It looks like Hollywood is in a twist over $1 movie rentals from popular kiosks like that run by Redbox. The cheap rentals are “costing” Hollywood a billion dollars, at least according to some analysts.

I doubt it. Fact is, most of those purchasing the rental would never go out and buy the movie in the first place. I’m pretty sure Redbox probably winds up a net positive for studios for the time being. Claims to the contrary seem a bit foolish. You know, like they’re coming from advisers who got the predictions wrong.

The deeper question here is about media markets, and the inherent value of the service Hollywood is providing. I’m not alone in thinking that the Hollywood studio system is pumping out a lot of worthless crap these days. Apparently $1 rentals are very, very popular. That could mean one of several things: first, that DVDs (even at their currently discounted rates) are still too expensive to purchase, and second that $1 is probably too low a price (but it is a convenient marketing pitch).

The value of a DVD has diminished over the last few years for a few reasons: the most notable being the final victory of high definition over standard definition. DVD video quality isn’t quite up to snuff, and so the value of those discs has diminished. The other problem is convenience. As online systems like Netflix increase in popularity (and deliver in HD even over mediocre Internet connections), the DVD value drops even more. Even at $10 per month, the Netflix system is a value for those who watch enough movies and value the convenience of instant, last minute viewing choice.

So, what are Hollywood movies valued at by consumers? Not a lot. At least not at the moment. There are no real viable online solutions at the moment. Netflix’s library is small at the moment, and there’s a lack of competition at the moment. We won’t know for several years what the final pricing solution will be.

One thing is clear, though: Hollywood placed a huge number of bets on continued DVD sales that simply aren’t materializing. Blu-ray remains underwhelming in its adoption rates (though it is doing better now that hardware prices have come down). Hollywood greenlit some movies based on potential DVD sales, but now that money has dried up. That means smaller movie budgets in the short term. Once again, Hollywood made a sucker bet. It’s been clear the last few years that physical media for movies was going to follow physical media for music, and Hollywood didn’t adequately prepare. Who exactly is working over there these days? Don’t any of them keep up with the technology?

tags: markets, media, movies, technology
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I don’t normally do lists, but I recently saw a list of technologies that we use today that will be gone in ten years. Now, I also don’t like to make tech predictions (they’re always wrong). So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to list a few technologies/industries that I think should die. And soon.

1. Network Television/Movie Studios/Recording Labels

I’ve thought quite a bit about this over the years, and I wish that television networks would die. And movie studios, for that matter. With the internet, there is an easy, low-cost distribution mechanism for artists. I would prefer something like a guild system, where artists of similar styles or goals share resources and distribute directly to consumers. We get lower prices, more direct contact with the artists, and no more of the intervention of studios in the artistic life of writers, musicians and actors. Good riddance.

2. Drive media

By this I mean optical discs of all types. There’s simply no need for them anymore. Download things off the Internet. If you want to save them, save them on a mass storage device like a hard drive. For portability, flash storage is smaller, more durable, and more convenient.

3. Coax Cable

I’d like coax to die and be replaced with fiber. It’ll be a long and expensive road, but in the end we’ll have so much bandwidth we won’t know what to do with it.

4. Cables, period

There’s no need for cables. Wireless bandwidth is enough for nearly all data within a home. Why shouldn’t my audio components simply know when my TV is nearby? Why shouldn’t my laptop instantly be able to stream music directly through my stereo system just by being in the same room? Why shouldn’t my iPod simply see any home speakers and be able to use them without connecting things with a cable? And why can’t the same thing be true of power?

5. DRM

Data, as the saying goes, just wants to be free. The fact is, we have a difficult time at the moment knowing precisely what people would pay for digital content. Purchased data is so heavily encumbered by rights management that I can never be sure of its true market value: I purchase a song or video on iTunes, but can’t share it easily between my systems. Certainly DRM free movies, television shows and music would result in an immediate deflation of value. But eventually I imagine a market could emerge where people who want the data will pay for it on their own, not because it’s how they get the data, but because its the only way they can guarantee they’ll get more of what they like.

There’s more I could think of. There’s also some tech that I imagine we’ll still be stuck with in ten years. Some have said that the keyboard and mouse are on the way out. I am not convinced of this. Along with the keyboard and mouse, I’ve seen people predict the end of the standard game console controller. Only someone who has never played games could say this. The reality of motion and touch controls is that they remain far more inefficient than standard controllers today. Just as voice recognition has been on the cusp of acceptance for thirty years, the mouse and keyboard is the mousetrap of computer interfaces. It’s too simple and intuitive to be easily replaced. Why? Because it just works. Anyone who has struggled with voice recognition systems and Wii motion controls knows this first hand.

Wired telephones are already going, replaced by cell phones. I rather suspect gasoline cars will be gone within my lifetime. Perhaps within twenty years. I hope to see more distributed power generation. In fact, I might go so far as to make a general prediction about technology in the next twenty years: distributed systems, rather than centralized systems, will prevail. Distributed power. Distributed data. Fewer gatekeepers. At least, I hope that is the case.

tags: drm, markets, media, technology, whatever
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Michael Malone chats here about the recent T-Mobile Sidekick disaster which resulted in the loss of a huge amount of personal data on the smartphones. Sidekick users awoke one day to find that every user of the Sidekick data service lost emails, notes, contacts, calendar entries, etc. Eventually some of the data was retrieved, but not all of it.

I’ve talked about my concerns about “cloud” computing before: this idea that all your data is stored on a centralized server somewhere and accessible by a variety of devices no matter where you happen to be. This idea has never appealed to me, and this incident with T-Mobile highlights precisely why. Data is precious, and it is difficult to put a price tag on the hours of work we put into the data on our mobile devices. T-Mobile was in the unhappy position of doing just that: they gave their users a $100 gift card and a month worth of data service for free. I doubt many were happy with that.

We put faith in our data systems to be there when we need them. While the idea of a centralized data storage system seems like a good deal (we assume these centralized systems will have defenses our home systems do not have) it also means that we rely on decisions that other people are making to keep our data safe. But as this incident shows, that faith is often misplaced. There’s no guarantee that those systems will be safeguarded against inept IT managers or those seeking personal information to exploit. It’s the primary argument against centralizing any large data system. Centralization produces a very large single target. Not to mention that all your data is not on a computer system that you own. What if the rules change? What if the company or government guarding your data suddenly decides to do something with it you don’t like?

This happened recently with Facebook, who decided to let third party advertisers use photos you’ve uploaded in their ads. Without your permission. A setting was made available (with very little fanfare) to turn off the system, but the fact is that Facebook decided on its own to co-opt your data for its own purposes.

Distributed data, on the other hand, is robust. Sure, things get stored hundreds or thousands of times, but once the data is produced and distributed, it is impossible to erase. Just ask any Hollywood starlet about those nude photos that popped up on the Internet, or the record labels about those MP3s of their latest album.

I’ve had similar thoughts about digital media in general. I use centralized services like Netflix, for instance, for movie viewing. But what if the service disappeared? Suddenly, all those movies and shows I now have access to would be gone. If I had them on my own system, though, no matter what happened to the centralized server, I’d still have what I want. Some would like to think that digital distribution means the end of ownership, but I’m not so sure.

In short, cloud computing doesn’t make sense, and probably never will. There’s always a place for centralized data servers in some instances, but when it comes to personal data, I still think keeping things local is the best bet.

tags: media, technology
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I love reading blogs, but there are just way too many of them. I’ve tried a number of RSS readers, and none of them do what I’d like them to do. They’re all too cumbersome. Over the last year, my blog reading has plummeted to the point where I really only ever vistit a handful regularly. And you know what that means: I’ve forgotten where a lot of the ones I used to read are. In particular, the blogs of a number of SF/Fantasy writers.

But now I’ve found a website that aggregates them all. Best yet, a brief snippet is available just by hovering over the post. Very nice. Blogs by John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Sawyer, Toby Buckell, William Gibson, and just about everyone else who writes SF/Fantasy and has a blog is on there.

Very cool.

tags: Books, media, science fiction
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Here’s a list I stumbled on listing seven SF books that are, in that blogger’s opinion, unfilmable. The list includes some classics like The Stars My Destination (which I vaguely remember reading years ago), and A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as some of my own favorites such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels and Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

But here’s my problem with this (and all) lists like this: nearly all books are unfilmable. Not if you want to stay true to the source material and do it justice. I’ll admit that the Lord of the Rings trilogy did as best as could be done in bringing the books to the big screen. But don’t mistake best as could be done with good. The movies mangled most of the subplots, destroyed a few beloved secondary characters, and lost most of the central theme of the books. So, no, they weren’t good translations of the book to the screen. But they were good movies, which is all I really wanted.

So I guess this depends on what you mean by “filmable.” I don’t like movies made from books, in general. Books are very different beasts than screenplays, and it’s best to keep the two separate, in my opinion. Movies are inherently brief, and derive their depth from what actors bring to it. Books are about words. Movies are about images. The two very rarely overlap.

That doesn’t mean that some books aren’t inherently filmable. Some writers are good at that. Stephen King and Michael Crichton come immediately to mind as writers whose style is very cinematic. Of course, both have experience writing things for the screen, so big surprise there.

Rather than compile a list of books which are unfilmable, I think it is more productive to compile a list of books which are, more or less, filmable. Shorter, punchier books whose action would translate well to the screen. Who in their right mind would want to see Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on the big screen? It would be a waste. On the other hand (and I’ve said this before) a book like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War would translate fantastically to the screen. Of course, I’d prefer a six- to eight-hour made-for-TV (preferably Showtime or some other uncensored cable network) miniseries with high production values. Now that would kick ass, and allow the themes of the book to emerge.

But at two, maybe two-and-a-half hours? No. No book is truly filmable at that point. Only if you accept that the movie version is, for all intents and purposes, a completely separate work could that ever be acceptable. If the movie tries to be the book, it won’t work. It must be its own thing. And at that point, it really ceases to be a film of the book, doesn’t it?

I could probably name all the filmable SF books on the fingers of … ok, both hands. And I’m being generous.

Leave the books alone. Let them be what they are. The big screen demands its own unique stories tailor made for that medium. So, rather than telling filmmakers to destroy great works of SF by putting them on the big screen, perhaps it would be better for some visually-oriented filmmaker to team up with the hottest SF writers and create new works for the big screen. Adaptations are always exercises in compromise. I like my SF uncompromising, please.

tags: Books, media, movies, science fiction
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During last year’s writer’s strike, writer and (in my opinion) creative genius Joss Whedon got together with friends and colleagues and produced Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, a three-episode musical comedy for distribution over the Internet. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available for viewing here. The production (I’m not sure what else to call it) stars Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and Neil Patrick Harris. It’s brilliant in a lot of ways, so long as you look past the obviously low production values (the value here is in the writing and performances, not the sets and … costumes).

Anyway, it’s yet another example of Hollywood content creators coming up with new, unique and experimental ways of trying to monetize the Internet. After all, the studios are screwing the writers and actors out of the profits they’re making off the Internet, so it makes sense that they’d try to find their own way.

Whedon talks here about the limited success of the venture. It’s an interesting read that uncovers some of the mixed results of the project (which, according to Whedon, has made at least some profit overall). Like recent experiments in music distribution, these early attempts are guaranteed to be mixed. After all, there is no solid business model for the Internet in terms of media distribution. Whedon took advantage of a number of outlets, including iTunes, Hulu and more traditional DVD distribution. The combination seems to have worked. The question is, I guess, whether other content creators would have the same results.

I’m happy to see that some writers and actors are willing to put their talent on the line for this sort of thing. But it’s going to take more experiments like this before a real, reliable model emerges.

Lots of good insight there, and it’s worth a read if you are at all interested in the future of creative media.

tags: culture, media, movies, music, technology, television
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I don’t watch Jon Stewart at all, but Glenn Reynolds posted this video from Stewart’s show that, strangely enough, points out some of the ridiculousness of media coverage of Obama’s (rather lackluster, at least in the written form I read it) speech.  Lackluster, in my opinion, because so little of it was new or interesting.  Stewart’s take is different, as you would expect.  He juxtaposes some of what Obama says with past Bush speeches.  Guess what: parts of Obama’s speech are lifted almost word-for-word from Bush speeches.  Take a look.

Now, it’s not that Obama is plagiarizing. It’s just that these themes are pretty standard in American speechmaking, and they have been heightened since 9/11.  More importantly, I think that since Obama has been getting the daily intelligence briefings, he’s realized how dangerous things really are and his mind has changed.  Obama’s move to the right on Iraq, FISA, Gitmo, etc., can probably be tied to simply knowing more, rather than him being deceitful.

But take note of Stewart’s attitude.  He never seems to wonder why Obama might say what he’s saying.  He simply things that Obama doesn’t really mean it when he says it.  That he’s being a demogogue.  A liar.  Stewart is taking comfort in the fact that Obama is likely lying when he uses rhetoric like this.  I may not agree with Obama on much, but I tend to think that even politicians believe what they say in public.  They’re not trying  to lie.  They may stretch things for their audiences, but in his inaugural speech? I don’t think there’s anything there he doesn’t believe.

It’s no surprise to me. Because accepting the fact that Obama’s rhetoric might be justified means that Bush may have been similarly justified. And that so many in the media accept the rhetoric as “soaring” from Obama but “tired” when they hear it from Bush means that they’re not really listening anymore.  It’s not about policy, it’s about personality.  They despise Bush, love Obama, and as a result are willing to listen to one and ignore the other, even if they’re saying essentially the same thing.

tags: culture, elections, media, politics
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Westhawk muses about the fact that none of the three major networks has any full-time reporters in Iraq anymore, and wonders how the US might dop a better job at this:

This aspect of information warfare, controlling the narrative of how long-lasting irregular wars are portrayed to both Western and subject populations, remains a critical and unresolved vulnerability to future American counterinsurgency campaigns. The Three-Year Rule, the time allotted by the American public for significant military operations using general purpose forces, remains in effect. Nor has the U.S. come up with an answer for the likes of al Jazeera or other such channels of enemy information operations. All U.S. analysts of irregular warfare agree that the U.S. government must do a better job at information operations, yet no one has come up with realistic techniques that would past muster with American culture and law.

The answer isn’t all that difficult: an official US Government News Network.  Why not?  Sure, we’ll all know that the content is spun the way the administration might want it to be spun, but it would give the administration a way to get its own message out without being filtered by the gatekeeper media. Better yet, make it available online for free (like a US Government version of YouTube). There ought to be more direct communication between the government and the people anyway.

Let the people decide if what the government is saying is worth hearing and listening to.  Right now, what we get from the media is the government distorted by individual perspectives of reporters in the media. I’d much rather have the administration’s message (Bush’s or Obama’s) undiluted.

People would deride it as government propaganda, and that might even be fair. But it would allow a channel for the government to get information out to the masses without first being filtered through the media. In the case of military operations, this is particularly useful, as the administration can tell the story it wants to unfettered by a hostile media.  This may even be useful for Obama, who won’t enjoy favorable media coverage forever.

I can’t imagine this approach would violate any American cultural norms, and certainly would not present any constitutional or legal problems.

Just a thought.

UPDATE: Hell, it looks like the Israeli Defense Forces are doing just that: publishing video on YouTube, and doing it successfully.  Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds for that link. Heh… now that’s a real “Army of Davids” isn’t it, Glenn?

tags: democracy, ethics, media, movies, war
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Every once in a while I spend a few minutes looking through establishment media websites, usually for a laugh.  It didn’t take me long to find the funny today.  I stumbled across this editorial by Richard Cohen who has found out that Dubya reads a lot of books:

Still, the fact remains that Bush is a prodigious, industrial reader, and this does not conform at all to his critics’ idea of who he is. They would prefer seeing him as a dolt, since that, as opposed to policy or ideological differences, is a briefer, more bloggish explanation of what went wrong.

“Briefer, more bloggish” explanation?  Actually, I see this attitude far more often in the mainstream media than on blogs.  Anyway, it’s true: it’s easier for people to criticize Bush for being stupid than for policy disagreements because formulating policy disagreements requires … intelligence.  That’s not to say there aren’t intelligent critiques of Bush’s policies.  There are.  But most of Bush’s critics rely on the simple arguments (even though they aren’t true) because they are lazy.

As I’ve said before, the outright hatred of Bush’s personality and leadership style has prevented people from creating a realistic assessment of his policies.  After all, he’s liberated 60 million people in his eight years in office.  That’s more than any president since FDR. Instead, though, people tend to call him stupid.  Once the personal animosity fades, only the facts will remain.

That said, Cohen quickly demonstrates that he’s drinking the loony Kool-aid:

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Tom Ricks’s “Fiasco,” George Packer’s “The Assassins’ Gate” or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side” about “extraordinary rendition” and other riffs on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman’s “Angler,” about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

But why would Bush read these books? It’s difficult to argue that there is anything in these books he doesn’t already know.  After all, he’s closer to the real facts of the Iraq war than these authors. “Fiasco” for instance, is riddled with errors. And Bush is as aware of his critics’ arguments as anyone else. Why read a rehashing of a topic he knows better than these authors? It’s like reading a biography of yourself by a stranger with the hope of learning something new about yourself.

Narrow list? Wow. This guy’s a riot.

Then Cohen contradicts himself:

My hat is off to Bush for the sheer volume and, often, high quality of his reading. But his books reflect a man who is seeking to learn what he already knows.

Heh, that’s funny. Cohen already has his opinion formed about the Iraq war, and yet he’s read a dozen books which affirm his opinion of it.  How many books has Cohen read that defend the Iraq war, extraordinary rendition (not a Bush invention, by the way), or Guantanamo? I suspect that number is around zero. The books are out there.

The caricature of Bush as unread died today — or was it yesterday? But the reality of the intellectually insulated man endures.

Intellectually insulated?  For reading nearly 200 books in three years?  No, Cohen is merely demonstrating his own elitism here.  Bush is “insulated” because he hasn’t read the books Cohen wants him to read, and because Bush hasn’t apparently spent the requisite time on Cohen’s point of view.  As if book choices demonstrate the full range of intellectual grappling with an issue.

The caricature of Bush as unread was foolish from the beginning.  He’s always been seen carrying books that he’s reading. Only those in the establishment media who had their own ideological reasons for hating Bush bought into this line.  What does it say about Cohen et al., for them having believed their own bullshit for eight years?

It’s just another reason not to bother with these clowns anymore. Cohen’s screed is plenty of evidence that it is the media that is increasingly insulated, and not Bush.  Let’s see if they keep up this high standard of expectations for the next four years. Somehow, I think not.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse comments on the Cohen piece here.  There are some priceless comments there as well.

tags: Books, culture, media, politics
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It’s become trendy to believe that childhood immunizations are behind increases in asthma and autism, even though there’s a lot of scientific evidence proving that it isn’t the case.  And part of the problem has been the media: a willingness on their part to pass on questionable science for the sake of a good story.

This story over at the Guardian website examines the problem.  As I’ve said before, press bias isn’t necessarily about what is said, but what is left unsaid.  What people are allowed to speak, and which ones are passed over.  It’s this gatekeeping function that has doomed the mainstream press.  Journalists get to decide who we hear, even when they might not be qualified to make such decisions.

It’s gotten worse lately.  There are a lot of reasons for it.  It’s increasingly evident that in American political coverage, for instance, the press gatekeeping function results in news skewed to the political left (which is where most American journalists are politically).  So there is certainly a political bias.  But there are biases that cause trouble elsewhere.  This is most notable in science coverage.

You’ll find the best science coverage in science magazines and websites, not in the mainstream press.  When you do see science coverage in the mainstream press, it’s amazingly easy to pick out the problems and mistakes.  It’s also clearly evident in religion coverage.

I say this from first hand experience, both as someone who has interviewed a lot of people for articles I’ve written, and as someone who has some experience in being interviewed by the mainstream press.  From 2003-2005 I gave regular interviews to newspapers, and about half the time I was misquoted.  About 10% of the time I found that journalists created quotes from me whole cloth.

I was irritated enough that before interviews I would write down word-for-word responses to questions I knew would be asked.  And I’d read them right from the page over the phone.  They were rarely quoted correctly.  I’m not talking about minor edits and screw-ups.  I’m talking major rewrites, using words I’d never used.  Almost always, those quotes would be changed in order to fit the journalist’s preconceived notion of what had happened, or what they wanted me to say.

This happened with both “friendly” and “hostile” interviews.  Some of the worst cases of quote abuse came in friendly interviews.  It’s one reason why I decided to stop doing that sort of work.

In my opinion, journalism needs to fundamentally change if it is to retain any respect whatsoever as an occupation.  Journalists are too political.  They’re too obsessed with advocacy (whether on specific issues or just with “defending the little guy”) to be objective.  They are too willing to accept what they see if it jibes with their own experience, and not willing to ask difficult questions if it means undermining their own world view.  Editors are too willing to let biased or factually questionable stories go to press just because they will be controversial or raise readership.

That’s the real source of trouble for newspapers these days.  They run questionable stories for the shock factor to raise readership, only to destroy their own credibility.

I’m not sure exactly how journalism needs to change.  Perhaps we’re seeing the end of general purpose journalism.  Perhaps the future will see more and more specific journalistic venues with actual, qualified experts to tell us what we need to know without letting their egos or their own personal political or ideological views getting in the way.  But it’s increasingly clear that whatever “good journalism” is, it’s rarely to be found in the mainstream media.

tags: culture, media
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