Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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[andy patterson] “Adobe could charge $14.95 a month and still make money. “
How do you figure?
[andy patterson] “If Adobe were like Apple we would pay $950.00 for the CC and get free updates for 6 years. “
Since Adobe is a publicly traded company in the US that would be illegal under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act unless Adobe deferred total recognition of the revenue for six years, in which case the company would most likely fold before the six year mark comes around. Apple, on the other can, and easily defer the revenue from FCP X as long as it wants since it probably only makes up a fraction of a percent of their total annual revenue. BMD isn’t a publicly traded company in the US so it doesn’t have to follow accounting regulations like SOX.
If you want more info on how the Sarbanes-Oxley Act pertains to the discussion at hand just search for “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” or “SOX” in the forum or the Adobe Creative Cloud Debate forum (it’s been addressed multiple times) and you’ll find out more about accounting rules than you probably ever wanted to know. ????
[andy patterson] “Phone companies have dropped their prices form 2 years ago and offer better data plans. “
Yet my cable bill is more than it was two years ago even though my plan hasn’t changed at all and Apple is still selling 4yr old tech a near top dollar pricing. What do phones and rigged data plans* have to do with Adobe again?
[andy patterson] “If we have to be on the perpetual treadmill and there are no DVDs the price should be less than the old school CS upgrades but they are not.”
DVD blanks cost a fraction of a cent. The cost making the software dwarfs every aspect of producing and distributing discs at the scale that Adobe was doing it.
[andy patterson] “BMD has offered free upgrades for DR.”
Apples to oranges as BMD has a totally different business model than Adobe.
[andy patterson] ” If I charge$1000.00 to build a website and my potential client find someone to do it for less I loose the business. “
Only if you can’t convince them that you offer a superior product and experience which is worth the extra money. Reminds me of the old joke about two competing barber shops that were across the street from each other. The owner of one shop put out a sign that read “Today only, $5.99 hair cuts”. The owner of the other shop responded with a sign of their own, “We fix $5.99 hair cuts”.
That’s not to say that you can’t price yourself out of your market, but price tiers are common for a reason.
*I recently worked on a doc about Net Neutrality and the Internet and the pricing on data plans (even cell plans) is beyond insane. It’s De Beers level of market manipulation.
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[Scott Witthaus] “Wait….Apple doesn’t care about the professional, right? ;-)”
Only once every 4 years or so. 😉
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[Oliver Peters] “I think the “sin” here is that software companies are changing the business relationship away from what people have been used to. “
And of course what people are used to varies from person to person. Much of my journey through the industry was along the ‘everything is rented’ path so when FCP got to the point of being ‘good enough’ *and* it was cheap enough to own that was novel to me.
I’m rather ambivalent about software subscriptions, but given the market conditions it’s either adapt (via alt business models like subscriptions) or die for many software venders.
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[andy patterson] “Adobe doesn’t have to make I/O hardware devices. “
It was just an example, but if Adobe wanted to drop software prices to compete with the price points Apple and BM are offering then Adobe would have to do something to fill that revenue void out since selling software to creatives would no longer be their primary source of income.
By creating other sources of revenue targeting creatives (Adobe Stock, Team Projects, etc.,) I think raising the CC subscription price is the last thing they want to do in order to boost revenue. Adobe also has two other company pillars (Marketing Cloud and Document Cloud), and while Marketing Cloud is growing a lot, Creative Cloud is still the biggest revenue generator by far. If the other two segments keep growing then I think that will help keep Creative Cloud prices stable which would be a win/win situation (Adobe revenue increases w/o a need to raise CC prices).
[Oliver Peters] “If you lapse on the annual support, MC continues to work, but is frozen and not upgradeable beyond the last valid updated version.”
I’ll add that even get bug fixes are unavailable once you stop paying, and if you want to get back on the train you have to pay full retail price again (no upgrade discounts).
[Bill Davis] “I am a bit surprised at the “access to your property via take it to somebody else who rents it” idea. How is that remotely equivelent to keeping control of your own IP? “
This situation is decades (if not a century or more) old. People rent gear (and/or rent crew) all the time and if they want to continue to use the equipment/crew beyond the scope of the original rental agreement they have to pay for it. Honestly, it’s not much different than a relationship we might have with a client. We do an agreed up amount of work for an agreed upon amount of time at an agreed upon price. Once it’s done the client is, by your definition, effectively locked out of their IP until they pay us, or a competitor, more money to access it again.
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[andy patterson] ” I am saying the older CS paradigm was better.”
Better or not, the traditional software business model is disappearing and I don’t see that course changing. Also, don’t forget that towards the end of CS’s life Adobe changed the upgrade policy so that upgrade pricing only went back one version. So if you were on CS 5 you could get an upgrade discount to CS 6, but if you were on CS 4 and wanted to upgrade to CS 6 you would have to pay full retail for it. Creative Cloud or not, the Adobe was ending the ability for customers to ‘coast’ via the upgrade policy.
Hardware companies like Apple and BMD are transitioning software into a ‘freebie’ to help entice users to buy their hardware (which of course the software is locked to) which means software companies have to adapt or go under. Adobe and many, many other software companies (from video games to productivity apps) are moving to new business models (subscription, ad supported, freemium, etc.,) because they have little choice. Hell, even Microsoft (arguably the biggest computer software company ever) is pivoting away from a company that sells software into a company that sells hardware and subscriptions to software. The ripple effects of Apple’s restrictive sales polices in their App Stores and pricing polices for their first party software can’t be overstated, IMO.
[andy patterson] “At $14.95 a month more people would probably opt for the CC paradigm instead of the CS paradigm. See my point?”
How did you arrive at $14.95? I’d like Adobe to offer different application bundles for less, but $14.95 for everything just seems like a very low, and arbitrary, number. Avid’s annual subscription price is the same as Adobe’s yet with Adobe you get significantly more bang for your buck so should Avid charge $1.99 for MC?
Just speaking for myself, I’m less concerned with saving a few bucks today and more concerned with the long term health of the industry that makes the tools that I use to make a living. I’m really not a fan of hardware lock-in and/or race to the bottom pricing because customers ultimately lose in those situations. For example, I’m stuck using BM I/O hardware because I need it for Resolve, yet I’d prefer to be using AJA. I think the new color panels BM released look great, but I’d never consider buying them because they only work with Resolve.
I’d much rather pay a subscription to Adobe for CC than for Adobe to copy BM’s game plan and release Adobe brand I/O devices and Adobe Brand control panels that are tied to their software. I think users are best served when they have the freedom to choose what they think is the best hardware and best software for their needs, even if that means mixing and matching hardware and software from different venders.
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[Steve Connor] “It’s a giant, house-crushing ball of wax!”
Dude, it’s the biggest ball of wax you’ve ever seen, bro! 😉
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I think there is more demand for finishing now than ever before… and I think there is less need for finishing now than ever before. It just depends on what part of the market you are looking at. In terms of sheer volume, user generated content that is uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo, etc., outnumbers everything else, but with more and more outlets for ‘broadcast quality’ (for lack of a better term) original content such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, the premium side of YouTube, a plethora of cable channels, etc., I don’t think finishing is going to be less relevant any time soon (even if the toolset used to get there keeps expanding).
One thing I notice in many conversations here is when the discussion turns to Old Media and New Media we largely focus on the high end of Old Media and the lower end of New Media even though both have their own stratifications. New Media outlets produce/distribute high-end content (Man in the High Castle, House of Cards, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.) and Old Media has lower production such as well (like local/regional programming). Sure, all programing intended for broadcast had to meet some basic technical standards (which brick wall limiters could brutally impose), but quality standards were all across the board. Do the local commercials for Crazy Eddie’s Crazy Car Emporium have the same spit and polish as The Abyss? Public Access Television has been around for decades and could be seen as the father of user generated content distributors like YouTube. The biggest difference is local/regional distribution vs global.
[Joe Marler] “However Youtube alone is estimated to have $27 billion in revenue by 2020, and the demographic chart on this page is interesting: https://www.tubefilter.com/2016/04/15/youtube-estimated-revenues-27-billion-...”
Google doesn’t split out specific numbers for YouTube, but from the analyst estimates I’ve read, YouTube has never turned a profit (their overhead is insane) and likely won’t until they get a handle on premium content because that’s what viewers and advertisers will pay for. Google knows this which is why they’ve launched things like YouTube Original Channel Innovative (now defunct), YouTube Red, and YouTube TV. YouTube is also becoming more and more advertiser friendly even if it’s to the detriment of traditional YouTubers. For example, YouTube recently changed some policies so that content deemed “inappropriate for advertising” can’t be monetized. “Violence” was one of the inappropriate categories so this meant that YouTubers covering video games containing violence (like the best selling Call of Duty series) have seen their revenue plummet even as their views go up. Their only recourse is to complain to YT and hope that something changes.
https://kotaku.com/youtubers-say-they-cant-make-money-covering-call-of-dut-1794884320
[Scott Witthaus] “Can there be such a thing as too MUCH content? The amount of content is now overwhelming to the point where (in my opinion) a lot of it is not very good and we are missing good stuff because it’s “lost in the sauce” of web content.”
I think so, which is why the New Media gatekeepers (Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc.,) will become as powerful and influential as the Old Media gate keepers. On a related note, Indiewire recently had a piece about Netflix buying good movies that ultimately get buried and remain largely unseen ( https://www.indiewire.com/2017/04/netflix-bad-for-movies-theaters-okja-tramps-1201806272/ ). Making content is easier than ever. Distributing content is easier than ever. Garnering an audience and/or monetizing your content is whole other ball of wax.
-Andrew
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[andy patterson] “I hope competition will make Adobe lower the price to $14.95 a month.”
I think $14.95 is… overly optimistic. I could see Adobe maybe doing something like bundling the apps like they did in the CS days and charging $29.99/mo for a bundle while keeping $49.99/mo for people who want the whole enchilada.
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[Bill Davis] “Just poking my head back in on the way to dinner, and curious as to why if Pancaking is such a big efficiency driver – and it appears to have been available for such a long in other NLEs (as this thread implies) – I never heard about anyone using it much until months and months after X was released?
Anyone want to speculate?”
I’ll speculate that you weren’t aware of what Premiere could/couldn’t do because you didn’t use it and you didn’t hang out with editors that did use it and discuss with them the finer points of editing with Premiere Pro.
And I think that goes for a lot of editors given that, prior to Apple killing FCP Legend, Premiere’s user base was much smaller (especially in the film, cable/broadcast and web/digital realms) that it is now. I’m not surprised that the editing community at large wasn’t talking about Premiere Pro editing techniques prior to the editing community at large starting to use Premiere Pro. It’s like asking why mainstream movie goers weren’t talking about Christopher Nolan before Batman Begins. Were his previous movies bad, or were mainstream audiences just ignorant to their existence?
Being able to easily stack/pancake timelines is something unique to Premiere Pro given how the GUI works. It makes seeing and referencing multiple timelines much easier than in other NLEs. You could do it with FCP Legend but the GUI really didn’t lend itself to it so I don’t think people really did it (they just tabbed or moused between multiple sequences in the timeline window. I don’t know how you’d do it in Avid because you can only have one sequence open in Avid (the timeline window is either referencing the Record monitor or the Source monitor).
The basic process, editing from one sequence into another, is of course not new or unique to PPro, but the variation/improvement in how PPro lets you do it is what’s really nice. When I first started using FCP (either v2 or v3) being able to have multiple sequences open was amazing to me and one of the biggest things I missed (and still miss) when I use Avid MC. When I first started using PPro and figured out you could stack/pancake multiple sequences it instantly became a feature I missed when working in other NLEs. I’ve always gravitated towards organizing via sequences and markers, and editing between sequences so I’m not surprised how much I enjoy pancake editing in PPro.
EDIT: fixed a few typos (probably more in there).
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No need for the snark.
Bill’s been getting double billed for his Adobe subscription for a year or so (IIRC) due to an error on Adobe’s part that they haven’t been able to rectify. I don’t think wanting to the ability to cancel a subscription to be as easy as signing up for the subscription is that much of an ask.