Posted by Jim Connelly in Amazon, Apple, DRM, Medialoper, Microsoft, Movies, Music, Politics, Television, Unexpected Results, iTunes on Dec 17, 2008
“Ducking the Shoe” is a phrase coined by Daniel Fienberg a couple of days ago on Twitter to mean “escaping even the most minor of punishments for extended errors or misdeeds.”
Well, yeah.
So in the spirit of George W. Bush’s ninja-like ability to duck a shoe thrown at him from point blank range, the following people and things spent 2008 getting away with shit that they really should have been busted on.
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There was an interesting article in the AP yesterday about Battlestar Galactica, and post-finale projects that the producers are planning that will be set in the Galaticaverse.
The point of the article was this: BSG has never had huge numbers, and they are continuing to shrink, so why bother with spinoffs?
Most of the answers in the article had to do with the inadequacy of measuring numbers in this day and age, and how the numbers initially reported by Nielsen don’t reflect the true popularity of the show.
Which may be true, but if show, it’s true for every TV show, not just Battlestar. So what makes Battlestar different from, say, Eureka, which has much higher ratings, but no movies or spinoffs planned?
I’ve got a theory: in a Long Tail universe, it isn’t about the fan quantity as much as it is about the Fan Quality.
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Rather than fight over who was going to get to like the Best Show on Television on the day of the premiere of its much-anticipated third season, we figured that we would split the duties. We are nothing if not democratic at Medialoper.
This isn’t quite an oral history, but just like oral histories, when you put it together, it hopefully gives you a well-rounded view of just what makes Battlestar Galactica so fracking awesome. Note: we’ve just gone ahead and spoiled Seasons One and Two because, well, we believe you should have watched them already anyway. And even if we give something away that we shouldn’t, it won’t matter — as they say, it’s all in the execution. And our beloved Battlestar executes in the best possible way.
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With only a month left before the launch of Season Three of what is probably our consensus favorite show around here, Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi.com has launched a series of “webisodes” — internet-only episodes with brand-new content.
Obviously, Battlestar isn’t the first TV show to do this, but the webisodes were actually delayed for a month or so because of controversy over compensation. It’s the latest variation of the “new media meets old contracts” meta-issue we’ve seen played out over and over again.
In this case, the legal issue can be boiled down to this: what is a “webisode” anyways? Is it strictly promotional? Or is it brand-new content for a brand-new medium?
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A while back, when the first reports of the delay for the “true Video” iPod surfaced, I argued that it might not be such a bad thing for Apple if there were a few months between new iPods.
It seemed to me that there was a possibility of market fatigue with all of the iPods already out there, as well as a bit of a backlash by consumers who discovered that the 60GB iPod that they had just purchased to watch episodes of Battlestar Galactica on a cross-country flight wasn’t the “true” video iPod.
However, there are fresh reports of even longer delays, and we may look back at these delays as the tipping point where the iPod stopped being the center of the universe and started being just another cool gadget.
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