WHAT DOES FACEBOOK’S MOVE TO MOVIES MEAN FOR MEDIA COMPANIES?

Recently, Warner and Facebook announced that they will be offering the rental of the movie Dark Night on the social networking site.

I’m sure even if they wouldn’t want to accept it, this move by Facebook has given many new media startups and media incumbants sleepless nights. The announcement even sent Netflix’s stock down. The billion dollar question is, is this a real threat to media content distribution companies or just another move by an over-grown startup that is trying to own everything else online, of course apart from search which Google already owns.

If you have followed Internet companies for at least 6 to 7 years, you should know that every move facebook makes should be taken seriously.

If you look at their continuous iterations and for the fact that they have more than 600 million registered members, you will see the large distribution power they have over anything. If there is one thing they learned from creating a huge open platform, is that the money is not on the platform itself (facebook) but on ecommerce services third parties have shown them how to create, grow and monetize off their own platform. This is the best thing about creating an open platform and giving users and third parties control, you get to tap into their creativity and ultimately find monetization ways you wouldn’t have thought of. {This is a complete post on its own on how to get users to creatively show you how to monetize}.

So Facebook can definitely give media startups a run for their money and yes, we in the business should be worried. Even media companies and startups in Africa should be worried, this is why;

Facebook is good with taking things Global, advertisers may argue Facebook ads are not as effective as Google’s adwords but believe me, Facebook ads are more geo-targeted.

Facebook’s global strategy was one of the reasons they beat myspace. Facebook grew well with International markets and Myspace was still bigger than Facebook in America.

Big brands are all jumping on the Facebook ride. It’s completely debatable if this is going to last or not, afterall we’ve seen AOL. But personally I believe Facebook is different and could get even bigger than Google. Facebook taps into our behaviour to design how we interact and use the site, so unless human behaviour completely changes, Facebook is here to stay (I know this is a very bold prediction, still I’m ready and willing to make).

Social gaming is very succesful on Facebook, and social TV could even be more successful. Facebook can even make local social TV successful for their recorded success in scoring local advertising deals.

If Facebook could connect people based on their interest and location through movies and TV? Boom!! It would be the biggest media company. I’m not exagerating here...
So with all these, what do you do as a small video content startup?

1. Niche Distribution.

This is debatable because Facebook is divided into networks and that covers lots of niche markets. Still if you have a huge reach in a niche, lets say lovers of movies in a particular African language or setting, then you have a stay of execution.

2. Exclusive content.

Netflix is moving to create it’s own network quality TV content. You need exclusivity to differentiate and that exclusivity is going to be hard because the content owners will go to someone with bigger distribution to produce more revenue for their content.

3. User experience

This is the one that will actually determine if you’ll win or lose. User experience in media design is everything. Content of course is king, and once your technology doesn’t suck, the one with the best user experience wins. If you can beat the geeks in designing for viewing (social networking and watching a show or movie are active and passive things respectively) since the people at Facebook may not hit the nail on its head the first time, then you’ll get some much needed traction in time.

Even though the Netflix boss said “people don’t go to Facebook to watch movies”, we at AfricaMars media are taking nothing for granted.

Facebook is bigger than just a social network, its becoming a global community and in every community people live, eat, work and do so many other things. Same with Facebook, people mainly connect on facebook, but soon they will work on it, discover information and entertainment on it, may be even study and of course always go there to kill boredom (watching movies) ;)