Program scripts from week of August 5, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Hot New Toy
There has been a “Holy Grail” out there for a lot of technology companies for a while now. It’s the ability to hook up the computer to the TV and make it all work together. Apple TV has tried with limited success, Google TV has had only limited success as well. The technology isn’t all that tough but getting the user experience down to something simple and intuitive seems to be the hang up. If you’re going to ask the consumer to put yet another box on top of the TV (and in all likelihood ask them to do the wiring themselves) consumers have been underwhelmed. As much as we complain about the cable guy or the satellite company guy coming in to hook up the box it’s done and it works.
And that means a lot in this market.
So when Google launched their new Chromecast device last month people sat up and took notice. Because it was plug in simple.
Let’s deal with one thing right off the bat. The device that you plug into the HDMI slot on your TV is called a “dongle”. Get your snickering over with now because that’s a term that’s been around for a long time. Give it a year and it won’t sound weird anymore. Dongle. OK? Good.
The great thing is that you just plug it in, very much like a USB jump drive. There’s not wiring, there’s not even a remote control. You connect and control Chromecast through your laptop, tablet or smartphone. Basically you can now “cast” or send whatever you watch on those devices, Youtube, Netflix, et cetera, to the Chromecast dongle and it plays on your TV. Simple. And even better, cheap. The Chromecast device is selling for $35.
As with any brand new device it has some bugs and bumps. It already supports Youtube, Netflix streaming and Google Play. But folks are lining up to help make the experience even better. Hulu, HBO Go and Pandora are all in talks with Google. Behind them come folks like AOL, Redbox Instant by Verizon, Vevo and Vimeo.
After trying far more complicated solutions it looks like Google may have finally found the “Holy Grail”. The even better news is that Google’s competitors won’t be far behind.
The days of truly bringing all your media together in one place just might be just around the corner.
Stupider?
I have become a little more concerned when I saw a new study about two things. First, I discover I am not alone. More of us than ever before are multi-tasking with technology. This year alone time watching media will rise by 13 minutes on average leaving us just a few minutes shy of 12 hours of media per person.
That’s a little intimidating all by itself. Then I came across a study out of South Korea. The Koreans are the most digitally connected country in the world. What is being seen is a spike in what they are calling digital dementia. That’s when folks who spend a lot of time viewing media show the same kinds of memory loss more commonly associated with head injury or psychiatric illness.
Ummmm, excuse me while I lean over and turn off the TV.
Ok. Now let’s take a step back. The study was looking especially at the effect on children and teens. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to take into account normal responses in the teen aged years. Teens do tend to become obsessed with ideas at that age. Take a look at Beatlemania or Sinatra’s bobby soxers and tell me that doesn’t look like mental illness. Plus remembering phone numbers (which is one of the tests used) has changed because of our access to smartphones. My wife has had the same cell phone number for years. I have no idea what it is. It’s programmed into my phone so I don’t worry about it.
Do we all spend more time with media that we probably should? 12 hours a day? Yeah, that’s an easy one. Seems like the cure for this is easy. Step away from the technology and go watch a sunset. Or talk with your family.
It’s a win-win situation.
Consider today’s program a public service.
I’m sure you’re familiar with those annoying Facebook posts that say things like “Name a city whose name doesn’t have an “R” in it. It’s harder than you think!” (You mean like Jamestown, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago?) or the “Like if you hate cancer!” ones. You’ve seen them. The ones with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes.
Most people fall into two categories. Those that click on those things and those that find them just too annoying to bother. I want to create a much larger third group. Those who know what’s going on.
It’s called “like farming”. And we're the farm animals. The goal is to get a whole lot of people to connect with your page then sell it to an advertiser who now has a database to exploit. And that’s not the only thing they do. A lot of these involve photos taken from websites without permission or attribution, giving them a fake name and backstory, to generate likes. It’s a sham from start to finish.
Is this an end of the world kind of problem? Honestly, no. We are giving away our contact info right and left on the Internet most days. To be honest most of us don’t even realize how much of our info is out there and how freely we’ve granted the business community the opportunity to make use of it.
But there just seems to be something more insidious about this. There is something disturbing at a fundamental level about exploiting people’s decency for profit without their knowledge. The good news is that it’s a lot easier to fix than some of the problems with privacy issues on the World Wide Web.
Just stop doing it.
The reality is that you’re not accomplishing anything other than handing the keys to your digital life to someone you don’t know and don’t want to know. Oh there is one other thing you’re doing. You are annoying the daylights out of most of your friends.
I’m willing to stipulate that my friends are basically decent folks who hate cancer, love kittens and puppies and support our troops.
I’m hoping they’re smart enough not to continue to let themselves be “farm” animals.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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