Tech vs. Entertainment
I’ve been sick and mostly in bed for the last three days. Through the sweat and fever I watched as the tech community joined together to let congress know elected representatives don’t understand the tech they are attempting to regulate. It made me proud to be a little part of this disparate group of people who come together when our ones and zeros are threatened. The Internet is speech and it is press. This certainly won’t be the only time the tech community will have to join to defend freedom against power established in an analog economy, but I hope we won’t go through too many of these battles.
I trust technology more than I could ever trust religion, government, and because I have a bit of Aspergers, I trust technology more than I trust in personal relationships. The constant purpose of technology is to work to improve life and solve problems. After technology, the thing I love is show business. I cherish the idea of people working to entertain.
In the last 100 years, we’ve seen technology transform transportation and manufacturing. In the last 60 years, technology created new forms of entertainment. Big, strong companies with expensive equipment and distribution systems worked to build bridges between content creators and content consumers. In the last 20 years, technology has begun to disintermediate the big, powerful systems of content distribution that produced physical products like books, records, cassettes, CDs, video tapes, DVDs and films. Change is hard and the established power of the entertainment industry wants to protect territory that no longer exists. Entertainment executives are like kings in a castle building motes to protect rejected authority.
It’s hard to let go of systems that worked well and made money. Trust me! I know how hard that is! Ultimately businesses created to produce, sell and distribute analog media products will have invent new business models or go out of business. So far the entertainment industry has been willing to spend massive amounts of money to try to stop technology. With PIPA and SOPA, they got close.
The entertainment business is holding on too tight and focused too much on the good ‘ol days. The sooner they embrace and work with the evolution of technology and the inevitability of change the sooner they’ll enjoy opportunity provided by innovation. Tech doesn’t want to compete with entertainment. Tech wants to invent new possibilities. The dispute over SOPA and PIPA shows tech culture has matured enough to have political muscle, but tech culture doesn’t want to have to deal with that nonsense. It’s an inefficient distraction from the work that matters.
Technology will ultimately win because technology constantly evolves to break through barriers and limitations. The culture that creates tech routes around anything or anyone who says no, don’t, stop, or can’t. Resistance is futile.
Read MoreThe Gadget Report
Just in time for CES, I’ve launched a new Gadget News show called The Gadget Report at GadgetReport.TV. I’m using the first couple episodes to work out my workflow and attempt to get it up to speed by Monday.
There are a couple major challenges I have being on camera. So far, my biggest problem is bringing enough energy to my presentation. My natural speaking voice is very soft. I kick it up when I talk to strangers. I have to kick it up even more when I talk through a camera. It’s a matter of practice. I’ll get there quick enough. The other challenge for me is a tendency to talk with my hands. People found it distracting on episode 1, especially since my hands don’t necessarily relate to what I’m saying. 
In episode 2, which I’m editing now, I calm my hands. It turns out, though, there is some degree of correlation between how much my hands move and the amount of energy I put in my voice. It will be interesting to see if anyone notices that.
When you watch the first episode, I hope you’ll be reminded of the spirit and humor of GeekBrief.TV, and I hope you’ll get a sense of where I’m going with the show. I’m starting with a look back at some of my favorite gadgets, in different categories, from the last year. Tomorrow, I’ll start covering CES remotely the way we did with GeekBrief.TV.
I’m a pretty harsh self-critic, and I have to read the advice Ira Glass from This American Life gives to creatives from time to time …
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” -Ira Glass
Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.
The first few episodes of The Gadget Report will have flaws, but they’ll give you a taste of what I’ve imagined. It will take a bit of time to work out a workflow that isn’t interminable. I like making extremely produced shows. That takes a lot of time. Episode 1 took at least 20 hours to post-produce. I’m building template elements that are already helping me speed things up. My goal is for it to take six hours from writing to upload. It may take months to get to that point. I expect to release an episode approximately every other day.
If you haven’t seen the first episode of GadgetReport.TV, please watch it now and help me spread the word. Subscribe and give thumbs up at Youtube, and then subscribe in iTunes once it’s available there as a podcast later this week! I appreciate you giving it a shot and need your help in matchmaking the show with the audience that will enjoy it!
The script and transparent .png files of gadgets I cover will be available at GadgetReport.TV / episode number, so for example the script and images for episode 1 of The Gadget Report is at GadgetReport.TV/1.
Read MoreRobert Scoble’s 40-Minute Look at Flipbook for iPhone
Robert Scoble saw it and said, “WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW.”
Read MoreHate Fake
I’m not a fan of the Muppets now that I’m old. Now I’m a Jim Henson fan. I’m more interested in the puppeteer than the puppet.
As we move toward the next election, the paid pundits on the left and the right tell us it’s going to be Romney V. Obama, even though very few Republicans give a damn about Romney. I gotta say it’s weird for me because I’m a social liberal and a fiscal conservative and that’s what Romney’s record suggests he is too. I just don’t believe him. He comes across as 97% inauthentic. I’ve experienced enough of that in my personal life to know it when I see it.
The other night, I decided to watch the Republican debate. I put out a few tweets and then got one back from someone pretending to be named Jen Littlefield. The twitter names is jPENNAME!!! This person may tweet again, but hasn’t tweeted sense he or she tweeted,
Read More@nealcampbell are you looking for an actor or a president. Why do people always want their candidates to sound like Dr. Phil. Geesh.
latakoo … this is important
When Luria and I launched GeekBrief.TV in 2005, we bumped up against a lot of limitations. Bandwidth was only as good as we could get. The first batch of shows was in standard definition, and I wanted us to be HD. Even when we started shooting in HD, the show couldn’t be delivered in anything like real HD.
Here’s the dream for any new media producer. When we’re able to shoot in 4K and get that video to anyone who wants to watch it on a mobile phone or IMAX sized screen within minutes (even better live), then we have a real revolution.
I read about a company today on Techcrunch called latakoo. The story is a group of journalists joined some tech guys to fix a problem. We’ve got gear to shoot amazing footage. Moving that footage from one part of the world to another without lots of quality loss or lots of time to wait makes what we do frustrating. Latakoo says they’re solving that problem.
The best way I can explain how cool this is is to give you a hypothetical case study. With GeekBrief.TV, we never covered CES by going there. It’s expensive to go, and I’m a cheapskate. I was only willing to go if we could get the expense sponsored, but that wasn’t possible because of our deal with Mevio. We covered CES by making several short episodes of GeekBrief.TV based on news coming out of CES.
Here’s the deal, though … there were lots of people attending CES that would have gladly served as GeekBrief.TV corespondents. There was no way to get high quality video from Vegas to Dallas in an amount of time that would have been good enough to make the kind of show I wanted to make.
Latakoo has built a system for moving great quality video from source to production quickly.
I haven’t tried latakoo, but what I read about them sounds like just what wasn’t possible when we were covering events remotely. I hope to have an opportunity to work with this company on a future product because they’re meeting a need in a really important way.
Read MoreVenture Capital and Beyond Talk with Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen offers answers questions from a Stanford audience about topics from the state of VC and the stock market, to Facebook’s market dominance, to the rebirth of consumer electronics.
Read More
