Convergence Culture Consortium (C3@MIT)

Dramafever.com full interview (part 5)

2009-06-22T15:10:00Z

In the 5th, final installment of my interview, the founders of dramafever.com discuss their monetization plans for the site, and the unique offering to the kdrama fan community.

Part 1, part 2, and part 3
part 4
of the interview are available.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you come to decide on an add-supported monetization model rather than a subscription model?

Suk Park: Given our research on the existing illegal platforms, the issue was about capturing market share. It seems unrealistic to come out with a pay-per-view model, which was the other alternative, when all this content was being offered for free. So the best approach to capture market-share fast, and away from the free sites seemed to be to offer an equally free site, but with much higher quality and a better user experience to get our brand out. Now does that mean that going forward we might or might not include a premium site without ads? That's still to be discussed. But given what we're seeing in the market, we've adapted our business model according to that.

Seung Bak: Let me just add to that -- I think over time we will offer a variety of ways for people to consume this content because there's a bunch of people who want to watch for free and will watch ads, and there's a lot of people who want to will pay for it without ads, and it's just a function of us trying to figure out how we can provide packages and offerings with people in a variety of spectrums. The real costs associated with different sorts of models -- it doesn't have to be an either/or kind of thing. The right answer is probably something in between and something we have to figure out in the coming months.

Suk Park: One thing's for sure: we will not get rid of our free offering.

Seung Bak: Yes, there will always be a substantial free offering. This is not a bait-and-switch game. We're trying to build a real destination site, and there's always going to be a free component. But there might be an opportunity for us to create some premium offerings that complement what we have.

Xiaochang: So coming out of beta, what sort of tactics will you be taking to get the word out about Dramafever?

Seung Bak: Let me just recap what we've been doing. As I'm sure you've noticed, our first priority was engaging the early adopters. The early adopters are people who are going to dramabeans and they other sorts of blogs and going to d-addicts and consuming on mysoju and so forth. Our main priority in the beta phase was to make sure that the site works perfectly. So right now, we still have some kinks to work out, there's lot of little things we have to fix and we're also developing new features so that the site will be more robust than what we have now. We're also trying to line up some anchoring sponsors to go with the initial launch. So there's a lot of moving pieces that we have right now. But I think that the goal is to have a very PR-driven campaign. So in the early phase, in the beta phase, there was a lot of working with the niche fan-oriented blogs. When we officially launch, we're going to engage a lot of the mainstream blogs and the mainstream blogs and the mainstream media to really kick it off with a big bang. I think the thing that we're getting right is that we got to make sure that we have a very good user experience and we reply to every single feedback that we get from people, which I think is unheard of. I think if you try to write mysoju and email, they probably never get back. WE're offering people a very high level of service even though it's a very free site. We're actively engaging the users and actively engaging the community and I think we're just going to build on that as we move toward our formal launch.

Xiaochang: Out of curiosity, how many people are you right now?

Seung Bak: There's a core team of 5 people: Suk and myself, and we have a CTO, and a developer and a graphic designer. And then we have an additional group of 10 people who are helping us in different freelance and consulting capacities who bring in different skill-sets. Some could be finance, some could be on licensing and sales or more strategic stuff. So, a fully staffed team and we'll just get bigger and bigger as we go along.

Xiaochang: Okay, one last question, which about the community you're planning on building. How do you see this community on your site as any way different than the communities that are on the sites like d-addicts that are already built elsewhere that are already talking about this content? What's going to make them want to do the same thing on your site?

Seung Bak: I mean, if you just look at the web in general, it's not a zero-sum game. Just because you have a community about a particular subject doesn't mean that no one else could have it. The approach that we're taking is that we're not trying to become d-addicts nor are we trying to become mysoju or soompie or any of these other existing places where people are hanging out. What we're doing is that we're hoping to ultimately compliment the sort of ecosystem of Asian entertainment in this country, so the features that we're building are very dramafever centric -- they'll be around the dramas that we carry, they'll be around the way people are experiencing content. It'll be around stuff that we're creating for people. So, we're not going to go out and create a wiki because that's already being very well addressed by d-addicts, and the people who are going to d-addicts are also our audience members and the people who are running it are potentially our friends and our partners. So when we talk community, we're talking offering features unique to our site.

Dramafever.com full interview (part 4)

2009-06-15T13:30:00Z

The 4th installment of my interview with the founders of Dramafever.com delves into their relationship with fans and efforts to fulfill what they viewed as a clear market need. Of particular interest is the discussion on how they select content based on observing audience-enagement on fan-driven sites and the site's success in collaborating with the fansubbing community.

Part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the interview are available.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: It's interesting that you mentioned earlier that people who are already on these illegal sites are coming and rewatching content on your site. It almost seems like you guys aren't so much direct competitors since you offer a different sort of audience experience.

Seung Bak: To be totally candid with you, we don't really look at Mysoju or some of these illegal sites as real competitive threats because they're filling a market need at this moment and the market need is that there's a demand for this content. If a legal provider isn't going to put it together in a way that's accessible, someone is going to put a simple HTML site together where you can watch it illegally. And the experience is the same as with American mainstream media. Before Hulu and Apple and a lot of these other places started distributing digital content in a legitimate way, there was stuff all over Youtube and other illegal sites. And as soon as legal platforms started taking off, that stuff started disappearing. Mostly organically, some of it due to DMCA notices, but it's not a sustainable model in the long run, when you're operating a media site in a completely illegal way. Quality wins in the long run, that's what we believe.

Xiaochang: How engaged or involved are you guys in the drama-watching experience? Are you guys drama fans as well?

Seung Bak: It's funny that you say that because before we launched the beta, we used to watch dramas. But now that we're running a site for dramas, there's just so much stuff to do. We try to watch when we can and at least click through some of the episodes of the ones we carry, but because we're doing this, it's taking away our time to watch dramas.

Xiaochang: But prior to that, you were fans . . . ?

Seung Bak: Well, we watched enough to know that this content was really high quality and we could see why people would be really engaged in this content. Suk and I both watched a bunch of dramas, obviously not everything that came out, but the ones that were really popular. And we were like wow, this is great, why isn't it available in the US? That was the most basic question that we asked. Why do I have to do to the supermarket to watch this? Which is the experience that a lot of people have here.

Xiaochang: Going back to the features you haven't rolled out yet, are you guys planning on having anything to enhance community engagement? Forums, or anything of that nature?

Seung Bak: Yes, yes. We're definitely going to have those. The forums will come when we get a little bit more traffic. It will come in due time.

Suk Park: There's nothing more sad than an empty forum.

Xiaochang: So going back to your personal relationship with drama for a moment, how did you guys personally get into drama? What was that history like?

Seung Bak: As Suk mentioned, we've noticed that Korean dramas are pretty popular. Something we've been keeping an eye on and it's pretty easy to see. Everytime I see my parents they're watching a Korean drama. Your friends are watching this stuff. You go to some hotel room in China and you have nothing to watch and I think CCTV 9 has Korean dramas running 24/7. You go to Mexico, there's some international channel showing Korean dramas in Spanish. It's everywhere, except in the US in a very accessible way. So clearly we saw a business need for this, so the next step was trying to figure out if there was a real demand for this. That was the research process where we took just basically took a look at every drama-related site out there and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of traffic going to mysoju and a lot of places. And so we decided to do something about it and built a site where people could really consume this stuff in a much higher quality way.

Xiaochang: So what sort of criteria do you look at when you're deciding which dramas to host on your site? Is it just based on popularity in Asia or are there other considerations?

Seung Bak: It's interesting you bring that up, because we are addressing the market that's in the US right now, so it's driven by popularity in the US channels right now. So we're looking at what seems to be working on places like d-addicts, where people are talking about this. We're getting very good feedback from bloggers about what's popular. And it's pretty easy to figure out what's going to stick. There are some shows that were not that popular in Korea per se, but a lot of people were engaged by it here.

Xiaochang: Can you give me an example?

Seung Bak: La Dolce Vita was an interesting example. It didn't do all that well in Korea when it was airing. But here, there's a certain about of people watching that.

Suk Park: Relative to how many people are watching the other things on out site. For instance, we know that one of the dramas we want to get right now is Boys Before Flowers as we've gotten a ton of request for that Drama.

Seung Bak: Every day, every hour . . .

Xiaochang: Related to that, actually, how soon after they air in Korea and in Asia are you looking to get things onto your site?

Suk Park: In the beginning, for a lot of the content owners -- you can understand the site hadn't launched yet when we wanted to sign contracts with them -- they wanted to give us some of the older stuff first. And from the older stuff, we focused on the blockbusters. Going forward, once this model has been proven to the content owners, we expect to launch their content as soon after broadcast as possible.

Xiaochang: So going on that, I've read rumors in the drama blogosphere that you guys are talking about working with fansubbers in order to subtitle content.

Seung Bak: Well, I mean, the basic mindset is that the fansubbers exist because there's a void in the market that isn't addressed. So these are true fans. These are people who are very passionate about being able to enjoy this content and being able to share with others. And once you look at them in that light, they're your best allies. So a lot of the content that's coming out of Asia, [major producers] are only creating English subtitles for the ones that are selling through DVDs and it's only a small subset of the content that's being produced. So over time, as we start ramping up our site with a pretty broad selection of content, it only makes sense to work with these fansubbers because they're also the audience. So the key point that I want to emphasize is that we want this to be a very community-driven site. We're making our content selection, we're making our functionality development choices really based on what we're observing out there. We're simply reacting to a market need and what the market is telling us.

Suk Park: We can talk a little bit about how fansubbers would sub not always dramas, but anime and so forth and they never got credit and they're looking for a platform.

Seung Bak: Yeah, if you look at the fan community sort of as the Open Software development community, these are very talented, passionate individuals. And for the most part, they're looking for some recognition for the work that they're doing. And we think we could be a platform that could provide them with that, while addressing a very real need, which is creating a place where people can consume Asian content with English subtitles so that they can understand it.

Xiaochang: So traditionally fansubs were originally created with the idea that it could be widely shared throughout the community so long as no one is making off of it. How are you going to renegotiate that relationship now that money does enter into it.

Seung Bak: First of all, one of our key principles is that we do everything right. So we always ask permission before we do anything. And anyone (? This part was a little unclear on the recording) that we start working with in terms of putting our product out there is after we have conversations with them about the best way to work together. So when we say that we work with fansubbers, it's not that we go to d-addicts and download fansubs and putting it up on the site. It's going to be done in a way where we talk to them and set down some business terms that are acceptable and that both parties can be happy about.

Suk Park: So, one of the problems was that the minute the fansubbed material is included in sites like mysoju or crunchyroll and we start to make money off the fansubs, the fansubbers can be persecuted for infringement. Now, in our completely legal platform, the fact that we make money off the site, that doesn't become an issue as long as we ask permission and, depending on what the fansubbers want, come to an agreement. In our experience, it seems that what the fansubbers want is recognition for what they've done.

Collaborative (Transnational) Audienceship: Viikii.net

2009-06-05T13:05:00Z

I've been thinking a lot recently on audiences and audienceship, and what it means for media audiences and the communities they form when being part of an audience can increasingly involve collaborating on the (re)production, distribution, and curation of content.

One of the sites that for me really begins to touch upon the participatory potential of new media audienceship is Viikii.net, a collaborative translation and subtitling platform for streaming video that distributes that tasks of translating television shows and other media from around the world across an entire community of users.

The site has been around since early 2008, but I stumbled across it last December, when I realized that fans were joining in a distributed labor network to subtitle a popular Korean drama that was airing at the time within hours of it being broadcast in Asia. The astonishing speed, as well as the decentralized collaboration system caught my eye and I've been talking excitedly about the site to people ever since.

The way Viikii.net work is that people can register for the site and contribute to subtitling uploaded video files in over 200 languages, line by line. Users can also edit and revise each other's translations, refine the timing of the subtitles, or upload new files and put in requests for translations. The subtitles are added then and there, so that viewers on the site can see files even when they're partially translated, so that you may come across a Korea drama that has had 80% translated into English, 30% complete in Spanish, and so forth. The video files are sectioned, so that people can contribute as much or as little as they want, much like a wiki for adding subtitles rather than general information.

The idea behind the site, according to the articles on the viikii blog was to help generate cultural understanding and language education through the use of popular media, since popular media was a means through which people could come to understand "not only language, but also the social texture that harbors it, the people who use it." While this idea isn't particularly novel, what makes viikii.net compelling is its radically collaborative and decentralized structure. Collaboration and decentralization of power and participation is one of the fundamental principles behind the found of the site as well:

"We people are who make, use, and live in all these languages; we built language, and so its barriers, which means that we're the ones to tear these walls down. No super-power can do this alone, we must come together to do this, hail the potential of joined force! We already see wonders created by collaboration, made possible by WWW" (about viikii)

A significant portion of transnational media audience are no strangers to the phenomenon of fansubbing -- amateur, fan-made subtitles for foreign media content. But even though fansubbing is undertaken by people who consider themselves part of the fan audience, it nevertheless creates certain social hierarchies within the community. More importantly, the flow of content is shaped by what content fansubbers decide to translate. Despite the significantly increased ease of fansubbing with digital technology, the time, technical skill, and resource commitment needed to fansub full episodes or entire television series in a timely manner still limited who could contribute.

Viikii.net takes the notion of "by us for us" behind fansubbing to the next level, opening up participation and lowering the barriers of entry significantly for anyone who wants to try their hand at helping translate, and shape the meaning of, the media content that they are consuming. By breaking down the units of contribution into single lines of dialogue, as well as creating a platform through which people could collaborate without having to even know one another, it has opened up the practice to a far wider range of participants, broadening even more -- and for more people -- what it means to be part of an audience.

Transmedia in Latin America (Part I of II)

2009-05-31T02:59:49Z

Xiaochang and I just got back from Turner Networks where we did a presentation on spreadability and many other convergence culture-y things. One of the first requests we received was to address the issue of transmedia narratives across borders, in my case, specifically across Latin America. My first, very silly, reaction was to say "sorry guys, there is nothing there" and then proceeded to obsessively look for evidence to prove me wrong. Of course, there is much transmedia storytelling in Latin America, I just hadn't read these properties as such. In these two posts, I'd like to share with you the three cases I presented to our partners in Atlanta.

First, "El Chavo del Ocho" (The Kid from Apartment 8), this sitcom grew out of a comedy sketch in 1971. It tells the story of an homeless boy that lives in a barrel in the middle of a low-income housing complex surrounded by un-empathic yet comedic children and adults. The children are all played by adults and in fact Roberto Gomez, the show's creator and protagonist, played "El Chavo" until his mid-sixties when he thought it might be "grotesque" to play a boy.

With very low production values and focusing mainly on repetitive gags this show is still on-air through re-runs in some 20 countries and has in fact had an uninterrupted presence all over Latin America during almost 40 years. "El Chavo" is an icon of shared popular culture in the region.

By the mid-70s, when it was clear that the show had become an international success, its creators launched a comic book series that worked with the same premise, characters and gags but that was able to follow the characters outside of the show's limited number of sets. With few modifications, the comics where distributes in almost every country where the show ran.

When Roberto Gomez was about to retire he decided to publish the Chavo's diary, telling the full story of this abandoned child. It is written in a child's voice and has drawings by the author. Today, this might form part of the production "bible" where the story world's canon is documented.

The fact that both the book and the comics were available in the whole region is notable because even today. When a show is distributes internationally, its transmedia extensions tend to be left behind; for instance the case of "Heroes", you can watch the show in Brazil, but not access any of the transmedia material. As long as transmedia is only considered part of local marketing strategies in stead of, potentially profitable, extensions of the story, that will probably continue to be the case.

"El Chavo" has also been expanded through merchandise. Lunch boxes, towels, posters have been available all over Latin America since the show begun, but, given the success of its animated adaptation and the original show in the U.S. this year Target started carrying an exclusive line of fully bilingual "Chavo del 8" toys. These continue to be important extensions of the show, but not exactly what we'd call transmedia. Through adaptation they replicate popular aspects of the show in order to extend the experience and the consumption.

Over the years, "El Chavo's" presence has also grown due to abundant fan production, fanvids, mashups, parodies are present all over the web, but probably the popular fan-led contribution to this canon has been the adaptation of the game "Street Fighter" into "Chavo Fighter". Apparently it was first created in Brazil because all the characters names come from the Portuguese version.

"El Chavo" presents a case that is transmedia storytelling in most "conventional" sense of the word (if you could say such a thing). It expands the narrative and the story-world across different media relying heavily on television as its driving platform. In my next post I describe two other Latin American properties that don't fit with this rather clean-cut version of what transmedia storytelling may be.

IP or Censorship: DMCA take-downs of racism protest

2009-05-12T12:05:00Z

Recently, in one of the "routine sweeps" of DMCA take-downs we've all become accustomed to throughout a variety of user-generated content platforms, the contents of the racebending.com store were removed from on-demand retail platform zazzle.com.

Racebending.com was a non-profit effort that sold t-shirts to protest the all-white casting of non-white leads in the Avatar: the Last Airbender live-action film (more details on that particular controversy here http://io9.com/5111680/avatar-casting-makes-fans-see-white and here http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/1007.html). The store sold shirts with original art and designs, mostly slogans such as "Aang ain't white," and none of the products on the site contained any images from the series (check out the designs) -- the only thing "in violation of Viacom's intellectual property rights" were words used to talk about the Viacom property. (In an update, a counter-claim was filed and the store was restored, with both Zazzle.com and Viacom refusing responsibility and laying the blame with the other party).

We are, by now, long accustomed to epic failure on the part of DMCA takedowns initiated by major media conglomerates. Viacom, in particular, has been a visible and often hilariously illogical offender, with its memorable removal of a clip Christopher Knight put up on youtube from the show WebJunk 2.0, which had featured none other than Knight's own campaign commercial (presumably aired without permission).

A version of this was originally posted at canarytrap.net

But there are two unsettling things that this instance in particular highlights. The first is a rising trend in companies deciding to "participate" and "acknowledge" and with fans and users by effectively claiming ownership over their discussions and discourse. This is, for instance, what I pointed out with Skittles use (and consequent barring of access to) the twitter feed on their front page. It is a problem of companies claiming to want conversation, but attempting only to enact control.

Related to this is then the second pattern, which is that these supposedly objective methods at issuing take-down, general search-term sweeps that don't differentiate and make value judgements, are in fact anything but neutral. They presumes the right of large corporations -- which are, lest we forget, are already part of a structure of unequal power relations -- while simultaneously allowing them disavow responsibility by blaming it on the technological limitations. That is to say, Viacom and Zazzle.com, in this instance, will no doubt claim innocence to censorship by virtue of it having been "unintentional," conveniently overlooking the fact that they have structured their use of technology in a way that makes precisely these types of "unintentional" abuses possible, and increasingly prevalent. The system in place privileges corporations with their take-down then counter-claim process, forcing people to defend their legitimate uses of materials, or in this case, their basic mentioning of a TV series, rather than forcing companies to prove the existence of actual violations.

All of this, finally, is made all the more poignant not only by the fact that this case is one in which either Viacom, in trying to control the use of their properties, or Zazzle.com, in looking out for the interests of media conglomerates, not only manages to make copyright claims on work that would in any case by protected under fair use. In the process, they managed to censor a protest around the question of race and representation. In other words, the very voices temporarily silenced this time around -- whatever the intent of Viacom or Zazzle -- we those being raised in protest of already being silenced. Thus, effectively making a statement that groups already struggling for representation in mainstream mass media similarly don't even have the right to represent themselves elsewhere.

MiT6: Streaming Television

2009-04-30T19:26:23Z

Continuing our coverage of last week's MiT6 conference, I'd like to share a paper from Elisabeth Jones, a doctoral student at the University of Washington's Information School. Jones presented a paper last Saturday on Network Television Streaming Technologies and the Shifting Television Social Sphere.

Jones explores how streaming technologies change the viewing space of television. To do this, Jones presents three sites where viewing experiences are changing :

Where and when we watch

How and with whom we watch

Role of collective experience and serendipity

Jones argues that most of what's written about television focuses on content and not on the actual practice of viewing. Broadcast television, Jones argues, has the potential to bring families together around TV viewing. Broadcast television can also give people a way to connect over a shared experience and get exposure to things they wouldn't otherwise encounter. Jones also points to some criticisms of television, namely Robert Putnam's assertion that individualized viewing patterns signal the death of civic engagement.

Jones uses Hulu and ABC's Full Episode Player to analyze streaming how streaming television is changing viewing patterns. In contrast to broadcast viewing, Jones argues that online television could diminish the potential for collective experience since most viewers only choose to stream content they're interested in. Further, streaming TV shows don't feature breaking news or emergency weather reports. If people had been watching streaming sitcoms in the summer of 1994, for example, no one would have known that OJ Simpson was involved in a low-speed car chase.

Of course, streaming television is in its infancy and if it could very well begin to incorporate more local information and breaking news. Still, Jones's paper gives us a lot to think about in terms of how the experience of watching television is changing as we integrate online TV into our lives.

MiT6 Recap: Cult Media and Global Fandom

2009-04-28T13:05:00Z

The Cult Media and Global Fandom panel at this weekend's MiT 6 Conference focused a variety of ways that media texts circulate in the global community.

Derek Kompare presented a paper entitled "Time Vortex: Versioning and the Fluid Text," in which he explored the "versioning" that takes place with the arguably "cult" TV series Star Trek and Doctor Who. Kompare graciously made his slides available so we can share them here.

Time Vortex: Versioning and the Fluid Text (MiT 6)

View more presentations from Derek Kompare.

Kompare argues that while US television was once organized around textual reception, it now functions on a logic of versioning, which is based on mobility, scalability, and creativity. Media texts, like Star Trek and Doctor Who, are released in as many versions as the market will tolerate. Versioning does not refer to remakes or adaptations of original series, but instead refers to the ways a single text is remastered, repackaged, and ultimately re-sold to fans.

Kompare poses three sites through which we can examine the practices of versioning:

The text is the starting point in both official and fan versions of a property.
The work is the text in its fixed, copyrighted form, but fans can also create works that have the materiality of official versions.
Brands benefit from versioning practices because each version of a text helps to create a brand presence and recognition.

Within the logic of versioning, the value of the original work becomes a site for discussion as most versions try to enhance original production values while trying to remain true to the tonal and narrative qualities of the original release.

Shawn Shimpach presented a case study of Doctor Who entitled "The International Circulation and Afterlife of Doctor Who or Who in the World?" Shimpach argues that time shifting options have changed the temporality of watching Doctor Who. Where once liveness and simultaneous viewing was paramount, industrial processes have made temporal expansion possible. Viewers are now able to see a program in a variety of distribution windows: first on broadcast, then on DVD, then in syndication, etc. Shimpach urges us to consider the "developing institutional strategies around the 'afterlife' of television programming."

As both Shimpach and Kompare argue, fan production is very important to the concept of versioning. For example, the restoration of Doctor Who was originally a fan product. Petra Kwong turned the discussion more explicitly toward fan production in her exploration of Chinese ACG fan communities, "Remapping the Relationship between Authors, Readers and Texts among Chinese Fan Communities in the Cyber Age." In her presentation, Kwong examined doujinshi--nonprofit magazines and books that are published and funded by amateur fan artists and writers. Kwong traced the history of these publications and explained how the Internet has allowed these communities to circulate their work on a larger scale. Doujinshi are an interesting example of organized and monetized fan labor that give us different ways to think about the value of fan work.

As Kompare, Shimpach, and Kwong demonstrated, fan practices and new technologies continue to inform industrial strategies and distribution flows.

MIT 6: Marketing for New Media

2009-04-28T02:30:00Z

Throughout the week we'll continue posting our recaps of the wonderfully intense Media in Transition 6 Conference that just took place here at MIT. On Saturday I had the pleasure of moderating the "New Media Business Models" panel. with participation. Goran Bolin, professor in the Department of Media & Communication Studies at Sodertorn University in Stockholm and Leif Dahlberg, who teaches media and literature in the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, were our panelists.

Bolin referred to John Ellis' conception of the audience as a rather abstract statistical aggregate that had been conceptualized in board rooms rather than in relation to actual diverse and contradiction-laden consumers.

Bolin also commented on the difficulties on targeting audiences through the traditional models given that they were focusing on individual and not behaviors. He described how with the advent of web 2.0 there have been advances in behavioral targeting and contextual targeting, yet for these to succeed they need to be built on unobtrusive strategies. This is no easy task, and it requires inventiveness, but as one executive commented to Bolin, "it's not creative until it sells".

Dahlberg's presentation focused on the transformation of space with the installation of advertising screens. He began his presentation describing the uses of digital signage in Beijing and Shanghai and ended in Stockholm, looking at public and semi-public places being transformed by digital screen media.

In all three cities he was struck by how ineffective this forms of advertising are. He noted how "the experiences from these media places can be instructive, although not necessarily generalizable or applicable to other places and other audiences."
In order to attract the attention of urban citizens, Dahlberg notices that "the video messages need to be relatively short, visually interesting, preferably with some local connection, and possibly use interactive media that project live images of the audience on the screen(s)"

Dahlberg plans to continue his research analyzing the further implications of this medium.

MIT 6: Marketing for New Media

2009-04-28T02:30:00Z

Throughout the week we'll continue posting our recaps of the wonderfully intense Media in Transition 6 Conference that just took place here at MIT. On Saturday I had the pleasure of moderating the "New Media Business Models" panel. with participation. Goran Bolin, professor in the Department of Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm and Leif Dahlberg, who teaches media and literature in the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, were our panelists.

The panel started with the clarification that neither work was really about business models per se, but about new marketing strategies. Having said that, Goran Bolin did start his talk summarizing the media business models. Namely selling texts to audiences, when the media is the commodity, and also, selling audiences to advertisers, where the media is merely the channel to reach those potential consumers.
Bolin referred to John Ellis' conception of the audience as a rather abstract statistical aggregate that had been conceptualized in board rooms rather than in relation to actual diverse and contradiction-laden consumers.
Bolin also commented on the difficulties on targeting audiences through the traditional models given that they were focusing on individual and not behaviors. He described how with the advent of web 2.0 there have been advances in behavioral targeting and contextual targeting, yet for these to succeed they need to be built on unobtrusive strategies. This is no easy task, and it requires inventiveness, but as one executive commented to Bolin, "it's not creative until it sells".

"Fun with YouTube's Audio Content ID System"

2009-04-27T15:19:28Z

It's very evident why they choose to mute the entire audio track of a positively ID'd video instead of just the part with the problem audio: The fingerprinter can only reliably say "yes, [one particular song] is in here, somewhere," but it doesn't know exactly where in the video the infringing content starts or for how long it plays. It's far easier to just nuke the entire audio track than try to figure out precisely how to cut into it.

Remember #silentyoutube, when YouTube started switching out "unauthorised audio tracks" rendering videos silent? Well just how does YouTube's audio content ID system work? Slashdot links to an interesting analysis and discussion of the functioning of YouTube audio fingerprinting technology by someone from Rochester Institute of Technology's Computer Science House (sorry, I couldn't work out who the author is).

Looking for a way to understand how the fingerprinting service identifies music, the author tweaked a range of factors incuding pitch, speed, sampling length, and the "stereo imagery" of 1982's "I know what boys like" by The Waitresses, uploading the song repeatedly to YouTube to see if it would get caught in the filter or not. The reasons for using this track are sound, and worth quoting:

It was the first song I ever saw that was identified and removed by YouTube's fingerprinting system.

It has a very distinctive sound that I thought would be easily identifiable. It's also really repetitive, which probably makes it an easy target for an automated system to detect.

It's one of the few songs I actually have readily available in an uncompressed format. The majority of my music collection is stored with lossy data compression, which might have impacted the results.

In general, it's just a terrible song. I wanted to highlight the fact that somewhere out there, somebody thinks this 27-year-old heap is still valuable enough to be barred from YouTube.

The results are interesting, if a litle inconclusive (see the table of results for each test, in the original article). The system seems to be progressively scanning all of YouTube's content, it hears in mono, and it is fairly persistent and resilient, identifing some tracks where the audio was fairly well screwed with. However it seems to operate around the first 30 seconds of the track:

When I muted the beginning of the song up until 0:30 (leaving the rest to play) the fingerprinter missed it. When I kept the beginning up until 0:30 and muted everything from 0:30 to the end, the fingerprinter caught it. That indicates that the content database only knows about something in the first 30 seconds of the song. As long as you cut that part off, you can theoretically use the remainder of the song without being detected. I don't know if all samples in the content database suffer from similar weaknesses, but it's something that merits further research.

It seems you can thwart it by accelerating the pitch or speed by 5% though. I find work like this incredibly interesting, because it highlights both the opaqueness of how YouTube operates and the inherent technical difficulties of trying to resolve cultural matters with technical solutions. Having content remixed, repurposed, appropriated and made use of by people signals the success of a creative endeavour - it means your content has become cultural meaningful, even if it doesn't remain so for very long. Approaches that attempt to patrol, circumscribe or exert strict control over the circulation of content, approach it as a commodity alone, and the current markets (as I've argued elsewhere) are ones that don't operate according solely to commodity logics anymore (if indeed they ever did).

This post was previously published here.

Media In Transition 6: Global Media panel recap

2009-04-24T18:50:00Z

As we head into the weekend, we here at C3 will be diving into the Media in Transition 6 conference. The full conference spans three days with dozens of panels on a wide array of media topics from Youtube to poetry machines of the early modern period to issues around the archival and transport of media in the digital age.

C3 will be in full representation at the conference. I will be speaking ontransnational audiences and fan-driven circulation of East Asian television dramas on Saturday while Josh will be giving a

Though the bulk of activities begins today, the conference has its official launch last night, with a communications forum on Global Media featuring C3 consulting researchers Jonathan Gray and Aswin Punathambekar alongside University of Georgia professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako, moderated by our own Henry Jenkins.

Henry opened the panel with two anecdotes of our current media landscape. The first was the unprecedented popularity of Susan Boyle, the Britain's Got Talent contestant whose performance has over 100 million views on Youtube.com worldwide, and yet whose progress cannot be viewed via broadcast channels in the US. The second was the launch of Youtube's cinema channel, which had the category of "foreign film" despite Youtube being a global and globally accessible platform. Both incidents serve to remind us that we are in a contradictory moment, that even as we think of new media as surpassing the boundaries of geographical location, media producers, distributors, and broadcasters are often still operating under the logic of nation and location.

The issue then of how we thought of media gone "global" between the transnational and the local, between broadcast structures and grassroutes circulation, was the central focus of the panel, with each of the panelists bringing in cases and examples from different regions and different conditions of media production, circulation, and consumption. Aswin spoke on on the map the flows of distribution of Bollywood, Carolina on the production and circulation of Telenovelas, Jonathan on media use in Malawi, and Abderrahamane on the uneven flows of media in and out of Africa.

A few of the key points and provocations brought up during the panel:

Looking carefully at the flows of media circulation in addition to production and consumption, provides us with a new and important means to understanding media on a global scale.
Brought up by Aswin towards the beginning of the panel but echoed in different ways by all of the speakers, the importance of circulation as a site of media power was one of the central problematics discussed. The question of how media gets from one place to another, through what channels, at whose behest (or against whose wishes) reappeared in different forms throughout the talk. Aswin discussed the varied, criss-crossing flows of Bollywood content. Carolina's discussed different national forms of the telenovela throughout Latin America and which ones travels with the help of or despite national governments. Jonathan described the almost entirely pirate-led circulation of VCD and DVD films in Malawi and how media circulation into spaces neglected by corporations due to their unprofitability forces us to rethink the temporality, as well as the spatiality of global media. And Abderrahamane linked the power of distribution, of being able to show and export your media, to representation. He suggested that the unevenness in the transmission of media perpetuated the cultural domination upon Africa because as a place that often receives media from the outside but does not produce and distribute its own images, Africa is constructed as a place that has no culture to share.

Not just a question of legal versus illegal circulation
Another key issue was that role of piracy in global media, since illegal distribution channels are often the only means through which much of this media can move. Aswin was first quick to point out that illegal/extralegal versus legal was a false binary, that in actuality the systems are far more complex and overlapping. Jonathan added that, in a case such as Malawi, piracy takes multiple forms, the first being that piracy is the only way to bring outside media in because there is so little profit to be made in Malawi that media corporations never address the area. The second is that piracy stops production of local media because it makes it incredibly difficult for Malawian musicians to make money. In the case of telenovelas, piracy can also be an act of resistance, when national governments crack down on the export of media through official channels. And in Africa, the routes of media circulation are so complex and it is often difficult to trace where any given film comes from. Ultimately, the false binary between legal and illegal circulation makes us overlook the fact that cultures of distribution are simultaneously cultures of production

Down with "industry lore"
Finally, coming out of a discussion of which genres of media circulate, the panelists warned against the trap of "industry lore." As Jonathan points out in the case of Malawi, that even as general patterns emerge as to what genres and forms are popular, there are constantly exceptions to every rule. Thus we must be careful not to make too broad of generalizations about what audiences want to see and why based on assumptions and speculations.

Report From the Land of Acai Berries and "Cheesy Tecno"

2009-04-23T06:11:55Z

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I was heading to Belém, home of Tecnobrega (yes, it means cheesy tecno) and the apparently miraculous acai berry. I spent around ten days doing participant observation and interviews with various members of the Tecnobrega community, mainly their enthusiastic and generous fans. Although I'm still working on the research, I figured I could share a few of my observations right away.
Tecnobrega has become well known because of its copyleft approach to music production/distribution. In theory, musicians "give" their songs to the "pirates" (who make and sell the CDs) and to the DJs (who promote them at the party). The musicians make money off live concerts. Because the musicians choose to not copyright their songs, all remixing and reselling is completely legal, but tecnobrega does use music from other places as well (I was subjected to Britney Spears more than once). Songs are "used up" every month or two, so they are in constant need for new music, but, for a while now, the DJs have become the center of the tecnobrega scene, concerts are less common and musicians no longer have a secure income even if their songs are popular. Having said that, Tecnobrega's business model has a particularly dynamic quality to it, and hopefully they'll come up with yet another solution that fits their new reality.

Even though the current system might be starting to crack, it does respond to the audience's practices, making all audience involvement "legal", and generating a amicable relationship between all the actors. Although tecnobrega stars do exist the relationships tend to be horizontal. There is also a sense of solidarity due to the lack of monetary resources. As Gabi Amarantos, one of Belém's musical divas said to me, "people here make milk out of stones".
The relationship with the audience is equally horizontal. In fact, the audience members don't organize themselves in "fan clubs", though at one point they did, they now preferred to be called "teams" (equipes). As a team they are part of the movement, they are not on the outside looking in or up. So much so, that they don't feel the need to declare their allegiance to any particular band or sound system, they are independent and valuable in their own right.
Teams also provide safe spaces, members treat each other with care and patience. I asked them what was necessary to have an "equipe", their answers always referred to immaterial things: solidarity, friendship, passion, constancy.
Having said that, most teams try to obtain material evidence of their existence as soon as possible. They all have logos (which in most cases are popular culture icons), beer buckets (big enough that DJs will recognize their equipe from the stage), some have t-shirts, banners, and the most important accomplishment a team song. To obtain a song, teams will hire a musician to write and record it for them, depending on the complexity of the piece and their relationship with the artist, songs cost anywhere from $70 to $250.
The way that audience members share and spread the music is a whole other topic, but for now, I would like to point to one area that I wasn't able to dig into while I was there , but that still intrigues me, the uses of radio. As far as I could tell Tecnobrega circulates over four different types of radio: 1) Traditional (mainstream, college, etc) 2) Online 3) Pirate Radios and 4) "Community Radios" which in this case means close circuit systems with loudspeakers attached to light posts. It would seem that each of these plays a different role and that different actors have access both to produce and listen to them, but I would love to find out more about how they operate and what they mean in people's daily media consumption. If anybody heads that way, let me know.

For now, I live you with DJ Claudermir's mp3 blog/online radio, so you too can enjoy the world of Tecnobrega.

The Electronic Intifada and the Challenges of Online Journalism (Part 2 of 2)

2009-04-20T13:00:00Z

Last Friday, we ran the first part of a piece I wrote about Maureen Murphy, Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada (EI). The second part of this piece deals with the challenges journalism faces in a spreadable media environment. Murphy explains how being an online-only publication has forced EI to address issues of credibility, crediting, activism, and bias.

Though the internet allows EI to reach--and possibly enlighten--a very large audience, Murphy also has some frustrations when thinking about the internet as a medium. "I think people take web media a little less seriously," she says. This is especially frustrating because the brand of journalism EI offers readers is much more complex--and arguably more serious--than much of what's found in the mainstream press. Still, the internet as an aggregate isn't governed by standards as strict as EI's editorial policy, so the same Google search can direct a reader to EI as well as other sites with varying levels of journalistic credibility. Of course it can be argued that many major newsrooms may have questionable journalistic standards, but there is an implicit level of trust that comes with the colophon of say, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

The internet also allows for content to spread easily through social networks and interest groups. While this is good for EI in many ways, this spreadable environment poses intellectual property issues that weren't apparent in the days of print-only journalism. Murphy explains, "It's harder to keep control of your content because of the viral nature of the internet. Something published on EI will find its way to many other places without us knowing or consenting... The point of EI as an educational project is to have as wide an audience as possible so it's not like we're losing the value of our product. But when someone reproduces an article, you wish they would credit you for originally publishing." Murphy accepts that she can't do much if EI's articles are used, changed, or even plagiarized online. She sees those outcomes as consequences of internet-only distribution, and instead of being discouraged by unaccredited use of EI's content, Murphy sees a way to learn about her readers. She explains, "We try to find ways to track it. Not to enforce crediting, but to see what people are interested in reading and what's making the most impact."

Murphy considers herself an activist. She describes her role in EI, "It is my activism because it's full time work. I think it's the best role I can personally play. Some people might be good speakers, and some might be good organizers. I can use my anal retentiveness about commas to help. To have a broad understanding of the conflict and to be able to make sound judgments on editorial matters is the best role I can play." Murphy's job is not only a job then; it's a way for her to user her skill set to contribute to a cause she believes in.

EI, as a site, also fosters activism. To that end, they are currently in the process of adding community features to the site. Murphy outlines the plan: "We're hoping to develop forums for people to spread the word about cultural events and activism events--to make it a more dynamic resource for people." Murphy sees forums as a way to further engage readers by making them feel connected to EI: "We want to be a community environment where people who feel connected to the issues. We want to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Editorial procedures by nature tend to be more exclusive, so having a forum on the website would help readers feel like they're involved."

The EI team is also upgrading the site's interface to allow for more multimedia content, both and commissioned and user-generated. Murphy explains, "We are doing one thing--publishing articles and that's bringing people into the site, but what we want to do is have more user-created content and more dynamic multimedia content." By getting users more involved in EI, Murphy and her team will be better able to use the publication to encourage activism and conversation.

Activism can also be construed as bias, especially when dealing with ideas of objective journalism. Many of EI's writers are, like Murphy, heavily involved in activist causes. Rather than seeing personal involvement as a hindrance to objective storytelling, Murphy regards activist contributors as an important component of EI's mission: "It's not like they shouldn't be allowed to write about an issue just because they're involved in it. I think dispassionate journalism is more harmful than potentially biased journalism." She explains that uninvolved journalists don't have at much at stake when reporting a story: "The writers won't necessarily have an impetus to dig deeper into the story because they don't necessarily care. They just want to get who, what, where, when, why, but that's not necessarily what journalism should be. Or at least not what alternate journalism should be." Since EI provides in-depth analysis of a single issue, the potentially biased views of its writers can provide valuable insight into the conflict--insight that mainstream, "objective" journalists may not be willing or able to offer.

EI has to present itself as contextually situated while maintaining a level of transparency. EI's editorial policy ensures that the opinions of its staff do not influence the content produced. Readers frequently engage in this conversation as Murphy explains, "People ask us if we have an editorial position on whether we think a one state or two state solution to the conflict is the best way forward. We don't have an editorial position on those issues. We do consider content for whether it makes a well informed and reasoned argument."

Murphy's discussion of bias hints at the fact that all journalists are situated within a particular context and their reporting is influenced by that context. Murphy herself is no exception--she values what some may call "bias" because it allows EI's content to engage a devoted group of readers at a more personal level. Murphy also acknowledges her own activist identity in her work, so she can connect with her job on a personal level and still have the guidelines of EI's editorial policy to inform her decisions and maintain journalistic standards.

The Electronic Intifada and the Challenges of Online Journalism (Part 1 of 2)

2009-04-17T16:26:06Z

With the recent announcement that the Boston Globe might fold if it can't cut $20 million in union costs, the state of print journalism seems to be in a state of flux. The print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer also folded to budget concerns, but the paper has continued to publish as an online-only news source. Are online editions the future of journalism? And how does online publishing differ from print journalism? As part of an assignment for Henry Jenkins's Theories and Methods class, I recently interviewed the managing editor of The Electronic Intifada, an online-only news source dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to get her opinion on the state of online journalism. Below, you'll find portion of my report.

Maureen Murphy is the Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada (EI), a nonprofit online publication--found at electronicintifada.net-- that features news, opinion, and analysis about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Disclosure: Maureen Murphy is also my cousin.) EI was founded in early 2001 by Ali Abunimah, Nigel Parry, Arjan El Fassed, and Laurie King--four activists who had never met in person. Murphy explains: "The Electronic Intifada project started as a reaction to the corporate media narration of the second Palestinian Intifada. It was started by a bunch of activists who didn't know each other, but who were able to find each other through the internet." EI was originally conceived as a supplement to the mainstream news media's coverage of the conflict, but it has quickly grown to a news source in its own right. EI averages 3000-5000 unique visitors daily, and they got as many as 30,000 visitors a day during the recent crisis in Gaza.

One of EI's main principles is to make the conflict understandable and accessible to everyone. As the managing editor, Murphy's evaluation of content submissions is key to supporting EI's educational goals. She says, "Sometimes it's a challenge because we get submissions that are for an audience that is intensely interested in the conflict, but a lot of our audience are people who come across us in a Google search. They just want to know what's happening because they can't make sense of what they read in the newspaper. Making our content accessible is a priority for us." Though the website strives to be accessible, Murphy has to balance the educational mission with EI's established position as one of the leading English-language publications devoted to the conflict. According to Murphy, "EI is where a lot of debates are held--Where does the solidarity movement go next? Where do Palestinian Politics go next? Those tend to be more advanced discussions."

When I ask Murphy how she knows whether EI is achieving its mission to educate people about the conflict, she replies, "We did a readership survey a couple years ago and a lot of our readers were university instructors and students, so it seems we're getting the audience we hope to get. But it's not just about educating people who are in education...We want average people to be reading EI and to have a stake in the conflict and work towards its resolution." Murphy must then read submissions with an eye not only for good writing and relevant material, but also for stories that can educate readers and maybe, just maybe, make them care enough to take action.

EI is also a product of its medium. Murphy explains that EI's cofounders "were amongst the first to realize the possibility of the internet as a medium for activists. One of the cofounders created what is thought to be the first blog from a war zone. He was basically doing daily diaries from the West Bank during the clashes that were happening there in the 90s. The cofounders were people tired with traditional ways of doing things and they wanted to use the internet to present an alternative narration."

The combination of compelling alternative narration and the affordances of the internet has allowed for a specialized publication like EI to thrive. Production costs are low and distribution costs are nil. Further, EI is able to reach interested audiences all over the world. Most readers access EI from North American and Europe since it is an English-language site, but Murphy says that people frequently translate EI's articles and distribute them in other language communities. The accessibility of EI's content has also become important to the mainstream media as Murphy explains, "During the recent Gaza War, the media were not allowed by Israel to enter the Gaza strip, [so they] were coming to us for contacts because their journalists weren't able to get in."

Dramafever.com full interview (part 3)

2009-04-16T14:05:00Z

Here then is part 3 of the full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever.This section deals with issues of audience measurement and engagement metric, as well as the challenges and opportunities licensed online video platforms face in light of the many unofficial sources of content out there.

Part 1 and part 2 of the interview are available, and the rest will be up soon.

Xiaochang: One of the big questions that always comes up is how do you measure audience engagement for advertisers?

Seung: Actually, that's very easy for us. We have a video platform, so we know basically when people hit play and when they drop out. Mind you, all of our videos are pretty long, about an hour long each. And looking at all the aggregate stuff from traffic to date it was shocking. About half the people stay on until about the 90% of the video. On most video sites I think people drop off after about the first minute or so, but what we're finding is that our drop off rate is very minimal, every 10 minutes 10% drop off, every five minutes another 2% drop off. We're finding that about half the people are watching the whole episode every given time. So that's just on the per drama episode basis and we'll have to do more research but based on what we're seeing now, our engagement rate is one of the highest on the internet from a video site perspective. These are very addictive dramas from what you've probably personally experienced.

Suk: When you talk about how do you measure audience engagement, what sort of advertisement are you referring to? Banners? Or TV ads? Or mostly online or other platforms?

Xiaochang: I mean, whatever you guys are using. Part of the question is just what sort of numbers are you presenting to your advertisers to tell them 'this is the amount of people who are paying attention' to your content?

Suk: It's interesting because different metrics apply to different advertising platforms, so when you're talking about impressions on a banner it gets tricky because it depends on the clicking of the banner and so forth. That's when click-through rates when click through rates become a measure of ROI. When we're talking about video ads, the conversation with the agency changes a little bit because although click-through rates are asked because they're curious about what the regular click-through rates are, but what's understood it that when these ads show up, 100% of the attention is focused on the ads. You cannot click forward, you cannot stop the ads, and if you want to watch the content -- and 50% remain until the 95th percentile -- you are watching the bulk of the ads. For branding opportunities, it's as good as it gets in terms of getting attention and relate that particular advertisement to that particular audience.

Seung: Just to add to that, the way we're distributing videos right now is pure streaming. This is not one of those things where you click play and you wait for the whole thing to download and you go away. Our site doesn't work like that. It's only streaming the bit of information you're looking at at the moment, so if you click pause, that's not getting accounted for in the engagement metrics. That's why we're very pleasantly surprised at the level of engagement that we're having because these are long videos and to have 50% of the people stick through the end is pretty interesting.

Xiaochang: Where do you think the appeal of this content is for your audience? What makes Asian dramas, or Korean dramas, different from what else is out there?

Seung: I think for the most part, the stuff that we're showing isn't just any type of content. We're curating some of the blockbusters from Korea, and certainly it's heavily geared towards content that's proven pretty popular throughout Asia. I think the common thread through Asian dramas and telenovelas and so forth is that it's somewhat of a refreshing change from what you're getting in American media. The story lines tend to be, for the most part, wholesome. They're very engaging and it's very linear -- you can't start from episode 24, you have to start at episode one and the story kind of pulls you in so that you watch the whole thing. The content itself has proven throughout the world that there's tremendous appeal in it. What we're proving here is that in the US where this content hasn't been distributed in a way where the mainstream has been exposed to it and we're hoping to be the platform that does that.

Suk: I would that it's not that the content is better or worse. It is what it is. But we know that there's a demand for it and we want to make it available in a legal way.

Seung: We had some initial assumptions before we launched our beta, and the whole idea was always to take information as we were getting it and be able to adapt and add new features. So when we lauched beta, we basically had one goal and that was to prove that there is a market for this by providing by far the best experience for viewing Korean dramas online right now. As you can see it's pretty high quality. There's almost no wait time. We feel pretty good about the results we've seen. It's only been about a month and we've kept it pretty under the radar. We've only engaged the select sort of bloggers that cater to this audience. Very niche blogs. And while working with them, we got about 13,000 beta registrations within the first month, which is pretty good. And there's an additional 20,000 - 30,000 people who came to our site who didn't register and I think that's the experience with closed beta in general. I think it shows that even with minimal marketing to date, and with a very small base of content, we were able to prove that there is a demand for all of this. I don't want to extrapolate too much from a limited sample pool, but we're getting lots of feedback from people and we feel good that this could easily spill over into somewhat of a mainstream audience based on what we've seen so far.

Xiaochang: If the does spill over into a mainstream audience, do you see it going on to some broadcast channels? Do you think will be different sorts of distribution channels for the content that's not just online?

Seung: That could be. What our content licensers decide to do on their own is ultimately up to them. What we're focusing on with Asian media companies is to offer them new audiences, to create a platform for them to monetize existing content. So we're fundamentally web-focused. We want to create a destination site where people can experience the best content from Asia in an english-supported format so people can understand it.

Xiaochang: One of the appeals of sites like Mysoju and sites like d-addicts is that there's such a wide array of content and this is one of the things that limited the rental circuit and certainly limited the broadcast channels in terms of limiting their audience, so where do you think you guys fit in with that? I mean, it does take time to get licensing deals and you can't provide the range of content and be as responsive as the fansubbing groups who can turn around content in a day after it airs on TV in Korea.

Seung: That was one of our biggest concerns going into this. We started up the site with basically 10 titles. Even now we only have 14 titles and all of our titles are stuff that's already been aired and a lot of people have already consumed it throughout the web. But in spite of the fact we have a very limited selection, we're still able to get 13,000 beta registrations in month one. We're getting consistent traffic everyday and we're getting consistent feedback. A lot of this is people who've already watched the same content on mysoju but they want to watch it again. There's also a lot of people who always felt a little weird going to an illegal pirated site, so they come to our site.

Suk: Your question is very interesting. There are other sites that have a wider variety of content, and immediate content that is broadcasting right now. How can we compete in that market? What Seung said it's right -- there are people who come to our site because of the better quality and because we're a legal site. It's exponentially harder to do things legally. The assumption that we made in the beginning, that we still hold to this day, is that going forward, maintaining these illegal sites will be harder and harder to do. From two different points: the first one is the advertising model. When you have an illegal site, you cannot bring direct sponsors to that site. You have to live by the advertising network that is willing to sponsor sites that infringe on intellectual property laws and so forth. The second one is that most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, they have to base a lot of their infrastructure on existing platforms. Mysoju loads all of their videos onto Veoh, youtube, etc. These companies also need to abide by much more stringent rules and regulations meant to protect IP, so if there is a site that consistently uploads material that doesn't belong to them, it is their responsibility upon notification to take it down immediately.

Seung: I think Suk is addressing very good long term considerations that ultimately favor out business. You're addressing very real concerns that we have, which is that we're competing with these guys that basically have none of the hurdles that we face because they're doing it illegally. But in the first month of our beta, we're competing head-on with these guys. The illegal sites are still up and running, they're running the same content that we have, and yet in spite of it we're getting consistent traffic. And in fact, we're adding new content every week and we're noticing that every time we add content, we're getting a spike in traffic. For all these reasons we feel pretty good that even though we're at a competetive disadvantage when it comes to content selection, the simple fact that we're offering an experience that is clearly superior to the illegal sites out there, that's winning over an audience. And we feel that as we add more content, the audience will come, because they're already coming with just 12, 13 titles.