Program scripts from week of September 2, 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.
Rating the Internet
I must admit to being utterly conflicted on this next subject. On the one hand we are going to face an ever increasing avalanche of content without any means to sort it. On the other hand the system that some people are suggesting as a model is one of the worst examples of fraud I’ve ever confronted.
Here’s the problem - with the growth of online content being available to us in our living rooms and family rooms through boxes like Apple TV or Roku or the newest entrant, Chromecast, we are now being confronted with all the content of the wild, wild web in a venue that used to be fairly safe. Our living room or family room TV set. I want you to think for just a minute about all the stuff that is out there. All the stuff you may have seen yourself or just heard about. The stupid stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff that you don’t even want to think about. You know it’s out there, right? Well with this new technology it’s now just as easily seen on the big screen in the main room of your house. I just came across a mention of an adult video that was filmed using the new Google Glass technology.
Seems like some way of rating all that stuff might be useful before it all just comes spilling out into your living room. A rating system, like the one we have for the movies, right?
Oh dear God I hope not.
The movie rating system is something that only works if you don’t think about it or ask questions. Watch the movie “This Film is Not Yet Rated” and you’ll never look at the ratings the same way again.
Here’s the problem. Who shall do the rating? Based on what standards? And how will we be able to use the rating system to control what is coming into our homes? Right now you can simply block entire channels but there’s a goodly dose of cutting off your nose to spite your face in that approach.
Do we turn our choices over to an aggregator channel that guarantees us that they’ll only share videos of a certain kind, certain style, certain approach? That doesn’t strike me as a particularly grown up way of dealing with the issue either.
The networks are controlled by the rules of the FCC. The Internet is proud of it’s no rules stand. I’m not so sure how that’s going to play when the stage for that performance is in America’s family rooms.
In the words of Pepe LePew - Le Sigh.
While the lucky folks in Dallas, L.A. and New York City now have their CBS stations back the underlying silliness of this battle still gets me.
The argument goes like this - the TV networks say that they put up all the money, take all the risks, in creating new content. The cable/satellite people just use that product to make money for themselves. As the content provider the networks want a bigger piece of the pie. Since no business person WANTS to give away more of the money they make the cable folk resist.
What got me this time was that Time Warner (the cable company in this episode) was not only telling their customers to watch TV on something other than cable they were giving those customers the technology to do it. They were giving away digital antennas. That’s right, a pay TV service is giving you the means to watch TV for free. What was really fun was that this left CBS in the position of explaining to their affiliates, the local TV stations, why this was a bad thing. Of course it’s NOT really a bad thing if you’re the local station. It’s really just all confusing and stupid posturing that ends up with the viewers getting the short end of the stick.
I don’t think any of this actually works to the benefit of the networks or the service providers. Annoying your consumers and making them think about getting their TV in some other way is just a bad plan in the long run. The big business types may not yet realize that they’re battling over the bones of a dying system. The battle is just speeding up the death spiral.
So did the two combatants come to a meeting of the minds on the issues at hand? Almost surely not. The reality is that the NFL season is about to begin and the cable folk caved rather than miss out on the audience and advertising dollars associated with pro football.
The story kind of came apart on them as well.
So imagine my immense surprise to discover that I had suddenly become one of the cool kids. This, I am sure you will be stunned to discover, virtually never happens. My last two cars were built by a company that no longer exists. I’m not a technology early adopter and I have no interest in what the latest fad is except as the subject for one of these commentaries.
And yet here I am, among the growing audience for podcasts. That’s right, I said growing. The folks at Apple note that the number of downloads of what is now an old school technology has been increasing over the last couple years. About 10% of us over the age of 12 listened to a podcast in 2006. Last year that number had grown to 26%. This is a technology that folks like the New York Times had abandoned because they didn’t see it making financial sense.
So why are people turning to podcasts? Well let me tell you why I have. My job involves a fair amount of long distance driving all over western New York. I love radio but too often I end up hearing the same thing over and over again. Even NPR repeats stories during the day. And I prefer a slightly higher IQ than most talk radio can provide. So what do I do?
Books on disc are fine but you need to invest some long hours to those. I need something to cover the hour and a half to two hours that my drives usually involve. Plus with podcasts I can find programs that cover just about any of my rather diverse interests.
My current list of subscriptions include “This Week in Technology”, the literary podcasts from “The Moth”, NPR’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” plus several history podcasts, creativity podcasts and TED talks.
One of the big adjustments that the media has to make in moving away from a broadcast mentality to a narrowcasting or niche model. Podcasting is the ultimate in targeted audience because we chose what’s on our media. And we’re investing more time in those programs. Not so curiously advertisers have figured this out and are moving more dollars into that marketplace.
So I’m either old school and the new cutting edge. I’m not sure I care either way. I’m just looking forward to many more hours of smart, funny, interesting listening on the road.
And THAT’S cool.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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