 Hi, this is Gerd Leonhard, media futurist in Basel, Switzerland today with a new episode of Gertjupe Friction is fiction This is a very important topic in fact It's so important that I wrote a book about it called friction is fiction if you want to get a free download off the book Go to friction is fiction.com and you can download you can also buy it on Amazon if you wish to buy that trees You can get it there and of course on Lulu So what I mean with friction is fiction basically what friction is it's some sort of hurdle That makes us do things because we want something so in the case of for example If you want a movie we have to buy a DVD or we have to get cable TV We have to do something to go over this hurdle and that's friction that generates revenues For example in music the friction is that either we download for free and we're sort of illegal in preventives Or we stream on YouTube which is sort of half legal in any case if we want to be doing the right thing and be legal And we have to buy an itunes and the friction is that it costs a dollar and we have to use Apple equipment so what's happening now is that a lot of people are getting worried about this idea of Getting over these hurdles all the time for example If you're looking at this lights many ways on the internet now you get in these notices When you're trying to play a video that's filmed in America You can't see it here because it's not licensed here if you buy a DVD in Hong Kong a real Purchased, you know legal DVD you put it in the DVD player here It won't play because there's a region coding so called region coding on it If you want to make a ringtone from your eye Itunes song it won't work because it is protected by copy protection or it used to be they have changed it now Now Apple has a device where you connect a certain kind of monitor to the to the notebook It won't play because you could record from the monitor output And so there's all these frictions that make people do things and of course now newspapers are starting to say well If you want to read the New York Times more than 12 times a month or whatever it is Whatever they've then you have to pay the $25 you have to subscribe. That's the so-called paywall so we've seen this friction all around us and Now it's becoming very hard to actually accept this I mean this is that this screenshot here is from my iPad where I purchased the 15 movies for my wife for a birthday We were on an airplane turns out that the 15 movies are bought for three year was a piece Only last for four weeks until they get automatically deleted Because that's the rule that Apple and the content owners have cooked up So five weeks later. We're on the airplane. None of the movies are working right and so what this makes The consequence of this for for consumers is that we're saying you know what we don't care whether it's illegal or not We just go somewhere else because this is just too much hassle We're no longer willing to accept all of the friction for example 15 years ago to book an airline ticket We'd have to go on the telephone and call the airline and they would have a database called Amadeus or whatever It's in those days and they could look up the connection for us and quote the price and the fact that they knew about this Made them able to charge more and of course enabled them to also charge a commission today We go to kalyak.com or we go to Expedia or we go the trip advisor We can look up the same thing. In fact now when I'm at the airport waiting for my flight to take off I use an app called flight tracker and this app knows more about the upcoming flight that I'm on than the person at the gate All right, because I have the power of the app connected to the web with all the information The person at the gate does not so we're no longer really happy about this friction things is artificial hurdles And you can see in the music business that the music business has declined 71% in the last 10 years because all we ever got there for the good money that we spend was friction And the same will happen with books if we're going to rent a book buy a book on the Kindle or on the iPad or whatever And the book is 14 euros electronically and then the printed book is 16 Then the value of the electronic book is like 50 cents because I can't give it to anyone I can't can't even print it because it's too big right and then it will eventually expire if somebody pulls the trigger So this kind of friction points won't work. That's why one of my main theories is friction is fiction That also goes for business context for example in banking anything that makes the customer unhappy Is not a good thing As you can see on this slide the idea of disconnecting people from the internet because the finding alternative is a very bad idea Because it criminalizes them rather than solving their problems You can see here what's happening with the pay balls of the times in the UK They've lost 70% of their traffic after they put up the pay wall So you have to pay before you can read the newspaper online Also in most cases not a good idea because it's creating lots and lots of friction is much better to do what the Huffington Post is doing or what many other businesses doing which is to make it fluid for the user The alternative as you can see on this slide is to make the process fluid to make it work and organic and Many cases also means rather cheap or affordable lower the price make it wanted as we've seen for example in the US Ever since mobile providers came up with flat rates a thousand minutes for $15 Everybody's using the mobile phone. So flat rates blanket offers Bundles and those kind of things that's that's really fluid if you're looking at some of these examples that I'm coming up with in the next slide as It's also really important to be transparent about the pricing so that we don't feel like we're becoming a victim of friction so Very important point here is that if you're in business and you're monetizing you're making money because you're putting up some hurdles You can pretty much anticipate in the near future Those hurdles will be removed by law by consumer action by people ignoring you That's pretty much inevitable And so the process of removing the friction can be rather painful because we've gotten so used to it But what we're seeing around the world is that this is something people will not be accepting in the future so we need to create fluid and liquid environments if you're looking what YouTube has achieved by making Self-produced video and other video available in a frictionless way. It's extremely powerful Facebook right now 700 billion minutes spent a month on Facebook because that experience completely fluid. There's no friction. There's no what if there's no Repeat logings. There's no payments for now, you know, we can Probably buy Facebook credits eventually by other things with that So the liquid stuff is what's really happening if you're looking at Wikipedia and YouTube and and of course Twitter and and eBay and Skype It's the stuff that works without bothering us with unneeded friction the stuff that does not work DVDs region coding cable television to a very large degree the music business Traditional ways of booking hotels and stuff. I mean every single hotel now you can book online You can watch videos. You can read the critiques. You can look up on TripAdvisor So the power is moving to the consumer. So friction is fiction make this sort of a paradigm of your business I think would be good advice for the future Thanks very much for listening and go to mediafuturists.com to check my videos and futureof.biz to read more about friction is fiction and of course finally my Book URL is friction is fiction.com again The book is free if you want to download it as a PDF Dead tree you have to pay for making a tree dead. Thanks very much and see you around