How serious a downturn? Media pros don’t ask the Times
Early last year, or maybe the year before, I bought the domain WorkingClassMBA.com – don’t go there, it’s not active. It was a joke. At the time my studio was feeling the early signs of economic contraction, our margins were being squeezed, and we thought it would be funny to chronicle the less than glamorous life of a couple of MBAs. I’m glad we didn’t. It would look pretty tasteless today. Shortly thereafter opportunity knocked and I was off to my current gig, but that studio and Xprove continue to grow.
Today that URL is no joke. The New York Times featured this story about the situation faced by many formerly high-salaried professionals. Many of us in the media business have spent a good portion of our careers “between positions” and “freelancing here and there.” We’re used to our fortunes being closely tied to the business cycles, but not your typical executive. He or she has made $150,000/year rain or shine.
Nine months ago [Mark Cooper] lost his job as the security manager for the western United States for a Fortune 500 company, overseeing a budget of $1.2 million and earning about $70,000 a year. Now he is grateful for the $12 an hour he makes in what is known in unemployment circles as a “survival job” at a friend’s janitorial services company.
No need to rehash freshman econ. The ripple effect is profound. There’s no point in advertising a Lexus to Mr. Cooper. In fact there’s little to be gained advertising the Denny’s $3 breakfast special to him. As advertising dollars shrink, the media – already hurting – further contracts.
So it was with more than a little surprise when I read Gail Collins column in the same NY times. Her shock that soap operas are stooping to product placement to generate revenue is, well, shocking. They’re called soap operas for a reason. Their job is to sell soap. In the broadcast model, entertainment is a catalyst for economic activity – not an end unto itself.
Collins is a very entertaining and often spot-on columnist, so I was ready to cut her some slack until I saw this among the most emailed articles from today’s Times. Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Remain Viable – an excerpt:
The future for the networks, it seems, is more low-cost reality shows, more news and talk, and a greater effort to find new revenue streams, whether they be from receiving subscriber fees as cable channels do, or becoming cable networks themselves, an idea that has gained currency.
You don’t say, Gray Lady. What have your media writers been watching for the last decade?
Still talking about convergence
It’s been about a decade since I first heard talk of the convergence of the TV and web experience. In that time talk of Interactive TV has come and gone. Walled gardens were villified needlessly — the walls kept out enough light to let anything significant grow. Mobile video burst on the scene only to gain virtually no traction. It took YouTube on the iPhone to get people watching.
The buzz around convergence continues on. It’s quieter these days, but it’s still spoken of by pundits as inevitiable. So then why hasn’t it happened? The New York Times revisited the issue this week — most likely because all the articles about the DTV transition had to be shelved.
I’m no oracle. I got interactive television all wrong back in a 2001 cover story for DV Magazine. But I have been right on convergence. I never imagined wanting to check my email on the big screen with the family gathered around. As Web 2.0 technologies take hold, the convergence of the internet and television looks even more remote. What teenager is going to update her Facebook profile in the living room?
The fact is the PlayStation and Xbox have already brought the internet to my TV. I don’t know anyone who uses those boxes to surf the net. Sony has apparently learned from this. Quoted from the Times article:
“Sony’s stance is that consumers don’t want an Internet-like experience with their TVs, and we’re really not focused on bringing anything other than Internet video or widgets to our sets right now,” said Greg Belloni, a spokesman for Sony. Widgets is an industry term for narrow channels of Internet programming like YouTube.
Yet pundits continue to declare, “This time it’s for real. Really. I mean it.” Like everything else, TVs will connect to the internet, but it will be a managed experience, and it won’t be browser-based. Weather, sports, and financial information will be available on the TV. Maybe Hulu and YouTube can be visited. But the rest of the browsing experience will be done elsewhere — where the screen is 12 inches not 12 feet away. I open my bills in my office at my desk. I don’t project them onto the wall for the whole family to watch.
The convergence ship has sailed. We can browse anywhere — with our iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other devices – so who’s going to want to learn another remote?
Why I became a product designer
Now I realize designing NLEs for the professional space is chump change compared to the sexy world of consumer electronics, but if I work hard enough impressing my colleagues someday I might get to build something like this and get noticed by Jakob Nielsen.
Don’t play this around kids or in the office.
