Cloud Challenges

Third of a Series of Blog Posts from Maremel’s White Paper: Opening Digital Pandora’s Box

 

If we believed ads and websites in 2011, eager consumers are ready to connect everywhere and anywhere.  Consumers and content service providers face challenges in their transition to cloud-based archiving of owned media content:

Consumer Challenges:

Discovery within My Own—and Other’s—“Digital Stuff”

In the physical home, old CDs and DVDs get shoved into the back of the shelf, given to friends, or sold at yard sales.  Some consumers have built 300 DVD collections, and a few have had software that helps them know what they own and where they have put it.  Search has been visual, scanning the covers or spines of the collections.  Concepts of discovery of our own content, as well as what to do (and IF we should pay) for old “stuff” will bring consumers to question what they need in terms of long-term access to “owned” content.

  • Books: Discovery and sharing—even with physical storage—has become a bigger challenge with large libraries.  A variety of social cataloging web tools have grown to help with abundant book libraries.  Within the book space, a variety of tools are available, including aNobii, Shelfari, BookJetty, weRead, Goodreads, and LibraryThing.  Some combine information on consumers’ physical library, recommendations from the community, and possible purchase of new digital books.

Consumers face a growing challenge of digesting their owned media.  With electronic books and other media files, the physical problem escalates.  Book storage online already raises the question of title-level metadata and sterile taxonomies.  For example, Kindle’s iPad software shows titles, authors, and cover art images to scan through, with no ability (yet) on the iPad App to search or “folderize.”

  • Music: Music has extended social curation and discovery with abundant new streaming SaaS offerings.  Data-rich new challengers in 2011—including Spotify, MOD, and Rdio—launched their curation offerings into Facebook’s connection-rich platform.  Turntable.fm brought individuals out as live DJs, sharing mixes and songs live on Facebook with friends and strangers.
  • Video: With video, 2011 and 2012 spurred the launch of a whole new breed of SaaS tools having to do with shared media curation of the television viewing experience.  Cloud co-viewing tools continued beyond GetGlue to Yahoo’s mobile IntoNow, which compares the audio of what you are watching to identify and share taste in television programs.  Tunerfish, a Comcast offering, reminds users that their favorite show is on tonight as well as lets them connect to discuss the program.

Joint Ownership

Ownership may not be to one IP address or individual.  For example, I don’t own most of my content.  My family owns most of my CDs and DVDs in a shared cupboard in my home.  We have a shared hard drive, and are building new digital home storage as we speak.  Ownership, however, is shared.  Even my Netflix account is shared, with my 14-year-old running the queue (much to my chagrin).

New digital services have been dealing with this issue.  Audible, for example, delivers “purchased” audio books, which means rights to listen on- and off-line to audio books on their service on a variety of devices.  The service allows use of up to 5 devices, which can be reset at any time.  Barnes & Noble permits digital book lending for up to 14 days, but only once.  UltraViolet, which has launched a multiple mode ownership system with Paramount, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Lionsgate, is another example in the video realm.  That new service permits up to six users in their Terms of Service agreement.  They have begun to release “Horrible Bosses” and “Green Lantern” (both Warner Bros.) since Oct. 2011 for home consumption under these rules; we’ll see if they change over time.

Offline and Online Use

Mobile bandwidth can be expensive for consumers to use for connecting to their own media, so Wi-Fi has become a welcome alternative for connecting mobile devices with rich media content.  Consumer storage has had to assume that you are not sitting at someone’s computer in a robust broadband work environment.  Users want to be able to fill their tablets or smartphones as a transport bucket for this week’s reading, listening, and viewing – at least under the current models of mobile monthly bandwidth contracts.

Content Provider:

 

Commoditization of Services, Migration, and Survivability

Consumers will want perfection: permanent tools for low cost.  Users will want migration and survivability if a SaaS fails, closes, or is sold, with the ability to transfer their “digital stuff” out.  Consumers will be afraid of “lock in,” as it would make them dependent on the terms of use, which might change.

Meanwhile, IaaS and PaaS will allow new systems to launch, cannibalizing existing systems and putting them at business risk.  Pure storage, with limited barriers to entry, can be a race to the bottom in terms of both service and pricing

Competing with Freemium

Many digital consumers have become trained to seek freemium business models, which give them a fairly large bucket of storage for free with extended product abilities and storage for a certain amount per month.  Dropbox, which has gained market share with its integration with the iPad, provides 2 GB for free, with more storage given for referrals (up to 5.5 GB), and even more for pay or for organizations.  Amazon’s CloudDrive is free for 5 GB, while Microsoft’s SkyDrive offers 25 GB for free.

Device Abundance from the Consumerization of IT

Increasingly, many consumers have gained the attitudes that their device is their stronghold and they have the right to use it for work and home. Publishers for mobile have been working on this question for years, and entire ecosystem layers have stepped into media platforms to digest digital output into the various carriers and devices.

 

Mutual Challenges:

Licensing:

Per the Betamax Case in 1984, users have the right to make a personal copy for their own use and time shifting. Questions repeat as to who owns what with what rights to digital copy, on what drive in what location.  As noted above, different companies are setting different rights rules as to cloud-based media.  As a consumer, the pitch seems to be rights to my stuff anywhere, everywhere, and all the time.  Start-ups, especially in music, have been pushing back on the physical-media based licensing structures while trying to launch readily on IaaS backbones.

In music, Echo Nest has launched a PaaS that connects licensing rights with new music platforms. So far, however, it only has EMI (which now has been sold) as its core.  220 young start-ups so far have launched new SaaS services based on this Echo Nest PaaS licensing-fluid platform.

Digital “Storage” of our Digital “Stuff”

First of a Series of Blog Posts from Maremel’s White Paper: Opening Pandora’s Digital Box

 

“Storage”: An interesting word in the context of “digital stuff.”  Like the word “collect,” storage implies that it is our “digital stuff,” that we have ownership rights to it.

Storage, as a social metaphor, brings with it context from our daily, physical lives. It may bring to mind Public Storage units, areas under overpasses where we put the detritus of our lives: mom’s sofa, the wagon wheel coffee table that we fight over, or three rooms of furniture as we downsize homes.  Storage bears echoes of George Carlin’s 1986 comedy routine about stuff to hold our stuff in.


He detailed how we have stuff everywhere and have some stuff that is more important than other stuff, which we want to keep with us always. Our digital stuff holds many of those same traits: we have digital stuff all over the place, some is more important, and some we want to keep with us always as well.

Email has become a “gateway drug” for the cloud, training users to expect abundance of digital storage.  Digital storage was framed for many years as precious, to be used wisely.  Previously, companies chastised their employees about using too much e-mail space through automated warning messages.  Expectations have escalated since 2 MB in free email storage was offered by Hotmail in 1996.  Yahoo started at 4 MB in 1997, and Gmail started its beta with 1 GB in 2004.  Yahoo joined in with unlimited storage in 2007, and Google upped the game soon after with its “Infinity Plus One” storage plan, which has grown individual storage now to more than 7 GB for free unlimited storage for Gmail[i].  Hotmail has since moved to “ever-growing,” nearly unlimited storage, continuing to change social norms about digital storage expectations.

Entire business ecosystems have sprung up, dealing with sharing, backup, and cloud storage.  These tools have shifted home and business users to consider storage issues such as ubiquity, mobility, sharing, multiple devices, and permanence.  Despite these roving ambitions, most people’s work and social habits have not kept up.  Products have launched to help us filter and gather our email, though the majority of users still let the content swamp us out and push into unfiltered folders.

2011 was a year of many media “cloud” storage toolset launches, with more solutions to this “problem” on the horizon.  Cloud-based content storage now reaches into consumer lives as well as business services.  Digital media is a growing percentage of our personal digital storage.  As a digital culture, we also are rethinking storage as to digital media.

This transition brings with it a series of questions about this “problem,” and about the relationships between the consumer and cloud-based media storage in the future:

  • What are the problems that companies and consumers are trying to solve with cloud-based media storage?
  • Is this time a transition while we are in changing habits of mobility, sharing, and recommendation with tablets and smartphones?
  • Is it a transition, with different trajectories for our existing digital stuff and entirely new behaviors with new acquisitions and our own digital media creations?
  • How might this transition drive permanent changes in our concepts of content ownership, collection, and storage?
  • How will this change our willingness to pay for storage and to pay a premium for ownership?

Further, playing off of the George Carlin riff on stuff drives two related questions:

  •  What do I expect from the stuff I need to manage my digital stuff?
  •  Is the nature of stuff itself changing?

The music and book media sectors have been facing these issues head-on.  Their company leaders have been forced to rethink what the context and containers for our media content mean in an environment of abundance.  They have been rethinking books and music in a terrain of fluid data and scarcer time.  Other sectors, including video and even education, may find ideas from looking to other media platforms and sectors for pain points, challenges, and new business models.

This blog post from Maremel’s white paper will continue in three steps:

  • Drivers that are accelerating cloud-based consumer media storage,
  • Challenges to be met as Pandora’s Box opens, and
  • Opportunities that lay beneath, beyond the popular discussions about content in the cloud.

 


[i] Now adding 3.3 MB each day to the limit, per Google.