Week In Review: Cord Cutting. Still Not Happening.

Welcome to Edition 2 of the new Friday Week In Review edition of TVREV. Where we’ll be examining the top stories of the week in detail, looking at why they matter and what you should do about them.

CORD CUTTING. STILL NOT HAPPENING.
Much to the dismay of the tech community, pay TV’s numbers held fast this quarter, with Comcast in particular coming on much stronger than in Q2. While the MVPDs are not gaining any subscribers, they’re losing them in teeny tiny increments. What many seem to forget is that a number that makes for a great Business Insider headline is actually a rounding error for an industry that has close to 90% penetration. This past quarter, those numbers were considerably smaller — Comcast, for example, only lost 48,000 subscribers, which constitutes 0.02% of their user base. Certainly not the stuff trends are made of.

WHY IT MATTERS: Pay TV is proving increasingly difficult to kill off. As TV Everywhere takes off in light of the new Nielsen OTT measurement system (TAM) it’s going to be even harder to eliminate. It may evolve — several MVPDs are following Dish’s lead and offering internet-only “skinny bundle” packages — but the appeal of a single bill, a program guide and DVR and lots of free channels is hard to beat.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: Keep on keeping on. There’s no need to drastically alter your pay TV plans or worry about a music-industry style collapses. Keep an eye out for broader trends around cord cutting, but right now nothing is.

TRUE[X] INTERACTIVE ADS ON HULU. 
The suddenly hot Hulu introduced yet another layer to their viewing model: viewers will have the option to watch a :30 interactive ad up front, allowing them to skip the two and a half minutes worth of interruptive advertising that would otherwise follow. While this option will initially only be available for viewers of Fox family shows on mobile devices, Hulu has plans to roll it out platform-wide.

WHY IT MATTERS: At a time when interruptive advertising gets less and less respect (and, more importantly, views) the industry is looking to find alternatives. Interactive advertising is appealing as it allows marketers to get in the more hard-sell messaging many of them miss in other “new advertising” formats like native, branded and #createdwith

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: If you’re a network, think about what adding interactive ad units, and offering them as an alternative to interruptive ones, would do for your bottom line. If you’re a network whose viewers lean heavy on the fast-forward button, then interactive makes sense as well. If you’re a marketer, think about what your brand’s interactive ad might look like. And hit up Joe Marchese at True[X] to learn more about what they have to offer.

THE MPAA SUCCEEDS IN GETTING POPCORNTIME SHUT DOWN.
In what’s rightly being hailed as a significant legal victory, the MPAA has managed to get the plug pulled on illegal streaming site PopcornTime. PopcornTime had Hollywood very freaked out because the interface looked prettier than Netflix and the platform made pirating movies a snap.

WHY IT MATTERS: While this probably isn’t the last we’ll hear of PopcornTime, and similar sites, there may just be a realization that there are financial consequences to piracy. Regardless, the ability of the MPAA to shut it down should have a chilling effect on others who are looking to do the same.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: Nothing. Piracy is still a real concern, sites that illegally stream movies and TV shows are more of a threat than download sites because they provide instant gratification. PopcornTime is still problematic in that it proved the value of a well-designed interface for video-based file sharing sites.

TWITTER TRADES STARS FOR HEARTS. 
Chasing innovation wherever they can find it, Twitter changed the icon for the favorites logo from a cold-but-bold star to a touchy-feely heart. Users reacted badly as the overall feeling was that the star was less about praise than acknowledgement and Twitter had (once again) fixed something that wasn’t broken.

WHY IT MATTERS: With quarter after quarter of flatline user growth, Twitter (and their new CEO Jack Dorsey) need to prove that they’re doing something to promote user growth. A heart probably isn’t it though, fellas.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: Treat the heart the same way you treated the star. Not worth stressing out about. You might also want to offer a prayer to the social media gods that Twitter figures out how to do something about that shrinking user base. Before said shrinking user base does something to Twitter.

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"Over The Top" Reviewed In New York Review Of Books

The cover story in this week's New York Review of Books, Will TV Beat The Internet, by Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg is a review of both my book, Over The Top, How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry and Michael Wolff's new book, Television Is The New Television.

While Weisberg takes Wolff to task for overstating the problems of digital media, he has nothing but kind words for Over The Top.

Two excerpts:

Whatever he believed ten years ago, is Wolff right that it’s now springtime for the old television machers? To answer that question, it’s necessary to step back from his latest embrace of the pre-digital in favor of more evidence-based analysis. An excellent place to start is Alan Wolk’s self-published book Over the Top: How the Internet Is (Slowly but Surely) Changing the Television Industry. Wolk, a well-connected industry analyst, points to a very different future for the television business than the one Wolff depicts. Wolk thinks that the sector is poised for major disruption, even if it’s unclear from which side or how quickly the transformation is likely to come.

and

Wolk’s book is also more interesting than Wolff’s about the way media economics is changing the shape of filmed content. The all-at-once release model, which Netflix pioneered with the Norwegian-American crime comedy Lilyhammer in 2012, was the experiment that immediately expanded the market for television auteurs. When a twenty- two-episode season was shown over six months, writers could introduce or kill off characters and plot lines in response to audience reactions. Now writers must rely mainly on their own instincts to deliver a finished season designed for binge viewing. This is another factor making scripted TV more novelistic. 

You can read the entire review here. 

Where’s The Wow? The New Apple TV Is Just Playing Catch-Up

Originally published at TV[R]EV on September 9, 2015

So Apple closed out today’s event with the band One Republic playing their two year-old hit “Counting Stars.”

Which only seemed to confirm the day’s theme, at least as far as Apple TV was concerned.

While there were plenty of upgrades to the AppleTV box, most of them were things their competitors have been doing for a while. Which, if our social media feeds are any indication, left many people feeling like Apple was playing catch-up rather than forging ahead.

Apple’s big announcements around TV centered around four new features: a new remote,  Siri integration, universal search, and a new SDK for games. And while they all had individual pieces that were innovative, nothing really overwhelmed us.

A Sleek New Remote
The most impressive new feature was probably the new remote control, which featured a glass touch pad that will allow you to swipe through the on-screen menu and tap to select. That’s a unique feature but without a keyboard to do the things you really want to do (e.g. search for specific shows) it’s still a hassle. Which is why a mini-tablet or smartphone based remote continues to make more sense.  Still, points to Apple for the sleek design.

Voice Commands Via Siri
The next big feature was Siri integration. You can use Siri to search, to pause, to rewind and fast-forward (in specific increments of time), even to call up the cast of the show you’re watching.
All of which Amazon Fire already does.

And here’s the rub with Siri: voice recognition systems circa fall 2015 do a good job with “find me Brad Pitt movies.” Less so with “find me Angelina Jolie movies.” And don’t even try “shows with Mariska Hargitay.” (Hence the aforementioned need for a keyboard.)

The voice-activated rewind and fast-forward and “what did she say” feature (Siri rewinds 15 seconds and includes closed-captions) should work well though, and we agree with Apple that voice commands are the future. It’s just that we’re not there yet.

Universal Search
Universal search was another feature Apple was pushing. Though for now it’s still not-quite-universal search—AppleTV will only look through Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime and iTunes for you. Here again, Roku’s had this feature for a while now,and it works across every app you’ve installed. Roku has no voice integration (yet) but, well,  Mariska Hargitay. As well as any foreign film you might be interested in watching. (“Hey Siri, find me La Nuit de Varennes.”) Typing is just easier.

The final new feature was a new operating system called tvOS that comes with an open SDK that seems to be geared towards game developers. While our Twitter feed was full of people mocking it as Apple reinventing Wii, there may be a market for “good enough” games—experiences that don’t require the intensity of a World of Warcraft, but are still fun and engaging. That said, other streaming device manufacturers (Amazon and Roku) have already been down this path without much success and beyond the remote, Apple doesn’t seem to be adding anything different. (And showing off the Gilt app certainly didn’t help their cause. We’ve already learned people don’t like to use the static interwebs on their TVs.)

Having neglected the Apple TV for quite some time, it is only natural that today’s update included a lot of catch-up features. The problem is that there was nothing ground-breaking either, nothing that really makes the new AppleTV stand out from its competitors. The new remote and voice-activated Siri are nice enough features, but neither one seems to justify the extra $100 Apple is charging for the new box. (Which still, interestingly enough, is priced to factor in users downloading large amounts of content, an idea that seems very 2010.)


If Siri’s ability to understand what we’re saying to her vastly improves, Apple may have something. But until then, we’re not seeing much reason to upgrade from the original AppleTV. Or switch over from Roku.

Apple’s Original Content Play: Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

Originally published at TV[R]EV on September 2, 2015

Apple might not be launching their own internet-based pay-TV service any time soon, but if the rumor mill is correct, they may be getting ready to produce some original content. And whether that content consists of iMovies or iSeries, one thing seems pretty clear: Apple will do whatever it takes to keep users tightly ensconced within their closed ecosystem.

A closed system is an anomaly at a time when consumers demand access to content on any device, at any time, in any place. It’s a system that’s served Apple well in the past when the iPod-iTunes loop dominated the music industry back in the mid-00s. But will it work for them ten years later with TV?
The jury is still out on that one, particularly because, when it comes to streaming television, Apple is operating from a position of weakness. Their decision to cling to the TVOD (transactional VOD) business model for iTunes, when everyone else was moving to subscription has left them behind the pack, to a point where it’s seemingly impossible for Apple to pivot, as almost all the existing network content of any value has been snapped up by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, and all that’s left for Apple are the scraps. Hence original content becomes Apple’s ticket to a subscription model, but original content is expensive and it will take Apple years to produce enough of it to catch up with its competitors.

That said, Apple’s decision to pursue original content may be less about software and more about hardware.

Apple is preparing to launch the latest iteration of its Apple TV and (credible) rumors put the price point at either $149 or $199. That’s a good $100 more than Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV and (especially) Roku and unless there are some significant bells and whistles (which there don’t appear to be—improved Siri integration doesn’t count, nor do the “good enough” games the SDK and app store will churn up)— it’s going to be very hard to convince anyone other than a hardcore fanboy to cough up the extra cash.

Enter original content. If Apple can produce a number of can’t-miss series that can only be seen on iTunes, that may well be the straw that breaks down resistance to  Apple TV’s high price point, bringing new users into the Apple ecosystem, where Apple can monitor their moves and collect their data. It’s a high-risk move, however, because if there’s one thing we know about original content, it’s that it’s very hard to predict what will stick.

And then, of course, there’s Apple’s long rumored pay-TV service.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Apple’s pay-TV service hasn’t launched because the networks don’t want to cut them any kind of a deal. More than YouTube loving, cord-nevering Millennials, the one thing the TV Industrial Complex fears is an Apple with a virtual stranglehold over the industry, the way iTunes once had a stranglehold over the music industry. It sounds almost quaint today, what with Spotify rising and the new Apple Music sinking, but it was once the music industry’s cold hard reality, and the television industry is resolute about not letting it happen again.

So the thought of Apple with it’s own pay-TV bundle plus original content plus a closed ecosystem to play it all on is the stuff of many a Brentwood resident’s nightmares.

In other words, don’t hold your breath for an Apple pay-TV service any time soon.

What does this all mean for the industry?

It means another entrant in the already saturated race to produce “quality” content of the sort that appeals to well-educated urbanites living on the coasts, quality, of course, being in the eye of the beholder. That leaves a big opening to produce the sort of “quality” content that appeals to the remaining 75% of Americans.

It means the possibility of a seeing the TV ecosystem bifurcated into Apple and non-Apple, the way the mobile universe currently is, which makes data collection, production and encoding more of a hassle, but opens up the door to those with the ability to work both sides of the room.

Finally, it means that there’s a real possibility that Apple will actually fail at something, that they waited too long (or were forced to wait too long) to actually enter the TV race, and that no amount of shiny Jonny Ives design will dislodge the existing players, who are already well entrenched with products no one seems all that chuffed about.

Which leaves us… right back where we are today, where Facebook’s hoodie-wearers pose far more of an existential threat to the television industry than the mock turtlenecks of Cupertino.

Time will tell.

Time Is Running Out For The 30-second TV Commercial

Time will soon be called on the traditional 30-second television spot. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Alan Wolk

Monday 22 June 2015 02.32 EDTLast modified on Monday 22 June 2015 02.36 EDT

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Originally published at The Guardian on June 22, 2015

The 30-second television commercial, once a cultural touchpoint, has lost its relevance in today’s world. It’s doomed to be relegated to the dustbin of 20th-century artefacts, right up there with cassette players and dial telephones.

TV commercials had their heyday in the 1960s when people had a surplus of time, particularly in the evenings after work. There were no emails, text messages or social networks to keep up with. Work and life had distinct boundaries, and TV was limited to a handful of stations that only broadcast during certain times of day.

Commercials were a part of the TV experience, a window onto the new world of packaged goods, automobiles and airline travel. They were an efficient way to learn about these products without having to get up from the couch.

The result of all this is that TV commercials feel like relics of a simpler era, one where the entire family gathered around the TV set each night to watch a limited set of programming without the ability to pause, fast forward, rewind, check Facebook, check Twitter, look something up on the internet or send a text message. They certainly don’t feel like 2015, and statistics indicate that viewers are assiduously avoiding them.

A study last year by Arris showed that 84% of respondents wanted to fast forward through the ads they watch, while 60% of them download or record shows so they can skip commercials. Even Super Bowl ads have lost their effectiveness: a 2014 study showed that 80% of them do not increase sales for the companies running them.

The increased use of smartphones and tablets also detracts from TV commercials’ relevance. Last month, researchers found that viewers who focused just on the TV screen were able to recall 2.43 out of every three brands mentioned, while smartphone and tablet users only managed to recall 1.62 on average.

Thanks to the internet, advertising’s even losing its role as an information source: A study by Mindshare earlier this year showed that the percentage of Americans who said advertising helped them learn about products and services dropped from 52% in 2005 to 41% in 2014.

So then, what sort of brand message is appropriate today? What can a brand do to get its message across to consumers in this new media environment without giving up the massive reach that TV commercials can bring?

The answer isn’t yet clear, but one place to start is branded content or native advertising. By sponsoring programming the viewer might want to watch purely for its entertainment value, the brand message does not feel quite so onerous. The emphasis here is on entertainment and on adopting the voice of the site, or the network the programme is showing on. The brand message is not buried, but it’s not front and centre either – a compromise many marketers still struggle with. Branded content and native advertising has proven effective online, such as on Buzzfeed, and there’s no reason to think that it won’t effectively translate to TV, where viewers will actively engage with it, versus the passive experience they have with old-school TV commercials.

Another option is to come to terms with the fact that many (if not most) viewers are watching TV on their own schedules and to start treating shows like in-cinema movies. That means limiting advertising to pre-roll ads only, where it’s less likely to be perceived as annoying or interruptive since it comes on before the viewer has had a chance to become involved with the show. It can even be followed up by a page on the show’s website that has a list of “sponsors” (which sounds better than advertisers), with links that allow the viewer to have a deeper engagement with the brand, anything from downloading coupons to watching a demo to straight-up e-commerce. 

TV commercials won’t disappear overnight – they’re still far too effective – and they won’t disappear for all the usual ”TV is dead, the internet is king” reasons. They’ll disappear because the modern consumer no longer has the patience to sit through a four-minute pod of eight 30-second sales pitches. As a result, their effectiveness will slowly wither away, leaving them as artefacts for historians as they study the latter half of the 20th century.

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Is HBO Now The Canary In The Coal Mine?

HBO Now launched yesterday and it could be the meteor that kills the industry’s dinosaurs, the biggest disaster since Ishtar, or anything in between. The trick — and it is no easy task — will be to convince cordless 20somethings to stop using their parents HBO Go passwords and spend $15/month for the new service instead.

That’s a big ask.

To begin with, HBO doesn’t have all that much “must-see” programming: Girls is over, so it’s Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley andJohn Oliver. They’ve got a passel of movies, good and bad, a couple of buzzed about documentaries (the one on Scientology.) But that’s about it.

There’s the full back catalog. Much of which is already on Amazon. Where for less than $15 a month, you get a lot more programming and free two-day shipping. More importantly, I’m guessing a sizable percentage of their potential audience has had access to HBO and HBO Go for a while now, so the back catalog is of less interest.

One extra large danger facing the service is what we call “binge and purge” — there is no minimum contract requirement, so it will be very easy for viewers to sign up for a month or two, binge on everything they want to see and then drop it. A similar scenario has them sticking with it until Game of Thrones (or Silicon Valley) is over and then dropping the service until next year.

That’s a very real problem for a service that’s twice the price of Netflix and Hulu with less than half the programming choices. If all you’re doing is watching Game of Thrones once a week, $15 a month is going to seem like an awful lot of money. And while the addition of daily news programming from Vice may help create more stickiness, it’s unclear whether that adds up to $15 a month worth of stickiness.

HBO has wisely made the first month of Now free and Apple is pushing it hard on the iTunes store. So while a goodly sized portion of its target may download the app just to check it out, it remains to be seen how many of them will stick around once that first bill arrives. (Or for that matter, how many of them will even want an app that duplicates what they already have for free with HBO Go, thanks Mom.)

However, HBO Now is important because it represents a step towards the unbundling of TV. It also serves as a reminder of just how expensive that unbundling might be: Cobble together your own DIY package with Now + Netflix + Sling + Hulu Plus + Amazon and you’re already looking at over $60/month for something that has far fewer options and is far more hassle than anything FIOS or Comcast might serve you for a few more dollars.

We’ll be keeping on eye on HBO Now’s numbers, this month and next as well as the month after Game of Thrones ends. Any way it turns out, it’s going to be interesting.

Originally published at www.braveventures.com

Going Mobile: What The Verizon/Awesomeness Deal Really Means

The news yesterday, that Verizon had signed a deal with DreamWorks and Awesomeness TV to broadcast original programming sounds like yet another milestone in the untethering of television from the set top box, but it raises an interesting set of questions.

First off, when Verizon's Terry Denson says that "mobile is the way millennials are increasingly consuming content" and Awesomeness's CEO Brian Robbins says that "(m)obile is where our audience lives" do they mean "mobile" as in the type of device or "mobile" in the type of technology used to deliver it?

Big difference.

As I've noted before, there is much confusion in the industry around the word "mobile" and many people bandying the term about don't seem to get the distinction.

Smartphones and tablets are referred to as mobile devices because they are easily moved from one place to the next and yes, they are popular with millennials.

LTE or mobile delivery on the other is an incredibly expensive way to watch video, especially when contrasted with WiFi. Most cellular plans include a fixed amount of data usage after which the price goes shooting up incrementally.

So it's unclear whether Verizon is planning to offer the new Awesomeness/DreamWorks package to its mobile customers to watch via an LTE connection only or if they'll be able to watch via their home WiFi once they've authenticated, even if they're using a broadband service that's not Verizon's.

I'd posit that the vast majority of long (or longish) form video viewing on mobile devices is done at home via the home WiFi connection. Both due to cost and to the fact that watching long or longer form video on a mobile device is an activity that's much more comfortably done at home.

While it's possible that Verizon may not count the data used to watch its new video service towards its users data usage amounts, that seems somewhat unlikely.

What's more likely is that customers of Verizon Wireless, a company (somewhat) separate from FIOS, with a national footprint of over 100 million users (versus FIOS' 6 million) will be able to watch the new channels via WiFi once they've authenticated. That's a huge market, one that Verizon is uniquely situated to tap.

Social Media Turned Awards Season Into Newest American Holiday

Originally published at brief.promaxbda.org on February 25, 2015, co-written with BRaVe Ventures

It’s only a matter of time before Hallmark starts selling cards for it, but it looks like Awards Show Season is the newest American holiday.

And social media is to blame.

The confluence of fans, brands and the shows themselves have taken what were once minor spectacles and turned them into major celebrations. That’s been a boon for the events themselves as well as the brands smart enough to be associated with them.

And what started out as a handful of fans using Twitter to make snarky comments about Super Bowl commercials has turned into an eight week-long celebration of celebrity that takes place not just on Twitter, but on Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest and, more and more, Snapchat.

People now await the second-screen activity going on around these events as much as they anticipate the events themselves. That’s a huge sea change and about as close as we’ll get to proof that the Unified Screen world is here to stay. Brands and shows are creating not just cross-screen executions, but cross-screen story arcs that start before the show and end afterwards. (Another bit of fallout courtesy of social media: award shows used to be a one-day event. Now they eat up much of the week beforehand and a day or two afterwards.)

One positive result of all this inflation is that brands, shows and frequent social media users now realize they need to bring their creative A games, that social media is built on buzz and that the only way to get that buzz is to create something people want to talk about. Which is rarely (if ever) a canned marketing message.

That’s lead to some BRaVe executions this year, the most notable (in our humble opinion) being the four minute Imagine Dragons concert that Target pulled together for the Grammys, the first real example of branded content being used as a commercial. The spot was perfectly Targeted (pun intended) at the music-loving Grammys audience and by giving them something they wanted to see rather than more “me! me! me!” the brand (and the band) both garnered lots of social media love… all while getting their message across.

Not to mention that Target is now running pre-roll in front of the clip on YouTube directing people to buy the band’s new album at — where else? — Target.

From the Golden Globes to the Super Bowl to the Grammys to the Oscars (with Saturday Night Live’s 40th Anniversary special thrown in just to snark things up) this year has seen an increased use of platforms-that-aren’t-Twitter with positive results.

Justin Timberlake, Billy Crystal and Jimmy Fallon all appeared on SNL’s 40th Anniversary special.

Few people over 21 had even heard of Snapchat last year, but then BOOM this year it was all over the big events, with a sizable influx of dollars and creative energy as everyone was trying to reach its young millennial audience.

Last year too, Instagram and Facebook were barely calls to action and had no notable “real-time” plays that people could see. This year, both platforms had major calls to action and Instagram literally won the red carpet at a few of the events — the Golden Globes in particular, but Vanity Fair’s celebrity Instagram portraits by photographer Mark Seliger also made quite a splash.

 Oscar goes a little more classic, a little less glitzy with its Instagram celebrity portraits.

‘The Imitation Game’‘s Benedict Cumberbatch and ‘Cake’‘s Jennifer Aniston gave away a Golden Globe and then posed for Instagram pictures backstage.

And while there was no Ellen Selfie moment in this year’s Oscars — although everyone was certainly expecting it — Facebook still managed to pull in 58 million engagements on a night when Twitter’s numbers actually went down. (Not that it’s fair to look at Twitter’s numbers: things change so quickly it makes little sense to try and do year over end analysis. Rather than comparing apples to apples, you wind up comparing apples to a never ending fruit salad of platforms.)

The takeaway is that Awards Season gives us a unique opportunity to test out those platforms, each of which offers a unique way to reach a segment of the audience that’s tuned out of traditional interruptive advertising and is looking for entertainment, a bar that rises higher every year as audiences continue to look for bigger and better circuses.

More than just a celebration however, Awards Season 2015 has been an eight-week marathon of creative growth as well as a proving ground for the unified screen world that’s showing us why TV+Social+Digital will be the force that drives this industry into a “CreatedWith” revolution.

We’re in the middle of an unprecedented TV (r)evolution right now, so fasten your seatbelts and hang on for the ride

Because They Can

The non-TV story at CES was all about the Internet of Things, whether it was wearables or smart homes/cars. There were hundreds of new products on display, but few of them seemed to actually solve any real problems and in some cases would seem to create them.

Now let me preface this by stating that I am the proud owner of a both a Pebble smartwatch and a smart home system from Verizon. I find them both very useful, the Pebble in particular as well as the piece of the Verizon system that texts me when someone has unlocked the door. (It’s a good way of keeping tabs on whether the kids are home from school.)

Unfortunately, much of what I saw on display did not reach that level of utility.  And every exhibitor seemed to gloss over the dirty little secret of the Internet of Things: In order for it to work, you’ve got to buy new things. You can’t retrofit your existing stuff. So while it’s great that a smart home app can tell your oven to start roasting a chicken, you’re going to have to buy a whole new stove in order to do that. Ditto blinds that raise and lower themselves according to the position of the sun: great idea, but do you really want to refit your house with new window treatments?

This is not to say that we won’t eventually get there with a lot of this stuff, just that it’s going to take a while. (It’s expensive to replace all your blinds.)


There’s also the utility issue I mentioned before: the answer to “why” for so many of these products is “because we can.”

Take Belty, the smart belt, for instance, winner of a CES Innovation Award. In addition to serving as a fitness tracker, it loosens and tightens itself as you (over)eat and then digest. Is this really a problem for people? Maybe I’m just a light eater, but the occasional Thanksgiving meal aside, I just don’t ever find myself wishing my belt was looser.

Ditto the “smart jar,” which helps you keep a running inventory of what’s in your pantry and whether you need to refill anything. A task I currently accomplish by opening a cabinet door and looking.

Volkswagen’s touch gestures seemed to fall in the category of creating problems. They claim that they are eliminating buttons and replacing them with hand gestures. Which looks sort of cool at a trade show, but would seem to cause problems in real life. For example, you open the sunroof by waving your hand near the roof of the car in a front-to-back swiping motion. (The opposite motion closes it.) Think of how many times people are going to be gesturing with their hands and have the sunroof fly open. Think too of how many people are not going to swipe hard enough or far enough as a sudden rain shower is drenching them.

That same VW concept car has a bar that runs along the dashboard. Swipe it with one finger to control the music, two fingers to control the navigation system, three fingers for something else. Think anybody’s actually going to remember that?

(In VW’s defense, they did show off a feature that’s part of their new navigation system that identifies open parking spots and directs you to them. That actually seemed quite useful… unless, of course, there’s a high concentration of VW drivers in your town.)

My final beef are the large tablet-sized control panels many car manufacturers were showing off. (Tesla’s was the size of two tablets.) They just seem dangerous. Drivers don’t need to be reading all that and the lack of a physical button makes the no-look push that much more difficult.

On the other hand, that may not be a problem if things like self-driving cars take off. Nvidia’s smart recognition software (below) , that identifies types of cars in real time, definitely provided a Wow! moment.

To leave on a positive note, there was one thing I thought was very cool, mostly because it resembled a science fair project: it’s called the Rockr2 and it’s a bluetooth enabled tube that has something that looks like half golf ball attached. The ball part emits vibrations and it able to turn everyday objects like empty cardboard boxes into speakers.

Because why buy a Jambox when you can use a shoebox…

WhatsApp and the 19 Billion Reasons UX Matters

One of the recurring themes you hear from naysayers who are unhappy with Facebook’s $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp is that it does the exact same thing as any number of messaging apps. Which is true. It just does it better and easier.

Take Skype, which is often held up as an app with even more functionality than WhatsApp: it allows texting, talking, and video chatting. But Skype requires you to sign up. It puts the onus of finding friends on you. And as any Skype user can attest, it’s buggy: IMs show up two days after they were sent. Friends online status get updated seemingly randomly with intrusive pop-up messages. And, the interface is often counterintuitive.

WhatsApp may not be breakthrough, but it’s simple and if you look at its core user base, you’ll understand why. WhatsApp didn’t break through with affluent American teenagers, they of the unlimited texting plans and unlimited iPhones— it got its traction overseas, with people whose friends didn’t always have smartphones, who had to pay for each text message, more for an MMS. In that sense, it’s similar to the Chinese WeChat, which is designed to work as well on an older Android technology as it is on the latest version of iOS. The recently announced addition of voice calls should play into that strategy too, provided it works as simply and easily as the chat app. The 40 million WhatsApp users in India and the 38 million in Brazil don’t have the same access to unlimited calling plans the way their American peers do. So a simple way to initiate and receive voice calls that doesn’t feel overly corporate (Skype) should be right in WhatsApp’s wheelhouse.

And while we’re riffing on WhatsApp, let’s not forget that a chat app— of any sort— is fundamentally different than Facebook, which bears a stronger resemblance to AOL circa 1998 than to any of today’s new crop of apps. Facebook allows users to spend hours doing anything but communicating with each other: playing CandyCrush, reading articles, stalking old girlfriends. It’s a win for Facebook because they get to serve up countless ads during your hours-long gaming and stalking visit and it gives people who aren't inherently social a reason to visit the app.

If you’re going to WhatsApp, on the other hand, the odds are high you’re going to communicate with someone. Not browse or dilly dally.

So if Facebook is smart, they’ll keep WhatsApp separate. And just be happy knowing that the Facebook brand gives users the best omnivore app (in the original Facebook) the best photo app (Instagram) and now the best messaging app. As companies from P&G to Disney can attest, there’s nothing wrong with that strategy.

Slaves of the Internet, Here's Your Problem

I hate the word "content" and strive to use it as infrequently as possible. I find it to be emblematic of the way stories, photos, movies and TV shows have been reduced to the status of filler and it carries the assumption that the end user could care less what the content is, so long as it is "compelling," an equally nebulous term.

But there's a reason it's become so ubiquitous and that's because the internet is filled with a whole lot of "content"-- poorly written/designed/filmed/concepted content, and the truth is very few people seem to care.

That's the unfortunate response I have to Tim Kreider's much-commented-upon screed Slaves Of The Internet, Unite!

You see while I get that it sucks that people are always asking him to write and speak for free (that's my world as well) I also get that the reason that happens is that audiences don't see enough of a difference between work that's really good and work that's just okay. And if that's the case, there's no reason for anyone to pay for work that's really good, when there's an unending source of "just okay" content (and in this case, the stuff I'm referring to is aptly called "content.")

So if your goal is to put out an 800 word listicle or a "How To" service piece, the audience doesn't seem to care a whole lot about craftsmanship. They care about the bullets and the quick takeaway and that's it. They care that there was some sort of photo to catch their eye, but unless it's egregiously offensive, that's about all they'll notice.

So while it's unfortunate that the people who used to be able to make a living out of those kinds of creative endeavors (and to be fair, the work that Kreider and the people he is talking about create is far more nuanced and skillful than just 800 word listicles or stock photos) the audience for whom their work is intended just doesn't see the value of it.

Once They've Seen Paris: A Revolutionary Proposal For The TV Industry

Once you’ve gotten used to watching television without advertising, it’s really hard to go back.

That’s something the industry hasn’t really come to terms with yet, the fact that they’ve been training a whole generation (and many of its elders) to studiously avoid the very thing they use to pay the bills. It’s like having a dull ache in your leg for years and then suddenly finding a pill that makes it go away. It wasn’t life-altering pain, but once it’s gone, you realize how much better you feel without it and there’s no way you’re ever going to put up with it again.

I was thinking about this while listening to the Netflix earnings call on Tuesday. For 8 dollars a month, they’re able to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year off subscriber fees alone. And no commercials. Ever.

But how many networks are there that we’d pay 8 dollars a month for? I suspect not that many. Maybe 5 or 10 at most. The rest we could live without: we mostly watch them because they’re free or we’re bored or because they have one particular show we like. The rest is just a flyover zone, the channels you pass through when clicking from NBC to Showtime.

So here’s a radical thought: what if we turned the whole paradigm around? What if we made ad supported TV the back-up option and subscription services the premier one?

Take the CBS series Under The Dome which premiered this summer on Monday nights, with multiple commercial breaks, on CBS and then resurfaced on Fridays on Amazon, commercial free.

What if the process was reversed and the Monday night broadcast was on a service called CBS Prime that you paid $8/month to subscribe to and where you got to watch Under The Dome and other CBS series ad-free?

Viewers who didn’t sign up for CBS Prime would get to watch the show five days later for free, only with the usual eight minutes worth of advertising thrown in.

This would create two strong reasons for fans to subscribe to CBS Prime (early access and no commercials) and would still allow the show to build audience with remaining viewers, some of whom might like the show enough to sign up for CBS Prime. It would also place pressure on the networks to improve the quality of their programming so that viewers would want to sign up for the prime versions.

There are potential downsides to this maneuver: affluent audiences might just default to the ad-free services and be lost to advertisers forever (though I’d argue that this is more or less happening already, thanks to streaming, VOD and DVR.)

The industry would also be forced to admit that an ad-supported model is an inferior model and risk losing ad revenue (though again, you can argue that this is already the case with apps and it’s not hurting mobile ad revenue. Plus TV advertising still has incredible reach and services like AdTonik that tie TV spots to mobile ads can help extend that reach, while also hitting affluent audiences.)

The biggest downside would be that the Prime system would only work for a dozen networks at most and that would create a more transparent two-tier system. On the other hand, if costs were low enough and a niche network had a small-but-extremely-loyal following, the Prime system could work for them as well.

How it would work is also open for discussion: the most logical move would be an HBO-style service with a preset linear schedule, though there’s also an argument to be made for a pure VOD service that had much of the network's library already on it (ad-free) and where each new episode would be available for download at noon Eastern time on Mondays. A Netflix-style system where all episodes were released at once is also possible, though spoilers might serve to disincentivize weekly viewers.)

Given the results of Piksel's recent Binge Viewing Survey, that showed many viewers are no longer watching their favorite shows live (and thus presumably watching them without commercials) a shift in emphasis to align TV with the rest of the entertainment industry, where the free/ad-supported model is not the premium model, could go a long way to keeping those viewers happy and keep them from leaving the pay TV ecosystem. It’s a major paradigm shift, but it’s one that could work to the advantage of all parties involved.

Viewers in particular.

Results of the 2013 Piksel Binge Viewing Survey

The results of our Piksel Binge Viewing Survey are in and they're up on SlideShare. 

You'll find some interesting conclusions, like the fact that only 11% of respondents watch their favorite TV shows live. Read through the results and share your thoughts.

The Not So Secret Life of the American Teenager

There’s been so much written lately about teenagers in the age of social media, so much of it patently ridiculous (e.g. I talked to my sister and her friends and thus extrapolated what all teenagers were up to) and/or posited by people who haven’t actually seen a teenager since they themselves were one, that I felt a tirade was in order. So here goes:

What’s the one constant about teenagers, of any generation, beyond the whole horniness thing? The fact that so many teens are constantly trying on new personalities and new identities just to see what it feels like or to see what fits. And so what apps they are into varies wildly from day to day, from school to school, from clique to clique and (especially) from girls to boys.

Facebook is the one constant. They may tell you they don’t really like it, don’t like seeing the dumb things people post on it, but reality check: so do most adults. And like teens, we may gripe about it, but we still use it.

Why? Because it’s its own self-contained theme park. You can chat, you can play games, you can look at pictures, listen to music, stalk old friends-- there’s a whole world of things you can do on Facebook depending on your mood. And everyone you know is on there, from Grandma to the kid you sat next to in kindergarten, so it’s got the same repellers and attractors as home. Especially if you’re 15 and undecided whether it’s comforting or mortifying that your mom “liked” your picture from soccer practice.

Apps are like teenage fashion choices. One day you’re wearing Ugg boots because they’re cool and trendy, the next day you decide they’re stupid and pretentious and want nothing to do with them. Substitute Pinterest or Twitter or Snapchat and you get the picture. And that shouldn’t be the least bit surprising: teenagers are like that, they’re capricious about pretty much everything from friends to music to the mood they’re in when they get home. And they have been like that since we invented them back in the 1950s.

So let’s stop trying to define them and assigning them a specific taste in apps. Vine is hot this month because comedians are making funny videos/hipsters are making cool artsy videos/someone was playing with it in study hall and everyone started watching/my older brother and his friends said it was cool.

Next month it’ll be something else.

Which is not to say that every teenager is doomed to spend their middle school and high school years in a permanent state of app flux. Sometimes it feels right and so you stick with it. But what that “it” is varies so widely, it’s foolish to try and define. The one thing we do know is that the next Facebook isn’t here yet. Facebook still feels like “home” and with the possible exception of Instagram and Snapchat, all the other apps are about interacting with others or about being entertained. None of them are the new Facebook, either singly or in combination.

The new Facebook won’t be here for a while: sea changes like that don’t come about very often. But when it does, don’t worry about trying to identify it: like the Supreme Court said about pornography, you’ll know it when you see it.

The Problem With Facebook Data

The more I use Facebook Graph Search, the more evident it becomes that Facebook made a major mistake with their most ubiquitous feature: the “Like.”

Follow this train: Facebook’s value, their kryptonite, is their data. They have a billion users, and they know the habits and preferences of all of billion of them because they can easily track that information by examining what they’ve Liked.

Or can they?

On the pre-Like Facebook, users were Fans of pages. That information - which brands, bands, books, movies, sports teams, etc. a user was a Fan of was prominently displayed on the user’s profile page. Which meant users spent a lot of time curating those selections, pruning and adding so that the list was an accurate reflection of who they were. Or at least who they wanted people to think they were.

As a result, it was tough (or tough-ish) to get users to become fans of pages they didn’t think would give them social currency or look good on their wall. Hence, the Like, an easy way to give a brand a thumbs-up (and permission to coat your wall with brand messages.)

But while the Like button has become ubiquitous and a seeming smash hit for Facebook, it does not appear to be used in any consistent manner. That was its selling point: a lower key way for users to indicate approval for a brand, but it’s also it’s Achille’s heel: if users aren’t displaying any sort of consistency in the way they use the like button, then the resulting data is fairly inaccurate and not all that useful. (Bye-bye monetization.)

This is evident in the spate of Tumblr blogs flagging the random overlaps Facebook Graph Search pulls up (married men who like prostitutes, Christians who like porn) and in less quirky uses, like the study BTIG did on the accuracy of using Graph Search as a movie recommendation engine. What they found should be somewhat troubling for Facebook: the movies users Liked overwhelmingly dated back to the list they compiled when they first signed up for the service or to the last used the Fan format.

There are multiple reasons users are either promiscuous or inconsistent with their Likes, but they all circle around two competing forces: (A) If The Brands We Like are how we present ourselves to the world, it takes a lot for a new brand to crack that list and (B) if Likes are easy to give and easily buried in the News Feed, there’s no reason not to give them out at random.

Now by brands, I mean any sort of product: movies, books, songs, actors, vacation spots, along with the more typical products and services we call brands. To the consumer, they’re all a part of who they are, and attaching their name to anything other than the tried and true, when that preference is in a prominent location, is a leap.

The constant rejiggering of the Facebook interface - particularly the introduction of the Timeline, where the “About” section, with the brands and media the user likes, is now one level down-- has lessened the amount of attention people give to their Likes. That in turn, works on the validity of Likes from another direction: those who don’t see their Likes as a reflection of who they are are likely to become more promiscuous with them, and at the same time more random, on the assumption that the action has both an immediate value (unlocking a coupon offer) and limited aftereffects.

The other culprit here, perhaps even more to blame than Timeline is Frictionless Sharing: by posting every article the user half-glanced at and every song they or their offspring started to listen to, Frictionless Sharing greatly reduced the impetus the user had to be sparing with their Likes. While “Mary is listening to Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones on Spotify” was supposed to be of lesser significance than “Mary Liked Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones,” users did not really grasp that subtlety and many likely figured that if all bets were off, why not just start Liking just about everything?

While it’s possible to imagine a scenario where Facebook encourages users to carefully parse out Likes to new products so that their opinions can help guide their friends, it seems unlikely:  first and foremost there is the black and white nature of the Like: it’s an endorsement, pure and simple, in the way that 3 stars out of 5 is not.

Can Facebook fix this? Probably. They’ll need to rethink both the Like and frictionless sharing and the value users place on having their brand and media preferences prominently featured on their profiles. If they can solve for that in a way that encourages more, rather than less interaction, and more curation of the brands (media and otherwise) a user Likes, they have a good chance to make their data more accurate and thus, more valuable.

The stakes are high, and it’s a big “if.”

Apples To Oranges

As someone who is frequently driving to unfamiliar locations and who relies on an iPhone based GPS to get himself there, I have to say that the new Apple maps program is quite an improvement, particularly in terms of the graphics, which make navigating while driving a lot simpler.

The problem, for Apple, is that the program it's quite an improvement on isn't Google Maps, which it replaced, but rather TomTom USA, which is the company the app is based on.

While Google maps on iOS is a wonderful thing, it didn't work like a GPS. If you wanted step-by-step directions, you needed a co-pilot: you had to both read and advance the app yourself.

That's why so many iPhone users went out and bought GPS apps like Tom Tom and Wayz: they allowed you to use your phone instead of a unique GPS device to access a program where a robotic voice read you directions as you drove.

That was the hole Apple was likely trying to plug. What they seem to have overlooked was that lots of people used Google Maps for things other than driving directions. Like walking directions. Biking directions. Or just browsing their current location to figure out what was close by.

In other words, from a user standpoint, the new Apple Maps was a GPS replacement app. Not a Google Maps replacement app. Hence the angst over Google Maps disappearance.

It's not that Apple Maps is a bad app. It's got great features like Siri and search integration. It's just that it doesn't do what GoogleApps did.

Not even almost.

Aaron Sorkin and the Counterrevolution

One of the most fascinating aspects of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO drama The Newsroom, is just how blatantly anti-“spirit-of-the-internet” it is. Which is a sign that the pendulum is about to start swinging in the opposite direction.

For years, media was ruled by gatekeepers: editors who manned the doorways and decided what was worthy and what was not. They could do this because the means of production-- printing a book or making a movie-- were too expensive for the average person. And if that didn’t work, they could rely on the fact that distribution channels were tightly controlled: you could only buy books through bookstores. You could only watch movies at theaters or on TV.

The web blew all that up and gave everyone a voice. Even something as simple as letters to the editor took an a different cast online: the editors couldn’t just decide which letters they wanted to publish: on the web, every letter (or comment) got published.

While this change was much-needed, it now seems close to spinning out of control. This is particularly true of news, for as Sorkin’s mouthpiece, executive producer Mackenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer) notes, news is about truth, not entertainment. Unfortunately, the gatekeepers of the internet favor articles and videos that instantly go “viral” because they’re outrageous, not because they add to our understanding of the truth.

The emphasis on instant popularity and creating “virality” has cheapened the entertainment industry, too. I was recently on a panel where the CEO of one of the many data interpretation companies was adamant that the main benefit of any sort of social TV would be to enable producers to see what plot devices garnered the most buzz, so that they could then go incorporate them into their own shows.

I twitched. Visibly.  And gently reminded him of the dozens of “me too” shows Hollywood blasts out each year, few (if any) of which meet with success. The key to Oprah isn’t having a talk show with an outspoken-yet-empathetic black woman with weight loss issues as the host. The key to Oprah is Oprah: she has that secret sauce that people respond to and cloning her is not going to give you the recipe.

More importantly, the programs and plot devices that get the most social media buzz usually aren’t the most interesting or clever or thoughtful. Like news, they’re just the most outrageous or cute or funny. Because outrageous is what gets click-through. And outrageous makes us dumber in that it doesn’t ask for a whole lot of thought or reflection. 

Outrageous isn’t prima facie a bad thing; it becomes bad when it’s the only thing, and that is what is starting to happen with the new gatekeepers.

But back to the news, which is not about cloning formulas, but about doing actual reporting. There are stories that only a real journalist can do, stories that require weeks, if not months of research, which in turn requires an organization that can finance that research. 

I’m a bit of a zealot about this: I make it a point to post “only a journalist could have done this” stories to my social networks. (This New York Times story about Apple store employees is a good recent example.) And I do this to point out that while citizen journalists are useful, they ultimately have a small role in the news gathering process: providing on-the-ground, front line details during revolutions or natural disasters. They can give the immediate picture, but not the big one.

Ditto the legions of Tweeters who retweet catchy headlines, “5 Reasons Why” lists and any story that sounds vaguely racy or scandalous. Tweeters are very good at reporting the deaths of celebrities. They usually beat the mainstream media. 

But that’s about it. 

The bulk of the stories that get shared via social media are not, as Sorkin notes, about presenting the truth or both sides of the argument. They’re about presenting something outrageous or funny or cute enough to be passed along. Which is dangerous, because it can make it seem as if a non-issue (Sorkin’s example is Birthers) actually has two equally valid points of view.

That’s why The Newsroom has significance beyond it’s actual place in the TV universe. It’s the first popular voice to point out the tyranny of the crowd; the fact that the new gatekeepers may be just as bad as the old ones; and that once again it’s truth and art that suffer.

Sorkin’s may be the first voice, but I suspect it won’t be the last.