Wednesday 15 August 2007

Live blog - 19

(Martin Lownde) I want to look at beautiful pictures of beautiful things like I see on television. Gaming has got there with the technology and there's very little stopping us from doing this.

We work with great talent and with fantastic artists, we do intellectual property creation and management, and we do commercial marketing and strategy. We work across music, sport, fashion, entertainment, drama.

What we've done with American Idol is revolutionised the music industry in America. 19 artists have sold over 50 million CDs in the US. That has bought us into other areas, such as managing sport talent such as David Beckham. We now manage Team England, the Beckham Academy, Honda My Earth Dream.

Fashion: Claudia Schiffer, Victoria Beckham. TV: So you think you can dance, Popworld. The Idol brand is worth $2.5 billion worldwide, 46 million viewers tuned into the US.

We've got brands, content and great talent. In the past, we've always been reliant on someone else to deliver our content. The beauty of digital entertainment is that we can now have a direct relationship with our audience.

Two examples of digital control: Songwriter application. You upload a song of your creation and the final song will be sung in the final by the winner of Pop Idol. Not only is this user generated content, but it is a great A&R tool.

American Band and Myspace. We've created an online tool which allows people to upload a video of this band, used as an A&R tool to allow us to judge who goes on the show.

Where are the fish? 165 million Internet users in the US (similar number in the EU), 137 in China. 3.25 billion mobile users in the world.

(And facebook obligitory mention)

We will be launching tv channels on the Internet to control our own brands.

Itunes is a boring shopping experience. We will be bringing a lot more an entertaining experience to the process of buying music in the next 6 months, that touches on the experience of going to a record store.

We will be working with the social networking environments to get our audience.

There are very few distribution barriers to any of the experience we want to deliver. Lets get back to the imagination, not through the business of technology.

Legal and business affairs are playing catch up in this environment. Rights management is complicated and we need to find a new legal framework to do this in. Sharing can seem counterintuitive.

The solution to consumer entertainment is keep up their expectation of pace of change. Users are impatient - "why can't I share this with my friends?". Lets give tools that enable it, and lets make money off of the process.

Partnerships are crucial to 19 moving forward. We need to work with partners to distribute our content: we can deliver IP, content and talent but we don't build in house. We can't employ all the people to make our ideas possible. We are looking for new partners to develop our brands further.

New experiences are being launched in the next six months: new online drama, there's a lot more in the sports arena which we have to bring them alive, why is going to the top shop online site so boring, we want to create new environments for music to be enjoyed and listened to.

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