Jim Connelly

The Weekly ‘Loper – August 6, 2006

August 6, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were working on your spreadsheet of who started which war when, here’s what we were looking at:

Suggestions For The New Media World – Some simple suggestions for those who want to be part of the changers, not the changees.
MTV Looks Better Than You Did At 25 – But then again, you drink a lot more than MTV did, too.
More Fun In The Digital World – Given the democratic nature of digitalizing content, we probably won’t be asking “who killed the ebook?” anytime soon, so the question is whether or not publishers are going to get serious about digitizing their backlists, because somebody is going to.
Why MySpace Won’t Live To See 25 – The second something like MySpace gets to be big enough to be purchased by, say Rupert Murdoch, it’s peaked.
Hollywood’s True Long Tail – It’s movies on TV. Who would have thought that Monster Chiller Horror Theatre was actually a profit center?
That’s What I Like: Countdown With Keith Olbermann – Kassia points out that there’s nothing sexier than a guy who wears glasses.
5 Signs That Zune Has Already Jumped the Shark – Perhaps, but in France, they make an amazing baked Zune with a white wine reduction sauce. At least that’s what I saw on the Helo Cooking Show.
No Heat, Little Vision & Jacking Off – I think that I’m going to make a pilot about uploading my reject pilot to YouTube and waiting for another network to call me about it.

No Heat, Little Vision & Jacking Off

August 5, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Because in Hollywood, no idea is ever too good not to try over and over and over again until it’s made the transformation from unique to ubiqutious, rejected pilots are now popping up all over YouTube and other sites like break.com.

As if the set of circumstances that made NBC’s picking up of Nobody’s Watching were, you know, easily duplicated.

MTV Looks Better Than You Did At 25

August 1, 2006 by Jim Connelly

MTV turns 25 today, and love it or hate it, it’s hard to imagine a pop culture landscape without it. Like the iPod, it took an that took an existing type of musical content — music videos had been around for decades — and turned it into a disruptive force.

And then abandoned it almost immediately. If they first made their name by the novelty of the music video, they kept their name by slowly turning their focus away from those videos. (Variations of the “MTV doesn’t play videos anymore” jokes started almost immediately and have aged worse than the channel itself.) Even though I have pretty much stopped watching MTV, I have always admired how they’ve managed to stay relevant. And I think that the they fact that they made it part of their programming philosophy to continually change in the same way that pop culture continually changes is how they’ve done it.

Googlin’ Mobile, Keep Me Movin’

July 26, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I am a map geek. And I am a traffic geek. Back when I was doing my 45-mile (one way!) commute in the Bay Area, I would always check the Web obessively prior to leaving, listen to traffic reports while driving, even call the special TravInfo phone number. None of that was really effective, at least partially because there was no way to get an on-the-fly visual overview of what was going on once I actually hit the road. Not on my budget.

Until now, that is.

NBC: Getting Smarter

July 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

When faced with the world of 21st Century Television, different networks do different things to bring audiences to their shows. In the past couple of weeks we’ve learned that FOX will continue to ruin the baseball playoffs; ABC wants to disable the fast-forward button on DVRs and CBS is going to advertise on food.

Lame lame lame. (Actually, I recognize that the FOX/MLB partnership is shrewd from the marketing standpoint; it’s just that I’m a lifelong baseball fan who recoils in horror at being faced with Tim McCarver, those dopey “Sounds of the Game” and sitcom stars in box seats every goddamn October until 2053 or whenever it is.)

So just when you’d figure that NBC would also come up with some kind of dumbass stunt or idea of their own, they actually go in the complete opposite direction and do something very very smart.

[Read more…] about NBC: Getting Smarter

Bloggers Just Wanna Have Fun

July 24, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Last week, I ran across an print ad in Newsweek for Technorati, probably the major blog-tracking service. The ad copy went like this:

Behind every breaking story, there’s a Blog
Behind every emerging trend, there’s a Blog
Beind every big scandal, there’s a Blog
Find it.

Every single day, the blogosphere gets blamed or credited for some world-changing event or another. Hell, this very blog has done it at least twice in the past week. Given of all of the coverage of the “blogosphere,” you might imagine it as one of those amorphous clouds in an old Star Trek episode, lurching this way and that, firing laser shots of truth and opinion at various politicians, athletes, tech companies, and the entertainment industry.

And you would be wrong.

The Weekly ‘Loper – July 23, 2006

July 23, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were watching the Weather Channel in disbelief — 111 degrees, WTF!?! — here’s what we were looking at:

Graying, Balding, Is The Record Store Ready For Retirement? – Probably, but I’ll always have fond memories of the amazing amount of time I spent in places like Tower, Ragin’ and Amoeba, pouring over the racks, trying to find something that was new and different and surprising and maybe even life-changing.
CBS Eggvertising: The Yolk’s On Us – Are there any surfaces that aren’t covered with ads anymore?
The RIAA and the Blogosphere – Like Oil and Water – The RIAA really needs to just pull its head out and realize that criminializing your customers might not be the best way to keep those customers.
Reaching Operatic Heights — Why isn’t Opera reaching a wider audience?
CinemaNow Steps Up (A Little) — After Movielink announced that they were going to let people burn movies to DVD at some point in the future, CinemaNow just went ahead and offered the ability. Just once. And not with new releases. And for Windows XP users only.
Blogosphere Without Pity — In which another hotshot TV producer professes to be shocked — shocked! — at the speed and fury of internet conversation about his show.
That’s What I Like: Robert Christgau – Jim discusses his favorite rock critic. In case you assumed that it would be Lester Bangs, that’s a good guess, except Bangs has missed the last quarter-century, and who knows where he would be right now. I’ve always figured that he would have quit writing about music eventually.
How Can I Get My TV Pilot Picked Up? — This may mark the peak of YouTube’s power. Especially if Nobody’s Watching doesn’t live up to the promise of the pilot. They’ll have to reshoot it anyways, and that’s where it will get interesting.
Hong Kong’s Anti-Piracy Sweatshop – My understanding that the merit badge for this like a bootlegged “Pirates of the Caribbean” DVD case with a circle slash over it.

How Can I Get My TV Pilot Picked Up?

July 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

Dear Lopy:

I just made a pilot for a big (OK, big-ish) TV Network, and it was rejected for being different from other TV shows. How can I get it picked up by another network?

Signed,

Hapless in Hollywood

Dear Hapless,

Here’s how to get your rejected pilot picked up by another network, in six easy steps.

That’s What I Like: Robert Christgau

July 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I first discovered Robert Christgau in the hallowed pages of Creem Magazine. It was nearly 30 years ago, and I was a music-crazy high school kid trying to come to terms with not just the two decades of rock ‘n’ roll I’d already missed, but this punk rock thing I was reading about, but not hearing. You gotta remember that, back in the day, not only was there no internet, there were no radio stations in Fresno that were playing anything more adventurous than The Cars, and everybody I knew were on a steady diet of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss and AC/DC. So I bought album after album without hearing a note; based entirely on what people wrote about them. That’s just what you did.

Punk Rock changed my life, for sure, but Creem was the catalyst. (And The Clash was the agent, but that’s another story.)

Since I spent every penny of disposable income on records, I didn’t have the money for a subscription, so I went to Thrifty’s Drugs (Tower Records wasn’t selling magazines yet) every day during the middle of every month because that’s when I noticed it would show up.

There was no doubt that it was just about my favorite thing in the universe. I devoured each issue, over and over again, month after month. And my favorite thing of alll was Christgau’s Consumer Guide.

CinemaNow Steps Up (A Little)

July 19, 2006 by Jim Connelly

A couple of days ago, I discussed the announcement by the film download service Movielink that they had licensed software to allow downloaded films to be burnt to DVD. Of course, there was still the tiny little hurdle of getting the studios to go along with their plan. Maybe by the end of the year.

Enter CinemaNow. They announced yesterday that they have not only licensed DVD-burning software and gotten a studios to take a flyer on the concept, but they have actually started offering the service. Naturally, there are issues.