virtualeconomics

Ad-lapsing, or TV plus or minus ten minutes

Appointment television ceased to be appointment television when we all got TiVos. We could skip the ads so we skipped the ads. Then we all got Twitter, and appointment television became appointment television again because what's the fun of watching Xfactor or The Apprentice or Dr Who the day after the twitter stream has flown by?

There's a couple of possible solutions to this, but the one that strikes me as most obviously achievable without the invention of any new technology is for us all to agree to a minor conspiracy.

On metaphor and pseudoantineofeudalism

This weekend I saw two things with the same uncompromising message. Charlie Brooker's latest Black Mirror 15 Million Merits, and the Timberlake / Seyfried film In Time.

Both apply the brutally belaboured metaphor of time as money and depict a class of indentured post-industrial serfs slaving away at pointedly mindless tasks for, in Brookerverse, the "merits" (Facebook likes times retweets times pounds) they need to buy everything from toothpaste to ad-skipping, and for the doomed residents of the In Time ghetto literally the minutes and hours they need to keep their hearts beating. Both depict a vast underclass grinding away to support a neofeudal aristocracy (in the one case of bankers, in the other a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell analogue celebrity freak-wrangler). Both offer the same escape routes for their doomed underclass - blind chance, inheritance and gambling.

So far so mind-numbingly obvious. The funny bit is that I paid thirty quid to take my parents to see In Time and we sat through maybe half an hour of ads while watching 15 Million Merits.

Contra Farmville for Dummies

The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

On football and competition

A recent European ruling apparently makes it likely that the football league will be prevented from selling rights on a territory by territory basis - a Portsmouth landlady has been buying the games for less than £1,000 from Greece instead of the £7,000 asked by Sky Sports, and initial opinion from European legal experts is that she is fully entitled to.

Apologists for the billionaires who own the big clubs and the millionaires who play for them will claim that the loss by the clubs of their current three billion odd pounds in territorial TV revenues will adversely affect the quality of football played.

Which is palpable nonsense.

Tried to pay, can't pay

Let me just add an English echo to the chorus of voices over at Techdirt pointing out that if we were simply allowed to pay for a copy of the media we download many of us would. The particular problem we have here in England is that our social media is global and connected (about half the people I talk to on Twitter are in the US) but our broadcast media are constrained by obsolete release windows, so by the time the latest shows hit our TV and cinema screens we've already heard all the spoilers. 

ITV bets its future on the thing that will kill it stone dead

News that Ofcom is to change the rules on product placement in British TV programmes has apparently been greeted with enthusiasm by commercial broadcasters, especially ITV. 

Commercial broadcasters should really think this one through. 

TV Twicker is the wrong way around

Lostremote reports on TV Twicker, a neat app for Internet-ready TVs that adds tweets from anyone you follow to a news ticker along the bottom of the TV. 

It's a neat idea to integrate tweets and TV, but this is the wrong way around. During scheduled broadcast TV, it's conceivable I'd want a feed of every tweet from everyone I follow at the bottom of the screen (mainly during ad breaks or if there's a lull). Much more useful would be when watching catch-up or recorded programmes to see all tweets with the relevant tags that were made when the programme was originally recorded. If I miss The Apprentice on Wednesday night and watch it on Thursday morning, what I miss is the realtime Twitter stream from the millions of other viewers. Replicating that stream, whenever I happen to catch up with the show, is where the real win would be. 

Twitter just quietly became a TV and radio broadcast platform

Twitter's announcement on Monday that it was embedding yet more multimedia sources in its preview pane completely passed me by - adding Instagram and Rdio to a roster of sites embeddable in the preview pane that already included Flickr and YouTube isn't obviously a big deal.

But it is a big deal, because with this announcement Twitter just became a multimedia broadcast channel. A single Twitter account can now be a new MTV, or Radio 1, with just the same combination of chat and music scheduled and released over the day so that as one song or music video ends (say as a link to YouTube or Rdio) the next can be scheduled into the feed, but with more interaction and more control from the listener end than any TV music channel or radio station.

The secret of ITV's success

It turns out the secret to running a successful commercial TV broadcasting business is to show programmes that lots and lots of people want to watch, and then sell ads against them. Who could have guessed?

Not, it seems, new ITV boss Adam Crozier, who said in August that "it is pretty obvious to me that being so reliant on one extremely volatile and declining source of income is not a healthy place for us to be in the long run." Or, to put it another way, while the secret to success as a TV broadcaster is showing programmes that lots and lots of people want to watch, the guy in charge at ITV isn't confident his business can consistently manage that. Now there's a comforting thought for the shareholders.

Why hack the iPlayer?

Except for the pure intellectual challenge, why would anyone bother to hack the iPlayer? So for a brief window of opportunity BBC programmes were available on the iPlayer without the DRM. They're already available without DRM via BitTorrent. So is, err, pretty much everything. See for example Dr Who on Piratebay below. The whole - fairly nebulous - benefit of using the iPlayer instead of Bittorrent is that you're not doing anything legally dubious. So why hack it? What an odd thing to bother doing.