Medialoper

We're Not Who You Think We Are

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.

Medialoper News of the World

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We’ve pulled together a sampling of stories that reflect discussions happening all over the entertainment industry. This week, we pay special attention to the UK.

iTunes Downloads Boost Ratings For “The Office”

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We keep hearing that Hollywood is experimenting with video downloads in a non-committal sort of way. Industry insiders almost always qualify their online video efforts as “pilot programs” — and we all know what happens to most pilots. It’s no wonder that some analysts are predicting that the television industry will somehow manage to maintain the current status quo until the year 2015. Unless, of course, the status quo begins to crumble in the face of . . . higher ratings.

The most recent episode of NBC’s The Office just scored a 5.1 — a personal best for the network’s interpretation of the highly regarded British comedy series. Network officials seem to think that The Office’s tremendous success on iTunes is actually helping the program’s ratings.

According to NBCU Television Distribution President, Frederick Huntsberry:

“Consumers have choices, and we are not reaching all consumers with one technology”

Appropriately, last week’s episode of The Office featured a bizarre reverse product endorsement as Dwight admired Pam’s Prism DuroSport (the cheap iPod knock-off her boyfriend gave her for christmas) and encouraged her to download music from a Russian website — the songs are only two cents each, but they’re all in Russian.

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.

Hens in the FOXhouse

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FOX, which once upon a time had a reputation of being a cutting-edge network, has decided to chicken out when it comes to making its shows available for download.

While it strikes me that this decision will be short-lived, especially when a Google Video Search on “Family Guy” returns 338 hits, not a single one bringing any revenue to FOX (or Seth MacFarlane, for that matter), but it’s still a bit puzzling.  This isn’t a case of counter-programming (like running 24 against The Golden Globes), it’s a case of on the bus or off the bus.

To me, it would make great sense for FOX to take some of their prematurely-canceled shows like Andy Richter Controls the Universe or Action and see if there is a download audience for those.  They could have done quite well, perhaps, with making the final shows of Arrested Development available for download at the same time they are burying them by running them against the Olympics.  That would be counter-programming.

What We’re Talking About

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There’s a lot of stuff I want to highlight this week, but thought this one was worth a quick post. When we first started discussion the Medialoper and Mediacratic idea, our focus was on television. It took about thirty seconds to realize that we’d have to look at all media. In the worlds of entertainment and information, every cherished institution is being re-examined.

Even magazines. I noted earlier this week that magazines are beefing up their online staffs, but what about the magazines who, well, abandon words entirely? What if there’s a movie magazine out there comprised of, well, movies? Short films, to be exact?

Wholphin (yes, that’s the progeny of a whale and dolphin) comes from the brain trust behind McSweeney’s and The Believer. And it comes at just the right time for the reviewers at the Washington Post:

That’s because we at The Magazine Reader are sick. We’re also tired. We’re sick and tired of words — endless words marching one after another in horizontal line after horizontal line in paragraph after paragraph in article after article in magazine after magazine.

In other words, we’re sick of reading. We long to join the rest of our fellow Americans sitting on the sofa with beer and Doritos, basking in the glow of a TV screen. And now Wholphin enables us to do just that.

Top Downloads

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So, as a public service,one of the things that the Mediacratic was going to do was provide all of the top download lists of the big boy sites. Peoplewhole thing comparing the top video downloads of all of the big-boy sites: iTunes; AOL; Google & Yahoo! It would be in interesting compare and contrast, and perhapsprovide some insight to how the various sites’ strategies were panning out.

Well, not so much. iTunes has top tens. (The most recent eps of Lost, The Office and Battlestar Galactica.) (And oh my gods, how amazing was that latest ep of Battlestar? How they were able to have a major major victory against the Cylons and yet things are even more frac–, oh, right, the point.) But that’s pretty much it. AOL has “What’s Hot,” but there really isn’t a ranking. Yahoo! has a “Popular” section, but it’s based on searches, not downloads. And Google, well, who know what the hell is going on there?

It’s not a secret that popularity breeds popularity. People are interested in what other people are interested in. That’s why record stores and video stores have always have top sales and new release sections. So it’s a bit baffling that, except for iTunes, of course, none of these video download sites do.

The Google Bazaar

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The Los Angeles Times has an interesting profile of the head of Google Video Store, Jennifer Feiken (though we could have done without the tidbit about her height increasing when she wears high-heeled boots — seriously, it’s 2006, people). While I found myself mildly interested in Feiken’s journey from the cutting room floor (an aborted role in Hairspray) to Silicon Valley, I was more interested in how Google will work its way into the brave new world of the new media.

Google has made a lot of bold moves in the media world, most notably with its Google Book Search/Print/Publish initiative (what is it, anyway?). And it’s not an overstatement to say they own the search engine world right now. Aggregating and cataloguing data is what they do best — it remains to be seen if they’re up to the task of selling content to the user. Our initial analysis indicates that Google has a long way to go — hiring an entertainment industry insider is a good first step, but this may be the time that Google needs to leverage other skills even more. First up: make it usable.

LAT describes Google’s initiative as an “online bazaar” and indicates that established media companies are facing the project with skepticism.

The service got a rocky start last week. It was launched three days late because of technical problems, and some users complained about glitches and a shortage of popular TV programming. For example, there were only one episode of CBS’ popular show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and fewer than a dozen music videos from Sony BMG Music Entertainment — two of Google’s major media partners.

Google also faces challenges from existing partnerships established by its competition, not to mention the fact that iTunes has set the bar very high:

[Read more…] about The Google Bazaar

Making It Play In Peoria

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The other day, I noted that Verizon’s V Cast music service doesn’t play nice with iTunes. In fact, it doesn’t play at all. While I’m sure that announcing a partnership with Microsoft (or any other exclusive, proprietary deal between a small number of companies) makes for great press conferences, it doesn’t play in Peoria. In this coming year, we are going to see more services and devices than the average person will be able to fathom. In fact, the average person missed your press conference and only wants Stuff To Work.

The dream, as described at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, is to allow devices like TVs, computers and audio receivers to share audio and video around the home, with a single remote control running the show.

Since everyone knows the dream — let’s call it a goal — surely new products are being developed to fulfill it. Or not.

At CES, tech heavyweights such as Intel, Panasonic, Samsung and Sharp all showed off networking systems, but none of those systems are designed to work together. The resulting problems are similar to miscommunication between people who speak the same language but different dialects — sometimes they might understand each other perfectly well, but at other times they might not.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but if you look to stereo components of the past, you can see that a receiver from Sony managed to work just fine with a DVD player from Panasonic. They live peacefully together in the same dwelling. That’s how the new home entertainment network needs to be. Consumers want cool, definitely, but they also want cool that works straight out of the box. . .with all the other cool stuff they’ve bought.
Apparent winners in this high-stakes game will emerge quickly, but if the needs of the consumer aren’t addressed early in the process, there will be more expensive failures than successes. And, like the iTunes store proved, consumers will flock to the technology that works for them.