Original Programming

July 2011 I wrote about how we watch TV, the title:  I Don’t Have a TV.  I recently read Outside the Box, by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker, an article I highly recommend and decided it was time to revisit the topic for a bit.

 

We know that “TV” has changed.  What has changed as well, is who means what when they use the word “TV”.  That’s what my blog post from nearly three years ago was mostly about.  This time around, I’m more interested in the programming aspect of TV; that is content, not context.

 

Television today faces two major threats: advertising models and streaming services.

If You Ain't Livin' On Edge, You're Takin' Too Much Space

The first time I heard the quote: "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space" was at "The Conversation" at Columbia University, March of 2010.  It was an exciting time, the internet and social media in particular were changing how a filmmaker - or any artist, content producer and creative - shared their wares with his or her audience and fan base. We now had direct access to audiences without layers of sales agents, distributors, aggregators, studios, etc.  We could engage directly, get our messages out AND (potentially) make some money.

Context - Part 3

A guest post Leadership Unplugged on Brian Solis’ site (yes, again) started out being about leadership and then went into context and content.  Written by Roland Deiser and Sylvain Newton the article makes some very relevant points about an ‘unplugged’ and less perfect leadership style in a fast changing and moving world.  What struck the nerve for me were the following paragraphs:

Internet 3.0

So where are we going? Quo vadis? That could be asked, no: that has to be asked of all aspect of our lives. (And yes, we’re back to one of my fave topics) This entry: quo vadis www? Where are we headed with the internet, and these days the internet seems to be near synonymous with social media. 

So: we moved from being consumers to being co-creators. That means media now engages with communities (niche audiences) and (should) no longer cater just to a generic audience. Companies that communicate to the outside no longer push information (or products for that matter) to a community, but need to be ready to pull information into their organizations and to LISTEN.  Organizations that are traditional hierarchical need to rethink being flat(er) in structure and allowing for a network of employees to listen and communicate with consumers.  Flexibility is key.  Leadership needs to move from control to empowerment.

Coincidentally that jives with my earlier entry (the Culture Code) on generation y – or generation “me” (aka Millennials): the need to be heard, to be empowered and to be co-creators.  So, at least www. 3.0 is squarely catering to generation y – surprised?  Ok; I agree it’s a chicken and egg situation. Did you know that by 2025, 75% of the work force is going to be generation y-ers (aka Millennials)?    

In summary, below a table put out by Vodafone Enterprise Plenum after their work trip 2013 in New York and Boston:

	www 2.0	www 3.0
Individuals	Consumers	Co-creators
Media	Audience	Community
Organizations	Hierarchy	Network
Markets	Products	Platform
Communication	Push	Pull
Leadership	Control	Empower

Content Delivery

Back in 2011 I wrote a post about owning a TV.  This week my friend Gary Delfiner posted an article about the future of program delivery and I agree with all he observes, but that the water cooler effect is gone. It’s not it’s just different.  And before ANY water cooler talk with colleagues about a TV show you do have to set some spoiler alert rules; that’s all. I actually found it very helpful to be a season behind with Scandal in a recent situation as it gave us a much needed opportunity for a bonding moment when I finally caught up to the final episode of season two (OMG!). 

Olymic Coverage

When worlds collide...  As the Summer Olympics 2012 are wrapping up I’m a bid sad, as I missed the entire thing and for several reasons.  Most importantly, I had better things to do – like get myself out of the house and enjoy the Swiss Alps and do some moving around myself.  Secondly: I was abroad and had no TV where I stay and thirdly, it never occurred to me that the first and second reason would prevent me from seeing highlights;  I had planned on watching what interested me virally, but apparently I got stuck somewhere between TV monopoly (anybody say NBC?), the Organizing Committee of the Olympic games and 2005. Seriously?

So here we are, 2012 and YouTube has been around for, say, seven years and we’ve (or at least I have) heard a lot about that nifty synergy where videos go viral and then garner more hits (as in clicks on the web) and more interest and move traffic to the source of the video.  Sound familiar?  Well, maybe to you, but not the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, NBC nor any other TV station that paid a g’zillion to secure exclusive broadcast rights.  

What on earth was NBC thinking when they delayed broadcasting the day’s events to the evening prime time slot when the games where in London, five hours ahead of the East Coast?  Did they seriously think they could control the internet and social media?  Why not go live AND show the highlights in the evening?

Did the OCO think they could control Social Media without consequences?  They sure tried hard for the past two weeks.  What happened to our 1^st Amendment?

The OCO is taking down all YouTube video of the current games and has threatened sanctions against athletes who tweet and mention their sponsors. See this guest post on the Brian Solis blog by Eric Schwartzman. It sums up the Olympic social media fiasco beautifully. 

And go on YouTube and search ‘Olympics 2012’ and click on say, synchronized swimming. I did and for a moment I was wondering why the swim suits were a tad old fashioned, but guess what, the clip is from 1984. Click on any other video of the 2012 Olympic Games:  NONE are from the current games. 

The OCO had a great opportunity to show the world how traditional and social media can play hand in hand and benefit from one another and share synergies and allow for a singular situation where the context is perfect to create and SHARE amazing media moment after media moment.  They failed miserably; going Orwellian on us instead à la 1984 and showing us the ugly side of “Big Brother is Watching You”.

Good bye London, no tears shed as I’m clueless as to what happened and hello Rio de Janeiro 2016 – please get it right.

The Importance of Local

As I am sloshing through “Within the Context of no Context” by Georges Trow I find myself torn between total awe for his insights and alienation for his fragmented writing style and the realization that it is the style that makes the reading so thought provoking and painful but also beautiful.  I’m a fast reader and this is a slim volume, but this book is one paragraph, often just one sentence, at a time reading. I’ve been digesting “Within the Context of no Context”, morsel by morsel for well over a year. 

Today I came across ChrisBrogan’s latest blog entry about how “local” will become more and more important, and I immediately had to think of “Within the Context of no Context”.  It made me realize just how much more we feel disconnected the bigger our virtual reach becomes and that a need for immediate connectedness and belonging to a smaller subset that is ‘manageable’ might not be filled in the physical world, especially where business is concerned. 

Trow talks about those opposing forces as quadrants. The quadrant of man alone and the quadrant of all (in this case all Americans). Trow writes about the loneliness of man in terms of one person looking for a connectedness in a one-way relationship with the TV (Trow’s essay was originally published in the New Yorker and as a book in 1981) and how we personalize and ‘make our own’ the stars and TV personalities we watch every day in an effort to shrink the distance between our quadrant of physical living and experiencing and the quadrant of the rest of America. Trow might as well have been talking about the internet 2.0. 

I would that that a step further and say, that the larger our network becomes the more we become a group of one in the physical world.  In an effort to manage our growing reach, we create an “us”, which in our own eyes encompasses “all”, but really only means an “us”; a group who’s sentiments, or geography, or political views we share. Everything beyond “us” is foreign and out of our reach, sic understanding. This, also a powerful explanation for any ‘club-yness’ to the exclusion of ‘the other’ (another favorite topic of mine). 

The internet has made the stakes higher and the distance between man and the ‘rest of the world’ more distant. Trow’s quadrants have moved even further apart.  Any business who understands to fill the void between the quadrants has a lottery ticket in hand.  

If a business can reach out and have a meaningful two-way interaction with its customers on a global, virtual, all-connected platform, AND can give them their local 'heroes’ on the ground (as Chris Brogan calls them) – it will have a very powerful brand and a very strong relationship with its customers and consumers indeed.

Information Onslaught

Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I offered to come back later or listen to it with them.  We ended up chatting while there was a long segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to start with the actual address.  

I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the speech.  Of course not!  We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video to engage our audience, then they’re gone.  TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.  

There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or attention seeking pets and husbands.  When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I want to even start to engage.  Books for fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few books.  

The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the way to work and watch the evening news.  We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of information form the net.

I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed – I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little time. 

We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we (old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know) about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay and showed video of him engaging with another man.  The article shows excerpts from the texts that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m reading “IDC”, what?  IDC? I don’t care.  My favorite was that the article was full of “WTF”.  We can now officially use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just WFT.  But, I digress.

So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue?  This morning on the news (NY1):  the app is dwindling.  Today the average user uses less than five apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess is SIGNIFICANTLY.  At some point we have to do the dishes and get some work done. 

I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert information. 

How do YOU manage your information flow?  How have your habits change since the first onslaught of social media and blogging?  Are you digging out from under?

Visual Education

I was talking to a client and a DP (director of photography) today and we discussed how to present learning content for a young audience – an out of college sales force let’s say - and at the same time get the suits that make the buying decision excited about the presentation too.

In an earlier post I talk about the future of storytelling and how there is no linear story telling anymore as we knew it only a few years back (OK, many years back). To expand on that discussion we should also look at the way we have learned to “read” and understand visual material, especially if it moves.

When I started working in film production some 20 years ago (I was VERY young) the images we produced where clean, clear and crisp. We told stories literally and linearly. Transitions where hard cuts and fade in and out or a dissolve where major effects and placed thoughtfully. Voice over and graphic cards underscored what we felt was visually not absolutely crystal clear. We left breathing space so everybody could “read” along with us.

Enter digital filmmaking, YouTube, Flip cameras, iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Everybody is a filmmaker. Picture quality declined both in the literal, technical sense and in terms of story-telling. Out of focus was art, so was off-kilter framing. Fragments of story lines, slice of life vignettes emerged (some fascinating and many of them truly dull). Stories were told faster, more effects where used sometimes to enhance the message, more than not however ‘because they could’. Audiences learned to read imagery, quicker, more intuitively; they understood what was said even if it wasn’t.

Today no one shuffles their feet in a client meeting when an image starts with a slow focus pull that throws the background out of focus and the fore ground into focus, or if we start on a partial frame or an empty frame. We create three ring circuses with three emerging story lines simultaneously developing in one frame. We have learned to read all three and put them together. We read a wallpaper video in the background and a content video in the foreground and listen to a voice over (often competing with music – which always drives me nuts as a producer) and ‘get’ the message and think nothing of it.

We’ve also learned that we’re not being spoon-fed a linear story. It all happens NOW or it unfolds backwards, or in pieces, or entire chapters are left out – we can fill them in surely – just a waste of time to show it all and be linear, because time is what we do NOT have.

We have learned to “read” movies very fast and if the tempo is not fast enough we move on to the next clip – there are so many of them after all. The smallest common denominator is the fastest paced movie – as we all seem to have come out with attention deficit disorder.

But I’m still a sucker for linear story telling… I’m all for innovation and ‘not so perfect’ and artsy new ways of telling the story, but I want to have a beginning, middle and end. Call me old-fashioned.

Things that Operate 24 Hours a Day

What do we take for granted 24 hours a day? In New York, the city that never sleeps (unless it snows real hard or Irene passes by) nearly everything and the subway system is one. Tropical Storm Irene is probably the only single event that has brought the entire system to a halt last fall.

Now repairs to the system shut down entire lines for five nights in a row leaving commuters in the 10 or even 100 thousands stranded for a week if they work night or early morning shifts. For most of us a 10 PM to 5 AM closure is merely annoying and might result in a big taxi bill for a night or two, but what if you are one of so many people who offer services and goods the “other 16 hours” of the day and depend on night schedule from public transport, to shopping, customer service and recreation? How many percent of the working force are they? What support do they get to get to work in time to serve us our first coffee at the deli when we run to the subway, or relieve us from a midnight craving of sushi? Pick up our garbage and prepare the morning news?

One thing we always can count on is the internet – at all hours, all the time, and (nearly) everywhere. That is: until now. I just goggled Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)  and Protect IP Act (PIPA) and as you might have noticed I hyperlinked them to Wikipedia. If you click on those links as of midnight tonight (1/18/12 and for the next 24 hours) they will NOT be operational. Incidentally Wikipedia will suspend operation to protest SOPA and PIPA. And Wikipedia will not be alone Reddit, MoveOn, BoingBoing, the Cheezburger Network, and FailBlog among others will join in the black out. Both SOPA and PIPA are bills slated to be passed (or not) in Congress. The New York Times has a very relevant article on the topic should you need some freshening up. The key sentence, a quote from Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit: “[…] it’s not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don’t.”

Ok, so back to things that operate for 24 hours. We tend to think we need to always be available. Response times have to be under an hour. With email, text, Skype and face time (phones are now near antiquated), and our many “i ”Devices we connected at all times. I find myself hanging my head off my bed in the morning after turning off the alarm clock to totally sleep drunken look at my iPad or BlackBerry I left on the floor besides my bed (and it also gives me the right distance to read without my reading glasses), to make sure I haven’t missed anything while sleeping.

Do we really work more and are available more, or do we just push our work around the work week or calendar year to end up doing maybe even less than when we showed up at 9 AM and left at 5 PM and had worked with less technical distractions? Where is our focus? How much time do we have to dedicate to one task without interruption?

My sister said to me the other day: “I’m open for business from 7 AM to 8 PM”. I thought she was kidding until I realized that those were her hours of operation as mother, daughter, and employee. After 8 PM she wanted to be left alone, kid in bed and no more work or planning sessions – “CLOSED” sign on her forehead. Might not be a bad idea to set boundaries where there are often none (especially in the mother and daughter category). I solved the issue differently – I moved a six hour time difference away from my family and that decimates the family-operating hours. As for the vendor, friend and buddy-hours – I’m working on those.

I personally have a hard time with the “all or nothing” stance that I still see a lot in Europe even in management positions. I never forget the German producer who announced, as we were wrapping out a 13-part series of one-hour TV show, that she would go on vacation the next day for three weeks with no access to phone or email. I don’t think I’ve ever wrapped a job faster and gotten the final invoice for her approval submitted that quickly.

I’d rather check my email daily while traveling and spend a few hours a week taking care of some of the email bulk so when I get back I’m not buried in a sea of emails and pending potential disasters. Being a small business owner of course also means that I can’t disappear for three weeks without any knowledge of what’s going on at the office.

So, for now I’m open 24 hours, but will be sleeping for seven of those and as I don’t have a home phone and turn off the cell phone at night, all hell can break loose and I will be oblivious until I turn on the cell phone or check email hanging off my bed. But I’m open for business 24/7 – theoretically.

The Big Unfollow - For All The Idiots (Keep Reading)

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan posted a story on being “unfollowed”. I read it, thought it was very interesting (as I think about 98% of his writing is and I have no clue where all his information and ideas come from; he’s either got a huge head or very dedicated and smart people working for him).

A few days later, as I’m preparing to write an email to a friend I’ve not heard of in a long time I go onto FB to make sure I have his new (and ever changing) physical location right, not to ask him how Florida is when in effect he’s moved on to California. I type in his first name, and…. nothing. Strange I think. Type his name again … nada. YIKES. He’s un-friended me! I have a bit of a gut reaction and think immediately: “what have I done wrong”?…. “is he mad at me”? Alas – it turns out he’s un-friended us all – no more profile on FB. Uff.

Chris Brogan unfollowed everybody on Twitter to take care of a spam issue. The reactions he writes where at times visceral, even hostile and some just plain strange. I’ve noticed that I have about the same amount of Twitter followers every time I log on, which is three to four times a week (I know not enough, or too much – depending on who you are), but I do average a new follower daily. That means seven people think I’m boring enough to drop me from their Twitter list every week. That’s a sobering thought.

When I started my Twitter account I would follow everybody in an account that was similar to mine, hoping I might find an audience (back then mostly for my film Abraham’s Children). It mostly worked like a charm until I went to unfollow the lot to make space for new conquests. “Retaliation” was often very swift.

I use FB, LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out and to communicate my thoughts on what I think is newsworthy. News coming to me: I’m not so good with. With (still) only 24 hours a day is there ever enough time to digest but the tip of the social media iceberg, let alone interact and react?

What are the rules of politeness around a friend or a follower? How do people see themselves in the numbers of their friends and followers? Who is actually reading Tweets and status updates of all their followers? Who even notices if you ditch them? Are the numbers of followers and friends the currency of our social networking self-worth? Are we all communicating out but not across or between? How much are we taking IN?

In the old days of email marketing (about a month ago), a 15% click rate was great. With Twitter and FB I think we’re not even touching 1% but racing right into 1 per-mille. In every one in a thousand follower I have a potential customer or client. That’s another sobering thought.

Dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. Read: time-sink-run-with-the-crowd-idiot if you do and dinosaur if you don’t. I choose idiot. And you? (If you’re reading this my money is on idiot…).

The Future of Storytelling from a Documentarian’s POV

Chris Brogan’s series of posts on the future of media, work, marketplaces and community got me thinking about the future of storytelling.

The future of storytelling is non-linear (sadly, as far as I’m concerned), media centric and for that reason flexible, I would venture to guess also more fragmented and modular. Storytelling will be increasingly interactive, in cases even crowd-sourced, free and digital. Copyright will get a run for its money and will need to reinvent itself. Curation of content will take on a big role. I also think the message of the story will become more important.

The message has always been the core for documentaries; and maybe I’m co-mingling message with truth. As documentaries will have to adapt further to non-linear, media centric, flexible, interactive and free – how does that change the story? Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”, says that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the medium by which people communicate than by the content of the communication.

Where IS the message? Where IS the story? What story does the medium itself give us and how will it shape us into the future? How will eternal story lines of Romeo and Juliet, Pygmalion and the Iliad come to us? Is the internet the message or the medium or ultimately the meta-medium. I would suspect all three.

“I don’t have a TV”

I love when people tell me they don’t watch TV, or they don’t have a TV. TV zaps your time like nothing else – well maybe a child (any age) will too, but I always think that people who tell me they don’t own a TV or they don’t watch TV are trying to go the high-brow route of not wasting time with “that stuff”.  For full disclosure: I own a TV and I watch TV.

Here a scientifically insignificant study on “watching TV”:

Case Study #1:

My parents, (in Europe), pay a state mandated TV tax for each TV in the house (two), they have a cable box and have dinner at 6:30 PM so they can watch the 7:30 PM main news segment on public television. The exact same news segment will be shown on an alternate channel at 8 PM, but my father favors the ‘freshness’ of the 7:30 PM news, not to mention that the 8:00 PM news interferes with the movie shown at 8:15 PM. If I call from New York – which I seem to always do during the news – I’m being told to call back – after the movie. The toilet probably flushes at the same time in all of Switzerland during the only commercial break in a 90 minute movie.

Case Study #2:

I have a TV in my living room, a digital cable box with DV-R, a Roku box, and a DVD player. I watch the same four or five shows nearly exclusively because I stopped channel surfing since I have the DV-R. I have no concept of which show runs on which network at what time and what day of the week. I watch TV when I’m done with work, I fast forward through commercials, lest I disappear into the kitchen.

In real time I only watch NY1 while I go through my morning routine which makes me dip in and out of the living room. Occasionally I will sit down for an ‘event’ like the Academy Awards or a Royal Wedding (sorry to say, but I had a visitor who insisted).

Case Study #3:

My co-worker, a 26 years old recent college graduate, doesn’t watch TV – she makes a point out of telling me so. She watches Hulu, YouTube and Netflix – but her laptop is tethered to a digital monitor, the digital monitor is an old TV which stands across the sofa in the living room…. but she does NOT watch TV.

So, we all still watch something, be it life TV or canned goods; we call it ‘watching TV’ or ‘not watching TV’ – does it really matter?

My parents spend 2.5 hours a night between the news and a movie – their TV dictates when they eat and go to the bathroom.

I watch TV when I have “time” – some weeks more, others not at all – the shows are always there on my cable box. I want to believe that I watch more focused, however I do tend to watch ‘one more show’ because it’s there on my cable box and it ONLY runs for 40 minutes if I zap through the commercials.

My co-worker culls her viewing from many different sources and has left the structure of TV viewing behind her entirely.

How have YOUR TV consumption habits changed and how do you think it will affect the future of content production?

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened doors to an unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents worldwide and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gap becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power.

To this day 70% of the U.S. population visits the public library not only for their reading and research projects, but also for their computer and internet use, according to departing New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc. (NY1 “New York Times close up” edition with Sam Roberts).

Within the thirty-four OECD states the U.S. has fallen from fourth place in 2001 to 15th place in 2006 in broadband penetration. (See graph) . Availability is one reason, pricing another. Where today Ireland and Switzerland are the countries with the best price points in the OECD for adding high speed internet to an existing phone line, the US is in the lower third of that list.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet; and soon. The lost potential of talent and the education gap are too great to ignore.