About Farming and the Business of Streaming

An illustration about the purpose and nature of TV Apps, Mobile Apps, Websites and Podcasts
- a little essay for media publishers -

Once upon a time there was an app... and it was destined to accomplish great things. But it felt misunderstood by its master, finding itself in a struggle to reach its potential...

And so the story begins: publishing properties such as apps and sites, are by nature, harvesters. They are harvesting machines.

Your harvest is your viewership. It has to be developed and nurtured in order to grow over time. No farmer would expect this to happen over night, nor to happen miraculously without intentional and strategic work, with great diligence, high level of know-how in many areas, and continuous persistency. To an outsider, a farmer’s daily determination may look like a senseless repetition of daily tasks, as for the better part of a year, it looks like nothing is happening at all. The fields remain more or less barren with only small crops showing after a while. Still, the farmer knows his stubborn daily grind is necessary in order to grow a mighty harvest. And he knows it is coming.

As a publisher, consider yourself a farmer, a big-time farmer. The further you sow your content-seeds, the more platform-fields you are cultivating, the greater the potential for your harvest. In order to maximize and automate seeding, you might want to use a seeding-machine like Lightcast’s Media Cloud, automating distribution to more fields, which you would barely be able to seed manually by hand, at least not within a reasonable timeframe. In the process, make sure to sow the right seeds which produces the type of harvest you are looking for.

Remember, your apps and websites by themselves are not your harvest. They are harvesters. They bring in the harvest.

If you sowed the right seed, across as many fields as possible, and you nurtured your crops with enough marketing-water, your harvest will grow.

Your TV apps, mobile apps, websites and podcasts capture your viewership and bring in your harvest.

But now what? You can’t eat the crops, can you? If you sowed content-seeds to grow grain, you will have to convert it into bread in order to enjoy it.

You sowed good content-seeds across many platform-fields, spreading it with your Lightcast seed-machine, and you patiently and persistently watered your seeds with plenty of marketing-water, your viewership-harvest grew and your app-harvesters captured it for you.

Now you have to convert it into an edible ROI: something you can eat or sell in order to buy stuff or pay bills, and this process is called “conversion”. This is the ultimate goal. Your seeds, fields, water and harvesters are just part of the process, but your ultimate goal is your ROI, and this can be one or multiple of many different business goals - ranging from brand exposure, newsletter subscribers, followers, donors, product sales, service orders, advertising monetization, subscription revenue or PPV ticket sales. Every organization's conversion goals are different. Make sure you know your business goals and how to convert your harvest.

As Lightcast, we are providing you the machines: the seed-machine and the harvester. It is up to you to produce the right content-seeds, apply plenty of marketing fertilizer and water continuously. And once your app-harvesters have captured your viewership-harvest, it is again up to you to convert it into whichever ROI and conversion goal meets your business objectives. No one can replace your content, your marketing strategy and your business conversion. You may use machines to automate and maximize efficiency, but YOU are the farmer, and no one can run your business but you.

Happy farming!
Your Lightcast Success Team