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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Here’s an article over at Seed about the continuing attempts to build a working simulation of the human brain in a supercomputer. These articles tend to be a bit too optimistic for my taste. Perhaps it is because the objections to such projects are primarily philosophical, and that the writers tend to share the reductionist premises of such projects (if we can just model everything perfectly, then we can recreate the human brain).

I tend to be skeptical of the reductionist argument. At least in this article they reference some of the philosophical issues:

Some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, have argued that this divide between the physical facts of neuroscience and the reality of subjective experience represents an epistemological dead end. No matter how much we know about our neurons, we still won’t be able to explain how a twitch of ions in the frontal cortex becomes the Technicolor cinema of consciousness.

The article goes on to say that the scientists take this criticism seriously, but offer no real evidence of it. They talk about “transcending” traditional neuroscience, but it is difficult to take that seriously when they’re using, essentially, the same tools and approach of traditional neuroscience.

One need not even go so far as to raise the religious opposition to the concept of physical reductionism. We don’t need go so far as talking about souls. We can simply say that it is likely that consciousness as we know it is as much a function of phenomena at the quantum level as it is the mere three-dimensional biological level. In fact, it seems very likely to me that this is true. So, until a computer can fully model the brain at the quantum level, I’m not sure current models will prove accurate. They’ll be useful, I’m sure, but I imagine they’ll turn on these fully realized models and find that they don’t do what we expect them to do.

I think of it kind of like reverse engineering a movie. You can digitize each frame. Break it down into pixels with color wavelengths. Sample the audio by channel, and map out its waveform. Break it down into its bare minimum components. You can even try to recreate it in another form. But how much are you really learning about it? Are you learning about “movies” or just a specific movie? And could you recreate a new movie based on what you learned by ripping the thing apart? Perhaps. But would anyone watching it recognize it as a movie? Or would it be a complete mash of incomprehensible images and sounds?

Consciousness seems much the same kind of thing to me. We only understand it as it plays out in front of us. Like the movie, we understand it by watching it, not by ripping it into its component parts. That’s not to say we can’t learn quite a bit from this approach, only that I think we’ll never learn enough about consciousness through this approach. We’re still a few orders of magnitude below the necessary understanding of the universe to have anything close to a working model of what makes us what we are.

tags: science, technology, whatever
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Over at Wired.com, Gregg Easterbrook has an article on human cloning, in which he encourages us to embrace it. Here’s a snippet:

Others argue that cloning is “unnatural.” But nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended. Moreover, cloning itself isn’t new; there have been many species that reproduced clonally and a few that still do. And there’s nothing intrinsically unnatural about human inventions that improve reproductive odds—does anyone think nature is offended by hospital delivery made safe by banks of machines?

Many of the ethical questions raised about human cloning are really nothing more than excuses because people tend to think of it as icky. The argument that it is “unnatural” is perhaps the most pervasive. I have a difficult time taking seriously any argument that technology is in any way “unnatural.” These are machines, techniques, procedures all created in accord with the laws of reality in which we live. If something were truly unnatural (ie., beyond the bounds of nature), then perhaps it would be a valid argument. As Easterbrook points out, human clones do exist naturally in the form of identical twins. Questions about the nature of the soul, the mind, and free will all blow away in the reality that we’ve always treated twins as whole, separate, involate, authentic human beings. In fact, we’ve never really thought anything different about them. I’ve never quite understood the argument that this somehow violates God’s laws. We deal with the universe as it is, and the universe as it is allows us to do this. The question, then, seems more “how should we go about this?” rather than “should we go about this?” The knowledge is a gift. Our test is not one of accepting or rejecting the gift, but how to use it in a wise way.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious questions about how to use the technology (for instance, the creation of clones for backup organ farms). But that’s really no different from most other technologies that we consider commonplace. Eventually we will have the technology for safe human cloning, and probably even human cloning that is free from most of the ethical burdens surrounding the use of embryos. It’s worth noting that Easterbrook’s swiping aside of religious concerns about in vitro fertilization are probably a bit too optimistic: most of the people who were opposed to in vitro still are. Little has changed, despite what he suggests.

My ethic on this is pretty damned simple: life is good. Clones, by whomever made, are self-evidently everything any other human would be. So let’s set aside the arguments about personhood. Eventually the technology will sidestep ethical complaints, just as it has with stem cell research (which is increasingly possible to do without destroying embryos). Then we’ll be forced to deal with the reality of cloning. Best, I think, to begin now with crafting the legal structures ensuring clones are treated as the full, respected human beings they are, and to contain the inevitable abuses that will occur.

This nattering over the creation of new life strikes me as a bit foolish. The technology can of worms was opened long ago. It’s too late to step back from it now. We can only hope to shape the future by way of the hard-learned lessons of the past.

tags: ethics, technology
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According to this MediaPost article, Hulu may be the silver bullet that kills network TV:

It’s not the first time Martin has sounded the alarm on the rise of online TV. In a May report she warned that the entire $300 billion market valuation of the television industry is threatened by the shift of programming from TV to the Web. Spearheading the overthrow of TV-as-we-know-it is Hulu, the premium video site backed by NBC Universal, News Corp. and Walt Disney Co. that offers content from 120 partners from the Food Network to Paramount Pictures …. [T]he online video hub will cost TV networks $920 per viewer in advertising if their audiences are cannibalized by Hulu.

Hulu is only one front in this particular war, but it’s worth noting the possible collapse of ad revenue. Here are some of the offered calculations:

The report derives the figure of $920 per viewer lost to Hulu by estimating that Hulu runs four ads each hour at a $50 CPM compared to 32 ads during each hour of programming on TV at a $35 CPM. ($1,120-$200 = $920). Hulu has not disclosed actual ad sales or ad rates. [ed., CPM means “cost per 1000 impressions”)

As I’ve said before, there are ways for networks to get behind the new technology and benefit, but so far they seem unwilling to do so. Networks are addicted to ad revenue, but in the end their addiction will keep them from making necessary changes that could keep them relevant. Of course, I hope they continue down that path. The entire network television structure is antiquated: tied to irrelevant broadcast technology. They are protected from true market competition. If an ad revenue collapse is what is necessary to break them, so be it.

The fact is, opposition to a la carte pricing for television entertainment seems to be waning. iTunes does roaring business in selling television shows individually through its service. People have been pushing for a la carte pricing for networks through their cable providers for years, although that’s failed. A pay-by-show approach seems to be where this is headed. If you watch ten shows per season, why not pay them directly? Instead, we pay $50 or more for cable each month, mostly for shows that we would never watch. Creative control needs to be taken from networks and given back to the people making the show. Advertising should be a supplement to what we pay for entertainment, not the key factor.

The mistake is believing that ad revenue should be enough to cover the costs of these programs. A better choice is something like the cable network model. People pay for Showtime, and as a result get shows like Dexter, run without ads. Or HBO and Sopranos. I’d suggest something a bit more radical, that we disband networks all together, or at least think of them as something different, and use fewer (and probably more effective) ads.

In any case, if Hulu is going to kill network TV, more power to it. I watch Hulu already, but I encourage you all to do the same.

tags: technology, television
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Here’s an article from the Hollywood Reporter on the new consortium looking to bring the television ratings system into the 21st century. Ignore what they say, though, about this not being a challenge to Nielsen. That’s precisely what it is. If Nielsen were doing its job, this new consortium wouldn’t be needed at all.

Unfortunately, the article gives few new details about the group, save for a list of Hollywood bigwigs who signed on to the group. It’s a fairly broad set of broadcasting companies, advertising firms, etc. They’ll be doing some studies, then probably come up with some alternative system that takes changing viewership into account. That’s precisely what both the media companies and their advertisers want. While traditional broadcasters are continuing their relationship with Nielsen for the time being, I can’t imagine that will continue once a new system is in place that counts nontraditional viewers (who, I suspect, will be the majority of viewers within five to ten years, if they aren’t already).

What I really liked about this was the following comment:

The CIMM intends to look for ways to measure TV ratings data across multiple platforms and make the results publicly available.

Make the results publicly available. Excellent. Of course, we get ratings (a few weeks late) in the current system, but what I’d really like is to see near-real time reporting of ratings. Like a counter on a website, tallying views. I mean, with traditional broadcast you can’t do that, because you don’t know who is watching what at any given moment. But with the current system, you should be able to tally who is watching not only what shows, but what part of each show. Making all that data public would make the whole process more transparent. Not only that, but it might allow for more give-and-take between viewers and broadcasters/advertisers.

So, I have high hopes for this. Let’s hope they come up with a decent system. If done right, this could be a huge boon not only for viewers, but for advertisers and content creators as well.

tags: technology, television
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I realized lately that I don’t have much use for desktop computers. Sure, I still have one. I haven’t upgraded it in four years, and now plays little role in my computing other than as a file and media server. In that sense, it gets a lot of use: almost all the television I watch streams from that computer. But I could go days without sitting in front of it.

Originally I built the computer for my heavy-duty computing tasks: writing, graphic design, gaming, and later, audio recording (which I find I have precious little time for these days). I no longer game on the PC, and graphic design is no longer an occupation of mine. In fact, most of these things could be done as well or better on my laptop.

Technically, I could set up my desktop computer to accept remote access, and simply control it from my laptop. I’ve actually done this before (I’ve got technical problems with it now). The computer wouldn’t need a mouse, keyboard or even a monitor. It could sit in a room all by itself, plugged into the wall and the network, and I’d never need to actually sit at it to use it again. And I’m beginning to see the value of that.

I imagine I’ll never build the same kind of desktop system again. It might have a powerful processor and lots of hard drives, but never a fancy 3D graphics card. It seems that computers are sliding gradually toward the laptop as the common system, just as the big boxes of the 80s and early 90s gradually shifted to the tower models. I mean, when was the last time anyone had an actually computer that sat on top of the desk? Remember those? I do. Good riddance.

And good riddance to the bulky tower, as well. Yes, I know, there are still some places they’re useful. Like the office. For professionals, fine, take the desktop. But for everyone else, the desktop-style system is primarily good for very limited tasks, and best when hidden away and unseen.

To predict the future, one of the easiest things to do is look back ten years. What are we doing now that ten years ago was new, or different, or difficult? Ten years ago, digital music players with hard drives were barely a shadow in someone’s mind. Digital cameras were new and (save for a few niche applications) useless. Now nearly everyone carries a phone with a multi-megapixel camera that can also take video, and devices that carry tens of thousands of songs. So, what are we doing today that is new? High definition video, maybe. Video streaming. Shrink it, put it in your pocket, and what do you get? Can we have cell phones that are as powerful as today’s laptops, that have HD cameras built in? We’re already getting there. Can we stream HD content to those devices? Will we finally have a single device in our pocket that does the work of all of our devices? GPS, iPod, phone, Blackberry?

I ask this, because, I don’t see a place for the desktop in that scenario. What purpose does it serve? Will our phones/iPods not only be the receiver of such information streamed from larger central servers, but actually become servers themselves? Will they have terabytes of data that are freely shared by everyone connected to the net? Will I be able to stream thousands of hours of HD content to my TV, just by being in the same room with it, my phone in my pocket?

People are so used to their 20, 40, or 60 gigabyte iPods that they forget that the original models only held 5GB, which was huge at the time (most flash players of that era held 32 or 65 megabytes of data, enough for maybe one album). The idea of terabyte iPods is not that far away. Add a few years, and we’re talking multi-TB cell phones.

Ten years ago, that would have sounded ridiculous, but today it doesn’t sound all that distant. And I’m being conservative. The desktop is little more than a server in my tech world. I wonder how long it will be until even that function goes the way of the buggy whip.

tags: technology
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One of my favorite bloggers interviews one of my favorite authors. They spend a great deal of time talking about the technological singularity, and I’m happy to see that Scalzi and Reynolds seem to think the same thing about the singularity as I do, particularly regarding how remarkably adaptable people are when it comes to new tech. Definitely worth a viewing (it’s about twenty minutes).

tags: Books, culture, science, science fiction, technology
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Nielsen, despite paying massive amounts of money in”modernizing” their operations, has no interest in updating their system to take into account computer and DVR viewers. The networks aren’t happy with this, and have invested in a new consortium to take bids on a new rating service that will in all likelihood do what Nielsen won’t. Why? Because the networks want to be sure that, after investing the money and time and talent in creating a new show, that their decisions to cancel or continue with a given program are reasonable.

This can only be good for viewers. It’s been pointed out endlessly that Nielsen’s methodology has failed to keep up with changes in modern viewing habits. I can only wonder how many good shows were canceled because they drew mostly from pools of tech-savvy, nontraditional viewers (like myself), thus undercutting their Nielsen ratings.

The sooner this changes, the better.

tags: technology, television
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