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Final Cut Pro in Ads – Everything Changed
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[Craig Seeman] “That’s not profitable. Apple is a hardware company. There would be no point to invest the R&D they have for that.”
this statement is, I feel, incorrect. this has been a profitable exercise. As other people have pointed out to you, software is about at the ipod level of business for apple, they are more than capable of producing a piece of software designed to monetise a consumer video user base. Particularly when they are basically re-jigging iMovie.
Apple’s motivation in FCPX was to pivot the newly discarded FCP studio name to monetise the expanded consumer enthusiast base, with a pied piper piece of software conceived directly out of iMovie.
Again I’ll ask – out of the half a million rough guess FCPX consumers picking it up out of the appstore – how many are graduating out of imovie? 70%? 80? I’m going to say 80% if only because this software is designed to be a direct come hither to them – that still leaves over one hundred thousand editors trying to pay bills with this software.
FCPX has carefully expanded capabilities, direct adherence to iMovie norms, and generally, a very low confusion level. No weird track selection, no source monitor etc. Apple saying they will grow the software is a very neat blank statement. Its who the software is intended for is the point. It was not conceived as broad scale editing software product – it was intended to monetise casual enthusiast video work within their growing consumer base. that base is, versus bill paying editors, at least by a factor of three or four to one, the current customer for this product.
Also – I’d take issue with this mythical Apollo 11 cost base for producing this software – ten thousand men did not work on this product.
Let me give an example – Larry Jordan I think, god love him, re-told a mythical whispered conversation at NAB, where two Apple software engineers up front, when watching the demo on audio peaking visual indicators, whispered “they don’t know how hard that was” But we all know that’s simply not true right? they just lifted iMovie there – that in timeline moron’s guide to peaking is standing today built and coded in iMovie – identical FCPX actions right down to the pixel are in iMovie. they just shunted it in. This software is a bodge job of consumer parts.
that is why the fake R&D argument gets my goat Craig – does this thing look at all drenched in R&D? How’s the project file size mutation looking?
Great, great software this is.
that this effort to milk a consumer audience demanded great resources from Apple, such that the simple returns from selling it like hotcakes on the appstore could never provide a good return is a false argument. It has made a good return.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Chris Harlan] “Craig Seeman] “That revenue is before costs and payouts as I understand it. Gross Revenue, not Net.
”No. If you look at the 2011 summery I sent you, you will find the following line:
– iTunes Store generated 1.5 billion in revenue, new record. 16 billion songs, 650 million tv shows downloaded. Pleased with 180 million sales on iBookstore.
Clearly, with these numbers, it is not gross. That number would be around 17.5/18 billion, not including books, which I can’t easily figure. Notice also that Apps are not part of these numbers.
“Okay, fool. You took this too far. Clearly, you were processing facts incorrectly and you owe Craig an apology. Now, man up and do it.
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[Chris Harlan] “Okay, fool. You took this too far. Clearly, you were processing facts incorrectly and you owe Craig an apology. Now, man up and do it.
“Okay. Craig, I probably incorrectly inturpreted facts from the MacRumors site and presented them in a haughty manner.
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[Craig Seeman] “Apple sells hardware. The R&D in FCPX just to move iMovie users doesn’t match a hardware company’s business model. Apple is fundamentally NOT a software company.”
Craig,
I agree fundamentally they’ve modeled themselves as a gadget company after Sony.
I also agree that itunes is service not software model; this seems like a growing direction for Apple.
On the other hand, I always keep in mind their boast of 2 million licenses for FCP. If we assume some paid 1500.00, others less, and some around 300.00 for Xpress, we could get an average somewhere around 1000.00 per license times 2 million.
Either I have wildly low estimates of what they spend on software design and acquisition, or FCP was wildly profitable for Apple.
Franz.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Particularly when they are basically re-jigging iMovie.”
Not so. iMovie is 32-bit and built around QuickTime. FCPX is 64-bit and built around AVFoundation. They likely share very little code in common. They share very high level UI concepts in common, but in the nuts and bolts where the coding happens they share next to nothing in common. The work that went into iMovie was not there to build upon in FCPX (simply owing to how they respectively draw upon the APIs in OS X), despite outward appearances.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “It was not conceived as broad scale editing software product – it was intended to monetise casual enthusiast video work within their growing consumer base. “
I agree this is undoubtedly one reason they did it the way they did it, but I disagree it is the reason, or even the top reason. It is the reason best suited to cynical analysis though.
Best,
Andy -
I don’t think pulling 32 bit iMovie code into 64 bit FCPX code is a corporate moon shot.
Seriously – try the timeline audio-peaking. its literally identical. the idea that apple had to go to software jupiter and back to produce a paid for kludge of iMovie is hard to believe – doesn’t this at all feel like an unstable, monetised expansion of iMovie? Isn’t that what this is?
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
ah seriously craig –
sure let’s count them:
[Craig Seeman] “I heard the costs were steep relative to income given server, bandwidth, contracts for artists, payouts, etc.”
[Craig Seeman] ” I heard the cost are very high.”
[Craig Seeman] ” It’s not like FCPX, Logic, Aperture are cash cows. They aren’t from what I’ve heard.”
you alone on this forum are privately hearing all these things from Apple loud and clear – how are you hearing these things that underpin your specific argument that a simple prosumer appstore rejig of imovie for a simple pay day doesn’t pay?
Craig. Come on.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
I believe the data centers Apple keeps building to host and distribute all this are huge capital investments and there are rumors that they’re looking to build another.
Just as Google gives Android OS away free as an ad revenue vehicle, Apple is building out a very expensive backbone because it’s integral to their selling hardware from the glory days of iPods, to iPhones and iPads.
I do think the growth of iTunes has made their back end sustainable but I don’t think it is, in itself, a primary income generator. It moves commoditized hardware. That’s its intent.
If Apple were a software company than FCS with over two million sold would NOT have been killed. It did not serve Apple as a vehicle to grow hardware sales.
If video editing is the new language than iMovie is the Word Processor and FCPX is the Desktop Publishing tool and they hope that one would buy a Mac to run it on. Apple is looking for ways to sell Macs like they sell iPhones and iPads.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “On the other hand, I always keep in mind their boast of 2 million licenses for FCP. If we assume some paid 1500.00, others less, and some around 300.00 for Xpress, we could get an average somewhere around 1000.00 per license times 2 million.
Either I have wildly low estimates of what they spend on software design and acquisition, or FCP was wildly profitable for Apple.
“(quoting another post I just made)
If Apple were a software company than FCS with over two million sold would NOT have been killed. It did not serve Apple as a vehicle to grow hardware sales.If video editing is the new language than iMovie is the Word Processor and FCPX is the Desktop Publishing tool and they hope that one would buy a Mac to run it on. Apple is looking for ways to sell Macs like they sell iPhones and iPads.
That FCPX demands more of CPU/GPU will feed into this. They want to drive people into upgrading their computers every couple of years that they do their iPhones. To do that their computers must be commodities as well.
Apple seems to want to control content, content creation, distribution to hook one into an ecosystem that drives hardware sales with frequent end user hardware replacement.
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