For AT&T customers with a family plan, the carrier will subsidize subscriptions significantly: As many as five customers can access Beats for $15 per month, total, compared with the combined $50 they’d pay individually. AT&T customers will also get free trials of the service for 30 to 90 days, depending on their plans. Clever way to get access to a lot of users. But you can bet AT&T is keeping a lot of that money.]]>
The thing about it, that so many people out there seem to not grasp (which frustrates me to no end, I must say), is it takes about that much money to maintain the rough production costs (and profits) for all the shows we love to watch. See, we all know that there’s some perfect blend between Live TV broadcasting and an all-streaming/on-demand library (neither end of the spectrum are “correct”), but we don’t know how to get there. Meanwhile, everyone wants to talk about killing/disruption the TV ecosystem. So let’s talk about the cold hard facts of this world. A lot of people think it's just a question of hooking a TV up to the net. It isn't.]]>
What’s interesting to me is that streaming isn’t just killing downloads. 44% of the survey respondents indicated that they’d also stopped ripping CDs from friends and family. Which makes sense. Why bother if you have on-demand access?
Another major factor is somewhat related to litigation – 20% of users reported that they’d stopped illegally downloading music either because their favorite site was shut down, or because the sites that are around now are so underground that they’re filled with viruses and spyware. (Thanks #GambaKufu for the link.)]]>
Step 1. Lowery and his royalty reports clearly state he only owns 40% of the songwriting. As he says, this means the total fee to the songwriters was $16.89 x 2.5, or $42.23.
Step 2. Songwriters actually only get about 43.5% of the songwriting/publishing rights. The publisher and the songwriters split the fee 50/50 after the rights administrator’s (BMI in this case) operating expenses, which appears to be about 13%. So the full songwriting/publishing fee was in fact about $97.
Step 3. Pandora also pays a separate royalty for the performance itself, distinct from the songwriting. In 2012, that royalty was $0.0011 per streamed song.2 For 1,159,000 plays, that works out to a total performance royalty of $1,274.90.
After the administrator SoundExchange takes its fee of 5.3%, the performance royalty is split, with 50% going to the recording owner (i.e. record company), 45% to the band/performer, and 5% to any session/backup musicians. So the band in this case received $543.30 for their performance.
Conclusion. By this math:
Pandora paid a total of about $1,370. The band received a total of about $585. So (department of corrections) it's more than we thought. But if they had sold a million copies of the song - or even 100,000 copies - then it would be a stack more (probably around $100,000 in total?). Streaming is the low-paid future.]]>
At the time, the site served up porn streaming requests with the Real Time Messaging protocol (RTMP). More specifically, it used a Flash Media Server (FMS) solution, built by Adobe, to provide users with live streams. The basic process was as follows:
The user requests access to some live stream
The server replies with an RTMP session playing the desired footage
For a couple reasons, FMS wasn’t a good choice for us, starting with its costs, which included the purchasing of both:
Windows licenses for every machine on which we ran FMS.
~$4k FMS-specific licenses, of which we had to purchase several hundred (and more every day) due to our scale.
All of these fees began to rack up. And costs aside, FMS was a lacking product, especially in its functionality (more on this in a bit). So I decided to scrap FMS and write my own RTMP parser from scratch.
In the end, I managed to make our service roughly 20x more efficient. Actually a really interesting writeup of a challenging problem about multiple video stream demands.]]>