Free the Bits

Is there latency in your packet shaping, or are you just glad to see me?

It has been speculated for years that bandwidth providers (that'd be phone and cable companies) in the U.S. are slowing innovation and capacity increases on their networks.  Don't take my word for it, even the conservative Wall Street Journal is finally on board.  Why would they want to do that?  It seems mostly like a waiting game, trying to put off the day when entertainment users can download content as easily as music lovers were able to download mp3's back in the day.   These companies fear the day that their lucrative (and in the case of cable companies, local monopolies) businesses models that have served them so well are changed.   The companies that own the pipelines and distribution are increasingly the companies that own the content,  say NBC/Comcast or Time Warner.

What does that mean, besides the fact the people pay huge cable bills and still cannot pick (and only pay for) exactly what content they want delivered?  Now there's a radical idea, not paying for the Golf Channel because you don't want it.   For one thing, it means that innovation in new media forms are being stifled.  There are people out there with ideas out there that cannot be tried because they just are not feasible given data constraints.  It is in the interest of these companies to keep you passively watching cable TV and at best letting you DVR it so you can watch it on your schedule.  Forget interactivity, forget mob-sourcing, forget just about anything that isn't pretty much just a sickly derivative of the same stuff that's we've been watching for the past 60 years.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, especially with regard to decreased innovation.  Why is this important?  Culture is big business in the U.S.  It is a huge export product as well as being a political tool.  Will Hollywood become like GM and lose it's market share and profitability to other foreign producers through willfully slowing innovation and clinging to dying business models in order to control (slowly dwindling) profits?  Remember, in the 1960's it seemed inconceivable that Japanese cars were anything other than oddities to American consumers.   People laughed at the cars, their size and their quality.  With the democratization of media production, isn't there a whole world full of people out there now with their own media creation dreams?

The U.S. currently ranks #28 in Internet access speed and and "is not making significant progress in building a faster network."  The average download speed in Korea is four times faster than it is in the U.S.  And upload speeds, key for interactive media, those are even slower, usually by an order of 2-3X.  How long will consumers raised on interactivity and the belief that they are all media creators be willing to live with that?  And given the recent performance of U.S. mobile broadband providers like AT&T, will the future be more of the same?

Film Joke

An AC and a grip are out fishing, catching lots of fish.  The AC pulls out some tape and marks an X on the bottom of the boat. 

Grip: "What did you do that for?"
AC: "So we know where our spot is so we can come back to it."
Grip: "That's dumb, how can you be sure we'll get the same boat?"

That Barton Fink Feeling

Hollywood

Every day, to earn my daily bread

I go to the market where lies are bought

Hopefully

I take my place among the sellers.

Bertolt Brecht

American Poems 1941-1947

Hollywood Joke

So a guy goes to the circus. He's enjoying himself, when he notices an old, old man following the elephants around with a shovel and a garbage can, cleaning up their dung. He can't stop watching this tiny old guy struggle to drag the can around, stooped over and shaking, barely able to lift the shovel. At the end of the circus, he finds the man and says to him,"why don't you retire? " The man, stooped over turns up and looks at the man and says, "what, and give up show business?"

Will SAG-Producer labor relations help kill film?

What do labor relations have to do with film versus digital? Due to the contract issues between SAG and the Producers, as much TV production as possible is being done under AFTRA electronic media contracts (SAG represents all primetime series shot on film). My understanding is that this season's pilots are almost all being shot digitally. This is a huge deal. Television has been a major consumer of film, week after week, to the point where certain filmstocks have only been available due to the demand for them from TV productions. Many of the most visually compelling programs of recent years have been shot in 35mm (and a surprising number of shows have been shot on Super 16mm). Can film, and its infrastructure, stay viable if only features are using it? Talk about the law of unintended consequences....

When do we get paid?

Really interesting story in AdAge (I saw it originally here). If you create media, it is an absolute must read. It pretty well torches the "if you build it, they will come (and someone will pay for their eyeballs)" model of revenue generation (as does this opinion piece in the Economist) . And, well, getting people to pay for content directly in 2009? Yeah, ok, right. We seem to be fast approaching that mythical moment when content itself is valueless. Smart people suspected this was coming, but nobody seems to have a coherent response. The only response that I've heard to date that directly addresses the problem is creating community around your content and getting people to pay for what's surrounds the content, not the actual content itself. That and people saying that you need to be flexible, be able to do 10 different things. But aren't people already doing that? How many balls can we juggle?

It's a great time to make media. Film schools are churning out tons of able graduates and technology has made professional level results attainable by nearly everyone. Sadly, it's a horrible time to make a living off of it. Many types of production, including Hollywood, are hurting, bigtime. There are hardly any features in production or scheduled for production in Los Angeles. Low-budget reality programs gobble up a large segment of TV time. I've been hearing rumors that union types are turning up on low-budget indie shows. I know that there's a lot of schadenfreude out in Indieland about Hollywood's hard times. I'm not sure why, because aside from lower production costs, most indie productions are in the same boat as far as generating revenue. When you're 24 maybe it's not so important but how long are you willing to work for nothing, or close to it, with no health insurance? Last year I attended a conference where a development executive from a major production company gloated about how cheap webisodes are to produce, given "there are so many kids out there who live with their parents and are willing to work for $50/day." Is that our future?

This time, it may be different. The SAG thing has the Producers playing hardball and the disappearance of Wall Street money both have had a severe impact on production. But, beyond these two transitory events, there are serious structural economic issues that need to be resolved. And the implications are profound for all of us, including indies. Someone has to pay for content, somehow, if any of us want to survive. That is true for web, theatrical, TV, DVD or any other form of distribution, regardless of how low the entry costs are. Unless you like living with your parents.

Hollywood Joke

O.K. I heard this from a person who has an IMDb listing that's a full page long.


In Hollywood, what's the difference between your friends and enemies?

Your friends stab you in the chest.



Do I look like Mother Theresa?