Medialoper

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This Week In Media

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Continuing a long-standing tradition* here at Medialoper, we bring you all the news we couldn’t bring ourselves to rant or rave about — despite the fact that this news will change your life. Also it gives me something to do while I wait to see what I’m getting when I download Battlestar Galactica Vignette 2. More on the Battlestar experience to come later — here’s the news.

  • Verizon to Start TV Service in N.Y., Mass.: Like all smart phone service providers, Verizon is rollilng out the fiber optic and obtaining television broadcast franchise licenses (good news for cities who need the bucks). Like ATT, Verizon started it FiOS services in Texas before rolling the service out to other locations. The broadband, hopefully lightning fast, fiber optic will bring the standard slew of HBO, Showtime, ESPN delights to the masses.
  • Vote of Confidence for S&S – CBS head Les Moonves must have taken a tour of the Simon & Schuster dungeon because he’s discovered thousands upon thousands of potential moneymakers. In addition to providing a vote of confidence to the publishing house, Moonves realizes that a giant backlist is just content waiting to be exploited. We agree.
  • BusinessWeek: More blogs, less ads – FishbowlNY notes that BusinessWeek has goen blog-happy in light of declining advertising. Clearly, they have seen the future, and realize that creating a strong online presence now will be the key to survival. Not only is online cheaper to produce and maintain, but creating go-to content areas will bring back the advertising bucks — maybe not to print edition prices, but it’s clear that print edition prices aren’t long for this world anyway.
  • Breaking News: AT&T reaches out and touches…Endeavor – Meanwhile, FishbowlLA uncovers a first-of-its-kind (we hope) alliance: AT&T has partnered with Endeavor. One can only assume the telecom giant isn’t looking to go on casting calls, and one can only guess as to what a talent agency brings to the table. We will officially begin the countdown to AT&T’s “original content” announcement.
  • Netflix looks to download arena – As company revenue soars for Q4, year – Despite exceeding growth targets in 2005, Netflix is talking all downloadable video all the time. Without getting specific of course. The question remains whether the studios and Netflix are nimble enough to change to a multi-delivery business model.
  • Google May Be Close To Developing iTunes Competitor – A Bear Stearns analyst is speculating that Google, coveting that iTunes demographic (and all those lovely consumer dollars), will roll out a music service. Said analyst doesn’t explain how Google will differentiate its service from the already-crowded music market or the dead services along the trail. It is expected that Google’s entry, should it happen, will hit the Internet within six months.
  • The Long Snout – O’Reilly, an early adopter of online technologies to deliver content, notably reducing really heavy books to bits and bytes, is now offer “Rough Cuts”. The new service will allow subscribers to access works-in-progress. Given that the publisher plays heavily to the programming and technology crowds, this approach will get usable information out to market much faster and more effectively than the traditional publishing model.
  • TimesSelect Draws About 156,000 Web-Only Subs in First 4 Months – Proving that the paid content model isn’t dead, the New York Times online subscription sevice, TimesSelect, has pulled in over 150,000 paid subscribers. The NYT continues to tinker with the model, but given this early success, it shows that people will pay for content they want.

* – Like a collection, a tradition is formed when we have more than one of something.

iTunes Expands Programming: SpongeBob and Cartman To Corrupt iPod Nation

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The next time your grandmother downloads a copy of Monk from iTunes you can ask her to grab a classic episode of South Park for you while she’s at it. iTunes has just expanded it’s video programming, adding 14 new shows aimed squarely at a much younger audience than previous offerings.

Shows from Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central made their downloadable debuts this past friday. Individual programs are available for now standard $1.99.

Initial feedback to the new offerings has been mixed. A few comments on the site have questioned the pricing of the first two seasons of South Park, noting that the DVD’s are available from Amazon not much more. It’ll be interesting to see iTunes responds to this criticism or continues with a the flat pricing structure that has been so successful in their music store.

A full list of new programs:

  • South Park (seasons 1 and 2)
  • Drawn Together
  • Best of Comedy Central Standup
  • SponeBob SquarePants
  • Dora the Explorer
  • Zoey 101
  • Beavis and Butt-head (season 1)
  • Laguna Beach
  • Wonder Showzen
  • Gauntlet 2
  • My Super Sweet 16
  • Jackass
  • Punk’d
  • South of Nowhere

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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Is Google Music Next?

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Forbes is reporting that Wall Street analysts apparently have reason to believe that Google is developing a music service in an attempt to take on iTunes. As a result, these same analysts are maintaining an “outperform” rating and a target stock price of $550.

It sorta makes you wonder if these analysts have actually used the Google Video service – or iTunes for that matter.

As Jim just noted in his most recent post (see below) even Google has realized they’ve botched the beta launch of their video product. They’re nowhere near having the user experience or seamless end-to-end content delivery that iTunes offers it’s users. One can only imagine that a Google music service would be even more of a mess (after all, they’re likely to have more content).

On the other hand, a Google music service that allows musicians around the world to easily add their music to a global marketplace, set their own pricing, and deliver music in a DRM-free format might just work. It wouldn’t necessarily be an iTunes killer, but it could be a profitable service that competes in a parallel universe that iTunes isn’t necessarily interested in (ie, music by unsigned bands).

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.

The King Is Dead, Long Live The King!

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There have been more than a few interesting discussions this week about the old media dying and making making way for the new media. Each discussion concludes with the clear need for established media outlets to embrace change. And fast.

Any media business has two products to sell: its content (to readers and viewers); and its audience (to advertisers). The task for old media is first to protect its advertising revenues by amassing audiences online and, second, to offset their viewers’ intolerance of mass-advertising by making them pay more for content—which they are increasingly willing to do. It will not be easy, but then saving the heroine never was.

While I will not presume to speak for my fellow ‘lopers, I can say that we have been online, in a serious manner, for well over ten years. It’s getting to be that I don’t remember a time when Amazon.com wasn’t part of my everyday shopping experience. I think I downloaded my first e-book in 1998. A few weeks ago, we enjoyed a new episode of Monk on the big screen monitor (which, not surprisingly, has better resolution than our old-school television). I will even admit to downloading a couple of fansubs of Samurai Champloo because I was in dire need of a new anime series. It was the fansubs, by the way, that helped build early buzz for the series’ North American debut.

The record industry went ahead and spent a lot of money and energy not getting it. In fact, as an avid observer of industry efforts, I spent the better part of five years shaking my head in bewilderment. The solution was so simple, yet they rolled out a new partnership, format, initiative, plan, lawsuit, you name it, every few months. While the labels were scrambling to get a clue, the consumers had moved on. The recent demise of record stores like Aron’s may or may not have been inevitable, but the music industry didn’t help matters by continually fighting progress.

As we build the full-featured Medialoper site, we’re looking at the whole entertainment universe. It’s a big place. We think many of the old media companies will adapt to the new atmosphere. Those that won’t will be the ones who, like the music business, don’t get it.

Consumer Rights Fading In The Digital Age

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Back in the good old days of analog media (I can’t believe I actually just typed those words), consumers who purchased an LP or video tape could pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted with the physical product once they paid for it.

Say, for example, that shortly after buying Journey’s Departure LP you realized that you had made a horrible mistake. Half-way through the first listen it was clear that your head would explode if you heard just one more second of Steve Perry’s screeching voice. Not a problem. Thanks to the doctrine of first-sale (an established part of US Copyright law) you had every right to take that Journey album to the nearest used record store and sell it for whatever you could get for it.

The same rule applied to any media that contained copyrighted material. Amazingly, this rule lasted well into the digital age and was applied to CD’s and DVD’s as well (we’ll overlook the major record labels challenge to used CD sales in the late 80’s).

Consumers of copyrighted material have historically had certain legal rights that have been very well defined. Suddenly, however, everything seems to be changing.

eBay has begun cracking down on auctions featuring new iPods loaded with thousands of songs. On the surface these auctions may seem fishy, but until we know otherwise we have to assume that the songs contained on those iPods are not in violation of copyright law (that’s the “innocent until proven guilty” thing you’ve probably heard about).

There are plenty of possible scenarios in which these auctions could be entirely legal. Here are a few:

  • All of the music may be under a creative commons license that allows such distribution
  • All of the music may be public domain
  • All of the music may have been legally purchased through sources such as iTunes or eMusic

Of these three scenarios, it’s the last that scares the music industry the most — although it really should scare consumers the most since they’re the ones who will ultimately lose out when the entertainment industry finally kills the doctrine of first sale.

For some reason, we’re being asked to believe that digital content is is something entirely new and different. We’re being told that the principles of copyright that have applied for hundreds of years no longer apply in the digital realm, even though the content is essentially unchanged — only the method of delivery has changed.

It’s not just the doctrine of first sale that’s being compromised in the digital era. Thanks to Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) fair use is being curtailed as well.

As a result of the DMCA consumers have lost their right to shift certain types of digital content from one format to another. While it’s still legal to convert your CD’s to mp3 files and load them onto your iPod, you’re breaking the law if you try to do the same with a DVD and a video iPod. It doesn’t matter that you purchased the DVD legally and are just trying to transfer the video to a more convenient format. The DMCA clearly bans any software capable of breaking DVD encryption. The law is blind to the fact that you own the medium and the fact that historically you would have the right to shift content from one medium to another.

It’s only a matter of time before the major media companies follow the lead of software companies and ask consumers to consent to an end user license that is even more restrictive. Once that happens you can forget about fair use and the doctrine of first sale. Both concepts will be effectively dead by that point.

Does The World Really Need A Fifth Network?

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Jim has already taken time from his busy day to make fun of The CW’s name. I will take the time to, well, think about what the merger of UPN and The WB means. First off, the fact that UPN and WB merged has absolutely no impact on me. None. Not one little bit.

Granted, I’m not the target demographic, but it’s been a long time since I tied my television watching to a specific channel/time. In fact, the time was when I coerced the husband into HBO because I was going to watch The Sopranos or else. Since then (and before), we rely on TiVo to capture programs by title. It doesn’t matter to us when it airs or what channel it’s on. This is a very important thing to note — even my mother has a DVR. Sure, she needs my little sister to program it, but mom is a fast learner. All it takes is a show she doesn’t want to miss.

According to Les Moonves, head mucky muck of CBS, this merger will create a powerful fifth network. This begs the question: does the world need a fifth network? In addition to all the basic and pay cable channels? What does a fifth network have to offer the world (except for the great Everybody Hates Chris)*? Well, it’s obvious:

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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.