Content (Resolution) is King!

For those of you that know me, you've probably heard me ramble on for years about how we need to decouple media content and the service from whence it comes. At the drop of a hat I will often start spewing off the same tired example...

Imagine your music service of choice is Rhapsody and mine is iTunes. Or your use iLike and I use Last.fm. You use Spotify and I use Imeem. Or you use Blockbuster and I use Netflix. I should be able to follow your tastes, history and recommendations without having to join your service (or vice versa). We are now starting to see some lifestreaming apps/aggregators that solve the first piece of that puzzle.... I can see what you what media you are consuming without having to join your service.

But, currently when I see that you've played a song that I want to check out, the link takes me to your service provider, not mine. Sure, this is in your service provider's best interest (page view, conversion opportunity, etc.) but certainly not in mine. Now, I have to copy the info, got back to my service provider, and manually re-enter to find and acquire.

The way it should be (IMHO), is that the consumer of the media should get to decide what service provider fulfills it. Basically, it's a massive translation layer that can take content in from anywhere and map it back out to anywhere else.

This is what often referred to as the "resolver" problem. Back in 2007, there was a thread between Lucas Gonze, myself and a couple of other people where we talked about this issue... and who should take the lead in solving it.

In the absence of these "portable music identifiers", people that are passionate about greasing the wheels of taste and content sharing are forced to the lowest common denominator... MP3 search engines. This has been the basis of the projects I've been done recently.... mapping multiple services play history down to free-range MP3s (or at least what it could find). Of course, the rights-holders are not big fans of this approach (see "world vs. seeqpod" suits) - and the consumers are often frustrated by bad files, dead links and just poor overall quality of content delivery.
I've recently been vocal about the idea that the solution to this problem is an API platform that any/all services could use in lieu of MP3 search. Conceptually, an advertising/commerce supported (ok, subsidized in the near term) free-streaming catalog provider that most music could be mapped to - a fully licensed central digital music catalog(more on this later). Granted, this is a rather grandiose idea and anything in this industry that upsets the status quo is often met with resistance (at best) and endless lawsuits (at worst).

So, my rambling has finally led me to my point... content resolution. If there is no central catalog that everything can be mapped to, then what we need is that translation layer that lets content links be mapped back and forth across endless catalogs. Grandiose? A bit, but seems accomplishable without buy-in from the existing establishment. In fact, there is the very early stages of an open source project called Playdar whose goal is to provide the framework that lets content be mapped from one source to another - from the web to your local library, to your other networked devices, to your friends' machines, to music service providers, to search engines.
I'm pretty excited by the idea - I think it could enable some very compelling consumer experiences that the community is empowered to enable on their own.

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Apple Gets Their Dominoes in Place

I've been thinking more about the odds of whether Apple will decide 2008 is the year they launch a subscription music service (of some sort) and been asking others what they think the likelihood is.

The consensus (or lack thereof) is that people either lover or hate the subscription model. And I thought (once again) I would wax (un)poetically about what I'm currently thinking...

As someone that worked on subscription service, I can say without hesitation that the biggest consumer question (and hurdle to trial - and therefore adoption) was "does it work with my iPod"? In response, all of us in that business would do a little tap dance and reply with something akin to..."Uh, no... but check out these cool devices from Creative and iRiver. You should just get rid of your shiny new iPod (and Mac if you have one of those too) and buy one of these instead so you can try this really cool service that your not sure you understand the value of yet".

As subscription services suffer from the "TiVo problem" (where users don't fully appreciate the value until they try it), getting trial is key. If the the addressable market that can actually try it (aka the iPod installed base) is then in the hundreds of millions, the wall comes tumbling down and subscription takes off - albeit at the expense of Rhapsody, Napster and others (sell, sell, sell!).

A 3G (or maybe even WiMax?) WiFiPod/Phone with all-you-can-eat streaming/mobile downloads for $10/month? Done. Trials spike into the tens of millions virtually overnight and conversion rates give Apple a subscription base larger then all other competitors. Offer movie rentals for a couple more bucks a month and now Apple kills Netflix and Blockbuster too. Oh yeah, while they are at it Apple can throw a Skype client onto the device and begin to marginalize the carriers while they are at it by offering voice services for a fraction of consumers current voice plans.

All of this pervasive "Apple-Ready" content then drives adoption of AppleTV (and Mac Mini's) - or at least next generation ones that also support CableCard. People start forsaking their rented Cable Set-Top boxes for Apple boxes they own outright (and also allow them to do more then just watch videos). These boxes bring them broadcast and IP content delivered seamlessly to their living room and the public starts to wonder... "why am I paying Comcast $100/month for TV when everything I'm watching is on-demand content being delivered over the web"?

Apple then controls the devices and the delivery pipe for all your content ("you" pertaining both to the labels/studios and consumers) - and communication. The dominoes are in place... do you dare topple the first one?

If you listen closely you can hear Steve Jobs in the background.... "BWA HA HA HA HA!".

RecSys 2007

I spent a few days in Minneapolis last week attending the Recommender Systems Conference. The conference is in its 2nd year and brings together academics and industry to discuss the future, challenges and opportunities for recommender systems. This year there are about 110 participants from 16 countries, including industry representation from Google, Netflix, Amazon, AMG, Digg, AOL, eBay, Unilever, Aggregate Knowledge and MyStrands.

Day 1 featured a very interesting keynote speech from Khrishna Bharat, Principal Scientist from Google, about the history and future of news journalism and the social responsibility we all share in ensuring the continued freedom of speech. He also touched on the process by which Google crawls, clusters, ranks, classifies the most relevant stories in Google News. Followed by some insight into the increased user engagement they were able to realize with the introduction of their personalized news stories. The clickthrough of personalized news stories is indeed higher than on just a blind list of "top stories".

The keynote was followed by a number of academic papers presentations - focused on the hot topics of privacy and trust in collaborative filtering engines. Indeed some very interesting research going on in these fields, and I look forward to seeing what the continued research here bears out in the coming months and years.

After lunch, I was honored to take part in a panel with the focus of "Where should we be investing most in research and practice to increase the value of recommenders?". This was the opportunity for the industry folks like ourselves to provide some insight to the academics about the "real world" issues that we are trying to solve or improve. It was a lively discussion that extended the dialog on recommenders beyond the science and into user experience, consumer value and business models built around them. The panel included:

• Joaquin Delgado, CTO, Lending Club Corp.


• Jason Herskowitz, VP of Consumer Products, MyStrands


• Kartik Hosanagar, Assistant Professor, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania


• David Jennings, DJ Alchemi LLC


• Zac Johnson, Product Manager, All Media Guide, Inc.

The day closed out with Poster Sessions by the academic community and some very interesting demos, with the lively discussion moving on to dinner and drinks.

The second day presented us with more research papers and another industry session titled "Appraising Recommender Systems" featuring:

• Jennifer Consalvo, Director of Personalization, AOL

• Greg Linden, Founder, Findory, Inc.

• Shail Patel, Platform Leader, Unilever Corporate Research

• Neel Sundaresan, Director, eBay Research Labs

• Tim Vogel, Chief Scientist, Aggregate Knowledge, Inc

All-in-all, the industry folks (myself included) challenged the academics with problems and questions.... not answers. Some of the ones I found more interesting were:

• How conservative should a "good" recommendation be? The pro is the con, in that a conservative recommendation is rarely wrong, but also just as rarely leads to a serendipitous discovery.
• When is a recommendation "good enough"? Where is the point of diminishing returns in further research into the algorithms?
• How do you differentiate based on algorithm? Is it possible, or do companies need to focus on differentiating the experience they present *around* the algorithm?
• Do consumers even want the "best" recommendation, or just the most useful? Greg Linden suggested that if Amazon just recommended Harry Potter to every customer, that would probably be the *best*, but not nearly as useful the consumer as recommending something less obvious.
• How do you present a "story" around a recommendation that makes it interesting enough for a user to invest in?
• Can the industry get behind a standard "taste data" format that enables users to own their preferences and consumption history and seamless share that information with any site they desire without having to train yet another system?

The side-benefit of this trip is that I got to meet a number of "Facebook Friends" in person for the first time - David Jennings, Paul Lamere, Zac Johnson, Oscar Celma and others from the "music 2.0" community. Sorry about the tequila shots guys... not my idea. :-)