Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Twilight is awesome

The other night I saw Twilight: New Moon. I'm not sure what all the hate is about. Yes, it's a terrible movie. Yes, the acting is worse than most YouTube videos. Yes, the characters are all shallow and uninteresting. And yes, there are lots of half-naked men walking around for no apparent reason.

All those things just make it more awesome. It stole the record for being the highest-grossing movie on an opening day. According to Wikipedia, the movie made $72,740,052 in a single day. It turns out that, when marketing to teen girls, revenue is inversely related to the amount of clothing that main characters wear. Imagine that formula as a strategic direction.

Last year I was working with an entertainment brand (a video game to be precise) that skewed heavily female. It was somewhat targeted at women as a product, and a large part of the consumer base just happened to be made up of teen girls. The company which owned this brand had determined that the only way they could grow the brand was by trying to bring more men into the franchise. I thought, “Why? Why not completely own that space? What’s wrong with creating a product that speaks directly to women? Why would you water down your communications in order to try to appeal to men?” Clearly, they should have just come out with a Twilight-themed version of their product.

Twilight shines as a beacon that shows how powerful the female demographic is. The notion that a movie as bad as Twilight could sell so well is a testament to their collective purchasing power. It also goes to show you that a movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be a box office hit – it just needs naked people.

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A box for Boxee

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.
via blog.boxee.tv

Boxee gets an official box. This is actually a pretty big deal. I've used Boxee for a while now on my notebook and I love it. If they can get this box down to $99, then they've really got something that come in and trounce everything else. It would be great to see something like Boxee actually enter the marketplace and eliminate the need for a traditional cable box. It's going to be pretty interesting to see how Boxee's recommendation engine develops and what kind of business model they develop. It seems to me like Boxee has the potential to provide a really compelling recommendation engine. They know what you like, what your favorite shows are (across networks), who your friends are, what they like, etc.. If they worked with Amazon in a creative way they could make a fortune on referrals alone.

I also wonder what companies like Comcast and Time Warner think about Boxee. I wonder if they are genuinely worried about a legion of Boxee-enabled devices entering the marketplace and destroying their business model, or if they just completely dismiss it. Once major sports networks start creating models for distributing live content through the web, it's pretty much game over for the cable box. And really, it's only a matter of time.

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