

And don’t forget, Blockbuster is owned by Viacom, who owns and operates about 1,400 movie screens, Paramount Pictures, Paramount theme parks, many broadcast television and radio stations (Infinity Broadcasting) , outdoor billboards, cable channels, two broadcast networks, and Simon & Schuster books.

So there’s the overview of the other guys, Wal-Mart as usual has the lowest price, but not the best selection and Blockbuster having a slightly lower price with the added bonus of 2 rentals from their stores per month. They all mail the DVDs out and for the most part, the services seem pretty similar.

That’s the problem, sameness.

Netflix present

Last week Netflix got

slammed in the market, share dropped almost $9 (or 28%) to $23.02 on NASDAQ.

Analysts sited fulfillment expenses as well as an incredibly high cost per new customer ($35.12). That means it costs over $35 bucks to get a new customer on average, and that’s up from $30 from the second quarter of 2003. Add to that, they’re reporting this is going to go up even more ($37 to $39) as they increase their marketing spend, on TV, TV? They also mentioned spending more on online ads, which we think is a good idea, but it’s all about being surgical and going where the most likely new customers are going.

I am a Netflix customer and I know that it’s the best service with the best selection out there, but that doesn’t mean anything, a lot of people are going to go after price (Wal-Mart) and a lot of people are going to hammered over the head with the reach and marketing Blockbuster has (plus the in-store rental deal). When everyone does the same thing, price tends to win, so Wal-Mart might make some gains this year.

But isn’t what Netflix did pretty novel? Almost patent worthy? Netflix does in fact have a patent, in fact there were tons of stories about “the patent” but none of them actually said what the patent was.

So I looked it up, there might be others, but the one I found was the patent on the envelope used. That’s right, that self-addressed envelope that Netflix uses is patented, I am pretty sure Blockbuster, Wal-Mart and even Gamefly uses the same thing, so maybe Netflix will cash in on that later, but that’s not hard to get around.

Here

< br /> it is.

Netflix future

So as a customer, a marketer and a developer…I ‘m going to outline what I think Netflix needs to do. Yah, Blockbuster and Wal-mart could do this too, but they’re too big, but hey- If they pull this off, that’s cool too.

Open up. Google did it, Amazon did, Apple did it, Netflix— expose your API so people out there can use www.netflix.com  the way they want to, in new ways, in ways you haven’t imagined. What do I mean by that?

RSS Feeds. See that little XML or RSS button on every site out there? That’s RSS feed, the quickest way to deliver updated information to folks. No one wants to log in to the Netflix site all the time, let folks subscribe to RSS feeds that have new releases, reviews and more. Netflix has a newsletter, sure, but that stopped getting to me about 2 years ago when I started using spam filters.

My DVD “playlist”. If you go to TextAmerica, or use BlogRolling, millions of people add can add a link to their site(s) which is updated from someplace else. For Netflix, it would work like this. A blog site, like this one, or a personal one could easily add their DVD list, what they’re watching, what they’ve watched, and what they’re going to watch. Technoraiti tracks about 3 million blogs, these people all index really high in all the things your focus groups are likely telling you. Give them the tools they need to distribute your message for free.

There’s a reason Apple make the playlist feature, folks upload their playlists, send to friends, everyone has a music mix their proud of, it’s really important that Netflix let’s folks expose their movie list.

Let people add items to my playlist, have “always send me new popular releases” each month, things like that really matter.

Integration with Moviefone and Fandango would also be possible. If you’re like me, when you buy a ticket to see a movie, you’re likely going to one day rent that movie - with an API that others can use, that would all be possible when
you buy your movie tickets online.

Social Networks. If the Netflix API was exposed when Friendster, Orkut and all the other social networking sites were released, it would have been easy for millions of people to add their movie list (past, present and future to their profile). Heck, in ALL of these social networking sites they have “Favorite movies”. Heck, I might even go visit a pal if I knew they had a specific movie at their how, now that’s some real peer-to-peer networking in action.

AOL Netflix Buddy. People IM more than they email now, there are lots of reasons for that, from Spam to more computers being on all the time. So why wouldn’t Netflix have buddy anyone can add to their buddy list where they can query the Netflix database and also rent from there. Then they could even send it along to a buddy on their list. Again, this is part of the “Open up” theme, Netflix needs to provide ways
for folks to use its service in ways like this.

Here’s an example: Add “RecipeBuddie” to your AOL/iChatAV list and tell it you have chicken, it’ll give you a bunch of recipes and links to products to buy as well.

One year, $199. One month $19.99. The economics of this are tough, but Netflix has gotta stay below the $20 mark per month and they’ve gotta have a deal per year. It’ll lower
churn and keep the price sensitive folks from getting sticker shock. Or hey, at least give this deal to people who have
been a member for at least a year.

No TV ads. That’s right, don’t spend money on TV in the traditional sense. 30 second ads aren’t going to reach the
best prospects, really. Sponsor a show and make it “commercial free” so it’s more like a DVD.

If it cost Netflix $35 to add 583,000 trial users (as reported) that means they spent $20,405,000 in marketing (at least). That’s some good media buys.

With the summer movie season here, it’s cheap and easy to get some movie slides in specific markets around the USA before the movie comes on. And if Netflix needs to do TV in some way, do a 30 second commercial before a movie, they have those now. It’s a great surgical way to educate folks on what Netflix is while their in the movie mood.

Community. Netflix needs to get their best customers on an advisory board, maybe even pick some well known folks out in the web world and have them out. What Netflix can’t do is piss off their biggest fans,
like this guy.

Wal-Mart and Blockbuster will totally own the whole “ignore the customer” thing with their girth, but Netflix, you can
be different, you can be something that folks can rally around. Sponsoring blog sites and sites that talk about movies
wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Netflix as a platform. Last up, the big one.
Anyone can call up Amazon and make a deal to re-brand their platform (like Target has) same goes for google, Amazon
made a deal with them to use google’s search for A9, Amazon’s search engine. If Netflix made the move to make their
system a plaform, anyone could come along and rent any type of DVD media. Video games, specific movies, instructional
courses, you name it- it’s possible. And in the end, Netflix makes money while still sticking to their core
business.

More?

Sure, there’s lots more which would really get Netfix away from the pointless street brawl they’re in with the 2 big
guys—from leading the charge in downloadable movies, to partner deals with iTunes + Netflix integration, to working out
a system of movie viewing on the new Portable Video Players— all these things will happen in time, maybe with Netflix,
hopefully not Wal-Mart, but probably Blockbuster.

No matter what, Netflix can open up and should—what’s the point of all this unless more people can share their favorite movies with each other, in better ways, using all of what technology has to offer. Movies are just as much a part of our lives as childhood memories and shape our culture, even defining it at times, it would be good to see the company that has fueled my movie addiction for the last 5 years continue to do so in amazing ways for more people.

Phillip Torrone can be reached at his personal website www.flashenabled.com

[Engadget]

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