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Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Worth remembering 
As Neo said, it's about choice
| | Internet Radio guy: We're on the same side here. We promote artists and sell records. Our station plays deep cuts from the industry's catalog. We put lists of every artist and song we play up on the Web with links to online stores where listeners can buy the CD. We help fight piracy and increase record sales. Why are you trying to kill us? |
| | RIAA guy: You don't understand. We're in the blockbuster business. We don't care about the rest of the catalog. We pay a lot to make and promote blockbuster artists. We have a system for that. You're not in it. |
| | According to Chris's research, the proportion of Hollywood's money coming from blockbusters is falling, while the cost of making blockbusters is up, and the number of people going to blockbusters is falling. It doesn't take a psychic to see that this means trouble for Hollywood, which has been mainlining $200MM box-office turds for half a decade now. |
| | Here's the larger movement: Independence from closed distribution systems. It's happening in radio (streaming, podcasting, satellite), in TV (big screens with vestigial tuners, ready for unbundled video of all kinds) and now in movies (same as TV). |
| | It's happening not just with independent film production, but with amateur production, thanks to the availability of affordable high-def (1920x1080) camcorders and editing on PCs. The results will coincidentally be the best source of high-def content on screens with the same resolution that will start dropping below $1000 at Costco later this year. (Most big screens you see in stores now are 1280 x 720 — which is, by its broad definition, "HD"; but not as "H" as the "D" will soon become.) |
| | Expect home screen resolution progress to plateau for at least a year or two — and possibly longer — at 1920 x 1080 (the best of which is "1080p") because that's the top resolution defined by the HDTV standard, and it's close enough to movie quality to satisfy the masses. (There's an excellent entry on screen resolutions in Wikipedia.) |
| | As I said in Rebuilding TV, One Producer at a Time, you're not going to get your best-looking "content" from the usual sources: cable and satellite. They don't have the bandwidth, because they're busy wedging too many simultaneous signals into one pipe, and compressing everything to a quality that looks like moving .jpegs saved at "lowest". HDTV from local over-the-air stations might look better than what you get from cable and satellite; but how many of us will bother to put up an outside antenna and get an HDTV tuner? |
| | By the way, the FCC is forcing all TV stations to move to new channels and broadcast only digital signals by 2009. Given the natural efficiencies of stored and viewed video, this may be a death sentence for TV as we knew it for the last fifty years. Especially when you consider the huge inefficiencies that have always plagued the advertising that pays for most of it. |
| | See, just as huge amounts of money are wasted on crap blockbuster movies, huge amounts of money are wasted on big-budget advertising on big-budget TV that's even crappier than the movies. The big difference is that Hollywood studios at least know how many people sit still and pay attention in theaters. Advertisers have only a vague idea how many people pay attention to their :30 and :60 second TV spots. (Oh, they know about "impressions" and "exposures", which are vastly worthless.) Worse, they've known the awful truth from the beginning: most of us avoid, or barely endure, most TV advertising. In other words, its woefully inefficient. |
| | So, as content distribution itself becomes more efficient, and routed from more and more independent producers to more and more independent consumers, and the bulk of those producers and consumers are independent of the old broadcast distribution system, advertisers will, inevitably, bail. |
| | Sure, some will try to weasel their ways onto home flat screens, iPods and cell phones; but the intelligent ones will spend their marketing money on whatever comes after advertising. That new marketing system will, inevitably, respect the native, free-born independence of producers and consumers that are not captive to any of the old systems. |
| | Then the human batteries that power The Matrix will finally be free. |
Woof
| | In The Dog Told Me, Steve Gillmor attends at length to vendors and other market leaders who pay attention to Attention. Faced with qualityglut, we're searching (pardon the expression) for levers to intermediate the attention stream. And he rates them. |
| | He also makes the transition, and the connection, between attention and gesture: |
| | The ugly truth of the 60's we all refused to accept was that smoking pot did lead to the harder stuffgetting high and not smoking pot. Does anybody still think the reason the Beatles got famous was because Brian Epstein put them in suits? The technology revolution is about the power of the infinite, the capacity of each of us to imagine, and if we can imagine, then learn how to build it. The attention revolution is not about what we do, it's about what we aspire to do. If I can get this much done today, how can I do more tomorrow? If this is true, then what else is true? |
| | Finally, to gestures. If attention is true, then what now? If Office is dead, then what replaces it? The inforouter. How does that work? Poorly, at first. Poorly in the sense that the river of news is poor. Poor in the sense that when everyone can have an executive information system for the price of a connection, then how do we make paradise function more efficiently? Poor like the lowest paid millionaire at Google. Poor in the sense that every client is a rich client. Not poor, just uneducated. |
| | How do we teach the inforouter? By inverting the pyramid. Ask not what the Net can do for you; ask what you can do for the Net. I gesture, therefore I am. Blogging is not a gesture. What the blog is about is. What the feeling of the post is. The humor, the benign neglect, the faux disrespect, so many inversions of the outgoing search model. Can you imagine the granularity of the gesture field? No more lowest common denominator required. Gesture directly to those who are listening to you. If you have money, that's good. If you have predictive insight about those with money, that's even better. If you have complete and utter affinity for something, that may turn out to be just as good or better. |
| | As you see, he's getting to Economy here. Somebody's gonna make some money. (And I hope it's Steve.) He's also giving free advice to a company that might hardly seem to need it, but does (as do we all, frankly, if we're willing to accept the gesture): |
| | Here is where Google must rapidly integrate attention services across Desktop, Reader, Gmail, Gtalk, and GCal, and then bite the transparency bullet hard. In effect, the inforouter absorbs email, presence, and audio/video services, breaking the portal model by inverting search from user-triggered to information communication requests. Gesture interpolation and synthesis replaces virtually all Office document production as information publishers line up for permission to push content and track attention to validate gesture rankings. |
| | Here's a hint: It's not about Google. Or even about technology. It's about what you and I are doing right now. And how we'll do it better when the medium is no longer the message. |
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