#vhxtv

Bad Habit is now live, which means someone is about to die.

My friend Josh Tsui (long-time veteran of the game industry) tweeted this blog post "Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy". Reading through it this line got me. 

Fact: Starbucks Coffee is a Trustable Experience

Regardless of my preference of coffee I think that's true and it got me thinking (again) about digital entertainment. So I tweeted about it with Josh. 

@JoshYTsui discovery for any digital medium is vastly broken. We should take inspiration from Hollywood.

— Christian Arca (@ChrisA9)

July 13, 2014

@JoshYTsui seeing a sony classic studio film or a Duncan Jones film gives some aspect of reliability or reputation.

— Christian Arca (@ChrisA9)

July 13, 2014

@JoshYTsui the closest to a platform I’ve seen that could help not just with discovery but distro as well is @vhxtv. I’m fond of collections

— Christian Arca (@ChrisA9)

July 13, 2014

I'm not fond of most publishing partnerships. They take full advantage of the rising costs per install (specifically for mobile devices) and leverage that to take a 30% cut and exclusivity rights. In cases where a cut is already going to the original platform (like most app marketplaces) this could mean a significant loss for the creator. They end up getting 70% of their original 70%. Which means they're really getting 49% of the profits. This is historically better than archaic publishing deals but they're still not ideal. 

I think a far better approach would be for creators to leverage their own networks and help each other become successful. When I was in the game industry I saw this a lot with indie games. Successful indie developers would promote other indie developers who they liked which helped them gain traction. It's like an indie game posse. 

Like I mentioned in my tweets above I feel like the closest platform to execute on something like this is vhxtv with their concept of collections. And this past weekend they even further reinforced my thoughts when the Creativity Bundle was launched. 

Andy of USV (they're invested in VHX) wrote about VHX and collections in his post today. Here's a great description of what the Creativity Bundle is from his post: 

Yesterday, a bunch of disparate filmmakers who have used VHX before joined together to sell their films collectively, as a bundle. These artists don't necessarily have to have any relationship with each other - VHX allows these bundles to occur on the fly if they desire.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times this week about the issues with movie streaming services, focusing specifically on Netflix. The article goes into detail about complex legacy deals between Hollywood studios, cable providers, and various networks, which essentially ensure that the newest movies don’t end up on a streaming service like Netflix until years after they were originally released. The history of the web, especially in recent years has taught us that disruption of large and slow incumbents almost always emerges from the outside. After reading this article, I immediately began searching for someone who was working on this problem, and I soon came across VHX. VHX so clearly looks like the future. It is built for content creators. VHX provides the functionality for anyone to easily, and inexpensively distribute music or video to others. With the continuing rise, and widespread adoption of crowdfunding to help creators bring their projects to fruition, VHX seems like it is filling a natural need in the ecosystem. Hollywood’s inability, and unwillingness to innovate quickly was Netflix’s opportunity, and it has proved to be Kickstarter’s opportunity, and now I firmly believe that VHX will play an integral role in the future of content distribution. I have some interesting ideas around the powerful platform VHX could build going forward, but I am excited to see the company grow, and build the future.