Democracy in Media

Who Killed Tony

The Sopranos was not my favorite HBO series, but it was certainly a great series. I must admit I was with everyone else in thinking that my satellite connection dropped when the screen went black at the end before the credits rolled. I was a little disappointed, but certainly not pissed off like a bunch of other folks. The season felt like they could have continued on for 6 or 7 more episodes, but I felt that there were so many loose ends to tie up, that Chase must have been willing to leave a bunch on the ground at the end.

Anyway, when I heard the theory that Tony was killed at the end and that’s why the screen went black it just seemed so obvious I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me. Having heard that theory and watched the last episode again, I think it was certianly what happened. As a matter of fact, it was probably frustrating to Chase that he designed such a smart ending and then had to have the studio leak clues as to what actually transpired (which is what I think they must have done given the overwhelmingly negative press the finale was getting. I think if people weren’t so pissed, Chase just would have left it and let people figure it out over time). The point is, that it seems obvious that this is what Chase intended. What I haven’t seen is any perfect theories as to who actually did the killing.

The best one I’ve seen involves Nikki Leotardo, the guy sitting at the bar and Phil’s nephew. He’s wearing a Member’s Only jacket (the title of the first episode of the last series) and the camera focuses on him a few times apparently waiting to make sure the whole family was there or the timing was right or whatever. The only thing that seems weird about this is why Tony wouldn’t have recognized Nikki. Either way, it would seem to make sense that Phil’s nephew would take out the entire Soprano family in revenge for the death of Phil and his brother. Not sure if this is actually what happened, but seems like a theory that makes a bunch of sense.

Either way, the general point I want to make is that what HBO has been doing recently, designing series that have a beginning, middle, and end is fantastic. I hate losing shows like Rome and Deadwood, but I’ve got to appreciate their courage and vision in keeping to storylines and not dragging out success purely for financial reasons (‘Lost’ being a case in point). I think it shows a lot of discipline and the guys producing content at HBO should be emulated. They simply produce some of the best stories around.

UPDATE: Bob Harris has a brilliant blow-by-blow of the final scene.  I think he puts a nail in the coffin to any theory that assumes that Tony didn't die.  Not much attention to the shooter, although the Member's Only guys seems the clear and obvious candidate.  He might also not be Nikki...

Switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

I’ve been using Bloglines since the beginning of 2005 to manage all of my feeds. I switched momentarily to Rojo, but I still found Bloglines easier to use when it came to reading a lot of feeds quickly.

But Bloglines continues to frustrate. It routinely locks up and performs abysmally when it loads a long list of feeds. I often spend a few minutes waiting for some script to finish breaking before I can continue to scroll. I’ve now tried Google Reader for 24 hours without problems. It’s just as simple to use for large numbers of feeds as Bloglines.

I’m done with Bloglines.

Why TiVo is Irrelevant

First of all, I love TiVo. I still use TiVo a lot (although not nearly as much as MCE, simply because I’m at my computer all of the time), and I think that people suffering through the Moto Comcast PVR adventure are tragic figures. I bet big on TiVo for two years and invested myself on that platform to the point of pain. But TiVo is a wonderful device that took so long to gain traction that the market window is going to close before it ever really opened. TiVo will simply never be able to reach scale.

BTW, I’m not gleeful about this. I don’t like to see such a brilliant idea, executed relatively well, fail in the marketplace. As an entrepreneur it reminds me how easy it is to lose in a great segment with great technology and great marketing. This is not fun to think about.

What TiVo lacks right now is a way to grow the number of people (by an order of magnitude or greater) that access video through their interface. They can only monetize through advertising if they control the environment that the video is played within. An order of magnitude would still only net them 15-20 million users (DirecTV boxes aren’t really controlled by TiVo and don’t really count). This would only be the size of YouTube. But TiVo is never going to get there in a way that is relevant. They have been rapidly outflanked by the likes of Apple and Slingbox which will soon be replaced by a plethora of ‘soft’ open applications that run on browser-enabled devices.

To be a bit more detailed, the video access device of the future is one that connects to any screen (or is embedded in the device with the screen), has high speed Internet access and can render a powerful web browser (Flash9+ support). This can be done pretty inexpensively, and will likely wind up built into most modern TV sets and cell phones (or iPhones). These things are not going to come with TV-tuners installed, not at the glacial rate things like CableCard developed and the political wranglings of a few MSOs. I have argued the broadcast is not going to die anytime soon, and that is still the case, but the pace at which it is getting outflanked by IP delivery is astonishing. I mean, look at the CBS syndication strategy to see how quickly this is all happening.

I think the number of devices that ship with my described features above is about to explode. A sandbox in which developers can play has not served TiVo well. Adobe has created a platform separate and apart from the hardware that can do some pretty amazing things. The hardware to replace the TiVo ‘box’ will soon be bundled with tens of millions of devices each of which also carries the ability to display applications written in Flash. 

TiVo is, to quote someone I heard at a Red Herring conference back in the halcyon days of USPower, ‘putting lipstick on the corpse.’ Regardless of what Mark Cuban says, even ‘live’ broadcasts will be delivered over the Web. It’s true that bandwidth is still relatively limited and expensive and that TelCos don’t like P2P networks, but it will eventually happen. The only thing that we are arguing is time frame. And at the pace things are moving right now, that time frame is not long. And if you plot TiVos growth trajectory (even with the Moto roll out imminent), they are going to be reaching scale right around the time the mass market is shifting to Web delivery. And in web delivered content, TiVo is a laggard and has not clear differentiator over any other service.

Babbling a bit, but the point is, TiVo will look more like the 8-track tape than the cassette tape; replaced by something better before the market really produced a positive return on investment. I’ll continue to use TiVo for years, but I will be a member of a rapidly diminishing percentage of the global internet population. Sad, but true.

The Widget as Application

We’ve been working hard to get the latest version of CozmoTV out and as always, we’ve begun to focus on what’s next. As you have seen, we’ve made a pretty fundamental decision about widgets and the role they will play in the future of CozmoTV. In short, we are looking at widgets as our primary delivery platform.

I think that widgets represent a pretty profound change in how people will use the web. I think it represents the visual manifestation of the semantic web that Berners-Lee has been talking about for some time now.  The web is becoming a platform in which different applications and content coexist across multiple sites. I think it is the first glimpse of what the web looks like post webpage. Facebook’s recent API release and the richness of the applications already appearing are a further clue.

In my mind, widgets are simply a distributed application, as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Rather than look at the web as a collection of pages, widgets start to help us see the web as a collection of applications. They are built on standards that easy integration with other applications (RSS being the most obvious example). But they are not intended to be a destination, but rather the encapsulation of functionality and content, or maybe just one or the other. CozmoTV looks at the widget as the destination in and of itself. No need to ever go back to cozmo.tv, just do everything relevant right from the widget.

I think this is a basic evolution in how the web works and how people interact with the web. Increasingly as people look to syndicate content and functionality out across the all of these sites, they are beginning to shape the semantic web. Syndication requires standards, especially in the integration of function. This is going to be good for people like Pageflakes and Netvibes and Facebook, who are all looking to shape what those underlying standards look like.  Rather than build your own social network and chat and everything else, piggyback on the site in which you are embedded to supply context and community...

Anyway, I believe that widgets represent a fundamental shift in how the web is going to function over the next decade. We’re in the very early stages, but over the next 18 months to impact is going to start becoming much more obvious, especially as standards beyond RSS begin to take shape. It’s really exciting.

Marc Andreessen’s Blog

….has motivated me to resuscitate this blog (yet again), especially this post about productivity. The truth is that I actually enjoy blogging. I typically write up articles that I want to post and then I leave them for editing and never wind up posting them. They then get stale and wind up in the dustbin. But the biggest problem is time. With CozmoTV and kids, blogging feels like a fifth job and all too often just gets bumped. Anyway, here we go again, we’ll just have to keep trying…

Just Want to See This Work

Here is the new CozmoTV widget.  We're still doing some testing, but I think this is going to be pretty cool.

Clearwire or Someone like them is Going to Make a Fortune

Clearwire is getting a cautious coverage in the press. Nobody is singing their praises, but nobody really wants to bet wrong on McCaw either. But whether Craig wins or loses is pretty irrelevant to me. What it does mean is that the era of ultrafast wireless is starting. Craig is betting that it is a market already waiting for a solution, but even if he is early, he’s not early by much. Wireless broadband is going to be huge. 

Whether it’s a big centralized technology like WiMax or a Wi-Fi type network that is meshed and decentralized, wireless broadband is how the vast majority of consumers will access the Internet in 15-20 years (maybe even 10 as Clearwire is probably betting). It’s just cheaper to upgrade the network and keep pace with exponential growth of the underlying technologies.

And if the primary information devices are going to look like the iPhone or some derivative, wireless is foundational. I think Clearwire will probably not be a huge success, but even its failure will attract enough investment that someone will get it right. Whomever wins in this market is going to win very big.

Narcissism and Fame Are a Little Too Easy

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the way in which kids and bloggers are increasingly documenting their entire lives online. The premise is that narcissism was on the rise amongst kids and the lines between public and private lives are evaporating. People are not just documenting and sharing their digital life, they are documenting everything from childbirth to closet cleanings to family funerals.

I’ve been making the point for a while that the reason why people post entries on blogs, create MySpace pages, and generally share personal information with the world online had very little to do with money and mostly to do with a desire for fame. This was the reason why I felt that Revver’s business has suffered while YouTube’s has exploded. My thoughts have evolved a little recently.

I was at a Stanford conference on Wednesday in which Jay Adelson from Digg was on a panel and he said something that made me think a little deeper about my fame belief. I’m paraphrasing, but basically what he said was that the act of conveying information to others is in itself a very pleasant experience for most people. Just the simple act of telling someone else what I know actually feels good. Sharing gives you a buzz, especially when that sharing is acknowledged directly.

This got me to thinking that fame is a little bit of a simplification of this. It plays into the WSJ idea that this is about narcissism. But narcissism is all about excessive self-infatuation and vanity. But I’m not so sure that’s a fair characterization anymore. Many do these things for fame and self-aggrandizement, but I think the reason for most share their lives is that the simple act of sharing information for most humans is a very pleasant activity. 

I think this is an evolutional trait of human beings. We are genetically programmed to enjoy the process of passing along experience and information to others. The web has just enabled this to become a much larger part of many people’s lives. It’s magnified the pleasure of sharing because you can share with so many people at the same time. It’s more subtle and less sinister than fame, but actually more powerful.

It gives me great hope for the future of our emerging civilization.

A Thirst for Authenticity

It’s amazing how many people seem to look at all this user generated video stuff and scoff that it doesn’t live up to the standards set by Hollywood; that it will never be of the quality of ‘American Idol’ or some such.

We have grown up in a culture of perfection. Our cereal box is adorned with a perfect bowl of oats and raisins (part of a balanced breakfast or whatever), our swimsuit models are 110 pounds with D cups, our L’Oreal makeup is applied to skin that clearly doesn’t need the L’Oreal to begin with. Everything has been completely totally artificially false for so long, that there is an entire generation (or two) that finds anything less than perfection somehow unnerving.

All this new stuff is messy, unpredictable and generally boring as hell, but it’s real. I can look at a movie like ‘Crank’ and actually be entertained. But it’s weird, ‘Crank’ is so over the top, so unbelievable and manufactured that I feel entertained only because it is so over the top. I’m an unreality drug addict. We’ve seen so many over the top action films that we literally have to pump ourselves full of adrenaline to feel a pulse.

But at the end of the day, when I watch YouTube it is somehow more enthralling because it is (typically) real.  Thomas Hawk was recapping some predictions, one of which was the importance of authenticity in UGC in the coming year. I’ll go further to say that in UGC, authenticity is everything.

There is some disconnect when I watch an actor breaking the heart of a supporting actress. However good the actor is, I must overcome the boundary of fiction. Somewhere deep in my cortex I know that this is bullshit.  It takes effort of imagination to immerse yourself in unreality. Suspending imagination to immerse yourself in real and uncensored moments is an entirely different and refreshing experience. It’s not glamorous, but it actually happened and that makes all the difference in the world.

Why Peers Are So Valuable

I’ve read quite a few of Mark Cuban’s posts over the past year. There is a lot I agree with and some I disagree with. But I think Mark is actually a very smart guy. One of his rants a while back was about how the Internet is a terrible delivery mechanism for video simulcasts (essentially, broadcasting linear video over the Web to a large audience). This is right on the money and the reason why video is going to drive peer adoption which is in turn going to drive some of the next great business models of the Internet.

When I look at the Web right now, it’s at an awkward stage of adolescence. We started out with a Web that we very centralized. You had portals and there were some big media companies that were expanding into this new distribution channel. But essentially the Web was just a new version of cable TV. It was ugly and slow and largely one-way in its delivery of content.

What is happening now is that the web has done some serious growing up. Things are becoming much easier for people to understand (much of the whole Web2.0 movement is simply about making Web services easier to use through great interface design.) But most importantly, the social aspects of Web services are exploding. Users are contributing in growing numbers and rich communication between like individuals is accelerating. In many ways, the Web is finally beginning to step into the role of new communications medium rather than a new broadcast replacement.

But the transition hasn’t completed, most content is still stored and distributed from a central located in the cloud. In fact, central storage is actually accelerating. This is because this solution is simply easier for small files and simple communication that requires authentication and other services that are (currently) centralized. And centralized storage is actually great for lots of things like remote back-up, but it’s terrible for things like distributing very large files to lots of people very quickly.

The sheer bandwidth requirements of high quality (or high-def video) put a strain on this type of delivery system that cannot be overcome by simply adding another pipe to the ISP. It simply costs too much (a lesson that YouTube was experiencing before the Google acquisition). The only efficient delivery mechanism for such bandwidth intensive applications as HD video is through peers on a network.

Once everyone gets used to the idea that they can get any video on demand in low-quality streamed through YouTube, they’re going to start saying “Why can’t I watch this is high-def?” And when people start asking that question, any last hope that the studio system had of maintaining centralized control over their assets is going to evaporate (iTV or no). This process will only accelerate as the next-gen broadband networks roll out over the next 24 months and we start routinely seeing multi Mb upload bandwidth.

This is essentially what Sony bought with Grouper. It wasn’t traffic, it was half a million installed peers. That’s a powerful delivery network that someone at Sony seems to understand the strategic significance of (but one that Sony will almost certainly screw up for a bunch of other reasons.) But once these peers gets rolled out, there is a lot of very powerful things you can do with them, and I’m not just talking about redistributing contentJ