Great Reading from the Times

In late November, the NY Times published a special edition of its Sunday magazine called the "Screens" issue. There's so much in there.... a great piece by Kevin Kelly on "screen literacy," a piece about Netflix's recommendation technology, and interviews with David Lynch and Jennifer Aniston. Also an A.O. Scott piece about whether the movie theater is endangered.

Here's the explanatory intro:

Every fall the magazine publishes a special issue about Hollywood, a celebration and investigation of that unique experience called moviegoing: sitting in a dark theater for two hours with a few hundred strangers and being entertained by flickering lights and amplified sound. This year, we’ve stretched the issue to reflect a new reality: when you watch moving pictures these days, a theater is the last place you are likely to be. Cable, YouTube, DVDs, DVR, news briefs in the elevator and cartoons on your cellphone — through a variety of media, we now consume fragmented narratives on multiple screens. From a 16-second panda-sneeze video to 60 straight hours of “The Wire,” this is the way we watch now.

And in today's paper, Laura Holson has a piece headlined, 'Who Needs a TV? I'm Watching on a Laptop'

Just as more and more people have abandoned land-line telephones for their cell phone, it seems that the next trend is abandoning your home cable connection (and TV) for laptop video viewing.

The Internet: Bigger Than TV?

I've never been called a "historian" before... and I'm sure plenty of real historians would object... but here's an interview I did with Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee last Sunday night.

In it, I make the claim that the Internet as a delivery mechanism for video is more important than television. Television was great, but it only enabled media companies to distribute their content in a new way. The Internet allows anyone to distribute content, reach global audiences, and, ideally, make money.

New Online Series for Sony Pictures TV

Sony Pictures Television is launching a new series on the Web, 'Angel of Death,' with the hope that it'll do well later as a DVD. Budget is $1 million, and it'll be shown in eight-minute chunks online, according to the Wall Street Journal.

From Sarah McBride's piece:

In addition to generating some ad revenue on the Web, Sony hopes that launching the show online will translate into strong sales for the DVD, much as a good start in theaters builds DVD sales for feature movies.

"We're not expecting to make all our money back in that initial [online] window," says Sean Carey, senior executive vice president, Sony Pictures Television.

Key for these bigger-budget Web series will be getting them distributed on lots of sites, and sparking some geniune Internet buzz around them. (I feel like the only things I heard about 'quarterlife' and 'Prom Queen' was from mainstream media articles about them.)

Strike Resolved ... What It Means

A tentative deal between writers and producers was reached on Saturday; work in Hollywood could resume as soon as Wednesday. The big win for the Writer's Guild of America was securing a percentage of revenues when shows and movies are delivered online (rather than receiving a fixed fee.)

Cynthia Littleton of Variety has some thoughtful analysis of what the WGA strike meant to TV and screenwriters, in economic terms. She writes:

For the WGA, it was all about setting precedent and cementing the idea that scribes deserve to be paid for Internet exploitation of their work. More specifically, they wanted a deal that paid them a percentage of distributor's gross, on the principle that "when you get paid, we get paid."

But the cost of achieving that principle through a strike has been considerable -- particularly for the busiest and most successful WGA members with the most to lose. Meanwhile, the money to be made through the hard-fought new-media residuals is not exactly eye-popping.

A TV writer, for example, will earn about $1,400-$1,600 a year for each streamed episode on which he is the credited writer -- while some showrunners may have lost as much as six figures from unproduced episodes. Screenwriters will probably earn less from this new income source, as Web streaming of movies is not nearly as ubiquitous as streaming of TV programs.

The Wall Street Journal says:

Whether the advances the WGA made on winning new-media income will ever be worth anything remains to be seen. Some of the producers feel they have made a considerable concession in agreeing to pay the writers a percentage rather than a flat fee. But even the studios have little idea of what impact the Internet will have on the industry by the time the next negotiation comes around in 2011.

"There are important issues that remain unresolved and there are more discussions to be had over the next contract," said David Young, the WGA's West Coast executive director.

Reaching an accord with the Screen Actors Guild is next on the to-do list, according to the New York Times.

Note to NBC: Putting Video on the Net is Not Enough ... It Actually Has to Work

NBC's spat with iTunes has been well-publicized. The result is that new NBC shows are no longer available for purchase on iTunes.

Having missed a few recent episodes of 'The Office,' I first visited iTunes ... before remembering that they weren't for sale there. (I've bought two or three episodes of the show from iTunes in the past.)

Then I went to NBC.com, which offers recent episodes for free, supported by advertising.

The only problem is that they are utterly unwatchable. After four attempts on two different days, I couldn't get the videos to play at anything better than what looked like one frame per second.

I noticed today on the NBC Web site that others have the same problem. "I can't get the full episodes working either. Tried IE and Firefox to no avail. :(" wrote a user named Matt. "NBC.com has been totally lame all day. nothing's working," wrote another user.

Someone who seems to be an NBC employee posted the helpful advice, "To get the full episodes to work you have to refresh the page tben you have to close the page or try getting the video back. NBC is very sorry for you difficulties and wishes you the best."

Hmmm... is it better to sell episodes for $1.99 on iTunes, or offer them with advertising in a way that no one can actually watch them?

SneakerNet TV from SanDisk

The Wall Street Journal writes today about a new device from SanDisk designed to help in getting Internet videos from the PC to the TV. It's a "sneakernet" solution, meaning that you physically carry a USB drive from your PC to the television. SanDisk will also open up a content marketplace called Fanfare. CBS and Showtime are the two biggest content providers at launch.

From Nick Wingfield's story:

With TakeTV, users plug the device into a USB port on their PCs, load it with video files and physically shuttle the device to the TV, where they plug it into a cradle connected to the standard video ports on their television sets. TakeTV has a remote control for navigating among the videos stored on the device. The product sells for $100 for a model with four gigabytes of storage, capable of holding about five hours of video, and a $150 eight-gigabyte model with room for about 10 hours of video.

The device is essentially a souped-up version of USB drives, which use data-storage chips known as flash memory and are used to store and transport all types of computer documents and files. ...

New CBS Unit Will Chop Up Shows for the Web

It doesn't sound like CBS's new EyeLab group will be creating original content, aside from perhaps some "behind-the-scenes" footage or celeb interviews, but it's an interesting approach to repurposing TV content for the Web. Here's the Wall Street Journal's story. From the piece:

At a time when its competitors are focused on how to best distribute full-length TV shows online, CBS EyeLab represents a turn in the other direction. The content it offers will look more like videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube -- bite-size clips, streamed free, many with the feel of user-generated content -- than episodes of network prime-time shows. Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, said preliminary network research shows that less than a third of CBS's Web audience is interested in watching full-length episodes of shows online.

CBS says the EyeLab-produced clips will both entertain viewers and serve a marketing purpose. "It turns our promotion into content," said George Schweitzer, the president of CBS Marketing. "The clips about 'CSI' or something from how a director shoots a scene in the show 'NUMB3RS,' these are all things that link back to our shows." The network also plans to sell ads that will be embedded in the clips.

Two Great Podcasts for the Price of None

Remember podcasts? Those great audio files you can listen to on your computer while you're doing other stuff -- or transfer to your iPod? They're free?

- Back in March, I moderated a really informative panel at South by Southwest on "Building an Online Fan Base." The MP3 audio is here, and for context, there's some textual coverage of the panel here. Panelists were:

> Scilla Andreen, IndieFlix
> Jim Miller, Brave New Foundation
> Ian Schafer, Deep Focus
> David Straus, Without A Box
> Joe Swanberg, Filmmaker
> Lance Weiler, Filmmaker and Editor, The Workbook Project

- Speaking of The Workbook Project, Lance has just posted an interview with Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is trying to ensure that the medium of Internet TV stays open and independent.

Canadians Not Worried About Internet TV, Eh?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

What the "Future of Television in Canada" report actually says is that the Internet and television will "settle into a co-existence with one another as they evolve to fulfill different roles." Linear TV may be best for live programming like sports, while on demand will work best for movies and niche content.

Here's some coverage from the Hollywood Reporter and from The Globe and Mail. The report was issued just ahead of the Banff World Television Festival, which begins this weekend.

You can download the report, prepared by the Nordicity Group, here.

- Two other notes on upcoming events...

Looks like there will be a great crowd at this coming Tuesday's Apple Store event in San Francisco, where I'll be talking about 'Digital Distribution for Film and Video.' What's especially cool is that there will be a few filmmakers and video producers in the crowd, as well as some representatives from sites that support digital distribution; we'll hear from them a bit during the session, and then hopefully there will be schmoozing at a nearby bar afterwards. It's June 12th, 7 PM at the Apple Store in Union Square.

I'll be moderating a panel June 27th in San Jose at the Web Video Summit, focusing on production values. It's called "Lights, Cameras, Sound: How to Get Great Results." It's a topic I'm very interested in, and I'm looking forward to it. On the panel are Barry Braverman, author of "DV Shooter," Alex Lindsay, founder of Pixelcorps, Jennie Bourne from FutureofTV.net, and Chuck Olsen, a vlogger and correspondent for "Rocketboom."