Quickthink

As Jeff John Roberts informs us, YouTube is expanding its efforts to rival TV as a prime entertainment vehicle. Cheap Eats is one of its latest series, offered on the YouTube channel, Hungry. And according to NYT

Google, which owns YouTube, is stepping up that effort. On Monday, it plans to announce that it is adding more than 50 original channels to the 100 it has introduced in the last year and expanding original channels to France, Germany and Britain.

Will YouTube succeed? I think it will. Why? Because YouTube video will be more easily consumed from mobile devices. And that is the video growth market that is just around the corner.

Ralph Simon argues

The BRICS countries — and Africa in particular is at an historic moment in time where the mobile growth and mobile device usage is at a tipping point for the betterment of the continent. New forms of mobile entertainment are being created with greater consistency than ever before.

The Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, is starting to make mobile content in bite sized pieces suitable for a pan African audience — something unheard of prior to mobile. A company in New York called GlocalVocal has a special dubbing and translation platform that allows an artist singing in say, Xhosa or Zulu, to have their words digitally dubbed and translated into say, Swahili or Yoruba, and in doing so make South African content suitable for Nigeria or Kenya. This is going to bring in a whole new era of language content cross-pollination in Africa, and for the first time seeing artists develop a pan-African rather than just their own country, following.

Interesting stuff. Are we moving from Hollywood to Nollywood?

Hmmm … not so fast. The big media brands still have one ace up their sleeves. They still command view respect for quality content. Monday Note argues that they can survive if they leverage this value.  And btw, Cringely has argued that Hollywood still rules the roost when it comes to finding big money to back big media events.

So! Let the games begin!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2012 at 8:59 am and is filed under Business models. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.