Monthly Archive for August, 2007

NBC Dumps iTunes

Published
by
michael lee
on 31 August 2007
in The Intra-Web-O-Sphere!, art and culture and technology
. 9 Comments

Booooo! Boooooooooo!

NBC has decided that their new strategy for making money off of their content will be to remove it from the most popular, low-operational-cost, and globally effective distribution network ever built. Yup, according to the New York Times, NBC is pulling its content from the iTunes music store.

NBC on iTunes
This is just an awful idea. I think I’m a pretty typical customer of iTunes content - I’ll buy maybe one or two albums a month, and a few TV episodes a month. Check out the photo I’ve linked to the iTunes NBC page - it lists their 4 most popular shows. Here are the ways iTunes has enhanced my consumer relationship with NBC, and why NBC’s choice to pull their content is an awful idea.

The Office

Discovered it on the BBC, love the NBC version even more, but I’m not home to watch it when it’s regularly scheduled. Instead, I grab episodes online. I only follow one or two shows this way, so it’s cheaper than getting a TIVO.

Heroes

I followed this show on TV, but would occasionally miss an episode. How to get them? iTunes, of course! I jumped online and downloaded the episode the day after it aired.

Scrubs

I liked this show when it first came out, and then it got … what’s the word … stupid. I don’t follow the show at all anymore, but I wanted to watch some of the early episodes again. Rather than waiting for them to roll around on the syndication schedule, I jumped online and got them from iTunes.

30 Rock

This is the real tragedy of NBC’s choice. This show is probably the best new show they’ve developed in the last, let’s say, 39 years. How did I discover this show? They gave away an episode as a free download on iTunes. I downloaded it, loved it, am now a fan. Now, when I happen to be flipping channels and see it on TV, I stop flipping and watch the show. They earned a viewer for their broadcast network because of their use of alternate distribution channels.

Bad Business

The NYTimes article gives one real reason for the decision. Allow me to interpret:

The decision by NBC Universal highlights the escalating tension between Apple and media companies, which are unhappy that Apple will not give them more control over the pricing of songs and videos that are sold on iTunes.

NBC … wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.

means

Remember back when we made you buy an entire CD, with one great song and 12 filler pieces of crap? Oh man, we made so much money with that. Wasn’t that awesome? We think Apple should let us do the same thing with videos! Less consumer choice means more freedom for everyone! And by freedom, I mean money! And by everyone, I mean us!

Apple has shown, by virtue of their success in promoting music, that increasing the choices for consumers is a stronger model for building a distribution channel. People return to points of commerce where they feel empowered and valued. iTunes does that with it’s pricing and non-bundled policies. NBC, apparently, can’t understand that.

The Real Threat

I’m having a really hard time believing that the NBC executives are taking such a short-term view of their relationship with iTunes. The article states that they are limiting their distribution with iTunes out of concern for piracy. They should be concerned about piracy, but not for the reasons they give.

What they seem to not realize is that iTunes is not in competition with Hulu.com, or any other silo solution. The only real competition for iTunes media content is illegal downloads.

This is the brilliance of the iTunes price point, and the reason it has seen such explosive growth: $1.99 per show is exactly the point at which it becomes an easier choice to buy a show from iTunes than to go through the hassle of finding a torrent, loading it into a bit torrent client, waiting for it to download, hoping it’s high quality, and then sitting huddled in the dark hoping the RIAA doesn’t drop a lawsuit on your butt.

If NBC takes away the $1.99 iTunes option, people will not flock back to broadcast TV, they will not go hunt down the show at hulu.com, they will simply download it illegally, for free.

Check out how much of my value as a consumer NBC loses by ending their relationship with iTunes:

  1. The Office: This isn’t a time-sensitive show, so if I can’t get it through iTunes, I’ll wait and download the entire season at The Pirate Bay.
  2. Heroes: If I miss a single episode, I can pop over to isohunt and track it down. Again, the competition for the $1.99 iTunes Media Store is the Free Illegal Downloads Store.
  3. Scrubs: This was always a whim. If I don’t have easy access to previous episodes, I just won’t bother. The alternative to NBC selling me a show for $1.99 is … me doing nothing. Easy.
  4. 30 Rock: if NBC severs ties with iTunes, I don’t even find this show. I never watch a single episode. When it comes on broadcast TV and I’m flipping channels, I flip right past. NBC loses both an online purchaser and a broadcast viewer.

This is an awful, awful business move for NBC. They are alienating themselves from a whole population of potential consumers.

UPDATED: Nov. 25th
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Flickr Photos in the Morning

Published
by
michael lee
on 30 August 2007
in art and culture and technology
. 2 Comments

One of the the things I love about flickr is the ability to subscribe via RSS to the works of individual photographers. In addition to news updates, webcomics, blog posts, and the other assorted webby goodness that comes into my morning feed reader, I also get a healthy dose of just plain awesome photography. Here are some of my favorites:

Tal Bright

She shoots in Tel Aviv, and finds stark colors and contrasts. Many of her photos are close up shots of walls, doors, textured areas.

See all of her photos here.

Farl

Farl is a professional photographer who puts his non-professional work up on flickr. His non-professional work is pretty fantastic! He flies all over the world, and he is in love with all of it. His photos of Indonesian fishing villages and Brooklyn skylines alike share a kind of tender embrace, a joy toward the subject. And, again, Farl’s eye for color is amazing. Some of my favorite shots of his are from market days, just a basket of chilies or fruit.

His photo licensing doesn’t allow me to link his photos directly, but here are some links to a few photo pages of his (kerja, Reshia, pemain, lombok)

You can see all of his photos here.

Kenshi Daito

Kenshi is a process artist. Almost everything he shoots is altered significantly in the processing, but that’s not the point of his photos - the point is the narrative. There is an evocative storytelling to his photos, they pick you up midway through some series of events, and then leave you again. You become a spectator to intimate and reflective transitions in some other person’s story.

Again, the licensing restriction on his photos prevents me from linking samples here, but check out Orpheus(1), Orpheus(2), around and very close, and pregnancy. (Some of these photos are very tasteful nudes, FYI.)

All of Kenshi Daito’s photos can be seen here.

Other Notables

A few other photographers that you might enjoy, _rebekka, Thomas Hawk (unfortunately no longer posts to flickr due to censorship issues), and Nomad Photography.

There you have it. Share and enjoy! The world is a beautiful place, and an artful retelling of that beauty is always worth noticing.

coffee break

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 August 2007
in asides
. 4 Comments

one overlooked benefit to this crazy LA heatwave is that I can leave a half-finished cup of coffee in my truck when I go in to work, and when I come out 6 hours later it’s still warm. mmmmmm. Truck toaster coffee.

Seasonal Affective Reordering

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 August 2007
in art and culture, philosophy and university
. 16 Comments

I love these kids.

These bright eyed recruits, fresh to the craft, newly minted and unpolished, these old and young all-at-once, these boundless excesses of energy, not yet stunted by perspective.

They are as unafraid of questions as any group I’ve ever seen, setting their frame-of-reference up against everything new and ready to see it changed and stretched and grown. They are wolves, and every new thing is their prey. Knowledge, experience, fear, wonder, they hunt it down with precision and abandon.

I sit down to eat with one of them, and hear confession. They are uncertain, and afraid, but they are undaunted. They are ill-at-ease with their received faith, with simplicity and steps and a church reduced to social gatherings, and are looking for some way of meshing old truths with the complexity of the world as they are coming into it. This is the very meaning of courage, to me, to lay aside old comforts in order to take up greater things.

UCO rehearsal campIn these days before the start of classes, there is the luxury of unhurried time, and a kind of egalitarianism. I am not yet their Professor, they are not yet at the mercy of my gradebook, and we can talk freely. We can be friends, for a few days more, and we can talk about ideas and their consequences. I think sometimes that I get to do my best teaching in these last few days of summer, when the campus is full of eager students, and my time is unbounded by lectures and grading.

I love this place, and these kids, and my place here with them.

Thinky Thoughts with Aly: Inequality vs. Inequity

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 25 August 2007
in faith and theology, philosophy and politics
. 6 Comments

It’s not my plan to make all Thinky Thoughts with Aly a Something vs. Something Caged Death Match, but thinky thoughts have a mind of their own (ha) and that’s just how they thunk this week. Actually, now that I think about it (double ha), pitting related concepts against each other to duke it to the death is one of the the ways we sort shit out. Maybe it’s part of the system Michael mentioned: “We take in data, organize it into a structure that makes sense of it, then use that structure to gather more data.” Maybe Conceptual UFC (RESPECT) is a good idea after all.

We’ll see. Onward…

This week I began editing Tony Campolo’s new book, Red Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith & Politics. (I’m excited and alternately petrified. This is My First Big Book.) I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s already got me thinking. [Side note: In days of yore, I used to think and write about politics a lot. This was until I came to the painful realization that obsessing about civics was a substitute for working out my issues, and I had to put on the kibosh to avoid the looneybin. Now that I'm fractionally less crazy, I'm allowing myself to put politics back on the cooktop, albeit on the back burner. Hey, they're important, but they're not Life.]

So I’ve been musing on the difference between inequality and inequity. In the U.S., “inequality” gets a lot of airtime, I suspect because we’ve got the holding of these truths to be self-evident thing going on as the bedrock of our democracy. (That would be “all men are created equal,” for any of you just tuning in.) But I’m not sure what ol’ Benji Franklin was thinking…it’s pretty clear to me that all people are not created equal. You’ve got tall people and short people, female people and male people (and sometimes in-between people), athletic people and clumsy people, smart people and dumb-as-a-stick people, musical people and hey-I-can’t-lift-this-tune-bucket people. If God created all men equal, She must be using a different dictionary.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure ol’ Benji wasn’t thinking that all people are actually created equal — he was just trying to find a poetic way of saying “Georgie, you’ve got about as much divine right to rule me as I have to fart on your face.” But we seem to forget the circumstances under which The Equality Clause came into being, and have a very bad habit of taking the words at face value, sometimes almost believing that we’re all the same with the lights off. But we’re not. And we’d do well to remember it.

Because aiming social reform at erasing our God-given inequality is about as smart (and effective) as using a paintball gun to screw in a lightbulb. It don’t make no sense.

I hate that “inequality” is so much more of an emotionally loaded word. I think that must be why we keep using it in place of “inequity,” which feels dry and math-ish in comparison. Dry or not, however, inequity is the real Nasty, the bugger we ought to strap on big boots to stomp out.

But it’s hard, and hard is difficult. Inequity is much less abstract than inequality, and that makes it uncomfortable. The numbers don’t lie. (CEOs getting paid 400% of the average worker’s annual salary, anyone?) It’s so much nicer to toss around Big Ideas like “All men are created equal” and golf clap until our hands bleed than it is to sit down with our slide rule and abacus and do the work.