In Michael’s previous post on the subject, he points out that entertainment industries have yet to figure out how to adapt to new media. Everything we’ve seen from media companies, whether it be film, television, music, or books, has been part of an attempt to restrict access to content. How silly is that? Media companies are stuck in a model that says, essentially, “the less people see our product, the better.”
The counterargument is that these companies are not restricting content for people willing to pay, but that’s not necessarily true. E-books are a case in point.
If a book has been published in the United States, there’s a good chance a large library system will have a copy for checkout. I live in New York City, which has not one, but three public libraries run by the city. The New York Public Library, serving Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island is a gigantic repository of books. If you want to read something, it can be reserved online and when a copy becomes available, it is sent to a branch of your choice for pickup. It’s a remarkably convenient system, and this comes from an institution operating on a gutted budget.
Libraries have always been repositories of free content that book publishers have been willing to live with. But the e-book model is changing the relationship publishers have with public libraries.
When a popular book comes out, libraries have to buy many copies to keep pace with demand, just like a bookstore. As copies are worn down with use, replacements are bought, or, if demand has peaked, not replaced. Physical media demands multiple copies for multiple uses. But as libraries are setting up online libraries and warehousing content for e-readers, they are asking the obvious question, “Why should we have to purchase more than one digital file? Can’t we just host one copy on our servers and let our users download it?”
Publishers, understandably, don’t want that to happen, as open access to a library’s content would be legal piracy. So the system the two sides have come up with, and that is still being worked out, is a complicated licensing system whereby libraries pay publishers for a certain amount of checkouts. When a particular book has reached a cap, the library has to purchase more licenses. Users who have the downloaded book on their device have a limited time to read it before it erases itself from their machine. Because digital storage and transmission has completely upended the weight of content, the owners of that content are having to invent artificial barriers (that negate advances in technology) to its distribution.
Public libraries are free for its members. They do not fit into any pay model currently in use today, yet even they are now subject to the methods of an industry flailing to find its place in the 21st century.
For an example from television that breaks the pay model, one need look no further than hulu. Hulu.com has deals with all four of the major broadcast networks to carry their content online. Some of that content includes entire series runs of shows that are long off the air. It’s wonderful for anyone who loves television. But the spectre of artificial restrictions once again rears its ugly head.
The X-Files is one of the most popular shows of the 1990s. It ran for nine seasons and spawned a pair of films. All nine of those seasons are on hulu, but only for users who pay the monthly subscription fee to be part of hulu plus.
This is a television show that aired on network television, where the price to watch was paid in time, in the form of commercials, but in its online incarnation, that commitment is not good enough for the owners of the content, so the show resides behind an artificial barrier. For those not willing to pay with anything other than their time, using a torrent to steal the episodes is now more of an attractive option.
I would be willing to bet that if that content was taken out from behind hulu’s pay wall, and was interspersed with normal commercial breaks, like everything else on hulu, instances of piracy of that television show would decrease. I bet that would work with all shows. Weightless data is inherently hard to hide, and has created a new class of casual criminal. A great way to bring these people in from the dark, for movies and television, anyway, is to make content they wish to see available, and then sell ad space within it. Something like this has only been applied to relatively small amounts of content, so far. As soon as television and film companies realize more of their viewers aren’t wedded to a clock, and that they are willing to pay with their time like they always have been, that should begin to change. But hurry it up, already. I want to watch The X-Files.

I’ve been busy this year, between work and preparing my wife and I for our move from New York to Los Angeles at the end of this month. Because of this, I haven’t been able to watch any episodes from the new season (Season 18) of Top Gear (the original awesome UK version, not the shitty US version). Not a big deal I tell myself. I’ll check iTunes.
Nope. iTunes only has Season 17 to download.
That’s ok, I pay out the ass for premium cable television, and we get BBC America, which includes BBC America On Demand, so maybe they’ll at least have the first few episodes from the season up.
Nope.
The BBC is refusing to embrace the innovations the Internet and mobile computing have brought to our lives. Their behavior is representative of the cable industry at large.
The result of innovation is disruption. When you find a new way to do something, you disrupt the existing way of doing it. In commerce, when you innovate, you’re also disrupting existing streams of revenue.
There’s two ways to react to innovation:
– adapt/change your business model(s) and find new revenue streams
– preserve existing revenue streams
By ignoring innovation and preserving existing revenue streams you end up antiquating your business, potentially (inevitably?) ending it. IBM used to make typewriters, then personal computers. Then they sold their computer business to Lenovo and went into the enterprise market. IBM has adapted in order to survive (I know, IBM has more than those few things, but the point is still valid).
By not adapting to the ways people can now watch television, the BBC encouraged me to find other means of obtaining their content. I could probably download all of this season’s episodes of Top Gear from a Bittorrent site. But I don’t want to. I’d rather do it the right way, whether it be through iTunes or some other method the BBC endorses, but so far nothing exists.
What am I left to do?

What That Puppy Photo on Pinterest Says About the Future of the Internet

That fact is reflected everywhere on the Internet — a world that was born of text (the first HTML, the first linkblogs, the first instant messages and emails) but which quickly adjusted its architecture to accommodate images (emoticons! jpgs! Geocities! animated gifs!) and video (cats!). Today’s web, as an aesthetic object, is an advanced dialectic between text and image. (Comic sans, obviously, being the evil spawn of the two.) Online, text lives alongside decorative illustrations and share buttons and logos and embedded videos, the whole vibrant cacophony interacting so seamlessly that it’s easy to forget that text and image are, in fact, different mediums. Social networks, in particular, break down neatly along text/image lines: There’s Twitter, heavy on the text and low on the pictures, and then there’s Facebook and Google+ (heavy text/heavy image), and then Tumblr (heavy image/low text), and then, at the other end of the spectrum, Pinterest (heavy image/effectively no text).

PSFK: Japanese Virtual Pop Idol More Popular Than Live Ones
Who needs human performers?

Over at paidContent, Robert Andrews sends word that Game Retailer Group is on the brink of collapse.

Europe’s biggest plastic-box video game retailer Game Group has warned its shares may become worthless, as it struggles to avoid the same fate that has beset retailers of physical-format music.

The group says it is trying to renegotiate its lending facilities with banks and its supply shortages with game publishers that are withholding stock while Game tries containing its financial problems.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand how the video game industry, an offspring of the computer industry, can continue to attempt to sell physical media and expect everything to be cool. We’re entering year 5 AI (After iPhone). Things need to have changed by now.
It’s like squatters staying in an apartment, refusing to pay rent, just waiting to be evicted.

via Suicide Cat

I don’t listen to music when I’m working on the computer – unless it’s mindless production work where my brain doesn’t require intense concentration. If I’m listening to anything, it’s usually something ambient or neutral (like brown noise, or sounds from nature). I like it quiet when I’m working creatively.
The same is true for for visual noise. I (try to) keep my computer and actual desktops clear of shit.
But even if my computer desktop is clean, I still have to deal with application windows stacked on top of application windows …stacked on top of application windows. It looks noisy. Messy.
Thanks to my friend Ryan, I’ve now solved this problem with Spirited Away.

Spirited Away is an invisible program that runs in the background and listens for inactive programs. When you haven’t used a program for a certain period of time, it hides it.
I’ve only been using it for a few hours now, but I love it.
Perhaps this also a side effect of using an iPad and an iPhone more and more. I’m getting accustomed to only seeing one program at a time. Multi-tasking is great when you have focus. And Spirited Away helps me get back some focus.
Some people might say it’s simply a matter of quitting out of programs you’re not using, but I’ve found that by simply not seeing the program, it’s almost the same as them not running. It also saves me the time of relaunching them.
Spirited Away is free, but I donated to the developers. I like supporting independent developers producing smart work.

Via my wife. Pretty incredible film and campaign.
See also Invisible Children
Update: There’s an interesting counter-point over at the Atlantic on Why We Should Take Heart From the Backlash Against Kony2012.

Farhad Manjoo on the unbeatable iPad:

Imagine you run a large technology company not named Apple. Let’s say you’re Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Meg Whitman, Larry Page, or Intel’s Paul Otellini. How are you feeling today, a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the new iPad? Are you discounting the device as just an incremental improvement, the same shiny tablet with a better screen and faster cellular access? Or is it possible you had trouble sleeping last night? Did you toss and turn, worrying that Apple’s new device represents a potential knockout punch, a move that will cement its place as the undisputed leader of the biggest, most disruptive new tech market since the advent of the Web browser? Maybe your last few hours have been even worse than that. Perhaps you’re now paralyzed with confusion, fearful that you might be completely boxed in by the iPad–that there seems no good way to beat it.

I love Apple, but it seems likely my weariness from writing only about Apple might continue for a while.

John Gertner for the NYTimes on Bell Labs:

So how can we explain how one relatively small group of scientists and engineers, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey over a relatively short span of time, came out with such an astonishing cluster of new technologies and ideas? They invented the future, which is what we now happen to call the present. And it was not by chance or serendipity. They knew something. But what?

The guy who was responsible for creating the creative culture was Mervin Kelly.
How did he do it?

One element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

Sounds like another building from an institution known for creativity and innovation, the original MIT Media Lab building (via):

The Lab, which has its origins in architecture (the founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, is an architect) draws upon the tradition of studio design critique; we have daily visits from our industry partners and other practitioners with whom we engage in an authentic critical dialogue about the work. In this exchange, the work is discussed within a broader context — ideas (and prototypes) are exchanged, improvements and alternatives suggested. We then advance to the third phase of the innovation cycle — iterate. Iteration within the Lab means returning to ‘Step One’ to push our ideas further. Iteration within our partners’ organisations means taking a prototype towards real-world application. In both cases, we can learn from our mistakes (and successes).

Pretty awesome 3-D dataviz posters by Pattern Matters (via Colossal)

When will Don Draper Die?

Beth Jinks reporting for Bloomberg on Watson’s new Wall Street job:

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)’s Watson computer, which beat champions of the quiz show “Jeopardy!” a year ago, will soon be advising Wall Street on risks, portfolios and clients.

Citigroup Inc. (C), the third-largest U.S. lender, is Watson’s first financial services client, IBM said yesterday. It will help analyze customer needs and process financial, economic and client data to advance and personalize digital banking.

Beautiful photography by Naz Hamid (via Wilson Miner)