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Archives for February 2006

Super Ratings

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Despite the supposed lack of glamour teams, this year’s Super Bowl was viewed in more homes than any other event in TV history except for the M*A*S*H finale in 1983. Were the recent articles bemoaning the fact that we don’t have mass entertainment moments anymore wrong? Nah. Fragmentation still rules; popularity is still dying. The Super Bowl is just the exception that makes us question the new rules.

Look. The Super Bowl isn’t really about the game – it’s more about having one more excuse for a party. In a unscientific poll taken at our place on Sunday, only 25% of the people there were interested in the game: the rest were there for the food, friends and fun. Which is fine of course, but makes the Super Bowl more like Christmas or Thanksgiving, just with a dollop of violence, commercials and officiating controversy.

Networks, Reality, and The Internet

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Two years ago — my, how time flies — I was looking at the future, or more specifically, looking at the treatment of revenues and expenses related to Made-for-Internet productions. It was a gray area then, and remains somewhat of a gray area now. There are all sorts of financial issues related to the backend needing to be resolved, but that’s not stopping networks and studios from launching Internet-first productions.

NBC is jumping onto the American Idol bandwagon with a new series called StarTomorrow (in the future, it seems that new series will be camel case rather than separate words, but I’ll let someone else ruminate on that). The series will flow through NBC.com, and while it’s unclear how the weekly voting concept will translate to a time-shifting audience, it’s a worthy experiment for a few key reasons:

“StarTomorrow” will cost about 20 percent of what it would cost to produce for the network; advertisers will also pay less for spots, making it (at least initially easier) to attract their interest (and dollars). More importantly, “StarTomorrow” takes NBC further into the realm of digital entertainment.

By staying in the reality television realm, content producers are likely deferring big backend decisions, but as has been made clear, even reality comes with participations and residuals. It will be interesting to see how this rush to push content online resonates with talent. And, of course, I’ll have thoughts on that issue in the near future.

Showtime Inks First Pay TV/iTunes Deal

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I’m going to be honest — I thought HBO would be the first pay television network (it is no longer a channel) to cut a deal with iTunes. I’m not sure why, but my incorrect belief made today’s announcement of a deal between Showtime and iTunes that much better. Sort of like finding a Tootsie Roll in the middle of a sucker.

The press releases tout the new availability of shows like Sleeper Cell and Weed (which my household hasn’t seen yet, but will surely check out now). We’re also looking forward to seeing the last season of The Chris Isaak Show and other series that we missed due to our decision to limit our pay television cash outlay.

And I would be remiss if I neglected to note that CBS owns the Showtime Network.

iPod Prices Approaching Free

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Apple has just lowered prices on both of its iPod Shuffle models and introduced a new 1GB iPod Nano priced at $149. The company now has a wide range of iPods priced from $69 to $399 – seemingly something for everyone.

As Cringley noted last year, Apple seems to be pursuing the King Gillette Strategy (give away the razor to sell more blades)- although at the time Cringley assumed that Apple had turned the Gillette model on its head by eliminating the loss leader altogether.

With every price cut Apple makes it starts to look more and more like the iPod is becoming the razor and that media sales are turning into the the blades. I’m beginning to wonder how long it will be before Apple releases a free 256mb iPod Shuffle tethered to iTunes.

Given a choice I think I’d take a free iPod over an invisible iPod. Although, for the time being, the free iPod is invisible.

HarperCollins Tries Online Publishing On For Size

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There is growing consensus in the publishing community that certain types of books really lend themselves to online ventures. O’Reilly Media has implemented “Rough Cuts”, where readers can access books about new technology while the manuscripts are being written. In a world where people can master the software before the traditional publishing timeline sends a book to market, this new approach represents both great customer service and increased market share.

HarperCollins, looking, oddly enough, to old media models for inspiration, has launched an advertiser-supported program. Readers get the content for free. Remember when you didn’t have to pay to listen to songs? Think pre-Napster.

Why is this revolutionary? Only because it shouldn’t be. To quote Jane Friedman:

“We hope this pilot will demonstrate a win-win for publishers, authors and search engines. The new era does not need to be a zero sum game,” HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman said Monday in a statement.

It’s a nice article, right up to the point where I remember that journalists seem to have lost the ability to analyze statements:

There has been disagreement in the publishing community over the effects of making material available on the Internet. Some worry about online piracy and about readers simply downloading the text, as opposed to paying for it.

This is where the author neglects to point out that consumers will happily pay for content — if it’s delivered in a manner they can readily use. He also neglects to point out that there are legitimate anti-piracy methods available to publishers. The music industry could never wrap its mind around the idea that consumer desires could co-exist with industry desires; I hope the publishing industry doesn’t make the same mistake.

These are not trivial considerations. No one model will fit all sizes; the key to success in the future is serving the maximum number of consumers in the maximum number of feasible ways. That means not assuming anything about the end user. Because as fond as I am of M.J. Rose (and I am), her statement in this article doesn’t necessarily pass the smell test:

But several writers, including marketer Seth Godin and science fiction author Cory Doctorow, have made a point of offering free content online, believing that it helps sales. M.J. Rose, a marketing expert and author of “Lip Service” among other novels, praised HarperCollins for its “smart” initiative.

“We all know that readers don’t want to read the whole book online,” Rose said. “But as Seth Godin proved with `Unleashing the Idea Virus’ — people will start a book on line and if they get hooked — click over and purchase it.”

There is no proof — mostly because it hasn’t been tested — that readers don’t want to read the whole book online. Currently, online texts don’t have user-friendly features, like bookmarks. If I could bookmark stuff at Project Gutenberg, I would. I might even pay for a “My Project Gutenberg” feature because I access classic literature often enough that it makes sense to me. It might be an innovative way to support a great initiative while providing cool service.

If I were a self-help, non-fiction-of-a-certain-bent (say diet books, for example) person, I’d want to access the whole book online at my convenience. Heck, look at the O’Reilly example. “Rough Cuts” might prove to accelerate the adoption and maturation of many programming techniques (not to mention teaching your mother to work her DVR, if they go in that direction). The key is to remember that each consumer is going to interact with media in a way that works for that particular consumer — it is no longer the right of the content providers to dictate the terms of consumption. The generation behind the generation behind me already has inherent assumptions. That is where publishing should be looking.

Meaning books as we know them won’t die. But books as we know them might become the productions their authors envision. And HarperCollins shouldn’t view one experiment in isolation. They see the future, and it’s not going to be a slam dunk. At first.

Another Week, Another CBS Fiasco

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Here’s what happened while CBS wasn’t trying to make up its mind:

  • Pirates: It Takes One to Know One: Will the music industry read this? Probably not.
  • Survey says: music costs too much, and it sucks – Of course this same survey could have been taken in 1966 or 1976 or 1986 or 1996 and had the same results. People have been complaining about the price and quality of music for decades.
  • A Wi-Fi iPod – Looks like Apple is working on an iPod equipped with wi-fi. Great… there goes another $400.
  • TV event draws a rare big crowd – It certainly drew a large crowd to our apartment, but of course it may have been the free food that drew everyone and not the game itself.
  • Digital Deadline Set: 2/17/09 – This just came over the telegraph: over the air analog TV transmissions will cease on February 17, 2009. Of course, if you still have a pair of rabbit ears on top of your TV, you’re probably not reading this anyway.

HDTV: Moving Beyond the Early Adopters

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One sure sign that a product is about to fully explode into the mass consciousness is when the terminology surrounding that producut starts getting recontextualized. The assumption being — of course — that enough people get the original reference to understand it in other contexts. And so when products like sunglasses and countertops get defined as “high definition,” you know it’s just about time for it to explode.

And indeed, it is poised to: since the introduction of the digitial TV in 1998, there have been 15 million sold, and that number is supposed to hit 50 million by 2009. Contrast that with color television’s first decade, which only netted 5 million new people.

There are issues: if you’ve already shelled out for a Tivo or a Replay (or two: since we time-shift all of our entertainment, we have a solution for the Lost / Veronica Mars on at the same time problem) you’re pretty much out of luck — as the addition of HD channels to your cable/satellite provider need to be watched live, or you need to spend more for one of your provider’s bundled HD DVRs.

And here’s another issue: the sheer size of current most HDTVs means that — when you decide to upgrade (and you will) — it won’t be easy to just turn your old HD TV into the bedroom TV or the kids TV, effectively ending an American Tradition of hand-me-downs.


High-definition hype splashes beyond TVs

CBS Considers iTunes – Another Win For Apple’s FairPlay DRM

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Earlier this week Jim beat me to a rant about the many things CBS is doing wrong with its video storefront. Charging $1.99 for an episode of Survivor that expire in 24 hours is ludicrous. It’s such a bad idea that there’s a special room reserved for CBS in the Medialoper Hall of Shame.

Who in their right mind would actually pay to download a video file with those restrictions? Now that CBS is talking to Apple about selling programming on iTunes we’ll probably never know.

It would be tempting to assume that CBS just couldn’t get it’s act together while NBC and ABC saw the opportunity to score big with iTunes. However, on further investigation this is more than just a story about a major network making some obvious screw-ups while trying to figure out how best to sell its programming in the new media-everywhere era.

This is really about CBS attempting to resist Apples FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) while maintaining maximum control over the network’s content. It’s also about a major network realizing it was fighting a loosing battle by resisting iTunes.

Some major aspects of CBS’s recent video download experiments have been glossed over by media analysts. For one, “the experts” have failed to note that Survivor episodes have the same 24 expiration on Google Video (look closely and you’ll see it’s $1.99 for “a day pass”). The content expiration is undoubtedly enforced through Microsoft DRM, which means that CBS’s downloads will not play on iPods (or Mac’s, for that matter).

When you get right down to it, content creators have a choice. Maintain maximum control over their content by using Microsoft DRM, or give up some of that control and sell their content in a format that plays on the most popular portable media device on the planet.

Alternately, content providers could sell content that has absolutely no DRM protection through other venues, but it’s unlikely that we’ll see major media companies doing that any time soon.

To recap for those who seem to be missing the big picture:

  • Google: DRM = Windows only – no iPod support
  • CBS Store: DRM = Windows only – no iPod support
  • iTunes: DRM = Windows/Mac – iPod only (but there are way more iPods than anything else)

Rehabilitating Movie Theaters

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It’s not easy being a movie theater these days: for more reasons that I can recount, people aren’t seeing theater-going as the best way to enjoy motion pictures. Studios and theater owners are rapidly moving toward digital distribution (see also: customized content for theaters), but this expensive investment in infrastructure sometimes feels desperate. It’s not scratchy prints that ranks highest on the consumer dissatisfaction list.

But digital distribution will allow theaters to use their spaces for more than traditional films. You can now enjoy all the glory of a concert without the hassle of parking and crowds. And if you’re short like me, chances are you spend more time watching the video monitors than the action on stage. . .if only because you can’t actually see over the person in front of you. In addition to music, look for sporting events and conventions (ah, the joy of going to a movie theater and munching on popcorn during the Democratic National Convention). And look for some confusion on the part of patrons:

“I’ve never been to one of these,” one attendee noted, “so I don’t know whether I am supposed to sit and watch or stand and clap.”