Medialoper

We're Not Who You Think We Are

Jim Connelly

Attack of the Hell Phones!!

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Funny piece in Slate about current pop-culture depictions of the evilness (evilosity?) (eviltude?) of cell phones. Both the current #1 New York Times best seller, Steven King’s Cell and the current #1 movie When a Stranger Calls, have cell phones smack dab in the middle of How It All Goes Wrong. Scary!

While a cynic might point out that a new Stephen King novel and a remake of a movie that contributed one of the most-loved movie quotes ever (“The call . . . it’s coming from inside the house!!) might debut at #1 anyways, that misses at least part of the point: a cutural uneasiness that we are possibly becoming a little bit too connected.

On the other hand, the cell phone doesn’t get a total bad rap in all of pop culture: how else could Jack Bauer save the world every single year with out his magic cell phone that allows him to yell “Do it! Now!” for 24 hours straight without ever losing its charge? Now that’s a service plan that I could get behind.

Comedy Central Gets It

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Comedy Central, encouraged by the response to the downloads of their shows on iTunes is taking the next step, and debuting a series on their own broadband channel, MotherLoad, a few months prior to its debut on their linear channel.

The show is a stand-up comedian showcase called Live at Gotham, and it looks like they will record a show one night, and premiere it the next day. Much like rock artists who offer CDs of the show you just attended as you walk out of it.

While Comedy Central’s MotherLoad isn’t a download service, but rather streaming with commercial, this is still a smart idea, because no doubt the popularity of things The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and the eternal South Park, among others, means that every time there is a buzz episode of those shows, they get a ton of traffic. So why not try to create a new hit show with that traffic?

It seems to be a pretty smart strategy: MotherLoad for those who just want to stream and watch and/or iTunes for those want to download and own. And since the multiple broadcasts that cable offers were probably one of the first cracks in the “window” — timeshifing offered by the source of the programmers themselves (and yes I know that it means that they don’t have to create as much content that way, but it also means more choice for me and, presumeably, higher quality from the programmer) — they seem to be on the leading tip of smashing it completely.

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.

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 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.

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