It’s 12.30am and here I am … playing around with fonts. That’s Rockwell in the post title, Myriad Pro in the text. Not sure how many people will actually see those, or what they fall back to. Ok … back to work.
A quick tip for anyone looking for organic meat around our fair store .. drive the 5 or 6kms to Thornbury to Belmore Biodynamic Meat. I spoke to the guy standing proudly on the front page of their website. You’ll find them here. The last year or so has taken it’s toll .. long hours, poor diet, lack of exercise = 5 kilos extra thank you very much. Enough! Bought a Breville mega juicer that is just outstanding, and am going organic as much as possible now. That brings me to Belmore which is a revelation. I bought a biodynamic eye fillet this morning for around the same price a non-organic cut would cost me at Leo’s. Brilliant. With organic fruit and veg deliveries now once a week, I’m all set!
Our Blu-ray collection here at APPLEBOX is continuing to grow .. 104 titles and counting .. and I’m working my way through all of them. Blu-ray is the best format to watch movies in. Period. Dramas, Action, Sci-Fi, Classics… no format is better suited. Frost/Nixon is a stunning transfer that shows how good a character driven drama can look. 2001 is equally stunning to see how a 40 year old print can be remastered and shown in the full glory it deserves. Ditto for Casablanca. Don’t take my word for it .. Ridley Scott sums it up well.
The stats say Blu-ray penetration is growing at a slightly faster pace than DVD did, almost 4 years in. Which is great news. Prices are coming down .. you can get a Kogan for $269 and Aldi have one going at $199. We’ve of course got a Sony BDP-S350 to rent here if you want to give it a shot without the upfront expense. JB is doing the BDP-S350 for $300 and we’ve also got a deal with the local retravision .. grab our Hi-Def primer in-store for all the details!
Really, if you’ve got a HD TV, do yourself a favour and buy a Blu-ray player .. you’ll never look back.
Just reading Andrew Cooper is extending dStore offline with a retail 2.0 move. From Smart Company:
Cooper is scouting stores that are around 800 square metres; the front half of the store will contain merchandise while the back half will be a small warehouse. Customers will be able to order in-store web kiosks and either pick up their goods on the spot (if in range) or have them delivered the next day.
Feels like a contradiction doesn’t it .. going offline to extend reach? As an online business, if you can’t extend globally - with conventional wisdom being this is the one true path - where do you go otherwise? Where are those customers that you’re not connecting with today? Ans: they’re in every suburb of every city of our wee little country. Local retail gets you in front of people you just can’t reach with a purely online play. Scoop up 5% of 200 million Americans .. And your online business will fly .. but 5% of 20 million Australians is a completely different set of numbers.
Way to go dStore .. way to go Andrew Cooper. Let’s see local retail taken to the next level.
It’s now 7.20am, Adelaide Airport, and I’ve just finished my cibo breakfast. I arrived about 7 mins outside the 45min checkin window Tiger stipulate. Ok .. I’m cabin baggage only .. with kiosk check in I’ll be able to head straight to the gate for a full 30 mins before take off. Hmmm .. No kiosks. Manual checkin overflows with people backed up prob 40 deep. 2 staff wipe sweat off their brow trying to get everyone through. No staff working the queue, streamlining the process. Ok, think i’ll head straight to boarding and checkin there. Wrong move, turned around, back to queue, time dissapears and missed flight!
Dang. Tiger lesson learned. Be on time or else! Jump on adioso.com (via iPhone) next avail flight out is virgin, booked online, confirmation sent, checked in via kiosk, boarding pass issued in seconds, no queues and voilà… Here I am drinking coffee waiting for my flight.
As chief anything-tech-I-gotta-handle, I’m generally the one who keeps the content flowing into the system (big props to Andrew who tackles TV and kids discs .. sick of Barbie yet Andy?). We add about 60 titles a month, from new release to back catalogue and that’s a lot of info and images. We’re no Quickflix with a dedicated content team .. we run on the smell of an oily rag.
But c’mon film makers and distributors! Sometimes finding poster art to promote your film is like digging for gold. You spend plenty of dosh to make your film, but forget that couple of grand to create some great poster art and put it on your website. C’MON! give a brother a break. I dig and dig and dig to try and find something hi-res. We’ve got the best cover art in the business (prove me wrong) but that’s a killer to pull together. I’m trying to get Storage (www.storagethemovie.com) in the system at the ‘mo. Just a little Aussie indie thriller which we’ve bought one copy of .. but can I find some dang poster art? Nup. It won’t be the first time I’ve screen capped a website and put some cover art together myself. And whilst I could wait for the actual DVD and scan it (ala Quickflix, Bigpondmovies and just about everyone else), poster art is typically a quality grade above what ends up on the DVD cover - so that’s what I want.
Yikes! I can’t believe it’s been 3 months since I posted here. Sorry everyone! Life is busy here at APPLEBOX and we’re still humming along nicely. Don’t forget we have our facebook page that Andrew keeps turning over and twitter 140 character movie reviews (put your sunnies on ’cause the green might blind you). James is chiming in as well.
But back to Think Global, Shop Local - Nice slogan! Been around for years I’m sure, but I noticed it down in Port Melbourne the other day (near our friends at glued.com.au) .. and I like it! sorta sums us up nicely.
Warner Brothers is experimenting with online distribution with their current release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This is a simultaneous DVD and VOD release which eliminates the normal release windows of DVD first (after cinema), then payTV and VOD last.
The exciting thing about this, is that whilst iTunes and BigpondMovies Download will automatically be included, Warner have decided to include DVD rental groups in the mix … and that means US! Yes, we’ve directly integrated the download choice for Ben Button into our catalogue:
From what I can see, we’re the first local video store to EVER seamlessly offer a download option to their membership (and that’s world wide). The keyword here is seamless .. i.e. at the point they would normally choose to select a movie to watch. Video Ezy can’t do this (and that’s can’t, not don’t), as their members aren’t online when they pick a DVD off a Video Ezy shelf. Even when our members are in-store, they’re online. About half our members do all their choosing from home (and drop in for a quick pickup), so about half our members now have a new choice - at the point they would actually choose - to download to their PC or laptop.
In Australia, the only other local outlets that offer online selection are InstantDVD, RedroomDVD and Glued. None of these guys are doing the Ben Button download. Whilst they all could put a banner ad on their sites, integrating into their vending catalogue is probably too difficult for the moment.
Who else is offering it then? The existing VOD players - iTunes, BigpondMovies Downloads, Foxtel, and then the DVD outlets - Leading Edge Video (who we buy through), Network Video, Quickflix and EzyDVD. Notable in their absence is Civic Video, Blockbuster & Video Ezy .. and that’s about half the local rental market. Interestingly, EzyDVD is owned by the FEG (Franchise Entertainment Group) who also own Video Ezy and Blockbuster, which means FEG have deliberately chosen not to test it with VE and BB. Hmmmm … is this an indication of their online strategy? To all the Video Ezy and Blockbuster Franchisees out there .. are FEG doing all they can for your digital future?
Execution is everything, and this is the achilles heel of the VOD industry to-date. Downloads are painful! For those interested, the process is:
With a 70 minute download I could have walked the 4km to APPLEBOX and back from my place .. but that aside it worked! I successfully downloaded Ben Button directly out of the APPLEBOX online storefront. I then watched 10 minutes of it on my PC monitor. I finished off by watching via Blu-ray on my 42inch plasma, as even in the name of future-VOD, until I can get 1080p to my TV it’s just an experiment for me.
Some points of view for Warner to think about:
Despite the niggles, I say well done to Warner. I applaud their strategy, which I believe is to acknowledge where the rental public is today and for the immediate future .. and that’s at the local store level. If you can reach out to these renters, via all the groups that service them today, potentially you’ll engage a bigger market than dealing with iTunes, Foxtel and Telstra alone. Whilst you could argue that local rental groups don’t really engage their members in the online space (sans APPLEBOX), 4+ million customers with established rental behaviours is hard to ignore.
DRM, Windows reliance, download managers, bandwidth costs, catalogue selection, Hi-def formats, TV playback & matching the value prop of local rental (eg any 3 for $10) .. all these are part of the challenges for VOD. There’s a lot of good stuff happening in the states with streaming services like hulu and platforms like boxee. It’s an interesting space, but good ‘ol local service is still a draw card. We want to be across it all, and local is where we’ve started.
Just came across a mention of this little baby which is a HD media player. For $130 it will play HD 1080p content to your TV (via HDMI) from a hard drive source ($120 for 320gig). So, for $250 today, I can have a full 1080p HD portable playback kit.
Thats brilliant. I won’t call this a torrent player .. piracy hurts my business and I know plenty of people working in the industry that also feel the hit. I’m not talking Clint Eastwood .. it’s average joe who doesn’t make the mega bucks but piracy devalues what they do.
But .. I’d love to visit my local video store, fill my drive with pre-paid 1080p content and watch when I’m ready. Packed with DRM to limit that watch to a couple of times and prevent me from copying it out? Fine by me. The convenience would be great.
Transporter 3 is due for release this time next month. At CDWOW you can get it for a snap at $41.95, EzyDVD does it for $32.97 and JB for $29.98. Thats a $12 variance from CDWOW to JB! If CDWOW can get away with it .. that’s a huge margin they’ll make. We’re online with price comparisons at our fingertips .. I gotta wonder how many they will sell. On that price check I wouldn’t go back to CDWOW next time. Add to the craziness, within 3 months after it’s release Transporter 3 will most likely drop to $15.
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