2 posts tagged “righteous”
So I was at one of those uber-bookstores the other day, reading books for free, since the uber-bookstores make it so damn easy to do so, when I walked by what I now refer to in my head as "The Big Box of Friends:"
Yes, every episode of "Friends" ever made, all in one big box, which can be yours for only US$300 (150 pounds, 225 euros). Which of course got me immediately thinking...
Who in their right mind would ever watch all 240 episodes or whatever of "Friends" on DVD? Especially when the show can still be caught multiple times a day on television?
The only people who watch 240 episodes of a television show on DVD are people like me -- complete fucking science-fiction losers. And we weren't the ones religiously watching "Friends" when it was originally on the air; it was the slightly daffy meatsacks of the world who were doing that.
You know, the ones who insisted that a show about sassy urban singles end with almost all of them married off and with children, and with half of them on their way to the suburbs. Those meatsacks.
And who, for the love of all that is good, is going to spend $300 for the privilege on top of everything else?
No one, that's who. This Big Box of Friends was in fact designed for one purpose and one purpose only: For those with too much discretionary income to purchase as a gift for others with too much discretionary income.
When the Big Box of Friends was first put together and released, not a single human being expected a single other human being to actually use this product from beginning to end. It is instead a $300 excuse for one person to say to another person, "I was thinking of you recently," for the other person to stick on a back shelf in an already overcrowded den, and to promptly never think about again for the rest of their life.
And then I thought, Wow, has it really gotten that expensive to maintain the consumerist status quo? Has it really come to this?
Yeah, I guess so. Out there in the hazy white-collar suburbs of the world, these sort of dim clouds for me now that I can never quite seem to understand anymore (even after spending my childhood in one), this is what people are doing -- they're working their asses to the bone, 14 hours a day sometimes, throwing their married lives into havoc, missing their offsprings' entire childhoods, getting road rage from those endless hours sitting on a vehicular tarmac, huffing gas fumes as they wait for the endless tie-up of terrorist-supporting ecohorrors to all move up another inch, so that they can all exchange $300 Big Boxes of Friends with each other at every wedding reception and birthday party, and promptly all throw their Big Boxes of Friends on a back shelf in a den and never touch them nor even think of them again.
Is this really what all you people out there in the white-collar sections of the world are doing? I can scarcely believe it. But yet there's the Big Box of Friends in the uber-bookstore to prove it.
Okay, I'm getting off my high horse now; it's time for me to bike over to my friend Tom's Memorial Day party. Price of a bike ride, by the way, after purchase of my $60 bike: free. And a lot more fun than 240 episodes of fucking "Friends."
I've been trying to keep my mouth shut about this, I really have. But then this headline came across my way in my news reader this morning...
This is not the first time, either, that I've seen executives at television properties become complete fucking morons when it came to online options. So yes, I guess it's finally time to sit down and explain some basic lessons about creativity, to all these executives in charge of online distribution of television properties.
First and most importantly -- you can't just sit down and cut an hour-long show into random four-minute segments, then present a random selection of segments in a random order online and have any of it make any sense. I mean, I get it, I get why you try to do it -- you see millions of kids enjoying nonsensical four-minute video snippets at YouTube, and you suddenly see an opportunity to sell exactly one ad with each of these millions of video snippets, and to even get the kids to advertise the snippets for you via MySpace and Digg. And you think, "We don't just have a 44-minute drama or a 22-minute comedy for airing on television; we have 11 new four-minute snippets of original dramatic intellectual property each week, 5 new comedy ones each day, each of which can have an ad sold, getting around the problem of people TiVoing over traditional blocks of ads like before."
But you can't just take an hour-long story, remove a random 240 seconds of it, run it by itself and expect it to make any sense. You just can't do that, no matter how much you want to. A dramatic story has a beginning, middle and end -- a point A, B and C -- and the audience needs all those moments in order to experience the entire story and be satisfied. And here's where a lot of you executives are making a mistake, frankly; that a lot of these successful online so-called "viral" videos actually do have a beginning, middle and end, just simplistic ones that fit within a four-minute timeframe. Many of you executives are mistaking that with simply having four minutes worth of high-budget videotape, showing a chase scene or a couple of jokes, or in other words what you have after cutting a full-length show into random chunks.
So please, executives, stop. Get into the habit of releasing the entire episode, beginning to end as an uninterrupted chunk, or with single commercials embedded within them which seems to be working well at your websites. Viacom executives, you're the fucking worst of all of them, so I especially hope you all are paying attention. I get that you want to divide The Daily Show and The Colbert Report into a dozen monetizable and Diggable little chunks each day, perfect for the meatsack undergraduates to repost on their blogs and MySpace accounts; but you're ruining the entire goddamn show by doing so, and by presenting the bits in a random order away from how they were originally performed, and by cutting out all the segues between bits, and by just not posting some of the bits at all. Cutting up a show like this and presenting it this way will ruin it; you are ruining your shows as you speak, when you do this. And then you all sit around and conclude that audiences simply must not want online versions of their favorite television shows because of this, like the fucking morons you are! Argh!
Okay, glad I got that off my chest. So, once you take care of that, then I'd like you to tackle the following:
1) Stop removing shows from websites after a certain amount of time. You should be doing the opposite; adding more and more back shows as quickly as possible, to have as complete an online library as possible that can be accessed by anyone at any time.
2) The only time that charging money for TV episodes made sense was when you had to pay for those millions of DVDs. Now that the distribution is digital, your revenue should come from advertising only, just like when it originally airs. The competition, then, should be long-tail in nature; over which network has the largest and most complete library of shows online, and hence can charge the most money for advertising.
Let's face facts: what I describe above is what fans of BitTorrent are doing for free right now anyway, on their home hard drives. And with BitTorrent clients becoming more and more automated, and hardware setups like Apple TV and Windows Media Center becoming more and more prevalent, it's only a matter of time before customers are simply programming their own viewing habits this way on their own, leaving your chopped-up attempts at rapid monetization in the dust whether you like it or not. And really, do you want to fall into that poisoned trap the music industry now finds itself -- where they're suing tens of thousands of their customers (including such infamous cases as newborn babies, grandmothers and the technically dead), turning into both a national joke and a national enemy in the eyes of the very people they're simultaneously advertising to? Seriously, television executives, do you really want to get to that point yourselves?
Embrace what I'm talking about; embrace what your most cutting-edge customers are already doing as we speak, and find a way to make money from it now while it's still somewhat in your hands. And let me finally have the chance to watch The Daily Show in some form other than chopped-up little slow-loading four-minute chunks that make no narrative sense, which you're doing after all because you think your audience is a bunch of dim-witted ADD-addled morons. Seriously, Viacom executives, stop releasing your shows online that way!
