Mid-market NAB happenings

[Mitch Ives]

[Walter Soyka] “Also buried under the avalanche of Resolve cheerleading, Digital Vision is now offering Nucoda at $2695 with a subset of their DVO tools, and with support for Tangent Element panels.

Resolve cheerleading? You don’t sound happy Walter?

[Walter Soyka] “Maybe there is still a little room outside the high end of the market for realistically-priced software that doesn’t fully embrace the race-to-the-bottom pricing we’re seeing elsewhere?”

I don’t often disagree with you Walter, and okay, I admit that having a degree in business and 40 years of experience starting and successfully running businesses may have clouded my vision, but I’d be interested in hearing your logic on how this is a problem?

The music industry thought this too, until they discovered that a billion sales at 99 cents made more money than $15 CD’s. I know it’s popular to hate capitalism these days, but in our industry, more money means more development resources, which means more new features. What have I missed?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Steve Connor]

[Mitch Ives] “[Walter Soyka] “Maybe there is still a little room outside the high end of the market for realistically-priced software that doesn’t fully embrace the race-to-the-bottom pricing we’re seeing elsewhere?”

I don’t often disagree with you Walter, and okay, I admit that having a degree in business and 40 years of experience starting and successfully running businesses may have clouded my vision, but I’d be interested in hearing your logic on how this is a problem? “

I didn’t understand this reference as well, it seems that BMD are actually developing Resolve much more than when it wasn’t basically free.

Steve Connor

Class Bully

[Frank Gothmann]

They may be developing it much more (and I hope it’s the guys from Davinici that are still there doing it), question is how stable and bug-free the outcome is. BM has not a great record in that respect, certainly with their drivers, firmware and Mediaexpress, and while I cannot speak for Davinci, I can speak about their converters and how Teranex handled things back then. Difference is night and day.
This also answers questions as to why converters from, say, Snell are more expensive (apart from the fact they they are much higher quality and motion compensated even in their mid-range products which are still clocking at around 25k). You have one person on the phone, who actually calls back, knows you by name, keeps track and if need be have someone write a custom patch in a day or two and/or get in the car and drive down to sort at problem out.
There are certain areas where you definitely get what you pay for. Sometimes that level of support, quality and reliability isn’t paramount, but when it is and you don’t get it you are f**cked despite all the money you have saved.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Walter Soyka]

[Mitch Ives] “I don’t often disagree with you Walter”

That’s ok, I’m bound to be wrong sometime!

[Mitch Ives] “I admit that having a degree in business and 40 years of experience starting and successfully running businesses may have clouded my vision, but I’d be interested in hearing your logic on how this is a problem? “

In your business experience, do you think it’d be possible for a new entrant to develop and bring a full-featured color corrector and NLE to market — and not charge a dime for it?

[Mitch Ives] “he music industry thought this too, until they discovered that a billion sales at 99 cents made more money than $15 CD’s. I know it’s popular to hate capitalism these days, but in our industry, more money means more development resources, which means more new features. What have I missed?”

I don’t think anyone who knows me would suggest I hate capitalism! I’m actually looking at this from a capitalist perspective, as a consumer of these tools.

In rooting for a free product whose development is subsidized by the sale of something else, you are rooting for a product with absolutely zero accountability to its users (note I didn’t say customers) in the market. I guess if they’re ever dissatisfied, at least they can get their money back.

Not all disruption is positive, and I’m not sure that free closed-source software is a good thing for this industry in the long term. Resolve’s price tag, or lack thereof, could be a pretty strong disincentive for other companies to invest the resources necessary to develop or maintain a competitive product.

Underpriced and free products devalue the work of the developers who build the tools we need to do our jobs. If the industry that supplies us becomes toxic, how healthy will our industry really be long term?

Resolve Lite for free makes me think of the proverbial kid with a camera that everyone here has been complaining about, living in his parents’ basement, who shoots with the 5D his parents bought him and charges $100/day. Except this time, WE are the clients excited about this new, low cost provider without understanding how the price is artificially and unsustainably depressed, and the kid is an ace DP showing up for free with a RED or Alexa and a full grip truck.

Let me be very clear: Resolve is a great product. I bought my license immediately upon its relaunch, and the BMD Resolve team has done an amazing job with it since they acquired it.

I’m not anti-Resolve, and I’m not calling for any kind of action. I am just concerned that this business model — much like Apple’s, where some really good software may be subsidized by unrelated hardware sold to different customers — MAY be negative for our industry in the long term by discouraging competitive development.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ricardo Marty]

Underpriced and free products devalue the work of the developers who build the tools we need to do our jobs. If the industry that supplies us becomes toxic, how healthy will our industry really be long term?

if it kills cc as is i am all for it.

ricardo marty

[Jim Wiseman]

Not as anti-competitive as what Adobe has done with AE/Premiere and Photoshop, et al. A no exit strategy for tools that are close to monopolistic at this point that quit working when you quit paying. In my position, if it weren’t for FCPX, Motion, and it appears Resolve 11, I’m not sure where a smaller operation would go. If the software isn’t good, no one will buy the hardware, and you always have to own SOMEONE’s hardware. Not that I don’t see your point Walter, I just see Adobe as more of the problem in the marketplace currently. No one else affects so many businesses/artists at so many levels.

Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.1.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.5, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1 TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD

[Walter Soyka]

[Walter Soyka] “Underpriced and free products devalue the work of the developers who build the tools we need to do our jobs. If the industry that supplies us becomes toxic, how healthy will our industry really be long term?”

[Ricardo Marty] “if it kills cc as is i am all for it.”

Ironically, I think that the move toward subscription software (which is happening across all industries) is partially in response to today’s dollar App Store mentality about software, as well as the software industry’s inability to articulate how much effort is required to simply maintain complex software in this era of ever-accelerating technology.

Put more directly, I think that companies are exploring the idea that in the face of $0 competitors, $50 monthly may be more attractive to consumers than $3000 upfront.

But really, NUKE STUDIO looks awesome. Is anyone else interested? You can show your support for perpetual licenses by buying products from The Foundry!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Andrew Kimery]

[Mitch Ives] “The music industry thought this too, until they discovered that a billion sales at 99 cents made more money than $15 CD’s. I know it’s popular to hate capitalism these days, but in our industry, more money means more development resources, which means more new features. What have I missed?”

Not to completely derail this thread, but the music industry isn’t a very good example. Their revenue is down 50% from a decade ago, digital sales are plateauing as market saturation is reached, digital albums have only bested CD sales four times (ever) even though CD sales have been dropping like a rock for nearly 15 years and streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.,) are struggling to be profitable. The perceived monetary value of music has been greatly devalued and it will likely never go back up.

With that, I understand Walter’s concern about software going the same way and what it means for software companies, what it means for competition and what it means for end users. While in the short term what BM is doing with Resolve is awesome for customers, is it generating something unsustainable that will be bad for customers in the long run?

I think a better example than the music industry is the PC industry. Dell triggered a race to the bottom in the computer market which drove prices down (good short term for consumers) but also caused a lot of market consolidation as companies buckled due to the unsustainable price wars. Are consumers better off without companies IBM, Compaq or a strong HP? Or were those companies on the outs anyway and Dell just accelerated the inevitable?

[Walter Soyka]

I respectfully disagree, Jim.

There are a number of anti-CC posters here regularly claiming millions of CS customers who refuse to upgrade to CC. If true, that suggests that Adobe doesn’t really have this singular, get-away-with-anything monopolistic control over the industry.

I think Adobe’s subscription-only move could actually stoke competition. If there are so many customers so upset with this direction, isn’t that’s an enormous market opportunity for competitors to profitably fill with perpetually-licensed products?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Franz Bieberkopf]

[Walter Soyka] “… do you think it’d be possible for a new entrant to develop and bring a full-featured color corrector and NLE to market — and not charge a dime for it?”

Walter,

One way to look at is that Blackmagic are the new entrant – and they’ve developed and brought a full-featured NLE to market – with a free tier.

It seems to me that this is one way of achieving it, and with different models from Apple, Adobe, Avid, Blackmagic, Lightworks, etc. etc. etc. it’s hard to say that there’s danger of one way of doing things crowding out others.

Franz.