HBO Sets Flight of the Conchords Free On the Internet Winds
There are those in traditional media who get it, and many more who still do not.
HBO gets it, as they are allowing episodes of the upcoming series Flight of the Conchords to be available on video sharing sites (YouTube and others, I’m guessing).
What’s to get? You have to let go of your content. Set it free, allow people to take it, embed it, post it on their MySpace profile, their blog, e-mail it to their friends, and basically do whatever they want with it. Allowing people to do that essentially creates a free workforce of grassroots marketers, and exponentially increases the odds that new people will see it.
It’s a counterintuitive thing for traditional media folk to wrap their minds around. Traditional conventional wisdom says: I have high quality original content, so I need to keep tight control over it. On TV, that will force people to watch or subscribe to my channel. In print, that will force people to buy or subscribe to my newspaper or magazine. And on the web, that will force people to visit my website. He shoots, he scores, drinks on me at Hoolihan’s!
It’s the web part that’s different. There are just too many distribution points available to force content to be available at just one. Even high quality content will be lost in a sea of other stuff. Attention spans are short, choices are infinite, and competition for attention sits around every e-corner.
A good recent example of not getting it is VH1Classic.com’s choice to not allow classic music videos to be embeddable.
Check out the Flight of the Conchords fellas, below. They’re from New Zealand, and they’re pretty great. Looking forward to seeing their show on HBO (and online!). Hey, I’m marketing for them right now…
