Hold My Avocado

One college broadcasting class I taught was "Electronic Media and Society," a survey course of communication, platforms, how each developed and in some cases such as the telegraph, what new medium came along to kill or replace it.

Image provided by fhwa.gov

Central was whether a specific technology was built on “point to point” or “point to many” communication.  The pony express was exclusively point to point.  Same for the original postal service and for dial-up telephones.  All sharing a goal of delivering one specific message …  call it “content”... to another single receiver or customer.

But other media emerged from “point to many” where one message or packet of information was for general consumption to anyone who could pick it up.  We all got the same content. Think of smoke signals, printed books and newspapers, old-style billboards, broadcast radio and over the air television.  One message going out to anyone who had the decoder to receive it ... whether electronic device or just plain old human ears and eyeballs.

What made the emergence of the Internet so disruptive to mass communications was that for the first time in history, one medium had the technology to be BOTH point-to-point AND point-to-many at the same time.  I can send a private email to my aunt in Des Moines, while a vertically integrated international corporation can multicast simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of recipients around the globe.  The carrier for both …  the medium of communication …  remains the Internet.

Image provided by standardrepublic.com

Flash forward to this week’s announcement that Disney is firing up its own over-the-top streaming service, with Mouse House pulling all their branded content from Netflix starting in 2019.  Disney’s not alone in jumping feet first into streaming.  In just the past couple weeks, we’ve seen similar announcements from cable’s AMC, ESPN, Fox’s FX distribution arm, along with CBS All Access.  Let’s not forget skinny bundles already coming from Dish’s SlingTV, AT&T’s DirecTV Now, and others.  Verizon’s trying to get their similar streaming service off the ground but can’t even sign up enough broadcasters to kick off their effort, just revealing yet another launch delay until sometime “after the fall season.”

Many of these new over-the-top offerings are available without any commercials.  No ads.  Out, damn spots.  Abandoning the old dual-profit profile that grew them fat and complacent.  For Comcast, Charter, Cox, Spectrum and others, this must evoke the shock and awe of raising a spear while spotting Daenerys and Drogon sweeping down onto the open battle field.

But cable companies were already on borrowed time, as a secession of subscribers and cord cutters demonstrate and their exodus comes down to greed on the part of MVTD providers. I don’t really need to define "greed." You’ve experienced it. Rising customer fees, dismal service, force-feeding unwanted channels as packages and ... greatest of all ... the dreaded “dual stream revenue” model, where access for which we pay a premium is riddled with additional endless ads and commercials, sold and inserted by our very same cable provider. Charging us for watching, and charging the advertisers for getting watched.

Image provided by areasbestbusiness.com

Yes, some channels earmarked “premium” are an exception to glut advertising, as with HBO and Showtime, but watching them brings another access fee on top of your regular monthly charges.  Surcharge on an already inflated invoice, just to be not held hostage to endless hucksterism and crass hawking.  Anyone remember that cardinal consumer rule, “the more a thing is advertised the less you actually need it” ?

The point here is that we as the consumer base demonstrate an encouraging new spin on two aspects of an old profit model:

       (1)    Abhorrence for traditional advertising, with it’s intrusive and offensive command and control dominance over our viewing experience

       (2)    Actual willingness to fairly compensate the content providers in exchange for what we want to watch, when we want to watch it

Image provided by produceclerkshandbook.com

What the major cable and satellite providers promulgated up to now was no different than the supermarket forcing me, as a customer, to only buy overripe avocados in bulk when I just wanted one for tonight’s meal.  Charging for a bundle of alligator fruit that I’ll never be able to consume, with most going bad and getting tossed unused. And expecting me to come back and buy the same terrible deal, week after week!

Image provided by californiaavocado.com

Blame or praise iTunes and Apple Store and Amazon, but the millennial generation accepts the business model that if priced fairly, good content is worth the purchase.  This means cable and dish companies have to resist old business habits that created corporate addiction to supplemental advertising profits and allowed them force feeding us quantity over quality as a customer retention technique.

Take this little guacamole parable and replace the "avocados" with "video programming content" and it demonstrates how big cable companies and their profit-above-principle policies created a consumer demand for simpler services like Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.  And why streaming newcomer newbies like Disney and AMC and Fox must eventually respect the profit model of fair price for unsponsored content, and in quantities we as customers can actually use.

Here, Comcast … hold my avocado.

Slack of Focus in a Sports Bar

Somehow, an epiphany on photography came to me while in a sports bar.

Not one to frequent such places, but one such establishment recently opened down the street. Promoting their “chef driven menu” two of us decided to stop by for happy hour. We were seated on the open-air upper deck, a view to the mountains on one side but a plethora of gigantic flat panel displays visible to the other. Several home theater-sized screens presented that day’s episode of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” studio-based sports talker.

I never watch this stuff normally. A couple years ago we cut the cord because Comcast, and later DISH network, kept forcing unwanted sports programming down our throats and escalating our monthly bill to cover their increasing programming fees. Enough was enough, we bought a Roku box with "no commercials" options to Hulu and Netflix. "Screw you, Comcast, always the United Airlines of cable consumer customer service."

But this kitchen was slow and the service lagged and my eyes drifted to the big screens. These things pushed all limits of current flat panel tech ... I have friends with driveways smaller than these monsters. Disinterested in the muddled verbal content of SportsCenter, my attention pulled me to the compromised clutter of the ESPN studio set design.

The set design itself not much, a very high-tech desk and behind it a matrix of very large flat panel displays, matrixed to show a cacophony of graphics and stats and athlete head shots and game clips, all dissolving and morphing like a sack full of cats. Fonts and and logos swirl and transmogrify faster than chameleons on amphetamines. All this as ESPN studio personalities sit and yammer among themselves. 

This was the premium content for which ESPN and Comcast so dearly bill each month?

Their studio production not a “set piece” in the traditional design sense, instead more a camera pointed at giant studio monitors displaying motion graphic content that could have just as simply been pushed out directly to viewer homes from the CG generator itself. ESPN was apparently insisting I watch my screen, fed from their camera pointed at another ESPN screen. Live human "hosts" reduced to clutter trapped between the studio camera and what that camera was REALLY capturing, which was simply more screens. The traditional background had become the conceptual foreground. It looked awful. There was no focus. Or more literally, the focus was everywhere all at once.

It made me long for the old days, when a big news set filled the television studio. Where space and distance could be used creatively and artistically, because physical laws of light, lens and optics never change. With larger lenses and bigger cameras (depending on the level and intensity of the studio lighting) at normal distances something is in focus, and stuff in front or behind is out of focus or “soft” visually. Having the background fuzzy helps visually isolate and reinforce the newscaster or anchor. It mimics our real life experience where our brain and eyes concentrate attention on what we want to see, and diffuse our perception of the extraneous stuff. 

But laws of optics also demand that as lenses get tinier and tinier, this depth of field effect grows less and less pronounced. With any lens miniaturized enough, EVERYTHING captured appears in focus and sharp. This may be a good thing for amateurs with smartphones, but bad for traditional esthetics and tasteful scenic design.

Today, small cramped studios with a desk with a panorama of flat panels immediately behind is a solution both quick and cheap. And cheap is the enemy of good. A stylish physical space for a television news or sports show does not come with an Ikea price tag. Designing and building physical walls and columns and arches and backgrounds requires human labor and craftsmanship ... to do it well is expensive. Once management commits to such an expense, those costs have to be amortized over several years. Make no mistake, even a bevy of 8-foot LCDs is cheaper than physical studio construction. Plus anything, any image, any signal, any graphic can electronically feed these screens. Want a completely different set? Boom, new graphics, done deal.

But with the LCD wall background only a few feet behind hosts and the guests, everything now sits within the same field of focus. Screens can’t be selectively soft because they’re too close to the talent. And besides, says the show’s producer, if we’re paying for all these graphics then by god, they’re gonna be sharp and not wasted as fuzzy, soft blobs floating somewhere behind the talent.  It’s become the new norm. Flat panels are versatile. Cheaper than physical set construction. Instantly changeable. What does it matter that the space and depth and selective focus that naturally go with it have disappeared?

Apparently it does matter. I ask you to consider that with great fanfare, Apple now offers with iOS 10.1 their “Portrait Mode” on iPhone models 7 Plus and higher. What does “Portrait Mode” do? It uses that regular “everything is sharp” iPhone photo from that nearly pinhole sized lens, and crunches it with software and algorithms to recreate the traditional depth-of-field effect. That same effect that happens naturally with larger lenses and formats now can be recreated via raw processing power. Irrelevant that what was once normally there now must be artificially restored because, as Apple puts it, “a beautiful new feature creates stunning photos … make your foreground subject sharp while creating a beautifully blurred background, also known as “bokeh” and previously only capable on DSLR cameras.” 

Wow. Just … wow. You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone. So now, the esthetic value of selective focus ... lost when lenses were miniaturized for smart phones ... can be restored or at least approximated via battery-draining computer processing. 

Will this mean that SportsCenter can invoke some semblance of artistic merit by applying software to “soften” the background and restore desirable beautifully blurred backgrounds to premium cable? Of course, the very same thing would happen automatically by just physically moving that wall of screens further away from the anchor desk. Moving the background so it’s actually “more in the background” allows simple optics to solve the visual problem.

But that’s the photographic revelation, that we’ve come to the point where an OS upgrade can insert what used to occur naturally. And until ESPN and all the other studio news and talk programs recognize their banal and disposable of pablum is merely filler between desperately overstuffed commercial blocks, then the larger problem of corporate focus will not disappear into the background anytime soon.

"X" Marks a Brand New Spot?

I spent quite a few years working on the production of national television commercials, and I know a classic rebranding campaign when I see one.

So, it's no surprise watching the rapid morphing of Comcast cable into Xfinity, and this current campaign follows to a “C” the classic rebranding structure:

1. Announce new name, but assure "we're still Comcast"

2. Use existing name, but share screen with new brand logo

3. Use new name, but share screen with old brand logo

4. Use new name exclusively, drop all reference to old identity

Current crop of ads place Comcast half-way between three and four. So far a very predictable metamorphosis, and one so textbook it breaks absolutely no new ground whatsoever. I can only hope that Comcast did not spend millions and millions on consultants or creative fees for this unimaginative corporate retread. 

  Of course, I would be wrong.

The current high-end national TV spots even go so far as hiring actor Jon Hamm for his come-hither voiceover, intoning as though he were the voice of computer HAL in Kubrick's space odyssey looking to hookup at a singles bar:

Actually, Hamm sounds here for all the world like his character ad exec Don Draper, in AMC's Mad Men, soullessly pitching new creative to a hapless client.

The bigger question in all this is "why"? Theories abound:

• Having totally trashed their image for customer service and support, Comcast wants to walk away from all their negative image issues and start over.

• Having max'd out their rate structure and facing mass customer defections to more cost-effective platforms, Comcast is simply repackaging their s.o.s. (same old service) in a fancy, shiny, glitzy wrapper in hope of dangling some suggestion of improvements. Well, my Comcast bill arrived last week, the same identical bundle at the identical price but with a big "welcome to Xfinity" sprawled across the invoice.

• Finally, in light of the current hearings in Washington debating Comcast's purchase of NBC-Universal, the Comcast execs decided divorcing their cable distribution from all soon-to-be acquired broadcast and motion picture content providers might be a wise move.

Overall, this last grand master plan is probably closest to the truth, but the laughable selection of the "Xfinity" monicker not only sounds like something out of the early 1980's, but also smacks of "X-rated" and "porn" which isn't surprising considering “adult content” makes up the largest portion of all cable's programming profits.

Or as one customer of a competing cable company so aptly put it, in a recent blog posting:

" … just so long as Cox cable doesn't try a similar name change."

Jim Furrer

Hear the Podcast of this Blog!

Original Audio Content by Jim Furrer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Next Bad News Bearers?

They say bad news comes in three's.  Major transportation disasters, passing of famous figures, Lindsay's court hearings.

So what next for the FCC?  The communications commissioners must be crouching behind their desks.

It was only this April, when the Washington DC Court of Appeals struck down the FCC's power to tell cable giant Comcast what to do.  Specifically, the Court found no authority under the Communications Act of 1934 for the Federal Communications Commission to try and enforce it's network neutrality principles upon the giant cable common carrier.

Simply put, on that one the FCC failed to tie its assertion of authority to any actual law enacted by Congress.  Observers called it a major blow to the Obama administration's emerging National Broadband Plan.

And now comes Wednesday's three judge ruling from the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down the FCC's current near-zero tolerance for accidental expletives during live events broadcast by the TV networks.  Calling the policy on fleeting expletives "unconstitutionally vague" the ruling did let stand a 1978 Supreme Court decision affirming the FCC's right to generally police the airwaves.

Simply put, with this one the FCC failed to tie it's assertion of authority over content to any actual law enacted by Congress.  Judge Rosemary Pooler wrote in the 3-0 decision, "Indeed, there is ample evidence in the record that the FCC's indecency policy has chilled protected speech."  The website Fast Company first published the following graphic:

Not a good call for the commission charged with policing our airwaves.  What next?  Well, today -- Thursday July 15 -- the FCC Dashboard meeting agenda includes Expanding Investment in Broadband Health Care Technology; Electronic Access to Cellphone Rate Information; an Inventory of Commercial Spectrum Space; and yes … Comcast's proposed takeover of NBC-Universal.

With the FCC having just recently lost in the courts to the same cable giant, if it's really true that bad news comes in three's, watching the government's behavior from this point forward will be, as Arte Johnson used to say, "ver-rrry interesting."


Jim Furrer

How often do you visit the forest?

Two nights ago, I was channel surfing the Comcast Digital Plus service. Out of boredom.

In case you failed to notice, with the Comcast digital set-top box EVERY CHANNEL gets displayed when you surf, even the ones you're not authorized to access ... that screen content "blacked out" but of course the datastream still presenting the name of the channel, the number, and the current program selection anyway.

Read that last one to apparently force upon me "what you're missing by not subscribing to this tier." I suppose this is a marketing scheme, some brilliant idea from another Comcast genius thinking I'll stumble across a show or movie that I'm so very desperate to view, I'll immediately reach for the phone and upgrade so not to miss it.

Right.

What I'm really being shown, with the program title and channel ID for EVERYTHING to which I'm not subscribed, is how repetitious and limited the programming universe really is. I'm happy for the movie studios, and all their "evergreen content" ... titles in their vaults that continue to generate revenue, year after year, be it DVD or PPV or premium channel packages. An ever-green forest of profits. I mean, how often can I possibly refuse to miss another rerun of "Die Hard" 1 or 2 or 3?

Two nights ago, all this surfing brought me to the 1964 Jerry Lewis film from Paramount, "The Patsy." It was running on Showtime's Family channel, a heavily leveraged premium service. This is a movie, now half-a-century old, that in the past ran time and again on over-the-air network television, syndicated local TV off-hour Hollywood movie packages, and even in a DVD home release. A quick check shows it can be purchased outright today for $3.77 from a multitude of retail web sites.

Now how much would you pay?

And yet, this title is presented as Prime Time Premium Cable Programming. Not basic service. Not practically free On Demand. Pay Premium Cable. I'm all for evergreen, but how often should I be expected to visit this forest?

And clicking through the Comcast Universe (near-pun intended) noting all the content I CANNOT view because I don't subscribe, I spot movie after movie after movie I already watched earlier on Encore or Multiplex or Starz or any of the other "pay services" that DO exist in my current tier. So, how does this motivate me to upgrade to additional premium services, when I can already see that a huge portion is stuff I've already recently watched elsewhere? What's my motivation? Why is forcing me to understand everything that's on every channel I CAN'T get such a good idea?

Instead, why can't I have a function that blocks or skips the ID and Current Program display for stuff I don't receive? Did anyone at Comcast every consider THAT option, that I could partake more of the content for which I'm authorized if it was easier and faster to access it? If I didn't need to wade through every single blocked channel in their digital maw?

But, that, apparently, is why Comcast is making the big bucks.

What do I know?


Jim Furrer