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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Good. This is a bad market for Apple; the content rights owners have all the power and the device manufacturers and distributors have next to none. That's why everyone is trying to get into the content creation game: it's the only way to keep users on your distribution service.

I'm guessing that Apple balked once the strategy evolved to producing its own content. I think they were imagining a market evolving that was a natural extension of the iTunes/App Store, but what they found was that they would need to structure like a media company to make that play effective.

This is ultimately a mixed bag for consumers; because it means that content ownership has won out. That means prices are likely to rise, and another round of media consolidation is in the cards in the near future. But on the plus side, the amount of quality content being produced under this model is amazing: I have probably two dozen TV series on my "to watch" list when I have time.

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>This is a bad market for Apple; the content rights owners have all the power

Isn't that what people said when the iTunes Store rolled out?

And I think content owners saw what happened and won't let it happen again.

Video content is also significantly more expensive to produce than music. The distributors and production companies in the music industry really didn't add much value, but distribution and production companies in video absolutely do add a lot of value.

You can produce a professional quality album on a laptop with a $50 mic and free software and release it on iTunes yourself. Songs are generally 3-5 minutes long, have only 3 - 5 moving parts, and file sizes are small.

It takes minimum $5k of equipment (and a LOT more time) to make professional video content. You have to worry about video, sound, talent, backgrounds, framing, etc. You need a whole team to produce even mediocre video content if you want it to be watchable (I'm not counting YouTube/Twitch streamers here - that's definitely a different niche).

> You need a whole team to produce even mediocre video content if you want it to be watchable (I'm not counting YouTube/Twitch streamers here - that's definitely a different niche).

I think we're comparing apples to oranges here. Look at the top twenty most subscribed channels and you will see the production value is pretty high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_subscribed_us...

They probably started off as one-person-show on a laptop webcam but at some point they tend to get better equipment and stuff. I believe YouTube gets in touch with the top 1% or 0.1% or whatever to help them get better.

Excluding youtube spotlight and vevo channels, here are the most recent videos from the top five most subscribed youtube channels:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbRV-5NzL1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D62HGy72HC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUlu-TRFBlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQHw0bSRBWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WffxX74u48

Now, they're not bad or anything - but it looks to me like most of them are still one-person shows.

Nope; none of them are. Though I don't fault you for thinking that; a lot of work goes in to making them feel "authentic" to viewers.

#1: PewDiePie is part of Polaris, which is the gaming sub-brand of Maker Studios, which is owned by Disney. He's also the top grossing star on YouTube for the last few years, and you don't stay king without a lot of marketing support.

#2: HolaSoyGerman is owned by Machinima. Machinima is relatively independent from big media (ignoring a $30M investment from Google), but they're still a major player in the YouTube world.

#3: Smosh is a huge enterprise, a YouTube brand in itself with dozens of sub-brands. It's the "juvenile humor" brand of Defy Media, which is owned by Viacom.

#4: This one was basically a PSA done by an actor / comedian / media personality. He likely had professional help making the video though (or is involved in video production work himself - not unusual for lesser known actors). But this one is a flash-in-the-pan viral video unless he can spin it into a production deal (though it wouldn't surprise me if he had already).

#5: Jenna Marbles is also part of the Smosh empire, though her deal looks to give her more independence with branding than most. But still, I guarantee she's not editing and posting videos herself.

All 5 of these videos were created by professional entertainers; 4 of them are the product of some YouTube media empire or another. It doesn't seem that way looking at the videos, but that's the entire point - it takes a lot of work to make something look low-budget yet still have high enough production value to be watchable.

The point remains though; you don't get a top viewed video on YouTube without significant paid advertising to support your channel. And most of the companies doing this advertising support are owned by traditional media companies.

> I believe YouTube gets in touch with the top 1% or 0.1% or whatever to help them get better.

Actually most end up selling their channel to a production company like RoosterTeeth, Smosh, or Maker, then working as "talent" for a decent salary as long as they keep producing X videos per month. It takes a lot of the risk out of it, and hooks you into a machine designed to keep viral content in the public eye.

Said production companies have editors, sound guys, effects people, etc. who handle the back end of the video workflow. Most (if not all) of these production companies are owned by mega-media (Maker = Disney, Smosh = Defy = Viacom, RoosterTeeth = Fullscreen = AT&T) who have the budget and industry connections to make sure they succeed.

I guarantee you if you look at the top 20 subscribed channels, probably 18 of them are owned by an "old media" company. The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Video production has been democratized a far bit but I don't really disagree with your basic point. The richer the media is, the more aspects require expertise/talent, the more expensive the gear, and the more hours everything takes. I sometimes do video, but I usually sit down until the urge goes away and stick with audio or just writing.

Of course, pros find increments of gear that they absolutely cannot live without in whatever field they're working in :-)

Correct; they'll make the entirely different mistake of trying to bundle the Golf channel with scripted-procedural-police-drama channel and charging so much for the bundle that no one who wants either channel individually will give them any money at all.

Meanwhile the <30 market will be too busy watching Youtube and Twitch to bother with hour-long shows, and before they realize it, their content will have been completely supplanted.

When the company that bundles the Golf channel with the police drama controls the pipe that provides YouTube and Twitch they can punish you with data caps similar to what most cell providers do. Along with price increases, and then offer streaming services that do not count towards your data cap.

It never makes me popular with the Apple fanpeople deigners at work, but I've long maintained that the genius move of Apple wasn't the design of the iPod, but rather than they finally gave people what they were demanding: One place to get (almost) all their music at reasonable prices.

I'm not sure WHY that offends them - that what people wanted was known doesn't mean it was easy to achieve. Frankly, I have more respect when someone solves a known but hard problem than when they come across something that happens to be popular. Given that intelligent design doesn't mean it will be popular, I see one as requiring hard work and the other requiring luck.

Well, the iPod came out in 2001, and was already a huge phenomenon when the iTunes Music Store launched in (I believe) 2005.

So you can't give all the credit for why the iPod succeeded to something that didn't exist for those crucial first 4 years.

It gave them the leverage to create the store. Remember "rip, mix, burn"?

Most people were skipping the rip part or digitizing old stuff. iTunes gave the music people their dream: go buy everything again.

2 years. The iTunes Store opened in 2003.

Initial models didn't even have USB or Windows support, remember. Incidentally, that came around the same time.

The iPod didn't sell all that well until 2004. It's no coincidence that was after Windows support and the iTunes Store.

Could be that it helped that Apple had a shoe in with media production.

I recall coming across musician magazines at a friends place, and it was all about Apple computers and how they could be used with midi and synthesizers.

Similarly a local newspaper, that was a heavy Windows user, had a old grayscale Mac hooked up to a SCSI scanner in their graphics office.

And in recent years the national broadcaster announced that they would be standardizing their production line on Apple hardware and software. And this was after Xserve was discontinued.

Apple was a household name for the labels, as such they were likely more comfortable to come to an agreement with Jobs than anyone else.

The Mac was good at creative tasks before the PC was, and despite the PC later catching up, that foothold largely remained.

This meant OS X (and later iOS) has a high-quality, low-latency audio API, for example, because it needed it for music creation.

Yes, but Apple was able to screw the music industry pretty hard so the other content providers are much more wary of dealing with them.

Plus iTunes was a blue ocean concept -- there was no serious competition for purchasing music online (at least not as easily as iTunes + iPod made it). To get into TV they would be going against some huge incumbents with lots of money.

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