Monday’s Apple event wasn’t just about an ultralight notebook computer that I really want and a watch that I don’t. There were also two announcements regarding television that were quite interesting.1
The price for the current Apple TV dropped to $69. This third-generation model has been on the market since 2012 and was available for $99 as recently as this past weekend. I imagine that this is an intermediate move on Apple’s part. There are clearly better options for OTT streaming devices, even for die-hard Apple nerds, and I would hope Apple plans to release an improved version in the near future for the $70 same price. (Or not… what do I know?)
HBO Now will launch exclusively on Apple devices for $15 per month. In some ways, this move is big because it marks the first time HBO is available without a multichannel TV subscription and could be a threat to multichannel TV as we know it. Consumers begged HBO to offer something like this, and now we know that it will be a full-featured service, not a crippled version that only the pay TV subscribers get.
In my most recent New Media class, I addressed the second announcement as an example of a technology adapting to our needs. We were discussing how social network sites were great for, you know, networking socially. Facebook has been great for sharing with your nearby friends, distant classmates, and obsessively doting relatives. After a while, though, we learned that our unsavory activities, such as our party pics, can be found by a potential employer, a college recruiter, or that human you are trying to date. The sharing aspect of Facebook is great, but the permanence is not. So, we now have something like Snapchat, and that is where we share indiscriminately because of its evanescence. We found a technology that better suited a particular need.
HBO Now is intended to provide stream HBO to those without pay TV subscriptions. But a lot of people I know already stream HBO programming with HBO Go. They just use someone else’s credentials to access it. As intrepid cord cutters, we already figured out how to get the product we need without HBO offering it. I’m not going to guess whether HBO Now is going to succeed. It could be a decade-long lifeline as iTunes was for the music industry or it could be as negligible as News Corp making an iPad-native Daily newsmagazine.
The Technology We Deserve
Net Neutrality plays an important role with this OTT service. Chris Morran at Consumerist speculates about the power of an ISP without net neutrality rules, where one could theoretically “throttle HBO Now while still allowing HBO Go to get through at full speed, effectively saying that the only way to get a decent HBO streaming service is if you have a cable package.” But with net neutrality rules, the two services should operate at the same level of performance. I won’t need to have my TV polluted with reality TV shows and shitty reruns in order to watch The Wire in 1080p.
The only not-neutral thing about the HBO Now service is that it will initially launch on only Apple devices, such as Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Roku, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast users will have to miss out on Game of Thrones until midsummer. Perhaps Mark Cuban was right when he said that we shouldn’t worry about the power of ISPs and that instead we should “worry about Google and Apple” because they make the operating systems of our mobile devices.
The Technology We Don’t Need
A few years ago, only the most devoted Internet libertarians were cognizant of that an ISP could potentially throttle or block a service it didn’t “like.” Today, even casual Internet users are skeptical about the control their ISP could potentially wield. For example, after the HBO Now announcement, Comcast subscribers were unable to access the http://hbonow.com website. It turns out that it was a technical problem caused by a DNS issue on HBO’s part, not some sinister shenanigans at the hands of Comcast. But because everyone hates their cable companies and because Comcast is as big as a cable company gets, the Internet reflexively blamed Comcast.
It’s hard to shed a tear for Comcast though. As I mentioned earlier, when a technology fails to meet our needs or desires, we move on to something else. Cable television as we know it evolved from two converging technologies: Community Antenna TV and satellite cable.2 CATV was a demand-side technology. Starting in the 1940s, CATV operators piped TV signals to TV set owners living in areas where an over-the-air signal wasn’t available. CATV was almost a necessity for people living in a valley, such as in rural Pennsylvania, or in densely populated and overbuilt area, such as Manhattan, because the terrain blocked the radio signals necessary for TV reception. Satellite cable, on the other hand, was a supply-side technology. Beginning in the 1970s, it allowed national distribution for emerging television channels, such as Ted Turner’s WTBS-TV in Atlanta and the Manhattan-based Home Box Office. In both cases, CATV and satellite cable—eventually merging as the modern cable TV industry—enabled TV viewers to get what the broadcasters were failing to provide them. Today, however, the cable companies are the ones failing to provide us what we want, and that’s why we’ve migrated to something that does.
And, I’m sorry, Apple. As of right now, I still can’t figure out why I need a smartwatch.
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Yesterday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal article criticizing television networks for speeding up movies and television episodes to squeeze in more time for commercials. While an informed first-impression might react in horror at such a practice, I argued that it’s no big whoop for two reasons.
TV broadcasts and in-class screenings are, at best, proxies for the original work. No one should expect these viewings to be the canonical version of a film or a first-run broadcast.
Whereas time and pacing might be crucial for some films, speeding up a film by 2-4% doesn’t really matter for other works. An educated expert in film history and aesthetics like me should be able to determine when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
All of this was before I had read Marco Arment’s defense of letting people listen to podcasts at whatever speed he/she wants, published on Tuesday. He has an interest in the matter because he developed Overcast), a popular podcatching app for iOS. One of the unique features of that app is Smart Speed, which allows listeners to skip moments of silence to reduce the overall listening time of the program. In his nuanced argument, he distinguishes between certain podcasts, where timing and pauses are essential, and other podcasts where it is less relevant. He notes:
Podcasts (and video) are impossible to skim effectively, but we can vary our listening speed. Just as not every article is worth reading slowly and completely, not every podcast is This American Life. Even most episodes of This American Life aren’t as timing-sensitive as the Mike Daisey retraction. Some podcasts are painstakingly crafted, artistic “storytelling” shows, but most aren’t, by far.
The same is true for most feature films and television programs. There are some works where pace and tempo absolutely matter and others where it does not. As I wrote yesterday, I would never speed up a Hitchcock or Maya Deren film—or an episode of The Wire—because speed and tempo absolutely matters in those works. The same is true for even less artistic works, but it takes a trained and experienced viewer to know when it does matter. For example, in college, a well-respected film professor—I won’t say who—confessed that she “skimmed” certain silent films at double speed because, in her expert opinion, the time saved outweighed the original intent of some long-dead hack studio filmmaker making five films a week (my words, not hers).
One of the unique aspects of Overcast is its approach to reducing listening time. Most other podcatching apps simply allow listeners to speed up playback. For example, Downcast for iOS allows listeners to audition a podcast at 1.5x and 2.0x speed.1 I have used Downcast for years but never used its 1.5x/2.0x feature because it altered the pitch to such a degree that l simply couldn’t enjoy the content. Smart Speed in Overcast, on the other hand, is a compromise. It retains the same pitch, a crucial aspect of sonic fidelity, but also allows listeners to “skim” the content. Reducing the moments of silence might be terrible for a chilling interview on 60 Minutes, but it might not matter as much for a group of journalists discussing the television industry, despite the fact that both are excellent, informative, and well-produced programs.
You can be doctrinal about screening and auditioning things at their original speed, but as with everything good and holy in this world, it is more complicated than you might have initially thought. That’s why we have to make our own decisions about balancing our precious time, in-class discussion (or advertising minutes), and the integrity of a work.
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Remember, that I have only sped up fewer than ten screening and only at 1.02x–1.04x. ↩
Joe Flint, writing for the Wall Street Journal‘s Digital microsite, exposes cable TV networks that compress programming content, such as when TBS broadcast The Wizard of Oz last November, to fit in more advertisements in the same block of time.
Tinkering with shows to squeeze more advertising dollars out of them has been done before. Cable networks have long made room for ads by shortening the opening credits. Reruns of “Law & Order” on TNT have a 24-second opening, in contrast to the original 1 minute, 45-second opening when it aired on NBC.
But speeding up the actual content is a more subtle tactic TV networks use to achieve a higher volume of ads. TBS also has sped up sitcom reruns of “Seinfeld” and other shows, and sister network TNT has also employed the approach as well. Viacom Inc.’s TV Land has done the same with “Friends” reruns.
A colleague, who forwarded the article earlier today, called the apparently unprecedented practice “scary.”
But is it, really?
First, is this even new? I thought this was already standard practice, especially for movies broadcast on television. I remember watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) on Comedy Central in the 1990s with my roommate Rick. It was a movie we knew well, having seen it dozens of times between the two of us. We had even seen it on 35mm film, paired with Election (1999), at a double-feature at the New Beverly Cinema, in Los Angeles at the end of the Clinton Administration. But with this Comedy Central screening, we could tell something was off.
To confirm our suspicions, Rick fetched his VHS copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to screen it and compare it to the broadcast version. Going back and forth between the cable net’s feed and the VHS deck, we verified that Comedy Central had indeed sped up the movie. It was most evident when Edward R. Rooney proclaims that, because of kids like Ferris, he “weeps for the future.” The voice of Jeffrey Jones, who played Rooney, was easily an octave higher on the broadcast than it was on the VHS version.1
From then on, we noticed this practice on countless other Comedy Central movie broadcasts, too. I guess once you see something like that, you can never unsee it.
Second, I’m guilty of having sped up screenings in class. In a few cases, after a lengthy lecture and class discussion, it was clear that we were going to go over time. To fit the screening, I have played a H.264 file from my Mac using VLC, which has a playback-speed control. I’ve gone as high as 104% but usually keep it at 102% or so. When I’ve sped up a screening, I’ve previewed it to ensure the playback doesn’t appear off, and I’ve only used it on films where pacing or tempo is not a significant element of the filmmaking. I’ve done it for films like Flaming Creatures and Sins of the Fleshapoids, where a viewer would be too preoccupied with horror or laughter, respectively, to notice a 2% increase in speed. However, I would never speed up a screening of a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage, or Maya Deren. In those cases, the pacing and rhythm are really important dimensions of their filmmaking.
Maya Deren, in At Land, can take as much time as she needs in my class.
Finally, is this even a big deal? The whole screening experience—in a classroom or on television—is already compromised. We watch with cheap projectors and television monitors that produce rainbow and soap opera effects. We listen with low-fi sound systems that don’t reproduce a full range of sounds. And, for decades, we have watched films that have been panned, scanned and center-cut to fit the aspect ratio of our TV sets.
He was the on-air pitchman for an electronics chain bearing his name here in the New York tri-state area, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Crazy Eddie’s persona and advertising strategy serves as a classic example of nuisance marketing (or irritation advertising, if you prefer). His ads would grate on you, but those same commercials would also forever remind you of their insane prices. In Los Angeles, I remember that we had a similar pitchman in Fred R. Rated for The Federated Group, a cut-rate electronics, played by Shadoe Stevens.
Although I can’t find the reference, I am pretty certain that John Gruber once called Amazon the crazy guy at the party who will accept any dare you propose. Amazon has apparently accepted the dare to sell a over-the-top streaming device for $39. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, Amazon Prime members can buy one for $19 until Wednesday morning.
The Fire TV stick, as it’s called, is basically what Google was selling last holiday season in the Chromecast. The biggest advantage of the Amazon Fire TV stick is that it will play anything from the Amazon Prime streaming library, including movies, music, and TV programs. Consider me tempted.
Can they really make money off a $20 streaming stick? Just sign up for a Prime trial, get the device for $20, and after the trial is over, keep the device to stream Netflix, Hulu, and some other “streaming channel.”
It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?
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Since Sunday, many PBS stations across the country have been broadcasting The Roosevelts, Ken Burns’s new seven-part, fourteen-hour series. The series runs through Saturday, and many stations will likely be showing encore performances in case you any of the episodes.
As a not-for-profit broadcast service, PBS has been ahead of commercial broadcast and cable networks in making available their content online. Between now and September 28, you can watch the entire series, even before it broadcasts on your local station, on a variety of connected and mobile devices.
Most commercial television stations have been offering a TV Everywhere product that allows you to watch TV on your Internet devices as long as you pay for a cable or satellite TV subscription and authenticate accordingly. On the other hand, PBS lets anyone with the necessary hardware and broadband connection to watch the whole series for free, albeit for only a limited time. Because PBS broadcasts do not live or die based on raw audience numbers or on retransmission fees, they can afford to cannibalize their broadcast product and let audiences stream their content for free or buy digital copies on iTunes.
I just started watching the series with great interest. It’s hard to live in New York and not be touched by their name or legacy in some way. Roosevelt Avenue spans most of western Queens. Roosevelt Island sits in the East River between Manhattan island and Queens. FDR Drive shuttles cars along the East River on Manhattan. And if you’re ready for a day trip, head to Oyster Bay on the north shore of Long Island to visit Teddy Roosevelt’s summer retreat at Sagamore Hill. Or, as my mom and I did over the summer, head north to Hyde Park on Hudson to visit the FDR Museum and Presidential Library.
My mother with the Eleanor and Franklin at the FDR Presidential Museum and Library in Hyde Park on Hudson.
By the way, if you don’t get to watch the broadcast television run this week and if you miss streaming the series before September 28, you will be able to buy the series on iTunes. Consider it your annual contribution to public broadcasting.
However, if you live in a major metropolitan area, you can watch the games the old fashioned way, over the air using an antenna.
ABC aired today’s Belgium–Argentina game, over the air, and in New York, I found the game on channel 7.1. Today’s late game, between Netherlands and Costa Rica, was on ESPN only so I had to find it on Univision’s broadcast channel. In New York, I had remembered that the channel was on 41 in the old analog days. I expected to find the digital channel on 41.1, but that’s not what you get in New York City. The Wikipedia article on WXTV had some information about the digital channel, but I had to get creative and search the proverbial dial. I found there were two feeds, one in 480-line SD and one in 1080-line HD.
Signal
Channel
Standard Definition, 480 lines
68.2
High Definition, 1080 lines
40.1
As I’ve said before, we cord cutters need to stick together.
Since I stopped paying for a multichannel television subscription, it’s been really hard to follow sports. This month, I’ve really noticed the absence of professional, spectator sports because it looks like this could be the greatest sports month ever.
Usually, October is every American sports fan’s favorite month. NHL hockey is just getting started. The NBA is about to start in a matter of weeks, and there are preseason games to watch. The NFL and college football seasons are each in their second month and are just getting interesting. And, my personal favorite, baseball is in full-blown postseason mode.
But this month, there’s even more sports to watch. Last week, a ton of people watched a horse finish fourth. The Stanley Cup Finals finished hours ago with a Los Angeles team defeating a New York team for the NHL title. The NBA Finals feature two of the winningest teams of the last decade, the Heat and the Spurs. Tennis fans have not one, but two, two, two grand-slam tournaments to watch: the French Open and Wimbledon. Baseball is winding down its first half, setting up the races that will remain with us throughout the summer. And if that wasn’t enough, then there’s the FIFA Men’s World Cup!
Best of all, with all these great sports to follow, none of them are college or NFL football games. This really is the greatest sports month!
The last time I was in College Park, Maryland was in 2006 to visit the National Archives. While the National Archives is housed in a Greek Revival building in Washington, D.C., easily accessible from the Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter Metro station, most of the archive’s materials are housed off-site in College Park.
While in College Park, you can also visit the Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland. The archive consists of two collections: a collection devoted to public broadcasting and the Library of American Broadcasting. This archive was featured in a recent video on the Washington Post website, where Post reporter John Kelly donates some television-related memorabilia.
Most of the artifacts in the video, such as the Partridge Family and the Starsky and Hutch board games should be familiar to most contemporary pop-culture fans, but you might not recognize Swayze. At first, I didn’t recognize it either, but, as I suspected, Swayze was named for John Cameron Swayze. Between 1949 and 1956, Swayze hosted the Camel News Caravan, which was also called the Plymouth News Caravan after 1955, when the automaker and cigarette maker began co-sponsoring the program on alternating days.
Swayze was a news trivia game made by Milton Bradley, produced around 1954. Apparently, you can find a copy for sale on Ebay, the Internet’s largest unofficial archive of ephemeral culture.
The second part of broadband is latency, which he compares to pneumatic tubes. Although he abandons the highway metaphor because he didn’t find it fit his understanding of latency, the pneumatic tube example didn’t work for me. As I’ve always understood it, latency is the delay in starting a transfer. Perhaps, if we could go back to the highway metaphor, latency could be compared to those traffic signals at freeway on-ramps that I remember seeing as a child in Los Angeles. (If you are driving with one or more passengers, you can bypass the signal, but who would ever do that?) At any rate, you can’t travel on the highway until you actually get on the road. Incidentally, the purpose of the signal is to reduce highway congestion, but I don’t think it makes anyone’s overall trip any faster.
Planes Are Fast… Sometimes
Speaking of transportation metaphors, my favorite way of comparing latency and throughput is in terms of airline travel. It can take hours to move a few miles to get started on your trip. For example, you take a taxi to the airport, wait in line to get check a bag (if you still do that), clear security, wait for your flight to begin boarding, board the plane and get to your seat, wait for the flight crew to secure the aircraft, and wait for your pilot to queue up for take-off. At the end of all that, you’re finally airborne. All that waiting is latency, and it’s why it’s much faster to take a train to Philadelphia from New York than to fly there, unless you’re just traveling from one airport to another.
Throughput, on the other hand, is the time you’re in the air, en route to your destination. In airline travel, that’s relatively fast, but as anyone who flies in and around New York knows, there’s plenty of congestion which slows your travel time. And because so many flights go through New York, it wreaks havoc on the nation’s air traffic. The same thing happens in inclement weather in other airports, such fog in San Francisco and snow in Chicago. In those cases, the capacity of each airport diminishes because fewer flights can get through.
By most technical accounts (and even these may still be wrong), the recent agreement between Comcast and Netflix seems to have addressed a throughput problem through an effort at latency reduction. Where many net neutrality advocates worried that Netflix was paying Comcast to give them faster throughput, the agreement is more oriented around removing a middle agent that was introducing latency into the system. Cogent, the company that transported Netflix data to Comcast for delivery to consumers, was not keeping up with demand – not enough staff in the tube transfer room, so to speak – so Netflix worked out a deal to tie their system more integrally to Comcast’s.
Another way of thinking about it was that Netflix cut out some steps towards getting on the plane. It no longer checks a bag, it got PreCheck to go through security faster, and it maybe even gets a ride on a Mercedes right up to the aircraft. Oh, and it always fly nonstop. All that makes the trip faster, cutting down on latency, but it doesn’t get you to the next airport any faster because as far as we know, the Netflix-Comcast peering agreement doesn’t include increased throughput.
A NBC television crew sets up outside of the RCA Pavilion at the New York City World’s Fair, 1939.
Last Tuesday, a bunch of people went to Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, the site of the 1964 World’s Fair to tour the Phillip Johnson–designed New York State Pavilion. The Pavilion was open to the public to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair. As with any free event in New York City, there was an hours-long line, and two people I know that went didn’t even get inside despite waiting over four hours.
Although it is still standing, the New York State Pavilion is in dire need of attention. Restoring or repairing it could cost as much as $75 million, and demolishing it would still cost around $14 million. These huge sums however have not deterred many groups from trying to restore the structure, a rare example of Googie architecture in New York City.
Some of the efforts to preserve the Pavilion include:
Flashing back even further, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park was also home to the 1939’s World Fair, and on April 30, 1939, seventy-five years ago today, the 1939 World’s Fair opened to the public. This date, by the way, was also the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington.
A statue representing the Freedom of the Press stands opposite a statue of George Washington, inaugurated 150 years earlier as the first president of the United States. (AP Photo.)
Speaking of presidents, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the Fair, the first such exposition in his home state.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt opens the 1939 World’s Fair. (AP Photo/John Lindsay)
The theme of the 1939 World’s Fair was the “World of Tomorrow.” Many of the corporate exhibits, such as General Motor’s Futurama, anticipated the role that consumerism would play in revolutionizing culture. The highways that would reshape the American landscape a decade later, for example, were on display as models at the Futurama exhibit.
Highways of the future. “Futurama” exhibit. New York City World’s Fair. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1674383.)
Now We Add Sight to Sound
To media scholars, the 1939’s World Fair is synonymous with the introduction of television. Although they didn’t invent it, RCA introduced television to the American public and, in very simple terms, explained its purpose.
RCA President, David Sarnoff, at the RCA Pavilion, New York City World’s Fair, 1939. (New York Public Library, Digital ID: 1681003.)
David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, clearly defined how television would work:
Now we add sight to sound.
Regardless of what television could do, RCA’s presentation of television introduced it with a clear purpose. RCA would guide television as an extension of radio. It would offer similar programming to what Americans heard on the radio in the 1930s, but with the addition of pictures. In the next decade, television would in effect supplant radio as the dominant entertainment medium, but it would still offer mostly entertainment programming sponsored by advertisers.
