Video Companies: What Keeps You On Top – Or Off The Bottom?

We've been discussing the video wars here (part of the Everything Wars) for quite some time–indeed it seems we started pretty much around the blogs founding. Now, years later, though Netflix still dominates all there are quite a few services – Hulu, Vudu, Amazon.com, possibly even Facebook, and so on.  It seems a lot of people want a piece of the video market, even if they're not quite sure why, how, or what they want.

Now, as noted, Netflix still dominates, and if I may say, rightly so – they've been at this for years and did a good job.  But nothing is forever and there's a lot of competition, lots of current and future legal battles, and always the chance for people to do stupid or smart things.

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Media Mutation

I noted a few posts back that many industries, geeky industries, are in transition – or should be.  I noted that movie theaters face many challenges, and perhaps even the and of what it means to be a movie theater, or its expansion into something else. I noted publishing is changing. Many, many industries and businesses are in transition, and those in them need to keep up or the changes may well crush them.

So, yes it's important to realize that businesses are changing in this bizarre, wonderful age of technical and media mutation. Yet, if you think about it, media itself is changing. Why should we expect the media to stay the same after all -  it relies on technology which is ever-changing, so it's going to change and morph and modify itself.

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Geek Alert: Epsilon Security Breach

If you haven't heard, the world's largest email marketing provider, Epsilon had a massive security breach.  There's a good chance that if you've participated in the US (or world) economy some of your data ended up at Epsilon.  This is pretty big.

A few takeaways:

  • This is an example of how much gets outsourced.
  • This is an example of how outsourced services can produce a critical point of failure.
  • You want to keep up on this in case.

Steven Savage