Yuhsuanchen’s Blog

Being an online video consumer, I am willing to pay reasonable subscription fee to the the quality video platform, such as Hulu. How much is the reasonable fee? It would be the fee that not exceeds the effort to get the same content from other  channels or sources.

Compared to other online video providers, Hulu provides better video quality than other channels like Youtube and is much easier to access than other sources like the legal Netflix or illegal P2P services. Hulu is an innovative video service and undoubtedly free is its killer so far. If Hulu starts charging the subscription fee, it will lose its advantage, at least some media observers said so.

Hulu offers high video quality which needs high bandwidth for stream transmission. The Internet infrastructure is not ready for this. It will confront a bottleneck for boosting its unique viewers. The subscription fee and the Internet speed will affect its user experience. Moreover, there are alternatives for video consumers to stay with. For example, Netflix model is another comparable competitor whose users can watch the movies offline with good experience.

How to balance the user experience and the subscription fee is a great challenge for hulu. It also have to consider other alternative competitors, existed cable network players, free P2P service providers, Netflix etc. I agree the mix pay and free model would be a hope for Hulu to create its second cow beside its advertisers. The challenge is the decision of what content is free and what is premium. To keep the 38 million users staying with Hulu, it needs to provider a freemium model which can simultaneously satisfy the two groups of willing pay and wanna free. If the freemium scheme fails, it would result in a disaster for Hulu.

nternet is not the cable network. Charging the subscription fee makes Hulu more like a traditional TV. The Internet is a medium for innovation and I think Hulu should be more creative in charging fee for its content. The economic model should take the advantage of free to benefit both content providers and consumers.

For me, the Ryan’s argument, “The image is not a way of telling the tale, but of evoking it”, is counterintuitive, since I have read so many stories from books with pictures dominant. These pictures, photos or drawings weave countless stories for my imagination. They are more powerful and effective in delivering information into my perception than words could do and the stories in the form of visualization often permeate much deeper and longer into my mind. Why he said that, I speculate.

His argument would be meaningful when only one still image is presented. One photo without captions, audios or other supplements to annotate would only deliver a message to our brains. How you decode this message depends upon your experience, knowledge and imagination, so people may receive distinct messages from the same photo. The message no matter how you decode is the key to evoke a story in your imagination, but not the true story behind this photo unless you have known it before. Getting still images together to represent one theme would be a different landscape in storytelling. You can link the messages from each image to compose a complete story that these still images would like to tell you, just like the text does.

What we can do for web-storytelling is interesting to those want to get benefit from digital technologies. Could we create a new way to tell story by mixing the existed pieces of storytelling that we have ever done before? I cannot answer it right away. The Internet provides us a new experience to access the media. Today, we can interact with web content directly and join the storytelling more closely. The story line would be no longer only one from the beginning to the end. A story can be developed in many branches and content consumers can interact with these story branches and choose one he/she likes. We can easily tell story by mixing text, pictures, and audio via powerful digital tools. More importantly, we have an open space, the Internet, to display our stories and exchange ideas of stories with others. All these give us more fun to enjoy storytelling.

My major was publishing in Taiwan. In ten years ago, publishing was very popular and many students in this field can easily find a job after graduation, but recently, publishing was getting harder and harder to survive because everything goes to digital. That’s why I change my field to the digital world. 

In this program, I have learned a lot about the digital media that I have never seen in Taiwan before.  In this digitized world, everything is measureable, trackable and interactive, so you will be rewarded more and frequently. This is a good opportunity to kick off your business once you have idea and I believe it will give me a lot of fun to turn my idea into reality.

Now I don’t have a clear goal for my future. I know I will definitely go back to my country to do something related to digital media. Even though the network infrastructure is developed well and the amount of people who access the Internet is large in Taiwan, few people have knowledge and ideas to create their own digital business or platform. The most popular websites are Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Youtube. All are not owned or created in Taiwan. Therefore, I would like to do two things. First, I wanna build a public space, maybe a blog or a forum, to share my knowledge and what I see in the USA to encourage and motivate Taiwanese to join the world of digital media. This will be fun to discuss and share with Taiwanese what the digital media in America is and how it works and then fits it into our own world.

I would also like to join a team, which is dedicated to creating and managing its own digital platform, to practice all I learn.

It is a big challenge in the digital media, since it changes so fast that no one would exaclty know what the next would be.  Nevertheless, I would like to bring what I learn from MCDM and practice them to the real world.  Taiwan would be a good place for me to try my best and devote myself in the digital field. 

I chose The Wall Street Journal to discuss its video news with advertisements embedded in.(http://online.wsj.com). Apparently, people come here to refresh their business or finance news and I noticed that the website provided a lot of relevant videos about that in a very low key arrangement on the web page(on the right side of the webpage, even smaller than the advertisements). Most videos are around 2 minutes long and the content is very succinct and suitable for those who want to spend little time to get more information. However, every video starts with playing a 15-second advertisement and cannot be skipped over. I watched over 10 videos and started to get tired of the monotonous and highly repeated advertisements. This website should provide more various ads if the ads are the must. The 15-second advertisement relative to around 1-2 minutes videos is a high proportion and provider should give more variety ads to keep the audiences or give more profuse content to attract people, otherwise, I would like to read the articles instead of spending extra many 15-second to watch the ads. 

Freemium, a word derived from “free” plus “premium”, is now being recognized as the future of digital business. Chris Anderson unveiled his insightful observation that free content, services or products would play a critical role in the future business. He believed that the new business model, charging for advanced features while offering basic services for free, is the trend for online companies. The model was based on the notion that if you gave consumer a taste, they’d happily be hooked and pay for more. Today, we can find that some companies really earn profits by offering a free service or product with an upsell or premium version.

This innovative model seems promising, doesn’t it? But in real world, online companies that can make money based on this freemium model are still few. There are many difficulties you would encounter when you decide to adopt this business model. In the beginning, you have to come up with an idea of what service, product, or content is likely to accumulate sufficient followers. This is the most important step to your startup since the freemium model would fail without large amount of fishes in your pool. If you really have such a great idea that could gather uncountable users, you still have to decide what to put in the free version and what to offer in the premium version. The answer is not that trivial. The target of your free version is to appeal users, so you need to put enough in your free version to get traffic but not so much that there’s not enough incentive for a certain percentage of people to upgrade. The final issue is pricing for your premium version. The price of your premium version should be competitive to your free version. This means that in order to convert your free audiences into paid customers the price shall be reasonable. An exorbitant price would cause the willing to use advanced features lower; therefore reducing the conversion rate from free to paid. The issues mentioned above are not that easy to answer, since different products, services have distinct financial structures, and acceptance.

In fact, I worry about this destructive innovative business model. This killer has already destroyed or toppled many traditional industries, particularly the media industry. However, the lost in journalism is far beyond the gain online. This free mechanism kills the traditional charging model no matter paid by customers or advertisers, but it seems that this destructive model cannot fill the gap between the lost in old times and the gain in digital age. Furthermore, the model with a high probability would downscale the economy since it only charges little for a few percentage of users. This may cause harm to the society by the rise of unemployment rate, the decline of wealth and so on. The social impact by this freemium model is also a critical topic in the social media area.