Category: Television

Sometimes it’s difficult when you’re writing a weblog to know how to change tone – you’ve just written something trivial and flighty, and now want to talk about something real and serious that matters to a lot of people. It can be hard to know how to handle that transition. And it’s such a challenge that I find myself confronting today, but I feel it must be done. I must stand up and state that Celebrity Big Brother is an extraordinary bit of television that’s slightly eating my brain, and that only one man is fit to win! So stand up and be counted, webloggers of Britain. It’s time to start our campaigning in earnest! Preston to win!

Apologies to any visiting Americans who haven’t got the wonder of Celebrity Big Brother in their lives. You’re really missing out. Cough. Preston to win!

A few months ago I wrote a piece called Will subscription media kill broadcast? in which I stuck on the internet my long-held belief that the six major players in the distribution of pay-for video content online (the long-term replacements for large broadcasters) would be Amazon, AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

If I’m honest, these predictions were not enormously hard to make, and it isn’t an enormous surprise to see the number of those companies that are distributing or have announced they are going to be distributing TV shows increase to four. Google are the latest to announce their plans to open an online video store (their press release). More importantly, it’s a completely open and neutral platform that will allow anyone to sell video (again – this time a litlte more smugly – as I predicted in this line, “If they have any sense, they’ll find ways to turn their hub status into a platform for a complete democratisation of content, becoming almost neutral intermediaries for large & small companies and creative individuals to put up and distribute their programming as they see fit.”)

The most interesting part of the whole enterprise is the debate about Google DRM. They’ve announced that the video will be DRM-able, but I’ve not had an enormous amount of luck finding out information about the approach they’re taking. Has anyone heard any more about this?

There’s an article in the Independent newspaper today that I’m trying really hard to convince myself isn’t true. If it is true, it sounds like one of the cruelest things I’ve ever heard of. A group of people chosen for their suggestability are going to be convinced that they are going to experiencer a near-space mission, trained in a fake Russian military base, and then convinced they are orbiting the planet for four days in space where they will perform experiments.

But they’re not going into space at all. In fact, the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated at enormous expense in an institution somewhere in England. The poor suckers they’ve found to inflict this ‘prank’ upon will find out the truth live on television in front of millions of people, just as they think they’ve completed what must seem to be one of the most important and impactful and life-changing experiences of their lives.

I have a tendency to identify too heavily with people on television and in films, which is one of the reasons I find media so compelling as well as one of the reasons I can’t watch embarrassment-based comedy. But I think if I went through such an experience of stress and striving – all in the aspirant desire to do something as astonishing and meaningful an experience as a space mission – I’d be devastated by the idea that it had all been a set-up. As a friend of mine said, the experience would be like one of those sudden context shifts that’s so disorientating and fascinating when suddenly realise where you are having been lost in a strange city, except that afterwards you’d go catatonic and never trust anyone ever again.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they’ve specifically gone after people who are prone to suggestion – which seems to me like actively taking advantage of the good nature and innocence of people – in order to ridicule and humiliate them in front of the nation. The idea of a cynical media hack celebrity consoling a contestant devastated by the revelation by the idea that at least now they’ll be on the cover of Heat magazine… God the whole thing makes me almost physical nauseous.

Who knows. I might be wrong – the whole enterprise might be in the best possible taste and all the people involved might not be permanently emotionally crippled by the idea that they could have such an experience pulled out from underneath them by monstrous inhuman cynics out to make a quick buck from advertising revenues. I’ll probably watch an episode or two before condemning the whole enterprise out of hand. But I’ve found the concept alone profoundly disturbing and a significant and unpleasant shift from Big Brother towards something much much darker and malevolent.

You can read all about the project in the Independent article: Unreality TV: The final frontier. After that, why not explore The Google News related stories. It’s been on Boing Boing too, I see, although they didn’t seem to find it as repulsive as do. So just to remind you all of what the hell they’re doing – here’s a quote to help you get your head around how unpleasant the whole ‘enterprise’ is:

Several months ago, the channel advertised for “thrill seekers” to take part in a new reality TV show. A hundred applicants were invited to London for an interview before being put through a series of psychological tests to ascertain how suggestible they were.

Although the term space cadet is slang for someone who is distracted from reality, Shirley Jones, the show’s executive producer, insisted the contestants were “not stupid people”.

“Suggestibility is a psychological term that has no link with intelligence or gullibility. People who have a creative mind tend to be quite suggestible. All the tests we did have been done in conjunction with a psychologist,” she said.

So changing the subject away from how great I am for just one minute because frankly it’s all a bit embarrassing, I’m watching the Daily Show on More 4 and suddenly – after a week – it’s gone all Global Edition and I’m crying ‘nooo’ at the screen – even more so when it starts with fragments of the previous week’s programming. WTF! And then three minutes in, pop, Phil Gyford appears dismayed in an IM window: “You watching the Daily Show?
I’ve travelled back in time to last Monday…” Ooooh, More 4. You’re in trouble now… The European metropolitan liberal elite are angry!

Anyway, we can all relax, because apparently – with no flagging or whatsover on the TV – it’s only the Monday episode that’s the Global Edition recap of the previous week. The rest of the week it’s the proper one-day-delayed quality Jon Stewart goodness that we’ve come to love, with none of the partially-digested-for-non-Americans baby brain food that the Monday edition consists of. The online explanation:

“Recorded on weekday evenings before a New York audience, the show will be screened the following night in the UK. Monday’s UK show will feature a round up of the highlights from the previous week, while on Tuesday to Friday nights, the US show from the previous night will be broadcast.”

Quick tip for More 4 controllers – it’s less expensive to tell us first than to deal with all the complaints and queries and confused people ringing up and e-mailing and hanging outside your house burning effigies.

This is so not a proper post. I’m really sorry about the whole thing.

A couple of days ago I was e-mail interviewed by a guy writing an article on future developments in televisions and home media centres who was interested in the piece I wrote on Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. For what it’s worth – here are my answers in full, slightly edited for clarity:

In your presentation you outlined some interesting ideas (buddy lists, watch with friends etc.) – Is anyone going down this route? Online gaming is leading this kind of hybridised social / entertainment stuff – things like Xbox Live already make it possible for you to talk and chat and play alongside people from all over the world – and to manage those relationships. Simultaneously, each of these boxes is coming closer and closer to the idea of a home entertainment hub, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the edges between the various activities you could do with them started to blur. Also, around the same time that I put up my stuff on Social Software for Set-Top Boxes, the PARC people also started talking about similar stuff. Obviously, a huge amount of the technology that we take for granted today was developed at PARC, so that bodes quite well for the future.

Is TV and PC convergence a dead idea? I think the idea of a screen in the corner of your room that you watch TV on and then completely change modes so that you can do your taxes is pretty much inevitably going to have limited appeal. There are machines that can do this kind of stuff already of course, but they’re really targeted towards people with very limited space – students and the like. I think the future looks much more interesting than that – with some of the functionality that has been associated with PCs starting to appear in entertainment appliances all around the home. The technology behind all the devices is probably going to be pretty much the same and slightly further off I think we can expect that they’ll all be talking to each other behind the scenes. The various devices in your home will be acting together to give you relatively unified access to your data and media and to the network – but each device will provide its own way of mediating that data – it’s own tailored interface.

What about the Apple media hub? Yeah, I don’t know quite what Apple are doing to be honest. With computer technology gradually moving out of the desktop PC and into the rest of the home, you’d think they’d be right at the forefront. That kind of thing – making complex concepts and devices comprehensible – is exactly what they’re great at. Sony and Microsoft are clearly making huge inroads with their gaming machines to the extent that they already have low-powered media hubs attached to millions of televisions worldwide – I really would have thought that Apple would similarly be looking to get into that space by leveraging their advantage in the digital audio space. But while there are rumours that the Mac Mini is destined to be a foundation for that kind of thing, there’s very little actual evidence of it so far.

Is D-TV more likely to see a continuation of selected internet or internet-like functions rather than fully-fledged net access? Fundamentally the interface just isn’t there for web-browsers on the TV to really take off enormously. I don’t doubt that people will continue to develop them, and I don’t doubt that there will be some people who use them, but having to have an extra wireless keyboard or input device and having to control the screen from the other side of a room makes the whole enterprise less than optimal. In the longer term, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t pretty easy to install network-enabled apps on your TV that allowed you to do things like access your Flickr photostream or the iTunes music store, but I would think you’ll probably do that kind of stuff via a different lean-forward interface somewhere else in your home.

How do the next generation of games consoles fit in to the mix? I think they’re fundamental – unlike with set-top boxes, it’s not a fully commoditised market, there’s enormous scope for technological development and each of the major players is throwing enormous amounts of money into the area – often expecting years of loss-leading before profit. Of course they’re looking to the future. Of course they’re competing to own this new critical space under the TV and at the heart of the connected home. That’s not to say that the gaming element is just a Trojan horse – it’s clearly not – but I think it’s also fairly clear that it’s not the end of the road. The set-top box space is a really powerful and important area – for a start it can potentially mediate all your media consumption. Whoever controls that has a lot of power. And the market for operating systems is huge – how many more people in the world have televisions than computers right now? Think how much money you could make by having your media centre installed on every new TV sold. And boxes like the X-box are in the perfect space to position for that final leap…

There are a whole ton of theories all over the internet at the moment about all the ‘Bad Wolf’ references appearing in Doctor Who. In two weeks an episode called “Bad Wolf” will air, and it looks like it’s the first part of a two-parter that will end the season. In pretty much every other episode so far there has been a reference to ‘Bad Wolf’. So obviously, people are thinking something pretty significant is going to happen. Obviously I have my theory, and again, obviously I have no interest in accidentally spoiling the experience for anyone should I inadvertantly appear to have got it right. So if you want to hear it, view the source and scroll down until you see the hidden comments…

Note added 20:00 pm on Saturday 4th June 2005: In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the BBC-owned URL of badwolf.org.uk started working yesterday, full of speculation and suggestions and theories. You might also like to read this thoroughly good weblog post about all the Bad Wolf references and this incredibly spoiler-full message board thread about the next couple of episodes. I’m not completely convinced that my theory is still correct, by the way. Particularly not after the end of the episode I just watched (which totally rocked).