“Every movie in every cinema is about death. Death sells.” So Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) tells the band’s front man David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) in the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap. Truth in comedy to be sure.
Death not only sells in the cinema, but TV as well. It always has of course, and over time, like many aspects of all media, the situations have progressively gotten stronger and more graphic. I’m not going to go all Parents Television Council on you, but I’ve always wondered what effect, if any, this has on viewers.
There has always been talk that we’ve been “desensitized” to sex and violence, but personally, I can’t agree. Over the years I’ve become more sensitized, particularly to violence. The supporters of the desensitizing theory claim that it takes more intense depictions of sex and violence to satisfy audiences. Maybe, but not for me.
I’m not sure what it is, but shows like C.S.I., Law and Order, Bones and so on, all critically acclaimed, hold no interest for me. From a writing and production stand point, they are all fine shows. However, I just don’t want to be immersed in that much murder and death. I watched loads of cop and detective shows when I was a kid, so maybe I’m just tired of the format. Perhaps it’s because I watch the news and read the news and see enough real-life misery, that that kind of TV is not an escape, but a reminder.
Oddly, I can handle death on shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost. I still enjoy watching Crime Story on DVD, and that was one of the most violent shows ever made. BSG and Lost though, are science fiction and that separation from reality is enough for me get some distance I suppose. Crime Story, a show filmed in the ‘80s about the 1960’s, was so over-the-top, that it too is far from realistic. I just love the era as well (and thus, I like Mad Men too).
At Thanksgiving this past year, a relative (well, relative of a relative) who doesn’t watch much TV, said he had really gotten into Dexter. This is the Showtime series about a serial killer. A lot of other people I know are really into it too. I can’t bring myself to even have a look.
Never criticize something you haven’t seen, I know. But I’m not criticizing it, I’m just saying I simply can’t get behind the premise. Dexter is played by Michael C. Hall, who played David Fisher in another Showtime series, Six Feet Under. On the recommendation of our niece, we checked that out on DVD. Great characters, well-cast, well-written, and lots of death. That’s a hard one to avoid, I know, because it is set in a Los Angeles funeral home.
First Blood we also started renting, and like Lost and BSG I’m not as put off by the killing. I am, however, kind of worn out on vampires. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Interview with the Vampire, Twilight--- it’s almost like what westerns were to kids in the ‘50s.
Unlike my wife, I don’t think that watching Dexter is going to cause someone to go on a killing spree. If you’re hooked up that way, it’s going to happen, TV or no TV. She also contends it gives those nuts “ideas.” Maybe, but again, that switch was tripped a long time ago, how it they follow through is irrelevant to the actual deed.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Paying for Internet content
Has Internet killed the newspaper star? With publications like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Christian Science Monitor shuttering their print operations and moving to web only distribution, the answer would seem to be “yes.”
Newspapers of course painted themselves into a corner when they embraced the World Wide Web. By not charging for their content, they quickly devalued their online presence, at least in monetary terms. Then again, the few that did charge right out of the gate found few takers. What had worked so well for broadcasters for over eighty years, hasn’t getting the job done.
Eric Clemons is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Guest posting on TechCrunch, he argues that
“pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.”
Perhaps the genie is already out of the bottle, but it seems that if people are expecting the message, the failure rate should decline. As a child of network television, I expect commercials. When I watch reruns of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone or Battlestar Galactica on line, I don’t bristle at watching an ad during what were the normal broadcast commercial breaks. It probably helps that my computer is a bit aged, and that trying to skip the spots goofs up the stream. But again, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to watch a total of 4 or 5 commercials in exchange for seeing the episode on demand and, otherwise, free.
On USA Today’s website I’m less forgiving for some reason. Click on a headline, and before the story pops up, there is often an ad. Oddly, you can click to close it and move on. Guess what I do? If I had to sit through, say, 15 seconds of an ad where I didn’t have the option of skipping, I’d wait patiently, probably even look at the advert and then read the content I was originally after.
There’s probably loads of research to show that people simply won’t do what I do, but the alternative isn’t very attractive. I hate signing up for every little thing on the web. It’s annoying. Usernames, passwords, “tell us about yourself”---bugger off, as our friends in the U.K. say. Couldn’t you just show me a nice ad instead? Even though we all hate ads, we sure do talk about the good ones. Sometimes we even go and seek them out on YouTube.
I don’t want to pay for Facebook. However, I’ll trade a half hour of Facebook time for a one minuet ad. They can even target it, I won’t be mad at ‘em. I’m a Cleveland Browns fan, so have the NFL Network run a spot that reminds me about their exclusive Thursday night game. Or on on-line music site can remind me about an upcoming release from one of the bands I’ve become a fan of on Facebook.
A lot of the debate out there is over whether advertising as we have known it can survive on the web, or can make money for people and their websites. As an individual consumer I say “yes,” but I’m just a guy north of 40, and the young people may have different notion.
By the way, here’s something fun. A report 1981 KRON San Francisco report on what the prospect of reading your morning newspaper on your home computer.
Newspapers of course painted themselves into a corner when they embraced the World Wide Web. By not charging for their content, they quickly devalued their online presence, at least in monetary terms. Then again, the few that did charge right out of the gate found few takers. What had worked so well for broadcasters for over eighty years, hasn’t getting the job done.
Eric Clemons is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Guest posting on TechCrunch, he argues that
“pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.”
Perhaps the genie is already out of the bottle, but it seems that if people are expecting the message, the failure rate should decline. As a child of network television, I expect commercials. When I watch reruns of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone or Battlestar Galactica on line, I don’t bristle at watching an ad during what were the normal broadcast commercial breaks. It probably helps that my computer is a bit aged, and that trying to skip the spots goofs up the stream. But again, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to watch a total of 4 or 5 commercials in exchange for seeing the episode on demand and, otherwise, free.
On USA Today’s website I’m less forgiving for some reason. Click on a headline, and before the story pops up, there is often an ad. Oddly, you can click to close it and move on. Guess what I do? If I had to sit through, say, 15 seconds of an ad where I didn’t have the option of skipping, I’d wait patiently, probably even look at the advert and then read the content I was originally after.
There’s probably loads of research to show that people simply won’t do what I do, but the alternative isn’t very attractive. I hate signing up for every little thing on the web. It’s annoying. Usernames, passwords, “tell us about yourself”---bugger off, as our friends in the U.K. say. Couldn’t you just show me a nice ad instead? Even though we all hate ads, we sure do talk about the good ones. Sometimes we even go and seek them out on YouTube.
I don’t want to pay for Facebook. However, I’ll trade a half hour of Facebook time for a one minuet ad. They can even target it, I won’t be mad at ‘em. I’m a Cleveland Browns fan, so have the NFL Network run a spot that reminds me about their exclusive Thursday night game. Or on on-line music site can remind me about an upcoming release from one of the bands I’ve become a fan of on Facebook.
A lot of the debate out there is over whether advertising as we have known it can survive on the web, or can make money for people and their websites. As an individual consumer I say “yes,” but I’m just a guy north of 40, and the young people may have different notion.
By the way, here’s something fun. A report 1981 KRON San Francisco report on what the prospect of reading your morning newspaper on your home computer.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Viedotape
Set a deadline. That should be the first rule of blogging. Post things more than once every 60 days. Of course that’s tough when you have paying gigs that require your attention, but as I pointed out in the first installment of this blog, this is where those great rare cuts and b-sides will be found. With that in mind Can I Have a Say? becomes a weekly effort starting now. I actually have lost of topics to cover, but the one I have the most energy for at the moment is, perhaps oddly, videotape.
Yes, videotape. I still use it---a lot. We rarely watch anything when it’s actually broadcast, except for sports. We do have a DVR, or digital video recorder, from our cable company, as well as a recordable DVD player. Yet the three VCRs do the bulk of the recording around here.
The DVR is nice because it records in High Definition (HD), which is great for time shifting a show like Survivor. I have it configured to run upstairs to the master bedroom, but through a quirk that I have yet to resolve, the downstairs TV must be on in order for the signal to go upstairs. It’s weird! It also consumes a lot of power having the HDTV on, w whopping 300 watts. Ouch!
The DVD-R is a spottier, and much more finicky beast. Nine times out of ten it works, but every so often the disc won’t finalize properly, meaning the disc cannot be watched in other DVD players. The discs themselves are also somewhat delicate. I think we all stopped believing the jive about digital discs, audio and video, being “indestructible” years ago. Also, you can’t re-use DVD-R and quite frankly I don’t trust the rewriteable DVDs.
Which brings us back to our old friend videotape. You can record over and over on it. Take it anywhere, and it stays cued up. It does wear out eventually, it’s kind of bulky and it’s not great for archiving, but then I’m not sure how good DVD-R is for the latter at this point. A lot of things I dumped form VHS to DVD-R freeze up when played back.
It just seems that we gave up on videotape a bit too soon. In the rush to get us to re-buy all of our VHS movies and TV shows on DVD we were left in a bit of a technology gap. Of course, that was likely seen as an advantage by studios looking to thwart piracy, as well as home-use copying.
The integration of computers may finally solve a lot of this. Being able to dump shows on to a zip drive and taking that to another room, or over to a friend’s house is a wonderful solution.
While that ramps up, the VCR slowly drifts away. You can buy VCR/DVD combos, presumably for folks who have not, or cannot convert parts of their libraries to DVD. The problem is, many of these don’t have tuners, so taping broadcasts is impossible.
Hopefully our old VCRs will hang on until the technology gap is easily and completely filled.
Yes, videotape. I still use it---a lot. We rarely watch anything when it’s actually broadcast, except for sports. We do have a DVR, or digital video recorder, from our cable company, as well as a recordable DVD player. Yet the three VCRs do the bulk of the recording around here.
The DVR is nice because it records in High Definition (HD), which is great for time shifting a show like Survivor. I have it configured to run upstairs to the master bedroom, but through a quirk that I have yet to resolve, the downstairs TV must be on in order for the signal to go upstairs. It’s weird! It also consumes a lot of power having the HDTV on, w whopping 300 watts. Ouch!
The DVD-R is a spottier, and much more finicky beast. Nine times out of ten it works, but every so often the disc won’t finalize properly, meaning the disc cannot be watched in other DVD players. The discs themselves are also somewhat delicate. I think we all stopped believing the jive about digital discs, audio and video, being “indestructible” years ago. Also, you can’t re-use DVD-R and quite frankly I don’t trust the rewriteable DVDs.
Which brings us back to our old friend videotape. You can record over and over on it. Take it anywhere, and it stays cued up. It does wear out eventually, it’s kind of bulky and it’s not great for archiving, but then I’m not sure how good DVD-R is for the latter at this point. A lot of things I dumped form VHS to DVD-R freeze up when played back.
It just seems that we gave up on videotape a bit too soon. In the rush to get us to re-buy all of our VHS movies and TV shows on DVD we were left in a bit of a technology gap. Of course, that was likely seen as an advantage by studios looking to thwart piracy, as well as home-use copying.
The integration of computers may finally solve a lot of this. Being able to dump shows on to a zip drive and taking that to another room, or over to a friend’s house is a wonderful solution.
While that ramps up, the VCR slowly drifts away. You can buy VCR/DVD combos, presumably for folks who have not, or cannot convert parts of their libraries to DVD. The problem is, many of these don’t have tuners, so taping broadcasts is impossible.
Hopefully our old VCRs will hang on until the technology gap is easily and completely filled.
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