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We're Not Who You Think We Are

Jim Connelly

CBS Bypasses iTunes, Common Sense

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In the latest twist on the road to anything, anytime, anywhere, CBS has decided to sell downloads of Survivor directly from its online store rather than going through iTunes or some other middleman. This is the first time one of the major networks is doing this, so it will be interesting to see what happens. Good.

The network is calling it an “experiment,” and saying that it doesn’t mean that they won’t be going through iTunes for other shows in the future. Also good: one wonders how long the exclusive deals like what NBC & ABC have with iTunes should and will last (though with Steve Jobs becoming a huge stakeholder in Disney, it’s not likely that AOL or Google will be getting Lost any time soon), or whether or not a more traditional model of the networks making the videos available (for a price) for any outlet willing to host them will end up taking hold.

However, there is one caveat on all this. A big enough issue toss the whole experiment right off of the island: the downloads will “expire” 24 hours after purchase. Sigh. Even if this works on the technological tip, and people don’t immediately figure out how to hack it, it still never works as a long-term business strategy. It didn’t work for videos in the 80s; Divx in the 90s, and it probably won’t work for CBS now. (Or Napster, but that’s another post for another time.) And it taints the whole “eliminate the middleman” part of this story, because they aren’t offering the same service as iTunes or AOL.

Here’s the thing: price it low enough so I want to purchase it. And let me play it when I want to play it on whatever device I choose. And let me copy it forward to play on my other media.

That’s all.

  • CBS Cuts Out Download Middleman

    • iTuning Inside Out?

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    Someone broke down what it would cost them to watch every episode of every TV show that they watch and is currently on iTunes, and decided that, because it was way more than their cable bill, it wasn’t worth it. Especially when they figured that iTunes doesn’t cover the full extent of what they could watch like, presumably, Cable or Satellite does.  Though I need to point out that I never saw Brilliant But Canceled because my cable provider never carried Trio.)

    Still, it’s an interesting piece, but I would argue, misses the point the point of the iTunes (or anybody else’s) downloads.  This isn’t a choice between say, Cable or iTunes.  The choice is between Cable and/or iTunes.  And it’s the “and/” which makes all of the difference.  It isn’t going to replace the experience of watching on my HD TV in my living room, but its going to supplement it. If I missed the end of Lost because those frackheads at ABC decided to run it an extra minute and not tell my Replay about that fact, now I have the choice of downloading it.  If I’m going on a trip to the U.K., and want to prove to a broadband-challenged friend over there that the U.S. of The Office has discovered its own groove quite outside of what Ricky Gervais did (perhaps with the back-to-back eps touting the iPod and the Prism DuroSport), I can now do that. 

    Which, I think, is more to the point.  Shelling out a couple of bucks occasionally for reasons you can’t always forsee right this second.

     

    AOLD Rush

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    When we ask for more content created specifically for the Web audience, the new Mark Burnett “reality” series Gold Rush! isn’t really what we mean.
    It looks like it’s little more than a glorified ad campaign, designed solely to increase traffic to the various AOL websites that will host it, and while it very well may be a hit — after all, greed is a powerful motivator — it still shouldn’t be confused with actual, you know, content.

    And while Burnett seems to get the future:

    He believes that in a few years television and online sites will be widely available on the same screen, and viewers will be going back and forth between the two media seamlessly.

    does anybody believe that he would be doing this if his most recent TV shows hadn’t been tanking?

    Placeshifting

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    As the ability to watch anything, anytime, anywhere begins to filter down from the early adopters to the masses, we are going to see a lot more articles like this one in the Christian Science Monitor:  where a “real person” (whom is usually the tech or entertainment reporter) integrates the technology into her life for a period and reports the results.

    She calls it “timeshifting,” which has been a familiar concept for a couple of decades now, but it’s really more “placeshifting” — the “anytime” factor is pretty much a given; the novelty is now the “anyplace” on multiple devices.

    Buffy the Network Slayer

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    Turns out that the move of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from The WB to UPN may have been the catalyst that set both networks on the road to their eventual merger.

    On one had, while financially a good move for The WB — they didn’t have to pay the huge licensing fees to Fox, who produced it — it was an apocalyptically bad move for the network’s brand, which had built youth-oriented programming around the audience that gathered around Buffy and other shows built around snarky post-everything teens. And we all know what happens when long-term brand identity is sacrificied for short-term financial gain.

    At the same time, it may have saved UPN, or at least turned it into the walking dead, and like most zombies the UPN went in search of brains, but unfortunately, they only found models. So they essentially went after The WB’s demographic, which resulted in Veronica Mars — yay — and enough money-drainage for them to pack everything in and form The CW, about which the jury is still very out.

    Fanfic Writ Large

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    Fanfic has no doubt been around since, well, probably the very second story ever told. Somebody probably liked the first story so much that they used the same characters and had them kill an ocelot or giant weevel instead of a dinosaur.

    Since that time, somebody has liked somebody else’s stories so much that they just had to write their own versions, even if those versions never found it into the official canon. Fast-forward to the late 20th Century, and fan fiction becomes just another profit stream for savvy media companies. And while Nicholas Meyer’s “The Seven-Percent Solution” is possibly the most artistically successful fanfic ever published — even if got up the noses of Holmes’ purists — it took the Star Trek people to really monetize fan fiction.

    [Read more…] about Fanfic Writ Large

    GoogVid Admits Mistakes, Takes Baby Steps . . . Still Sucks

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    In an interesting mea culpa, Google Video Vice President Marissa Mayer admitted this week that “We made a big mistake” with the rollout of their video download service, which was graciously described by the New York Times as “appallingly half-baked.”  More like not even kneaded.  Clearly, it was a last-second idea, rushed out in order to meet the totally artificial deadline of making a “hey, we can do video too!!” announcement at CES.

    Let’s just say that, right now, Google Video is Bridges to Babylon as compared to Google Earth’s Exile on Main Street. (iTunes is Bringing it All Back Home.)

    However, it seems that Google seems to think that the mistake centered more on not putting the pay content front and center as opposed to the “slap up some thumbnails” design and the maddening lack of any kind of categorization, consistency or context for the videos they offer on their home page.

    “We made a big mistake,” Mayer, who oversees all of Google’s search products, said Tuesday. “You can’t come out and launch a product like Google Video and say ‘CSI’ and ‘Survivor’ are there if they’re not on the home page.”

    The solution: cram the “for sale” videos into smaller thumbnails at the top of the page, but it still only takes a couple of clicks until you are once again stuck in a giant page of 15 videos with your only navigation choice being the utterly maddening “Another 15 videos from the store” clicking away over and over and over and over and never knowing what you are going to get on the next page, but you know whatever it is, there are only going to be 15 of them just randomly picked and slapped on the page so you continue clicking away over and over and over world without end amen . . .

    Or you know, you just go over to iTunes.

    CW: Worst Network Name Ever?

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    CBS and Warner Brothers have announced plans today to merge their eternall-struggling WB and UPN networks into a single entity called CW.  CW? CW. A combination of CBS and Warner Brothers.  Wow. They are so not even trying, are they?

     Seriously. CW. Is that not the most meaningless name for wannabe Major Network ever?  Spike and F/X, come home, all is forgiven. We have a new winner. Once upon a time, the broadcast network acronyms meant something.  Columbia Broadcasting System.  National Broadcasting Corporation.  Even United Paramount Network had a certain ring to it, even if they’ve not had a half-dozen shows worth watching in their entire existence. Sure, FOX wasn’t really an acroynm, but it was an established name, at least WB meant “Warner Brothers” even as they tried to edgily market to their audience by adding a “The” to it. 

    But CW?  Clearly that just stands for Corporate Weasels. 

    The Curse of Availability

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    Interesting thinkpiece in the today’s PopMatters about how the explosion of alternate versions, deluxe reissues and bootleg recordings could possibly alter and in some cases, diminish our original perception of a particularly beloved piece of music.

    This has, of course, been going on since the earliest days of the CD reissue, but as record companies struggle with the new paradigm of anything anywhere anytime, they often release two or three different versions of an individual album within the space of a few months.  This is often frustrating to the people who ran out and bought the original version, only to have it become obselete a few months later.  Perhaps, though, it brings in those who were on the fence in the first place.

    In the meantime, did the fact that I’ve been collecting live Wilco bootlegs for a decade end up enhancing or diminishing the pleasure I got from their recent live album? (Enhancing, but only because I know that Wilco is one of those bands who does something different each time out.) Will the eventual issuing of the Basement Tapes in their full ragged splendor be an event or a ho-hum because nearly everyone who cares already has downloaded or copied all of those dozens of recordings?  Barring some new treasure trove, or absolutely perfect sequencing, I’m guessing the latter: not because the music isn’t great, but precisely because it is so great, I’ve already wringed nearly everything from it that I’m going to.

    The Window is Closed

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    Back in the 1980’s, video store proprieters referred to the amount of time between when a huge hit such as “Rambo” or “Beverly Hills Cop” debuted in the movie theatres and the time when a person could enjoy the same piece of entertainment at home. Typically this window was between several months and a year, depending on how big of a hit the movie was. The flipside of this, of course, were those films that the studios deemed to be huge turkeys, and didn’t even bother to put in the theatres: the much-derided “straight-to-video,” which was code for “this movie sucks.”

    Over the past two decades, that has all changed for several reasons: things like the video & DVD revenues making hits of films that failed in the theatres; the splintering of the mass audience into a zillion different pieces; the rise of digital media and distribution have all contributed to lessen the equation that theatre release means quality in the mind of the public.

    So that window kept rolling up: a year became six months became 3 months becomes simultaneous. At the end of this month, a film from a major director — Steven Soderbergh — will be simultaneously released in theatres, DVD and HDTV. On purpose, as a marketing strategy, with no comment implied on the quality of the film itself. This is a quantum leap, even if the movie tanks or sucks (and it’s one of his more experimental films, so we’ll see), the idea itself of the release window is antiquated in a world where you can have everything when you want it.

    And if it even remotely succeeds, we will be able to add downloading to that simultaneous release schedule very very soon.