The plan for publicpatron dot org is to still be the home of one of those pieces that builds off of the internet as cultural infrastructure. Like I have written before, a non-profit tip jar. But my rants will be moved over to the new site while I try to turn this site into the place that provides the service. Bout it.

Last week’s TWIT and a video from Head TWIT Leo discusses the industry in general, and the TWIT numbers specifically. Great stuff.

And here are 9 ways to make money with podcasting…the PBS/NPR model is #3. How would the ease of Public Patron change that?

Most of the sites and platforms that have made publishing one’s work as easy as clicking a mouse aren’t “open source” in the formal sense that applies to software. Instead, they’re tools to facilitate cultural openness.

That quote comes from a Wired article about how the internet is supporting the rise of a real alternative to “mass media”:

The dirty secret of mass media, though, was — and still is — that a great deal of it belongs to the companies that distribute it, rather than to the people who make it. That’s begun to change as the internet rewrites the rules about who can put creative work into the public sphere as well as who can take it out. Mass culture has traditionally required corporate middlemen to operate the machinery of publishing and broadcasting; without them, no one’s creation had any hope of reaching a broad audience. In the age of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube and Twitter, that’s simply not true anymore.

My hope with Public Patron is that creators, at least of video & audio content, could make their creations accessible to the whole world without losing the creative rights to them, while simultaneously supporting themselves and a family. Culture should not be held hostage behind a pay wall nor reliant on the whims of commercial interests for distribution. We need to, and now we can, make it simple and almost automatic to support a lot of the culture that defines us.

With Boxee, you can hook up a mac or linux box to your HDTV and watch almost anything available on the internet on-demand on your nice big screen TV while using your remote and relaxing on your couch. While the geeks don’t talk about it enough, this switch from the experience of internet video on your laptop/desktop to internet video on your big HDTV is huge. Its cultural. And when you add HULU, arguably the most consistent higher quality free LEGAL content out there, it is quite hard to beat, if you dont mind the advertising.

But its over now. And it was the broken advertising/commercial business model built on controlling distribution that killed it.

For some reason, at some level, content producers make more money from advertisers if you get this stuff over broadcast or cable than if its streamed or downloaded over the internet. Most likely, its a function of CPM, where advertisers pay some amount for every thousand eyeballs, and the CPM is higher for broadcast & cable than for internet viewers, right now. So the content providers told HULU to tell Boxee that they are not allowed to pipe HULU through their application. They desperately want to prevent more people switching from watching their content over broadcast or cable to the internet, cause they’d make less money. And getting anything you wanted on-demand over the internet and onto your big screen HDTV, like Boxee+HULU supported, was a huge incentive to do so. They see putting their content on the internet and viewed on a desktop/laptop as an opportunity to add viewers, but viewing that same content distributed over the internet on your TV is understood as subtracting from the bottom line.

This is the convention wisdom on why HULU was forced to disconnect from Boxee, from the few of us who even think about this stuff. From a big picture perspective, this demonstrates how the big media companies are not too concerned about internet video on your desktop, but are scared sh*tless of the day that the internet makes open & independent HQ video a reality for most Americans on that big flat cultural icon in your living room. Big media has control of broadcast and cable, but the internet is truly an open media landscape. They don’t want folks even thinking about whats possible when you really bring the openness of the internet to television.

And it also points out how the business model is broken, how the incentives in the model fail those who are supposed to be at the center of the transaction, the creator and the fan. The people creating the content and the fans who love it are being shortchanged when advertisers have a voice in the creative decisions and when supporting the legacy big media distribution businesses prevent wider dissemination and enjoyment of the content. The creative teams want artistic freedom and to be fairly compensated while fans want great content at a fair price and to be able to experience it however they choose. We can do that.

Our plan is simple: we create the best station we possibly can, refrain from contaminating it with advertising, and then ask you to pay us what you think it’s worth. So far it seems to be working out nicely. We’re not likely to get rich this way, but that’s not our goal.

Here at RP we’re not just non-commercial. We’re anti-commercial. We feel that quality radio programming and advertising just cannot co-exist. We also choose to refrain from forcibly extracting money from you by charging subscription fees. We leave it up to you to decide what our service is worth to you.

…

Your voluntary support enables us to devote all of our time and energy to making RP the best station possible - and pays for the bandwidth, equipment and services required to keep the station online, and for the rather substantial copyright royalties we are required to pay.

The amount of your contribution is up to you - based on your opinion of how much you enjoy RP & what you can afford. A number of listeners have adopted the “one hour’s wages per month” formula - some can afford to send even more than that (thanks!), others can afford only $5 per month.

We particularly appreciate automatic monthly, quarterly or annual support payments. The more regular ongoing support we receive in that fashion the less we have to bug you on the air. Please consider choosing that option on the support form.

…

And, as always, we understand that contributing money is just not an option for some of you. That’s fine. All streams and services at RP are open to everyone, and we will do everything in our power to keep it that way.

Please check out their great website and their broadcast. And of course, check the wiki, especially the In the News section under External Links.

BitTorrent support for iTunes podcasts. Video podcasts are eating up more and more bandwidth, and podcasters don’t exactly have much money to spare in times like these. Adding a simple BitTorrent client to iTunes would go a long way towards guaranteeing that great shows will stay online even if corporate giants like AOL stop to sponsor podcasters with terabytes of free bandwidth. Apple could even limit the client to a company-run tracker to make sure that iTunes doesn’t become the latest toy of the Pirate Bay crowd. Likelihood of this going to happen: None. Never. Ever.

One media player already does this. Here is an example of how much money show creators can save when they distribute via torrent rss and encourage viewers to use Miro.

There is only one LEGAL way to get all the special features for the latest Batman movie, and that is by buying the Blu-ray disk.

Is this the future you want?

Via iTunes, the Pumpkins album “Zeitgeist” is DRM-ed (here is an explanation of why that sucks.). You can get HQ files without DRM from Amazon MP3, but you have to buy the songs one at a time and cant even buy one of the tracks at all. I have every album but this one, and I wanted to listen to every song by them before attending the concert this Sunday. I will probably download all the tracks but that one from Amazon, but I hate the idea of missing one song from an album, especially from an artist important to me.

Regarding “The Dark Knight”, you can buy the movie on DVD. But it doesn’t have nearly the amount of special features that come with the Blu-ray version. Normally I wouldn’t care that much, but I loved the film & it was filmed downtown in Chicago where I live so I want to pour over all the special features this one time. But I don’t have a Blu-ray player and this is isn’t enough to change my mind.

Yep, of course Ive gotta mention it, publicpatron would solve this problem. Just release the files on your site (in an RSS feed perhaps), and if users of publicpatron listened to the music or watched the special features, the creators would get paid.

Besides, all these anti-consumer strategies do is make more people have even less respect for copyright. You are feeding the monster.