Fresh of the pages of dead-tree media elite NYT comes news of a new media partnership:
“Mr. Lee, the director, is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones.
By hiring Mr. Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director’s pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.”
This is far from the first time a mobile carrier has tried the filmmaker approach. I remember watching a bunch of shorts made for VCast by well-known filmmakers.
Obviously, Spike Lee’s involvement ups the ante, but the big question is whether or not this kind of social-network/crowd-sourcing method can lead to truly entertaining content. It is all well and good to have a cool method for creation but the creation itself has to live up to the process.
Tags: Lee, mobile, nokia, nyt, spike, spike lee, spikelee, vcas, verizon, video
Uncategorized | admin | 
April 24, 2008 6:38 pm | 
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There is a nice little post on Brand Noise about Verizon’s decision to place ads on all photo’s uploaded to Flickr using their phones. Thus turning what had been a nice service into making the consumer an unwilling participant in shilling for Verizon.
Brand Noise sums things up:
“Mobile needs to understand that it is selling experiences – not phone plans – if you mess up the vibe of those experiences you can never expect people to jump on to new services.”
Amen.
There is a somewhat amusing post in one of the supposed titans of the advertising trade, AdWeek, in which the author breaks the news that digital media might threaten traditional TV! No way!
“Who would have believed that consumers would move away from listening to music on home and car stereos and toward personal music devices and computers? The same conventional wisdom about needing television to watch video content could be equally wrong. If you believe that watching TV is inherently social, or something that we are willing to do only in our living rooms instead of on our PCs or mobile phones, watch out! The music analogy proves that old habits can die fast, and consumers will likely embrace multiple screen sizes and formats for watching movies and television.”
It’s not that anything in this article is wrong but making it seem like new information honestly makes me worried for the industry as a whole.
If AdWeek, an industry leader, is just waking up to these issues maybe the industry really and truly is screwed.
There is a very brief report on MediaPost about Alltel’s mobile video plans:
“For $2.99 a month, Alltel customers can view, critique and send clips from entertainment sites including AtomFilms, GrindTV.com and Break.com. They can also search for videos across channels, create custom playlists and manage distribution lists.”
More and more I am becoming a believer in mobile video. The infrastructure is still horribly lacking but the desire from the end-user seems to be there.
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