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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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!

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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.