Life On the Phlipside

Hollywood Battle, Weather Weirdness, Terrible Movie Advice

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 21:00:00 +0000

"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY, Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly add or subtract words at a moment's notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.

Programs from the week of April 22, 2019

This Week's Podcast

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.

Terrible Movie Advice

I’m going to go off on a little bit of personal ramble today. It all began as I was sorting through some junk mail.

I have no idea why, but I always take a look at the junk mail flyers that we get. I’ve done it as along as I can remember. Rather than simply throwing them out or into the recycling, I will take a quick scan through them. My best bet is that I have some deep seated Fear of Missing Out issues that make me waste my time this way. Because it is a waste of time. The number of offers I’ve found that I had any interest in after decades of doing this don’t require all the fingers on one hand.

But the other day I did run across something that stopped me cold. It was an offer from some kind of educational institution (just because they call themselves a college doesn’t mean I believe them) and the tag line snagged me. “We’ll teach you to watch the movies like a college professor”. And my thought was “What a terrible thing to offer!”

No surprise here, I love the movies. I tell you that every couple months. And I enjoy offering my little insights into what makes a great movie, a good movie, an “ehhhh” movie and even what makes a bad movie. But there’s an upper limit on knowing what’s going on weighed against enjoying something.

Back when I was studying theater in college, one of my professors looked out at our bright shining faces and told us, “We are about to ruin theater for you.” His stance was that once you know too much about how things are done, the ability to believe in the magic of the stage is diminished or even destroyed. Based on my experience, he’s right. I walk into every play or musical now and spend my time looking at how things are being done. The lighting cues, the scenery design, the actor’s blocking. Which means I’m not immersing myself in the wonder of the show. And that’s sad.

It’s why I have intentionally limited my study of the movies. I don’t WANT to know too much. Sure, I understand acting and some directing principles, but I am careful NOT to become a student of the medium. At least not in depth. I want to keep my sense of wonder.

That’s why I very carefully crumpled that piece of junk mail up, and threw it away.

Weather Weirdness

Let’s face it, all of us like to complain about the weather. Whether it’s the snowbound parts of the north or the “let’s fry eggs on the sidewalk” summer heat of the south, everyone has an opinion about the weather. And we generally blame the local weather person for it all, one way or the other. So two stories about the weather today. One serious and one silly. Really silly.

First, the serious one. Just over a week ago, most golf fans were nailed to their seats watching Tiger Woods complete his amazing comeback with a win at the Masters. It was a compelling story. But in Atlanta, Georgia there was another story brewing, one that involved a tornado. WGCL TV decided it was time to make sure their viewers knew about the potential storm. So they went split screen on the Masters, muting the play by play, and with meteorologist Ella Dorsey giving the important update. That might seem like a reasonable compromise, you can still watch the action, without the annoying chatter of the golf commentators. Heck, I’d call that a win for the viewing audience.

Seems not everyone agreed. The stations got complaints. And Dorsey got death threats. One complaint maintained that, quoting now “...there could be a tornado outside my house and I wouldn’t care. Put the Masters back on”

That’s so appallingly idiotic that it boggles the imagination. I give Dorsey credit because she didn’t back down one inch, calling out both the death threats and the other complainers. Life and death versus a golf tournament? The station made the right call.

In other weather news, there is a kerfluffle over in England between the BBC’s weather presenters and folks in the far southwest of England. It seems the presenters stand in front of that region, which is Cornwall and the delightfully named Isles of Scilly, and never move. So they can never see what the weather will be for that part of the nation. There is a lot of tourism in that part of England, so weather is important. It includes places like the seaside resort town of Torquay, best known to John Cleese fans as the home of Basil Fawlty in the classic English television comedy “Fawlty Towers”. It would be like the national weather person standing in front of the Outer Banks and never moving. The BBC says it is reviewing the issue.

But you know what they say about the weather? Just wait, it’ll change.

Hollywood Battle

When we think about Hollywood we tend to think of the movies, their stars, and how much money is involved. As I mentioned many times, there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of people behind the scenes in the making of a movie. It’s easy to overlook them, despite their importance.

So the huge fight that has broken out in Hollywood is more important than the coverage it’s been receiving. The Writers Guild of America represents exactly who you think they do, the writers. The WGA and the Association of Talent Agents, again exactly who it sounds like, had an agreement on their working relationship that had been around for decades. That agreement expired recently and there is no new agreement in sight.

A quick review for those of us who have never had an agent. An agents job, in simplest terms, is to find their clients jobs and negotiate a contract. Pretty straight forward, right? Well, until agents banded together and those agencies began to grow. Today, there are four agencies that dominate Hollywood, Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, United Talent Agency and ICM Partners. These folks represent a lot of talent, in many fields. Writers, directors, actors and more. Here’s the agencies bright idea. We represent all these folks. Couldn’t we make a few more dollars by offering them in packages? Get a director, a couple top actors and some great writers, all at the same time. You pay their salaries and a packaging fee to the agency itself. Make life simple for the studios, keep the clientele working and everybody makes money. This is good, right.

The writers aren’t convinced. The agreement that expired, the Artists’ Manager Basic Agreement has been around since 1976. The entertainment wolrd has changed massively since then, and the writers point to median weekly earnings dropping by 23% between 2014 and 2016. They say this new emphasis on packaging clients means that the agents aren’t focused on the best interests of the individual client. Private equity firms have become large investors and, as always, the emphasis has shifted to profits over everything else.

So while the two organizations scream at each other publically, the WGA is requiring its members to sign and submit letters terminating their relationship with their agent. They want a new code of conduct for the new media age.

The writers struck for 100 days twelve years ago, giving rise to “reality TV” which requires no writing staff. I’m hoping the two sides will settle their issues before any further programming horrors are inflicted on us this time.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Do We Need To Stream?, Future of Smart Speakers, Apple Spoke

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 21:00:00 +0000

Last week I talked about the big announcement from Apple and wondered about the new streaming service planned. The day came and the question...wasn’t really answered. There was a lot of talk about the programming, and how HBO would be available, but specifics remained thin on the ground. We don’t know a lot more about that service now than we did before.

There was a lot of excitement about the new credit card, but that doesn’t really qualify as a topic for this program so we can pass on that. And there was some news about the gaming platform, Apple Arcade, but like the streaming service there wasn’t a lot of detail available.

There was one interesting bit of media news that did get some details offered. That’s the expansion of the Apple News + service. This $9.99 a month service gets you access to 300 top magazines, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times plus a few others. It’s been really funny listening to Millennial generation reporters try to sound excited about this offering. There are a bunch of problems lurking below the surface on this one. Enough that I have serious doubts about its long term viability.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s mismatched with its consumer base. It’s my generation and maybe Gen X that have any deep attachment to magazines. Those generations are not necessarily ready to do a lot of reading on our phones, while the Millennials aren’t that interested in reading the product. So that’s concern one.

Concern two is strictly business. This isn’t set up to be a winner for the magazines themselves. Apple takes a huge chunk of the subscription fees, and doesn’t give the publications access to the subscribers information. Which sounds like a lose-lose business proposition to me. I will be interested to see how many of the magazines stick around after the initial glow has worn off.

Last but not least is the issue of the Wall Street Journal. A lot is made of the fact that this highly respected newspaper is included. A closer look shows that the Journal is playing this close to the vest. You will not get full access to all their reporting, just a selected portion of it. It appears the newspaper knows its audience well enough to know they won’t lose anyone to the Apple service, but may gain some through the exposure. Plus, if I read it right, they are holding on to the subscription chain and not going through Apple.

In the end, there was a whole lot of sizzle but surprisingly little steak. We’ll have to wait and see if that is still coming.

The Future of Smart Speakers

Do you have a smart speaker in your house? Do you know what I’m talking about? Smart speaker seems to be the preferred name for things like Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home devices. We have two in the Phlipside house, an Amazon Dot and a Home Mini. I don’t know that either get a lot of work. Honestly, they are used mostly for background music, and as a timer. Not really getting the most out of that technology at my house.

There are people trying for more out in the great wide world. Which is probably a good thing since projected sales of smart speakers are expected to be more than 140 million units this year. Almost a quarter of homes with wifi have one. That’s expected to be close to half in the next three years. One idea I’ve heard recently is pretty cool, the other I’m not so thrilled.

So, bad news first.

Marketers are coming for you smart speaker. With all these speakers sitting in our homes, companies want to reach out and touch the customer. Through the use of specialized applications, called “skills” by Amazon and “actions” by Google, companies are working to create ways to bring their products and services to you. This includes things as innocuous as a tooth brushing timer from the folks at Oral-B, to a choose your adventure game connected to HBO’s show “Westworld”. Seems like fun and games now, but I’m always concerned about how far it will go. And there are the ongoing questions about security and privacy that have followed these devices from day one.

On the other hand, Amazon has opened up a new front for the devices with their Alexa for Business skills templates. The idea is to train the device to take care of a variety of routine tasks. For example, all the routine stuff done when a new employee joins the company. I believe the current HR term for it is “onboarding.” Instead of tasking a person to answer the same questions over and over, there’s an Alexa skill to help people set up the company e-mail, get passwords, how to access company sites on smartphones. Even better, these skills can be created without the company having to write any of the underlying code. It can all be handled by filling in a request form and plugging the information into a template. Just last year, Amazon added 50 new personal skills last year, and looks to increase the business related ones moving forward.

So I should probably start working on getting a little more work out of the ones at my house.

Do We Need To Stream?

I find myself conflicted on the subject of live streaming. The recent mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand shows the downside of the idea at its starkest. The ability to reach a worldwide audience in an instant, with no effective oversight is a lure for those people who want to aggrandize themselves and their anti-social behavior. That’s an extreme incident, I’ll grant you. The underlying question is, do we need to stream our lives LIVE?

I want to be clear from the start, I am aware that the overwhelming majority of live streams are benign, even fun. Live streams of events can spread the enjoyment. This past weekend, I was in charge of live streaming Sunday morning worship at my church. It has uses as a marketing tool, and a way for online folk to connect with their audience. There are times when the “live right now” aspect of a stream is important.

It’s the availability of live streams on social media platforms like Facebook

that concerns me. These companies make it simple to push your stream out to a worldwide audience. There’s little advance preparation required to jump on the social media platforms, and even less oversight of what is being presented.

And for what? I’ve said before, for most of us, our lives just aren’t that interesting. There is no need to put them out in the world in real time. The moments could be shared as effectively with a non-live video post. Then we might have a chance to head off the sharing of events like the one in New Zealand.

Even the professional media needs to take a step back from the “live right now” inclination. The Weather Channel is being sued for 125 million dollars following a fatal accident involving three storm chasers. The two who worked for the satellite weather channel were live streaming their 70 mile an hour chase when they ran a stop sign. They struck a National Weather Service storm tracker and all were killed. Why?

Late last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the need for better standards of content regulation on social media. Facebook has acknowledged that every one of their oversight systems failed to catch the New Zealand broadcast. They failed to catch previous murders and acts of violence too. Sadly, it took an event like the Christchurch mosque terror attack to force that to the front.

In the end, I believe we would all be better served if life came with a little delay attached.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Watching You Watching, Television's Demise?, Apple Speaks

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 19:00:00 +0000

There are few events in the modern media world guaranteed to generate more excitement, buzz or discussion than when Apple let’s us know that an announcement is coming. Before a member of the anti-Apple community rises up to challenge me with Google or whoever else, let me ask a question. Does anyone else out there, ANYONE, have the kind of “sex appeal” that Apple brings to everything it does? I’m not a member of the Apple cult. I’ve owned Apple products and liked them fine. But I don’t see what is so special about most of their products that I should pay the high prices demanded. And I’m not someone who puts much value on owning the “right” brand names. Just not me.

But when Apple debuts something, it’s always worth a look. Even when they’ve come up short (which they have done more often than their fans want to admit), their lesser products were interesting if nothing else.

And this week they have an announcement. Early this week Apple will unveil their streaming service. Now they’ve been trying to break into the movie/TV business for a decade now. It was one of Steve Jobs’ unfulfilled dreams. Apple TV has been a tepid success at best. This version of the project has been underway in some form for about two years. Here’s the fun part, nothing has leaked so far. Price, structure, even what channels will be available on the service are still up in the air. We do know that they will be providing a wide range of original series, including ones from J.J. Abrams, Reese Witherspoon, and a show starring Brie Larson from Captain Marvel, among others. While the question of HBO availability is unanswered as I write this, we do know that Netflix will NOT.

There are a lot of challenges still in front of Apple. As I mentioned, they haven’t set the world on fire in their previous attempts. Plus Amazon has a multi-year head start and has established their Amazon Channels as the team to beat. It’s not often that Apple has to play catch-up. It will be interesting to see how they do.

Finally, there is the Steve Jobs factor. A curious coincidence has shown up in the past. When Jobs left the company, Apple has struggled. They have had their greatest moments when he has been the visionary. Jobs passed away eight years ago, and this may be the biggest new idea the company has had since then.

The one thing guaranteed this week? It’s going to be interesting.

Television's Demise?

Everything is not always what it seems. We prefer simple explanations even when that gives us a false understanding of complex issues. I like to repeat a saying popularized in this country by Mark Twain. “There are lies, damn lies and statistics”. Our moment in history has a greater reverence for statistics than Twain could have imagined. The issue is taking the time to look at what is being presented.

As an example, let’s look at television. The common refrain is that television is dying. Broadcast network viewing is down. People are cable cutting, leaving cable and satellite television in greater numbers. Seems pretty obvious, right?

What got me started thinking about this was a recent snark-fest by the director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, aimed at the Netflix show “The Crown”. Hall made a big deal out of the fact that it had “only” seven million viewers despite its big budget and promotional buzz. He compared it to the lower budgets and larger audiences for the broadcast network’s shows. What’s ridiculous is the apples and oranges nature of the comparison. The potential audiences are so different that it makes the comparison useless.

But that’s not the only useless statistic floating around television. Yes, people are not watching TV the old fashioned way as much (unless you’re in the 65+ category). They are watching streaming video. But what still makes up the largest percentage of WHAT is being watched? The programs from the television networks. Television programming remains the largest portion of our weekly media usage. Smartphone app/web viewed media is second, and somewhat to my surprise, terrestrial radio, that’s the old school radio, is the third largest segment of media usage.

A recent survey in the United Kingdom may shed some light on this as well. Almost 1 out of 3 viewers there use streaming as their primary way to watch television. 63% of younger viewers believe they get better value through streaming over traditional delivery. I would expect the numbers in the U.S. to be close to that as well.

Which brings us back to the original question. How is television doing? Given that the definition of what television is has changed (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime? Television or not? They are trying to compete with and create product modeled on the older technology), it becomes more and more difficult to set our parameters for success. If we set aside the question of how the programming is delivered, then it looks like the reports of television’s death, much like the rumor that swirled around Mark Twain, has been greatly exaggerated.

Watching You Watching

How much do you love the movies? My personal love is not a secret. I watch movies every week and have reviewed hundreds of them on The View From The Phlipside website. Watching them at home is fun. I can stop and start them, get up and walk around, make as much noise as I want, and the refreshments are a whole lot cheaper. Having said that, there is nothing like the experience of the “big screen”. Even I had forgotten the wonder of the movie theater experience until three years ago when I got to see David O. Selznick’s iconic “Gone With the Wind” on a proper theater screen for the first time. A movie that I had mocked in the past showed me all of its epic grandeur in the theater.

So I look forward to the chance to sit in the theater with a big tub of popcorn, (which you don’t start eating till the movie starts), waiting for the lights to dim, the music to swell and a new adventure to roll out before my eyes.

With that in mind, you would think that I would be thrilled to discover a new app that helps you get free tickets to the movie theater, right? Well, first off, my enthusiasm is dulled by the unfulfilled promise of MoviePass, the program that I grudgingly had to acknowledge had lived beyond my prophecy of their demise. Burn me once… Plus, I am old enough to realize that nothing is really free. There’s a hook in there somewhere.

In the new app PreShow there is not one but TWO hooks. Created by Stacy Spikes, one of the founders of MoviePass, the smartphone app offers you the chance to earn free movie tickets. How do you earn them? That’s hook number one. You have to watch advertisements on your smartphone. 15-20 minutes of advertisements. That would be a deal breaker for a lot of people right there. But there’s a creepy hook number two as well. The app, using facial recognition software and your phones camera, watches you watching the ads. If you set the phone down, it pauses for five seconds and then shuts down the session. Your phone watches you watching the ads to make sure you’re not scamming the system.

While the logic of the system makes sense from a business point of view, I can’t see people getting excited about this at all. Fifteen to twenty minutes of advertisements is enough to sink the concept all by itself. Having my phone watch me watching them? It’s enough to make me reach for my home movie collection.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Baby Food News, Unwanted Companion, The Whole Story

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 20:00:00 +0000

I spent a lot of air time last year talking about journalism. By now, I’m pretty sure you know that my attitudes on the subject are pretty “old school.” Journalism at its best is almost a “higher calling” in my pantheon. But along with that great reverence, I keep a skeptical eye peeled on the subject too. History teaches me that there has always been a dark underbelly to journalism too. That can range from lazy reporting to outright yellow journalism. One that takes a position and makes the facts fit that position.

A recent story in the news brought all of this to the fore. It’s the college admissions scandal story. Wealthy families are alleged to have entered into fraudulent deals with colleges, coaches and an outside company to fake credentials to get their kids into high profile schools. Over 30 people were named in the first indictments. So here’s my question to you: how many of those names have you heard? Not how many can you remember, but how many have you even heard? Unless you have gone digging on this story, my bet is the answer is two. Two out of 30+. Those two would Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, both actresses.

Let me make clear right now, I have no sympathy for any of the people facing charges. The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach. And before anyone points out that rich families have been donating buildings to colleges to insure young Harwell the third got accepted, this is a very different thing. This is fraud. And it stinks.

But you know what else stinks? That these two women are treated like they are the worst of the worst. The “reporting” focuses on them because it’s easy and brings some sizzle. It’s cheap, lazy reporting. And if we want to see journalism respected again, we need to call this kind of garbage out. Among those charged were CEOs of large corporations, college coaches, and folks who organized the frauds. Somehow, their names are either barely mentioned or not reported at all.

So let me offer up and example. One of the names listed in that original set of charges was on William E. McGlashen, Jr. You’ve probably never heard of him. Like the others, it’s alleged he used his wealth to help his kids cheat their way into college. And here’s the kicker. Mr. McGlashen founded a big time investment fund. Funds like this usually have a central concept on how they invest your money. Mr. McGlashen’s fund? It was dedicated to ethical investing.

The story stinks. The reporting shouldn’t as well.

Unwanted Companion?

Once upon a time in the bad old days, cell phones were huge. Bag phones and bricks that looked like World War II walkie talkies. Then, as the technology grew more sophisticated, they began to shrink. There was a time about a decade ago when we were discussing how small a phone could be. Of late, that has reversed course again, and modern smartphones are getting pretty big again.

Today phones are getting smaller again. Just in a new way. These new phones come with fewer options and abilities. A company called Light offered up a phone that was only a phone back in 2017. Since then more companies have moved into this minimalist phone market. It’s phone and SMS plus a few other very basic functions (think alarm clock, basic calendar). That’s it. There’s no internet, no social media. A basic phone. What was once referred to as a “dumbphone” is the prize product of companies like Punkt and Palm.

These aren’t products aimed at techno-incompetent old folks. They are intended for long time smartphone users who feel their technology may hold a bit too much of their lives. Instead of being tempted to constantly fish out your smartphone and check whatever it is you check, this phone offers basic communication. Which lets you? Forces you? To re-engage with the world around you.

Some of them, like the new product from Palm, will piggyback on your main phone. Palm is calling their new offering a “companion phone”. Available only through Verizon, the phone was designed by a wide ranging team including NBA star Stephen Curry.

All of which sidesteps the question, who would want one of these? First, is there a market for this? Most of what I’ve described can be done with a smartwatch, another piece of technology that hasn’t taken the world by storm as of yet. But it has made inroads. Would you trade in your smartwatch for a credit card sized dumbphone? I can’t see it. Even I would lean toward the Dick Tracy wrist radio technology.

Then there’s the price. The Palm phone is priced at $349. The bottom of the line Punkt phone is $229, the Light phone which is call only and limits you to 9 speed dials, will set you back$150. All of those leave me shaking my head in disbelief. The Palm is outrageously pricey and the Light is absurdly minimalist.

So it appears we have a solution in search of a problem. Over-priced and under useful, I can’t see the world beating a path to these phones doors. Do you?

Baby Food News

Do you remember the first non-traditional place for media? You might say when radios were added to cars and that would be a good thought. I’m talking really non-traditional in this case. Like when news sheets showed up in toilet stalls. This was probably 20 or 30 years ago now. Some bright young mind thought, people spend a fair amount of time sitting or standing in restrooms with nothing to take their minds off of, you know. So let’s get our media product in front of them. This spawned a short-lived movement of plastic sleeves on the inside of toilet stall doors with print outs of the days news, advertising, comics, whatever.

I can only imagine it died off because of the work involved, added to people being annoyed by the concept and the new item for destruction by the various types of destructive idiots that roam the earth. I can’t remember the last one I saw.

But the idea hasn’t died. The first time my gas pump started talking to me, I just about had an embarrassing moment for a man of my advanced years. Now, the pumps play music, give me sports highlights, the news and weather. It appears that one other place of relative quiet is about to be invaded with more media. If you live in a large enough urban area, you may already have run into an elevator with media screens. Captivate is one of the leading companies doing this. They will now be teaming with the Scripps video news service called Newsy to bring some up to date news to your ride up to or down from the 32^nd floor.

According to the folks at Captivate, the average length of an elevator ride is 67 seconds. Which would indicate that I don’t live in what they would term a “large” urban area. The company has been teaming up with other content providers to keep our eyes glued to their screens. The goal is grab executives who are too busy to spend any actual time reading or watching the news and give them nice little chunks they have the time to digest.

That’s the part that I find the least appealing. The world today is far more complicated than it was 20 or 30 years ago. I find it hard to get excited about decision makers relying on baby food news to get the information they need about the world around them. It’s one thing to get the latest sports scores in a minute long burp session, but you’ll have to convince me that it’s offering much of any great nutrition otherwise.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Content PTSD, Momo Hoax, End of Blu-ray

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 21:00:00 +0000

This story frustrates me. And ticks me off a little bit too. Samsung, the company that first brought a commercial Blu-ray player to the consumer market, the largest producer of Blu-ray players in the world today, has announced they will stop making the machines altogether. First, think about how rare that is. Samsung controls almost 40 percent of the market. Four of the top 10 selling units on Amazon were from Samsung, including the machine in the top spot. The number one producer is walking away. I can not think of another example like it.

The culprit here is streaming video. Our consumption of video has been growing at an enormous rate over the last couple years. The top subscription streaming services, that would be folks like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, showed a business increase of 30 percent in the last year. That doesn’t count the billions of dollars we spent on rentals. Meanwhile the numbers for Blu-ray sales showed a drop of almost 14 percent from 2017-2018. Despite cutting edge and popular new technologies that are popular with consumers, Blu-rays appear to on their way to join VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc and other technologies on the scrapheap of history.

And that bothers me a lot. No, not because I’m an old guy. I was very happy when tapes were superseded by discs. The step up in quality was worth the hassle of having to replace my library. That acceptance was a bit more grudging when it came time to add Blu-rays to my collection. I’ll be honest and admit that my collection is happily divided between the technologies. I didn’t see the compelling reason to dump everything and start over, so I’ve kept my DVDs and augmented the collection. But I am disturbed when I hear top people at Netflix making noises like they will be allowing their DVD service to die, if it comes to that.

There’s a simple reality. The selection available on the streaming services is limited. Think about this-we’ve been making movies for over 100 years. Hundreds of movies are released every year. But the largest streaming library is under 15,000 titles. That means most movies are not available. Plus movies are often only available for short periods of time. And in that more producers are moving to creating their own service, think the coming Disney service, and you won’t be able to get a comprehensive choice from a single service.

At the surface, Samsung’s decision to get out of a business in decline makes business sense. If you love older movies and television shows, it may be the worst news of 2019.

The Momo Hoax

So my question for t the day is this- Are you familiar with the Momo Challenge? If you have teens you are probably familiar with this latest internet phenomenon.

So let’s get this out of the way first. Fact number one: It’s a hoax. Complete nonsense.

If you’re not familiar with it, I am extremely jealous. Like so many online phenomenons this started as one thing, changed into something else and then the media grabbed hold of it. I’m going to circle back to that last point in a moment.

The Momo challenge involves a picture of this really weird and rather frightening face. Huge eyes, enormous mouth. This is a sculpture at a Japanese folklore figure called an ubume. The piece’s name is “Mother Bird”. Someone took a picture and shared it on the internet. Shortly thereafter someone created a story about it. One where this character, now named Momo, is challenging teens to do dangerous acts and possibly kill themselves. Second fact: There is no evidence that any child has been harmed as part of this fake challenge. Yes, there are memes and videos. But if your child or any child starts talking about how Momo is killing kids, look them straight in the eye and tell them it’s a hoax. 100% nonsense. Sadly, there are some sick people in the world who are using social networks like WhatsApp to convince people that they are Momo. They try to talk people into doing things and post graphic photos afterward. As yet, no police force has reported any events verifiably related to the hoax. It’s all smoke, no fire.

Now let’s get to the real problem. It’s not that there is a stupid hoax challenge floating around the internet upsetting people. The problem is that some media outlets, especially television stations, have done stories about the whole Momo thing. Not stories debunking the hoax, although there have been some, but stories “covering” the “worldwide threat to our kids”. So now the kids can point to their local station or videos of other stations covering this idiocy as if it were news.

I’m not saying a lot of stations are doing this. But it only takes a few. A story that would have died off quickly a few decades ago, now gets to circle the globe and terrify parents and kids. We would be much better served if they would do some research and report with greater caution. It may not be as “sexy” a story, but it would be much more useful to us all.

And, just to be clear, Momo is a hoax.

Content PTSD

I’ve got a job description for you: Sit at a computer desk 8 hours a day reviewing content for a major social media site. This means that you will be reviewing anything that has been flagged as potentially violating the established standards. So you will look at everything from off color jokes to videos of graphic violence. Every conspiracy theory video, all of the racist, misogynistic, and hate filled pictures, posts, memes and videos will flow before your eyes . Sound like a fun job? No, I can’t imagine it does.

Reports out of a Facebook content moderation site in Arizona seem to back that up.

Workers are reporting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, increased use of drugs and alcohol and other “coping” behaviors to try and drive the unimaginable filth out of their memories. Now, maybe you’re an optimist like me. Surely Facebook and the contractor who runs the facility, a company name Cognizant, understand the stresses and create a supportive environment for the employees. I’ll let you decide that. Here are the working conditions.

You get two 15-minute breaks a day, 30 minutes for lunch and nine minutes a day “wellness time”. Pretty standard stuff. The issue is that there are a minimum number of restrooms in the building. There are some 100 employees at this facility. That means you will spend most of your break standing in line, waiting to take care of that other business. And just so you know, some of your co-workers may be “taking care of business” in one of those stalls at the same time. That’s one of the other “coping behaviors” apparently.

Does the pay make up for the problems? High stress jobs usually come with higher salaries. The pay at this facility is about $15 per hour. Assuming two weeks of vacation, that’s $30,000 a year. For a job that is creating mental health issues in employees. Creating stress to a level that some employees come to work with a gun because they fear what other workers or ex-workers may do. Some say they sleep with the gun next to them as well.

To be fair, the company offers a 24/7 helpline, onsite counselors and what they term a “comprehensive wellness program”. Based on the stories, you have to wonder if that’s enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the enormity of the challenge faced by all social media platforms in policing their content. The job is probably impossible, but it can’t be avoided. I just wonder if trying to get it done on the cheap, at the cost of the mental health of your employees, is the best answer.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

The Future Returns, Retail Disruption Again, YouTube Whiplash

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 21:00:00 +0000

I keep a file of stories that I’m considering for use on this program. The old school term for such a thing is a “tickler file”. It’s designed to tickle the memory that there may be something worth looking at in the future. I’ve been having a little whiplash because of two stories in that file.

So here’s what I see: a story with the headline “AT&T to Advertise on YouTube Again After a Nearly 2-Year Holdout”. The story was written by Sapna Maheshwari for the New York Times and is dated January 18, 2019. Right below it in my digital file is a story with this headline: “AT&T Joins Latest Brand Pullback From YouTube”. That story was written by Wall Street Journal writer Nat Ives and it is date February 21, 2019. A month and three days is the difference between the two stories.

YouTube has a problem.

It’s not a new problem. The issue is placement of advertising next to objectionable videos. Two years ago a bunch of big time advertisers discovered that their advertising was showing up next to a range of hateful, distasteful content. Which wasn’t supposed to happen. They pulled their business until YouTube got its house in order. Flash forward almost two years. YouTube assures everyone that the issue has been fixed. Major sponsors return. Almost immediately it is noted that ads are showing next to videos done by young girls where the comments contain a wide range of vicious, vulgar or potentially criminal content about the young ladies. YouTube, to its credit, responded immediately by shutting down comments on some videos, terminated the accounts of people it described as “bad actors” and referred some material to the authorities. While the advertisers applaud the moves, most of them (including names like McDonald's, Nestles, and the makers of the Fortnight game) are still suspending business till things look clearer.

Here’s the real problem-YouTube is always in reaction mode. They are never out in front of the problem, and may never be able to do so. They are always talking about trying to get better at catching abuse. The size of the YouTube universe is so large that it may take a sweeping change in how they do business to have any hope of controlling the issue. The kind of sweeping change which includes tighter reins on content, more human monitoring and potentially less advertising. None of which they have ever shown any stomach for.

What the two articles proves is that advertisers are watching the situation closely, and YouTube won’t be able to slide by this problem any more.

Retail Disruption Again

Tim Armstrong has made a career working with companies that have disrupted old school business models. His resume includes Google, AOL and Verizon. But he has announced that his latest venture will take him in a new direction. If he succeeds, it may spell a new era in how we buy things.

The company is dtx, spelled with all lowercase letters. The dtx company is designed to bring products directly to the customer, eliminating stores, both brick and mortar and online, completely. Think about it for a second. The system he is talking about eliminates several layers of organization in the shopping process. There is a distribution network step, the one that moves the product from the producer to a store or sometimes the consumer. Then you eliminate the store process too. The consumer and the producer interact directly. dtx plans to get the ball rolling by investing in companies that want to explore the concept. Most of the first batch of investments will be in companies marketing to women. So there’s a footwear company, a workwear company, a bra maker, manicure company, a healthy drink company and a company that offers a way to compare neighborhoods and schools.

That’s all pretty cool, but there’s another idea that dtx will be trying that really grabs my attention. The term the company uses is “experiences”. These are pop-up shopping opportunities. If you haven’t run into the pop-up concept before, it’s a store or often a restaurant that occupies a storefront for a short period, weeks maybe months, then goes away. These shopping experiences are described as the Consumer Electronics Show meets Coachella. The CES is one of the biggest trades show in America, Coachella is a huge annual arts and music festival in California. Think a sports stadium filled with products, food and more where you can come in, try things, taste things and experience stuff that you could only find online previously. A festival of shopping that moves around the country. That way it can bring the “cool stuff” that you might only be able to find in New York or L.A. anywhere in the country. Part Woodstock, part traveling carnival, part shopping mall, I guess.

It is a fascinating idea. The direct to consumer sales concept is obvious after even the simplest extrapolation of where retailing is going. The “experiences” concept is both a return to the traveling salesman and a bold step into the future. There will be a ton of bugs to work out, but I can hardly wait to see what comes of it.

The Future Returns

Three years ago, I did a story on an impressive young lady who may be what the future of journalism looks like. Her name is Hilde Lysiak and she is from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. In 2014 she founded the “Orange Street News” (known as OSN) as a family project with her journalist father. Over the next two years the project grew into something much larger. Lysiak began expanding the scope of her reporting. The paper’s tagline is “The ONLY newspaper devoted to Selinsgrove.” She made the news when she stumbled on the beginnings of a police investigation into a local murder. OSN broke the story several hours ahead of the “professionals”. She was nine years old.

Today, Hilde is 12. Her reporting recently took her to the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona, where she reported on the issues of border security and the border wall. This time the reporter became the news when a local law enforcement officer tried to warn her off of doing her work. At one point the officer, now identified as Joseph Patterson, the town marshal of Patagonia, Arizona, told her that if she didn’t stop following him he’d “throw her in juvy”. Later in the day, the reporter asked what law she had violated. The answer was rather confusing. There was mention of a mountain lion, a question of refusing to comply with an order given by law enforcement, an accusation that she had lied to the officer. He then informed her that it was illegal for her to video the officer and put his face on the internet. There are problems with all the statements made, but the last one is simply wrong. She was recording him in a public place while he was in the performance of his duties. Perfectly legal in Arizona, and in recognition of that the local police department has disciplined the officer.

Hilde Lysiak continues to work hard at reporting the news that’s important to her hometown. She has been interviewed on network TV, has a book deal with Scholastic and last year Apple announced they will be creating a mystery series based on her life.

All of which is great, but not the important part. Hilde Lysiak could be doing whatever it is that 12-year-old girls commonly do. Instead, she is working hard to report the news. She’s standing up for her Constitutional rights as a member of the press, and she is the youngest member of the Society of Profession Journalists. Plus, undoubtedly making her parents proud.

It’s the kind of story that is fun to report.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Broadway News, MoviePass Lives! and Spotify Is Tired of Your Nonsense

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 21:00:00 +0000

Today’s topic may be the single most important one for the future of the internet. More important than fake news, or trolls or deepfake videos. It has to do with the commercial nature of the modern internet. Most especially coming to an agreement on how we deal with that commercial nature.

At its simplest level it has to do with commercials. Advertising sponsors paying for our media is the oldest model there is. Commercial radio and television have used it from the beginning. Even print has sold advertising to cover the costs of the medium for more than 100 years. Despite its familiarity, it has never been particularly popular. I don’t have a study to back this up, but my personal observation is that there is no place it is MORE unpopular than the internet.

Part of this is history. When we first discovered the internet, everything was free for the most part. It was more a place to play than anything else unless you were one of the scientists for whom the web was created. Once things began to settle down, people looked around, saw all these potential customers wandering around digitally and had a thought. Thoughts of how to make money. There was great resistance to this. The process of working out how to pay for all the cool stuff on the internet is still underway. There are billions of dollars at stake here, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that some companies are getting cranky.

One way of dealing with advertising is to use an ad-blocker. This is a small program designed to hunt down the commercials on the website you’re visiting and make them go away. Companies that rely on that advertising are not fans.

You may get a polite message at times reminding you of the necessity of that advertising and nicely asking you to unblock the site. It seems the music streaming site Spotify has decided enough is enough. Their updated Terms of Service now specifically ban ad-blockers of any kind. And they are serious about the issue. Your service could be suspended or even terminated immediately. A study last year showed that 2% of users of the free service were using ad-blockers. Put that way it doesn’t sound like much but that’s 2 million users. Given that Spotify is still working on making a profit, they are not giving up quietly.

One way or the other, we have to find a compromise on how to pay for the media we use. I’m willing to put up with a few commercials along the way.

MoviePass Lives!

I supposed I owe this story to the world because I predicted it wouldn’t happen. Around the middle of last year, I predicted that the movie subscription company MoviePass would be out of business by the end of 2018. Well, here it is mid-February of 2019, and they are still around. Just barely, mind you, but still around.

In case the name slips your mind, MoviePass was the company that offered movie goers the chance to watch a movie a day for $9.99 a month. It was an insane offer and thousands upon thousands of people subscribed. Why wouldn’t you? A movie ticket in the larger cities costs close to $20. Here was the chance to see 30x that number of movies for half the cost of one. The company grew so fast that it couldn’t get the necessary materials out to the subscribers fast enough. They started having blackouts when the app wouldn’t work . They lost money hand over fist, until the wheels came off days before the opening of “Mission Impossible – Fallout” last July. The company that handled the MoviePass cards shut the entire system down. From a corporate point of view it’s like hitting at brick wall at 100 miles per hour. The company began to cut the subscription offer, and things spun out of control. By August of last year, the stock price was five cents a share, down from over $32. Today, the stock has been de-listed by NASDAQ and is available on what’s called the “over-the-counter” market for less than a penny a share. There is a plan for MoviePass to be spun off from that original company with a new stock offering at some point.

So I felt pretty comfortable saying they would dry up and blow away. MoviePass is a perfect example of a new company that lost track of what they actually did. They became obsessed with the idea they were a disruptive force in the market, that’s what all the cool companies do these days. The problem is that if you’re only focused on knocking things over without offering something better in its place, you just make a mess. The movie industry is notoriously resistant to outsiders. An outsider that arrived with such an obviously defective business plan was going to get the full shunning treatment. And MoviePass did.

So how have they survived? That’s a good question. They let the storm blow over, and now they are trying to find an actual useful business model. I congratulate them on their persistence, but I’d still make the bet that they don’t survive to end of this year.

News From Broadway

There was big news on the Great White Way last week. Actors Equity, the union for actors and stage managers in the theater, ended a month-long strike against the Broadway League. The League is the trade organization for the companies that produce and present theater on Broadway and across North America.

What interests me is that the new agreement recognizes the value of the folks who create the onstage product. The contract replaces one called the Lab Agreement, which covered shows as they are being developed. Most of us think that other than minor tweaking the Broadway shows we love are pretty much finished concepts once they hit the rehearsal hall. Nothing could be further from the truth. Songs in musicals move in and out of the show, scenes are re-written, moved around or dropped completely. There is a huge amount of work required, and the actors and stage managers are the ones who have to prove if something works or not. There is an intense amount of work that gets done. But the contract covering the development stage of new shows hasn’t changed since 2007. Meaning that the pay scale hasn’t changed in 11 years wither. When negotiations hit a stalemate, Equity called for its first strike in 50 years.

As much as my heart is always with the acting corps, I was happy to see the contract offered some support for the stage managers. Of all the backstage company, stage managers probably get the least recognition for the audience. Once the curtain goes up, the stage manager is the quarterback of the show. They have to track everything that is going on, is about to go on, and what goes on after that. It’s an intense and demanding job. A great stage manager is a joy, and they deserved the love they got in the new contract.

That contract also includes a five-year schedule for salaries, including three increases, additional health and retirement benefits, minimums on rehearsal time for musicals and plays, and, this is the one that is really revolutionary in some ways, profit sharing for the company after the initial investment is covered. Now the performers have a vested interest in doing everything they can to make sure a new show is as good as it can be.

I’m a firm believer that business works best when labor and management work as a team. When that idea is put to work to continue creating the best theater in the world, everybody wins.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Facebook Security, "New" Salinger Stories, Disappearing Currency

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 20:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, the internet was all about information. Engineering date, programming information. It was a technical space. Slowly it grew, becoming a space for more personal past times. Simple games became more complex, pictures and music began to dominate, and we began to use it transfer personal information, right down to love letters and flame wars.

After that there was a growth in the business side. Business in this case meaning products and services available for the average user to purchase. It was inevitable that a digital currency would evolve as well. That day came in ten years ago when Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that really is, launched Bitcoin. Now there was a kind of money that only existed as digital data, the perfect expression of our digital world.

The only problem is that when there is money, of any kind, there are going to be people making bad decisions. Outside of certain intimate activities, I don’t think there’s another area of our lives where we make bad decisions more often. Spend when w should save, save when we should spend. And a biggie for today’s story, trust when it isn’t advised.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of these digital currencies, called ‘cryptocurrencies’ in the world. A Canadian company launched a cryptocurrency exchange called ‘QuadrigaCX’. An exchange is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a marketplace where traders can exchange their cryptocurrencies for other cryptocurrencies or even cold, hard cash sometimes. QuadrigaCX was the most popular exchange in Canada. Then early this year, a problem developed.

I need to dive a little deeper into cryptocurrencies for a moment. This kind of money has no physical aspect. It is data, held in something called a blockchain. Like any data if it’s not protected it can be hacked. So the founder of QuadrigaCX did the one thing that keeps bad people from accessing the money on his exchange. He put it in a ‘cold wallet’, in simplest terms, an external hard drive that is never connected to the internet. Easy as that, security! It can’t be hacked.

Here’s where the problem arises. Gerald Cotten, the founder, died in India. To access the files in the ‘cold wallet’ you have to have an access code. The only person, the only person, in the world with it? Gerald Cotten. So at the moment, there may be as much as $190 million dollars that is permanently irretrievable. Cotten trusted no one. Now the people who trusted him may be out a lot of money.

The internet remains a tough neighborhood. Let’s be careful out there.

"New" Salinger?

If you are a book fan, there are few things more exciting than the announcement of a new book in a series or from your favorite author. It is exciting enough when the book comes in the normal passage of time. When the gap between books falls in the George R.R. Martin ‘Game of Thrones’ category the tension for a reader is almost too much to bear. But all of it pales when a new trove of writing is discovered by an author who has passed away. For fans of that writer now there are new stories, stories they have never experienced before. They believed the book had been closed (you should pardon the expression) on that collection, only to be told that there are new wonders awaiting.

The only problem is that many times, there is a reason those items were never published.

Here’s the first thing you need to know about writers. They produce massive volumes of material. First drafts, second, third or fourth drafts. Ideas that don’t work out. Stories that are started but not finished. Stories that are finished but don’t meet that writer’s standard of polish. Bits and pieces of all kinds of things. They are stored in files, piles, notebooks and scraps of paper. There’s even a term for them. Authors call them ‘W-I-P’s, Works In Progress. As a writer myself I can tell you, most WIPs, except those almost finished, are fairly awful. Writing is a long process of pruning, refining and rewriting. There are times when the process seems endless. So I approach announcements that new works from deceased authors with a certain trepidation.

The most recent one is from the family J. D. Salinger, best known for the angst-y teenage story “The Catcher In The Rye”. I am a fan of the book and not afraid to say that in public. Salinger’s total output was not large. His legend says he was very particular about his writing, and nothing was published till he thought it was done. Plus he disliked the fame that came with popularity of his work.

So it’s possible that there is a trove of perfected writing waiting to see the light of day. Salinger’s son and widow are working their way through a large volume of material. They have announced that all of his work will be made public eventually.

What worries me is that we will get another ‘Go Set A Watchman’, the earlier version of her classic ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. That book disappointed her fans and was unnecessary to publish.

As a Salinger fan, I want to believe. But we won’t know till the first new story arrives.

Facebook Fact Check

Well, I managed to avoid the first ‘Facebook Dumpster Fire’ story till February of 2019. The problem is that this story shows that despite all the trials and tribulations of 2018, it doesn’t appear that the social media giant has learned much of anything.

Following the issues surrounding fake news and Russian influence on the last Presidential election, Facebook made noises about finding a way to better clear away the bad stuff on its site. It reached out to some of the top fact-checking organizations, including journalists, to work towards that goal. As with so many things in the last couple years, that isn’t turning out so well.

Two of its fact-check partners have announced that they have stepped away from the program. Snopes.com and the Associated Press announced that as of the end of last year they were no longer working with Facebook. Some of what is emerging from those stories is disturbing.

The first thing that struck me is that Facebook paid Snopes.com just 100 thousand dollars for their work in 2017. That’s AFTER Snopes and some other fact-checkers volunteered to work for free. Even with more than 30 partners world wide, that price strikes me as absurdly low. With 2.27 billion active users as of the third quarter of last year, the volume of posts that would need to be checked is mind boggling. The idea that you can achieve something useful for that kind of small corporate change staggers the imagination. You have to question whether Facebook is really serious if it’s spending that kind of pocket change from a company that showed a $6.9 billion profit just in the fourth quarter of last year.

The other disturbing charge at Facebook is that it may not be interested in what the fact-checkers have to say. A lack of transparency, a resistant to creating a more efficient way of dealing with the crush of material to be covered, and the impression that the fact-check partners are there for window dressing reinforces what I’ve surmised for a couple years now. Facebook is all bark and now bite when it comes to these kinds of questions. With 4.75 billion pieces of content being shared daily, the challenge is enormous. The response doesn’t seem to be in proportion.

AP and Snopes have both acknowledged that they could return to the partnership in the future. At the moment, the work in the U.S. falls on the two remaining American partners, Politifact, and FactCheck.org. Under any circumstances, the social media giant has to get a better grip on the issue before the next election cycle begins.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Slowing Stupidity, Future of Books and Messenger Merger

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 20:00:00 +0000

Late last week word came out from Zuckerberg Castle that three of his vast dominions would be merged. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram are headed toward becoming a single integrated messaging service. There is a growing level of unhappiness among the populace.

So here’s the deal, the three services will undergo an “under the hood” merge with the stated intention of creating a unified platform. One set of rules and operating assumptions for everyone. That may be the worst news in all of this.

The why of it seems pretty clear to me. Facebook has become the domain of an older user group. Working with teens tells me anecdotally what the statistics seem to show, younger users want as little to do with Facebook as possible. Meanwhile, Instagram and WhatsApp users skew much younger, with huge percentages of their user bases under the age of 34. The obvious answer is an attempt to get those demographics re-focused on Facebook.

That may not be the only reason. Facebook has pulled back on the volume of ads on the big service and may be looking for new revenue services. This is a particular issue for WhatsApp users where a no advertising policy is a core concept. It’s been part of a larger conflict between the two entities since Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion dollars in 2014. As recently as last summer there were reports on how badly the two corporate cultures were clashing. Instagram, which the Kingdom of Z snagged in 2012, has had more time to grow accustom to doing things Facebook’s way.

The real issue for most users is security. WhatsApp has included end to end cryptography as part of its service from the beginning. User security is another core concept for them. Meanwhile, Instagram offers no real security features on its service, and Messenger requires a user opt in. Add in Facebook’s past emphasis on monetizing user information and its overall abysmal security record, and the concern is real.

There’s a lot at play here. What’s App has more monthly active users than either Messenger or Instagram. And Instagram is closing in on the Facebook app. Facebook has talked about better security for years without doing much about it. Trying to match up security parameters between the three services is thought to be harder than it sounds. I’m still waiting to hear an upside for anyone other than Facebook. And that bothers me.

Future of Books

I love books. Loved them since I was a small boy, and they offered a much more interesting life than the one I had in suburban Pittsburgh. I still love them. I read between 30 and 50 books a year, and now I’m writing them too. Conventional wisdom has maintained that books are for years now, but the statistics don’t seem to bear it out. There’s a new generation of readers that was launched in large part by the Harry Potter books. Having said all this, books as a medium are not thriving the way they might. With so many more options for entertainment, even the oldest mass medium is searching for ways to compete.

That was the central concept of a conference in London England late last year. The FutureBook conference is just what the name says, a meeting of a wide range of folks gathered to discuss the future of the book. They looked at a lot of ideas, particularly those aimed at younger readers. So discussions of books that use artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and three dimensional spatial audio were to be found there. Imagine the possibilities of books that offer that kind of interaction.

Of all the possibilities, I was fascinated by one that garnered a great deal of attention. If only because it is the most old school of the “new ideas”. Audiobooks have been growing in popularity by significant numbers. Some experts at the conference believe they will overhaul e-books in the near future. It’s enough of a growth spurt to attract the attention of both Google and Apple. Each has either launched or announced their intention to launch audiobook services. There is a bumper crop of smaller companies also exploring the possibilities. Audible’s days as the only option in this arena has come and gone.

With that success comes challenges. Audiobooks once were throwaway add-ons. They didn’t make a lot of money, so publishers didn’t pay them much attention. Plus, they can be expensive. Audiobook narrators get paid by the hour and a novel can run 6, 8, 10 hours or more. With the financial growth of the format, authors are now clamoring to get a better cut of the money related to the audiobook rights to their work.

It’s an audience with substantial growth possibilities, which can mean profits for everyone involved. All from a format that goes back to our earliest experience of books. When they were read to us.

Fighting the Stupid

This is a good news/bad news story. The bad news is that it will make you want to throw your hands in the air and despair for our culture. The good news is that something is being done about being stupid.

Warning-there is a certain “grumpy old man” aspect to this story as well.

In the last week or so, the folks at YouTube have upgraded their guidelines concerning videos that encourage people to do things that might be dangerous. This is in response to fads like the Tide pod thing from last year, something called the “fire challenge” and the Bird box challenge. I’d actually not heard of one of those so let’s review.

Tide pod challenge involves doing things OTHER than washing clothes with the laundry detergent pods. This could be biting into them, chewing them, even cooking them.

The fire challenge was the unknown one. This involves setting yourself on fire.

The Bird Box challenge comes from the Netflix series that involves blindfolding yourself to escape monsters. People are now trying to do things like drive cars in the real world while blindfolded.

All of these challenges have one thing in common. I have no idea why you would think it was an intelligent thing to do. And all of them have resulted in injuries, some of them serious. This is the part that inspires some to wonder what people are thinking when they do these things. Fox News used the headline “YouTube tells creators not to be idiots”. Yeah, I can see that.

The good news is that the video service has changed the rules and will take down videos that fall under the new ban. Videos that may cause serious injury now go into the same category with videos about illegal activities like how to build bombs, pranks that make victims believe they are in physical danger, or cause emotional distress to children. The problem is that there are thousands of these kinds of videos. Tracking them down and removing them will increase the strain on the system in place. YouTube also recognizes that there is a difference between the more benign kind of prank videos that have been a mainstay of the service for years. They will have to find a way to balance the fence on what is and isn’t banned.

But seriously, how on earth does anyone think setting themselves on fire is going to be fun? I’m just gonna sit here and shake my head in disbelief for a while.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Mea Culpa, Not Nice To Share, Over The Top!

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 20:00:00 +0000

If there was on media event that I would have thought couldn’t get any bigger, any more grandiose, any more over the top, it would be the Super Bowl. From its humble beginnings (the first one wasn’t a sell-out) as the championship game of professional football in America, it has become the biggest single day media event in the world. There’s a whole week of preparatory events, some of which even have to do with the game. That includes Media Day where the coaches and players say as little as possible, and everyone waits to see which whacko pseudo-journalist asks the most outrageous question of the day. Then you have concerts before the show, and at half time. All of the hubbub surrounding the commercials, and, oh yeah, a football game. Surely we have reached the acme of the media circus, right?

As it turns out, maybe not.

CBS has the rights to the big game and they are reaching for the next level of “over the top”. Using their CBS Sports HQ live streaming network, they will add an additional 30 hours of coverage between the Monday before the game and Super Bowl Sunday. That will include a 10 hour long pre-game show that kicks off at 8 AM. The usual stuff will be supplemented by hourly competitions between the broadcast professionals and former NFL athletes. My brain is going numb just thinking about it.

But here’s the thing. This looks like the wave of the future. More ways to watch events means more program ideas have to be generated. During the college football playoffs ESPN gave us a look at what the future may be. With their MegaCast programming viewers could get much more than just the game action. With the “Coaches Film Room” you got a room of current coaches doing play by play analysis of the nuts and bolts of the games as the game went on. Supplied with the full range of video playback, they could go over each play, show exactly what happened and why. It is programming for the ultimate football nerds. And its been popular enough that it’s already had a fan backlash moment. For the national championship game the network removed the coaches and put in the Monday Night Football broadcast crew.

CBS will be broadcasting the game live on television, plus stream it for free on CBSSports.com, their sports apps and on CBS All Access.

And in my head I hear the lyrics to the Andrea True Connection hit from 1976 - “More, more, more, How do you like it? How do you like it?

Not Nice To Share

One lesson that gets drilled into our heads from an early age is how it’s nice to share. Not all of us come to that habit easily. But after years of correction and instruction, most of us learn how to do it, if somewhat grudgingly at times. Well, today there is push back on that lesson from your mother. The streaming media industry would like you to stop sharing. And they are getting ready to come after you if you don’t.

When it comes to services like Netflix and Hulu, a lot of us will pay for a subscription and then share it with family and friends. A recent survey the folks at Parks Associates estimated that 54% of all American households were willing or very willing to pass around user names and passwords for video services. The numbers ranged from around 13% of Baby Boomer users to 42% of those age 21 and younger. That same study maintained that this kind of sharing could be costing the industry almost $10 billion by the year 2021. That sounds like a lot of money. OK, that IS a lot of money. On the other hand, I don’t think many subscribers will feel much sympathy for the industry as it makes money hand over fist. The fourth quarter earnings numbers for Netflix showed a 28% growth over the year before. How high is the ceiling for these companies? Let’s just say Netflix announced those 4^th quarter earnings and Wall Street still felt it was underperforming.

So I expect that all those companies will be interested in the development of a company from the United Kingdom that claims to plug that revenue leak. Synamedia says it has software that can track down who is sharing their account and put a stop to the practice. The program uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) which accounts are being shared, in part by tracking the locations of the users. The service, called Credential Sharing Insight, made its debut at the International Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas late last year. It offers the client a probability score for how likely it is that the account is being shared. At that point, the service can decide to warn the user, block the user or suggest that they buy a premium account. The system is being used on a trial basis by a number of companies.

Which means there’s a least one clever programmer out there working on a way around the system again. The rest I leave to your individual conscience.

Mea Culpa

Over the decade or so this program has been on the air, I’ve spent a bit of time talking about responsible ways to deal with the overwhelming volume of information on the internet. I’ve also talked about taking responsibility for when you get things wrong. Those two topics came crashing together for me personally last week.

It’s the story that has captured our attention. A group of young men from a Catholic high school in Kentucky, a Viet Nam veteran Native American elder and a group who call themselves African Hebrew Israelites. But the furor began with a single photo. A photo of Nick Sandman, the teen in the Make America Great hat facing Nathan Phillips as the older man drummed as part of a prayer.

Here’s the part where I need to take responsibility. I reacted emotionally, and made assumptions about what was going on. I posted that emotional reaction on my Facebook page. There’s only one problem. I didn’t have all the facts. As more video became available, it became clear that there was a lot going on. And a lot of people did things that made the situation worse. But as I tell the young people I work with, I’m only responsible for what I do. And I screwed up.

I screwed up because I didn’t do what I ALWAYS tell others to do. Don’t accept at face value, check before you react. As we discover more about the origin of the first posts, it is becoming clear that the Twitter account where it began is a fake. It claims to be the account of a school teacher from California. But it has all the signs of being a bot account. It averages 130 posts a day, posts that are generally polarizing. Oh, and it appears to be operating out of Brazil. That’s why Twitter has suspended the account.

For my own part, I have deleted the post I made and refrained from making any further comments about the story. Since I can’t pretend to take the high ground here, I would just offer myself as an example of what NOT to do. Taking the time to read, think and then decide is our best defense against the people who are trying to misinform, confuse and divide us. When we do anything else, we are playing their game. A game we can only lose.

I screwed up. I was wrong and I am sorry for it. I apologize. And I will do better in the future.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

To Tax Or Not, Cars and Video, Coming Back!

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 20:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last decade talking about companies and industries that have failed to deal with the challenges of the digital age. They refuse to re-think how they do things, and what their place in the new media environment might be. I’m not sure there was any company that handled the transition worse than the folks at Kodak.

Now before I get an earful from the folks in Rochester, New York about how well the company is doing, let’s look at both present and past of the company. Once upon a time, Eastman Kodak was one of the five most valuable brands in the world. In its heyday it controlled 90% of all film sales, and 85% of all camera sales. George Eastman, the company’s founder, had the novel idea of putting photography into the hands of the masses. It’s logo, the yellow square with the big “K” on it was as recognizable as the Coca-Cola script or the Golden Arches. Kodak even invented the first digital camera.

But in 2012 the company went bankrupt, and in the last five years stock prices have dropped from just over $30/share to just over $3/share. They sold off most of the photographic film related businesses, and their patents. A much smaller company moved its focus to digital imaging services for businesses. It was a huge loss of status for the company.

So I was interested to see that Kodak is trying to reverse the course of history, at least in a small way. 130 years after Eastman launched his company, they are banking on nostalgia to bring back their consumer brand.

To do that they are reaching into a wide range of partnerships and markets. The creation of a marketplace to bring together photographers and businesses who need them is an obvious place to start. Kodakit handles all the payment and middle man necessities for photographers in 30 countries. Playing to the nostalgia angle, the imaging company has a deal with the fashion outlet Forever 21. They offer a range of hoodies, t-shirts and other items with logos from the 1990s. They are also tapping into the return of analog media. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Kodak and its partners unveiled a new line of instant cameras that offer both the ability to print quickly and share with your smartphone via Bluetooth. Three models in the Kodak Smile line will launch this year, priced between $100 and $150.

It’s unlikely that Kodak will regain its top five status, but this old photographer would be happy to see the company back in everyone’s hands again.

Cars and Video

A story this week that combines two of my favorite topics, media and cars. I grew up in a car family and enjoy driving to this day. And media, I love me some media. This is the golden age for media of all kinds. Not just because there are so many ways to create media but also because there are so many ways to access it. Yes, there are problems with people getting too caught up in what they are watching on computers, tablets and smartphones, but that’s a matter of decision making and self control. The ability to watch your choice of media almost anywhere at any time is an amazing and awesome thing we have already taking for granted.

Having said all that, I’d like to say all media, all the time and in all places is not a good idea. There is an increasing push to bring my two favorite topics together. It’s bad enough when the media inspires people to do stupid things in cars like the current “Bird Box challenge” idiocy. In case you’ve been thinking about imitating the Netflix movie, and driving your car while blindfolded, let your old buddy Phlipside give you a hint. It’s a stupid idea, you don’t want to do it.

Here’s another stupid idea. Lots more media, especially streaming media, in cars. It’s an idea that seems to be growing in popularity in some areas. The folks at Tesla, Elon Musk’s erratically successful electric sports car company, announced that a future version of the operating system will permit streaming video for the first time. The stated purpose is for drivers to use the function while the car is charging. But it’s the genie out of the bottle, the camel’s nose under the tent flap, use whatever metaphor you like, once you get a little, the full onslaught won’t be long coming. Meanwhile, a Chinese car start-up called Byton debuted a prototype with a 49 inch wide screen in it. That’s the full width of the windshield. And it’s one of FIVE screens in the car named the M-Byte. The company says the goal is a complete internet-connected experience while driving.

I just can’t get excited. The number of distracted driver accidents is already too high. The report on last March’s fatal self-driving Uber car showed that the test driver, who was there to make sure nothing bad happened, was streaming Hulu for 40 minutes before the accident.

There are plenty of extras I’d love to have on my next car. Streaming video doesn’t make the list.

To Tax or Not To Tax

Elsewhere this week, I talked about the inability to put the genie back into the bottle, the slippery slope that once a word is spoken it can never be unspoken. Here’s another story about that same concept.

A quick poll. How many of you believe that once a governing body discovers a new tax, they will set that tax concept aside, never to be used again? Assuming I could look through your radio or computer, (which I can’t, I promise) I am confident I would see no hands up in the air. It doesn’t matter where you place yourself on the political spectrum; we are all pretty cynical when it comes to governments and taxes. Once they discover a tax concept, it will get used, somehow, someway, somewhen.

For the moment, a tax idea in the great state of California has been placed on hold. The California Public Utilities Commission (the CPUC) had planned to implement a new tax on texts last week. The final vote was on the calendar for January 10. The idea was to add a monthly fee onto the wireless bills of the citizens of the state to raise money to improve connectivity in under-served areas.

I am sure you won’t be surprised that the idea was met with divided opinions. The telecommunications industry was a loud voice in challenging the idea. Their top complaint was that the regulation would only cover cellular providers, but not services like WhatsApp or iMessage. That placed an unfair competitive burden on the industry.

So what made the regulators drop the tax plan? In December of last year the Federal Communications Commission, (the FCC) ruled that text messages were not a telecommunications service but rather and information service. As such, they did not properly fall under the regulatory oversight of the CPUC. With that federal ruling in place, the state commission couldn’t see their way forward. To enact the regulation after that federal decision would have sent it to the courts, which likely would have struck it down.

That’s all well and good. But it takes us back to the original concept. They may not pass the tax this time and in this manner. But it seems inevitable that the topic will come up again. It’s an extension of the wrangle over taxing purchases made online. As we spend more time using these kinds of services, regulators and taxing authorities will eye them as a source of revenue in the future.

Because once that camel gets its nose under the tent flap...well you know the rest.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Fictional Influence, The Ratings and Super Bowl Ads!

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 20:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of year! With the Super Bowl just a month away, it’s time for me to focus on the stuff that will bring the real interest to our unofficial national holiday. The TV commercials! Curiously, over the last couple years the relationship between the interest of the game and the advertising has swung for me. The games have become more interesting while the spots have let me down. We’ll see if we can swing everything back into its proper place. Besides, neither the Bills nor my beloved Steelers are in the playoffs, so why should I get excited about playoff football?

First of all, let’s get down to that most American of all concerns. Money. How much will this year’s spots cost? The price hasn’t changed much since last year. A 30-second spot will set you back right around $5 million. Last year you could a bit of a deal on the ads if you bundled it with spots during the Winter Olympics. No such deals are available in 2019.

Let’s start off with the veterans, the car commercials. Hyundai, Kia, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz have all inked deals. Since the game will take place at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, that last name is unsurprising. Audi will be back, while several other big names, including any of the General Motors marques, Fiat/Chrysler, BMW and Honda, are still keeping mum on their plans.

Budweiser has grabbed an exclusive slot for alcohol ads during the games. So it will be all Clydesdales and, sadly, yet another “Dilly Dilly”. That ad was a surprise hit the first time. Count on seeing lots of ads from the alcohol giant. They have four minutes of advertising in their playbooks.

Luke Wilson will being the face of a toothpaste ad this year. Colgate has drafted him to be rep their flagship brand. It’s their first appearance in three years.

M&Ms will be back. Rumors say they have a “big announcement” that will be included in the spot. Meanwhile, Pringles will do more flavor stacking in their spot. I could make a cheap joke here about Millennials and avocado toast but I’ll pass and just say that Avocados From Mexico will be back for the fifth straight year. Turbo-Tax and WeatherTech will be back as well.

What interests me is that I don’t hear any rumblings about any special ads, the ones that turn everything upside down. That may be a good thing since many of them bomb. And who knows? Maybe toothpaste will turn out to be really funny.

The Ratings

For years, ratings in the media were pretty straightforward. During my radio career I didn’t have to worry about ratings given my market size. But the name of the game in that industry was Arbitron. Meanwhile, on the television side the name was much better known. Nielsen. Nielsen ratings. Nielsen families. That one company has dominated the television ratings market basically forever. It’s an era that might be coming to an end.

There are two things at play here. The ratings company’s relation with a major broadcast network, and the changing face of the media world.

The agreement between Nielsen and CBS ended on December 31. That contract was estimated to be worth $100 million each year. The two companies have not, as of the moment I write this, come to an agreement on the cost of the next contract. CBS, like many folks in the media world, are concerned that the current method of estimating viewers isn’t accurate. Those numbers are how a media outlet of any kind establishes its value to advertisers. Nielsen has been the industry standard. A standard without a real second option. The problem for Nielsen is if they lack one of the biggest players' numbers, the value of the ratings decreases. It’s no longer one stop shopping. On the other hand, how can CBS sell to advertisers without those numbers? The ratings giant has made clear to its clients that they are NOT permitted to share information. With anyone. Again, there is no other standard that will work. Like the government shutdown, both sides can rant and rave, but in the end, they have no choice but compromise.

What about that second issue? There are serious questions about how you include traditional TV viewing, satellite/cable channels, streaming viewers and all the other options available to the audience into a single set of numbers. There isn’t a process that offers a number that the media accepts yet. There are traditional ratings systems, and there are digital ratings systems. There is no “one ring to rule them all”. Nielsen would love to continue being the go to company for that kind of information. But they have competition. From the digital side is a company called Comscore. Comscore is an American media analytics and measurement company that has had some teething pains since its founding 20 years ago. As recently as two years ago, they faced being delisted on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Today they are in a race with Nielsen to find that new standard for the media.

It’s not the sexiest media news of the new year, but in some ways it may be the most important.

Fictional Influence

One of the things that my parents drilled into my head as a kid was to think for myself. I haven’t always been perfect in practice, but the idea sits locked into the foundation of my worldview. How many times did you hear some variation of “If so and so jumped off a bridge, would you?”

The reality is that our culture has always encouraged us to let other people do our thinking for us. Celebrity endorsements are the most obvious examples of that. We are supposed to think “Well if famous-movie-star likes it then it must be good/cool/sexy”. It’s an idea that has been around for a long time.

And in the age of social media, it has a new name. “Influencer”. Social media is the perfect environment for influencer marketing. Because it’s all about social interaction and relationship.. The stronger the relationship the more powerful the impact can be on buying decisions.

Which makes a new trend in influencer marketing more disturbing to me than ever. I am no doubt late to this party because my social media sphere is still fairly small, but I only came across the name of L’il Miquela late last year. With a million and a half Instagram followers, L’il Miquela hit the news last spring when a rival hacked her account and demanded that she tell the truth.

That truth being that she isn’t a real person.

L’il Miquela is a CGI personality, a digital avatar, created as an art project in 2016. Since then the character has developed a devoted following, released several singles, and made a contributing editor to the website Dazed Beauty. Oh and has also become the face of high end fashion brands like Prada. All while claiming to be a sentient robot.

A quick moment on that last claim, if someone has actually broken the barrier on true, sentient robots and their best idea on how to use the technology was to make them a fashion influencer, they should be exiled to a desert island for the rest of their life.

Meanwhile, back to the question of a CGI influencer. If it’s a dumb idea to let movie stars influence your thinking, where does that leave the idea of being influenced by a person who isn’t a person? An avatar designed for one thing and one thing alone, separating your from your money. It’s a scam pretending to be a relationship. Fictional influencer is not a term that I find any need of.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Ranting In Color, In the Public Domain, and a New Year's Reminder

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 04 Jan 2019 20:00:00 +0000

"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment's notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.

Programs from the week of December 30, 2018

Here we go into a New Year, and that’s a good time to remind ourselves about staying safe on the internet. That may seem like old news, but the reality is that the scammers keep running their nefarious plots because people keep falling into them.

One of the things that always sets off my warning bells and buzzers is when I get an e-mail notice telling me that it’s time to fix, change or update one of my accounts. More often than not, there is a legitimate reason for it and the notice is coming from the service itself. But all it takes is one slip and I could be struggling with some or all of my personal information being exposed. So my rule of thumb is simple, I NEVER click on the link in the e-mail. In the last two weeks, I have gotten notices from Apple, Google, and E-Bay with various issues that they wanted me to correct. I went directly to my accounts and dealt with them there. Two of them were routine, my Apple ID was locked for some reason and I dealt with that as well. Nice and safe and secure. It’s not paranoia if they are really out to get you. And in the interwebs, there are people out to get us all.

It is important to keep an eye out for the latest attempts as well. The Federal Trade Commission released a warning last week about a new phishing scam that pretends it's from Netflix. The e-mail claims that there’s an issue with your payment information and that your account is on hold until your correct the issue. All you have to do is click that link, and all can be made well.

Uh, uh, uh!

The folks at the FTC remind us that most phishing scams are easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Are the grammar and spelling bad? Do they not use your name, or is it wrong? Beware of international phone numbers for U.S. companies, or word choices that aren’t right either. In the Netflix scam, the bad guys used U.K. spellings for some words rather than the U.S.

The internet can be a grim and gritty place. Curiously, one of the best ways to make sure you enjoy the best of the web is to carry a little bit of healthy suspicion with you at all times.

The Public Domain

You’ve probably heard several stories recently about 1923 and the Public Domain. That’s not a 60’s pop-rock group but an interesting piece of the media puzzle.

It begins with copyright, which are the laws that protect the work of creators. The laws vary from country to country. In the United States any original works of authorship, which are in some tangible form, ranging through music, literature, drama, art or any other intellectual form, published or not, has protection. You need to have permission and might have to pay for the right, to use someone else’s copywritten work. U.S. law on the subject dates back to 1790, based on English law from 1710.

But copyright protection only lasts for so long. Exactly how long that protection lasts is a complicated issue, because Congress has changed the rules several times in the last 50 years. It may be as little as 70 years after the death of the creator, or could stretch as long as 120 years after the creation of “works for hire”. However long the protection lasts, the work eventually moves into the “public domain”. That means that anyone can use it, without permission or fee.

So why doesn’t the creator and/or their heirs retain the rights forever? Because in the end, our culture and our economy benefit from general access to these works.

Let’s take an example. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. (Yes, I’m aware it’s from before the first copyright law, but let’s use it for the sake of the discussion). If this remained in the estate of William Shakespeare in perpetuity, all the works inspired by the story, the ballets, the movies, the books, the songs, et cetera, might not have been created. If the estate decided not to license the use or placed an exorbitant price on the license, those works disappear. Instead, we have an enormous number of works that grew from the original. When I googled the phrase “works based on Romeo and Juliet” it returned 105 pages of titles in plays, films, and ballets.

Beyond that, there is the historical value of being able to copy materials without cost. Because we can’t find the copyright owner of many films from the 1910s and ‘20s we lost most of these “orphan films”. The law prohibited curators and historians from restoring them. Now the original film has disintegrated.

In the end, we all benefit from works moving into the public domain. So we should greet the news that things are leaving copyright again with open arms.

Ranting In Color

Let’s get 2019 off to a proper start! And that means we will kick off the year a proper rant!

My father and I shared a great many things. I look and sound a lot like him. There was a shared love of travel and cooking and the movies. That last category was also the source of one of our most persistent disagreements. I got my love of the movies from the old man. And I love the old movies every bit as much as I do today's. Of course, many of those “old movies” were the ones that he had grown up watching. And he had watched most of them in black and white.

And that is where the disagreement arose. In the early days of cable television and video recording, some bright young mind discovered the ability to bring color to the black and white world. Now that wasn’t a new concept. Hand tinting photos and even movies went back a century before this wave. But many of the early efforts in the modern day were catastrophes. Colors bled around people or objects, creating “halos”. Plus there were the more famous mistakes, like making Frank Sinatra’s famous blue eyes brown.

And so the question of colorization divided father and son. It may surprise you that he was all in favor of the idea, and I rejected it utterly. I still do.

So I was outraged to discover that the folks at CBS have been colorizing classic television series from their catalog. That includes annual Christmas episodes of “I Love Lucy”. This year they also offered up two episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. And I am beside myself with anger.

First, because it’s a dumb idea. Here’s something a lot of people don’t know. When shooting in black and white under studio lights, sometimes the colors of the set or costume are altered so that they show up “properly” on film or tape. The original producers paid people to make the show look right, in black and white. So it’s not like you’re going to see the “real” colors of Laura Petri’s capri pants. You’re going to get a guess by the colorizer.

But the most important refutation is put forward by media columnist Adam Buckman, who asks “Is comedy funnier in color?” I can not imagine anyone saying that it is. These shows are all about funny. If it doesn’t improve the show in that manner, then why mess around with them? Whatever flaws they have will not be corrected by adding color.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

The Year in Review, The Year Ahead and Those We Lost

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 22:00:00 +0000

Every year the world loses many people. The media world loses some folks, both well know and lesser known every year. A quick look back at the stories we highlighted here.

A personal favorite actor passed away this year. For those a decade or so younger than me, the actor Robert Hardy will be remembered for his work as the Minister of Magic in the Harry Potter movies. While a lot of fun that’s an incredible shorting of a varied career. For me, he will always be Siegfried Farnon.

Since I’m starting with personal favorites, then I need to add speculative fiction writer, editor, and all-around gadfly, Harlan Ellison. Ellison pushed for science fiction to move beyond spaceships, bug-eyed monsters, and blasters. While he had a reputation for being difficult, the genre will never be the same again, and that’s a very good thing.

Mike Joseph was the least known name on the list year. If you are into the history of popular radio you might have known the name of the creator of the “Hot Hits” format. Joseph is one of the millions of people who work “behind the scenes” to make media the vibrant and fascinating world it can be.

Two television producers left us this year. Steven Bochco lead the way in creating several hit series but will be remembered for the astounding ensemble cast he created in “Hill Street Blues”. The show was groundbreaking in both its grittier look at the police drama. On the other hand is the lighter, cult following of Hugh Wilson’s “WKRP in Cincinnati”. Beloved by many radio professionals, the show lasted only a couple seasons but the characters are astounding. If I had one Christmas wish, it would be to solve the music licensing issues that keep a proper video collection of the show being released.

The last three names on the list all qualify for the label of “legend”. Each dominated their field for many years.

It’s easy to dismiss Burt Reynolds as just a good old boy playing at movie star. The reality is that at his height his movies were smash hits. It’s also easy to overlook the quality of his work when he took a turn at more serious work. Burt Reynolds was an old-school movie star.

Neil Simon also gets the cold shoulder from some folks. Like Reynolds, his work has been a huge popular success over the years.

Last but certainly not least is Stan Lee. Stan the Man changed how we approach comics, not once but twice. Again, critics may sneer at his legacy, but he will be remembered long after more “serious” artists are forgotten.

The world is a lesser place than it was.

The Year Ahead

It’s the final week of the year and in addition to looking back at what’s been in the media news of the year, I thought I’d take a look ahead as well. It’s impossible to predict what may happen in the next year, but there are a couple things that we can rely on discussing in 2019.

First, as much as I was tired of discussing Facebook this year, it’s inevitable that they will be back in the news in 2019. But it won’t just be them. This could be a tough year for all of the social media networks. Increasing questions about privacy and how our data is collected and used is likely to be a major topic all year long. The regulatory bodies in the European Union are much stricter than anything here in the United States and they take the subject of privacy far more seriously than we do here. That doesn’t mean the social networks can forget about U.S. regulatory bodies. Congress has shown interest in what has been going on, and with a new majority moving into the House of Representatives, you can count on them increasing the number of hearings scheduled.

There are two other topics that are sure bets to get lots of airtime (and not just here) in the coming year. There is an overlap between them as well. That’s the struggle to salvage journalism’s reputation in this country, and politics.

Given his track record, we can count on President Trump continuing his drumbeat of criticism of the media. Just last week he was complaining about a sketch on Saturday Night Live, suggesting that the government should have the authority to review all broadcasts. In times like these, it is even more important that journalists work hard to do their jobs well and to the standards. It is clear that the audience has grown tired of never-ending shrillness. The more that the news media sticks to reporting and analyzing the news and moves away from editorializing, the better it will be able to defend itself against the President’s repeated criticism. As consumers, we need to acknowledge that being critical of any position or person does not make the story “fake”.

Finally, politics itself will intrude with greater frequency on the media. By this time next year, we will be firmly in the grips of the next election cycle. For better or worse, the media will be part of that story once again.

2019 is guaranteed to bring lots of challenges and a few surprises along the way. I can hardly wait.

The Year In Review

Each year at this time I like to take a look back at what dominated our show. What always amazes me is that what I think was the most common topics is almost always wrong. With three shows a week for 52 weeks every year, it’s easy to lose track over the course of 156 shows. So I play a little game with myself before I total the topics. And for 2018, I was wrong again! Here’s what the year looked like on the Phlipside.

At the top of the list was a catchall category – General Media stories. These are exactly what they sound like, more sweeping topics about “the media”. And to be honest, I am perfectly happy to have this category finish in the number one slot. It shows that we’re covering a wide range of topics, which is always the goal. It finished just below ten percent of all shows with a 14.

I can’t imagine anyone will be surprised with one of the two categories that finished second. Commercials and advertising fascinate me more than most folks. My hope is that I can make the stories interesting for everyone else as well. Finishing with 13 stories, this category was tied with stories about television.

You won’t hear me complaining about the next category either. My love of the movies continues to grow, and I now have in excess of 300 movie reviews at the website of The View From The Phlipside. So movies are something I connected with this year with 11 stories.

The numbers start to fall off at this point. Social Media checked in next on the 2018 list with nine stories. Finally showing up tied for sixth place, with eight stories each, were Facebook, and Journalism. These were my guesses to take the top two spots. As I looked at the list I realized that there were a lot of journalism stories early in the year and a lot of Facebook in the second half.

Rounding out the top ten story categories were Sports, and Government/Regulatory stories at seven each. Technology stories took the final slot in the top ten with a mere five stories.

Stories about young people, Print, and the Internet all logged four stories, YouTube, and Music had three each, then radio, gaming, AR/VR, local media, theater, business issues, audiobooks, and computers logged in at two apiece. After that were scattered solo stories including pieces on politics, violence, satire, and plagiarism among others.

In the end, the list covers lots of ground and topics, which is what I want. I hope you enjoyed the stories as much as I have. I’m looking forward to 2019.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Millennials to the Rescue, Plagiarism Today, and, sigh, Facebook

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 22:00:00 +0000

Last week I promised the final chapter in the year-long story of the terrible year at Facebook. I am confident in saying I won’t do any more stories on the subject because next week is the last full week of the year, and I have a year in review planned. So barring something catastrophic, and Facebook’s year has been more along the lines of Chinese water torture, this should be it.

The center of all this year’s stories has been some variation on the theme of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg and his minions are always quick to assure us that they take our privacy very seriously. Then something pops up out of the woodwork that makes us doubt them, yet again.

Earlier this month, the latest addition to the social media giant’s game of “Whack-A-Mole” was a series of e-mails concerning data and app makers. They are excerpted in a paper presented in the United Kingdom as part of an investigation by the House of Commons Digital, Media, Culture and Sports Committee. In those e-mails are discussions of whether app makers should be charged for access to user data (meaning info about you and me). That would be a big shift from the traditional stance of the corporation. Also in the emails is the discovery that they kept what can be described as an “enemies list” of competitors. Companies that Facebook denied access to some services. Services that were available to companies that Facebook didn’t see as the competition. This is the kind of stuff that will perk up some folks ears. Especially when they are already annoyed with you. In November The Big Z was invited to speak before a parliamentary committee that was looking into disinformation and fake news. His Z-ness didn’t make the hearing. Predictably, the attitude toward the media giant soured.

Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg get involved in a flap about billionaire investor George Soros after he called Facebook a “menace”. There were charges of political maneuvers. That took a vote by the board of directors to calm down.

Finally, word from inside corporate HQ says the minions are getting restless. The feeling is that constant criticism of the company is taking its toll on morale, as is the tumbling stock price. Rumors are flying that a growing number of employees, including some longtime loyalists, are wondering if an Uber-style shakeup isn’t required.

It guarantees that there will be more to come in the future. But we should be able to close the book for this year.

Plagiarism Today

Plagiarism is a word that most people haven’t had to think about since the last time they had to write a term paper. I remember college professors thundering about they felt was the towering evil known as plagiarism. Civilization might fail if this was not wiped from the face of existence.

Despite all of that finger-wagging and pontificating, plagiarism is alive and well. Earlier this month, the longtime movie reviewer at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Colin Covert, resigned after a pattern of plagiarism was revealed. An internal study discovered reviews, one as recent as last month, that used phrases and whole sentences from writers at publications like the New Yorker, the Hollywood Reporter and Paste Magazine, among others. One instance dated back to 1974.

In journalism and academia, that remains unforgivable.

Here’s the funny thing. Not everyone agrees on a definition of the term. At its simplest, it’s cheating. Copying someone else’s work and claiming it for your own. To that point, everyone agrees. But is it an all or nothing issue? If I simply copy a sentence from an article written by someone one else without change am I as guilty as the person who copies an entire paragraph? Elizabeth Spayd wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that the first instance is lazy, the second is theft.

The question has become, is the traditional understanding of plagiarism outdated? Kenneth Goldsmith, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to think so. He has taught a class called “Uncreative Writing” where you are penalized for creativity and rewarded for what has been called plagiarism in the past.

The more you dig into the question, the more complicated the issue grows. A few years ago, billionaire media mogul Mark Cuban took content aggregators to the woodshed, calling them vampires. Content aggregators are folks who skim stories created by someone outside their staff and provide them to an audience that isn’t connected to the original creator. For traditionalists, that’s plagiarism. And it’s not a new concern. During World War I, the Associated Press sued another news organization for doing the same basic thing with reports from the front.

The reality is that the concept has never been simple. In an age when it’s easy to cut and paste, the temptation to plagiarize is ever more tempting. In the end, we may have to define plagiarism the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography in Jacobellis v Ohio, “I know it when I see it”. And for the moment that sight will still get you fired.

Millennials to the Rescue!

I got into the argument once again just last week. Another person who was into the whole “The Millennial generation stinks” trope. They’re lazy, they whine, they’ve RUINED EVERYTHING! Here’s the deal on that, from my point of view:

What a load of hogwash.

If I haven’t said here I know I’ve said it elsewhere in the world. I really, REALLY want my generation (who seem to be the primary, though not sole, offenders) to knock it off. It makes you sound cranky and old and foolish. The older generation said much the same about us, and we’ve turned out about as well as most generations. Get over yourself. Especially your fading-in-your-old-age-vision-through-rose-colored-glasses of just how wonderful young people “used to be”.

With that in mind, take a look at a new study from those fine folks at the Pew Research Center. After years of people telling us all that the book, and reading in general, were dying, turns out Millennials might just save it. Without much help from their elders.

A survey of over 6,000 American showed that 88 percent of those UNDER the age of 30 had read a book in the last year. For those of us above that arbitrary, cultural milestone the number is only 79 percent. And, for authors everywhere, the news is good on the book buying front as well. Among those who read at least a book a year, they tend to buy those books.

There’s bad news buried in that last sentence. Bad news for libraries. This younger generation is less likely to see libraries as an essential part of their community. Bodies through the doors at libraries have declined over the last couple of years.

But the news is not entirely bad for libraries. While the younger generation may not see them as the go-to place for books, they do like libraries. As a safe space, as a quiet place and as a resource for things that can’t be found on the internet. Yes, you heard that right. 62 percent of Millennials know that not everything can be found on the internet. Only 53 percent of those over 30 expressed the same belief. Library website usage is up as well, and libraries serve an important role in providing resources to find employment. They remain a vital resource for minorities, adults from lower income groups and lower educational levels.

So Millennials read books, buy books and still like to check in that the local library. Whattya know? Turns out these kids are pretty smart.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Public Apologies Redux, Baby It's Old, A Tough Week

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 22:00:00 +0000

I spend very little time talking about the financial side of the media. The numbers are ridiculously large and the financial stuff is beyond my expertise and experience. But what happened last week on Wall Street deserves a look.

Last week was a tough week all round for the stock market. There were several days when the market lost huge values. Among the groups hit hardest were the media companies. What is also interesting is that it was almost universal in the category to post negative numbers. The average drop was four percent. Some companies did much worse.

There were only a few companies that showed any significant growth last week. Tribune Media and Nexstar Media Group both had positive weeks. Tribune stock rose by over eleven percent while Nexstar rose just over three percent. The numbers are related because Nexstar made a deal to buy Tribune Media and the investors seem to like the idea.

As for the rest? Not so good. Commentators are putting 21^st Century Fox’s decline of only four-tenths of a percent as one of the “better performing” stocks of the week. Meanwhile, Apple dropped almost six percent, Amazon three point six, Walt Disney down three, Google at five point seven, Comcast down four point one, and Facebook two point three, to give you a taste of the devastation. Given what’s still going on with Facebook, I’m amazed they did that well. I’ll take our final look at the Facebook dumpster fire next week.

So what’s going on? It’s a bunch of things. Fears about the economy seem to lead the way. The on-again/off-again trade talks with China and the related tariffs have put a scare into the investing community. Advertising revenues suffer in hard economic times, and some of those numbers are looking a little fragile already. The economic struggles also affect interest rates. When you are looking at borrowing billions of dollars as part of your business plan that makes people nervous too. Don’t count out numbers that show a continuing decline in television ratings, or the ongoing struggles in social media circles as factors. For the investor, it must seem like no matter what direction they look in the media landscape, there are obstacles.

But let’s try and end on a happy note. There were two other media companies that put it into the positive numbers. One traditional escape for the American public in troubled times has been the movies. Both AMC and Cinemark showed some positive growth last week.

Baby, It's Old

In what may be a foolhardy move, I'm going to take a dip in the controversy surrounding the song “Baby, It's Cold Outside”. If you've missed this seasonal tempest in a teapot, the details are as follows. Radio stations in the United States and Canada dropped the 1940s hit tune from their holiday rotations when some listeners commented that the song was kind of creepy. The lyrics involve a conversation between a woman who says she needs to leave and a man who is trying to convince her to stay. It has been a holiday time standard for quite a while.

Here are my thoughts on the song.

First, it's not a Christmas song. It has nothing to do with anything related to the holidays or the season. So if a station decides to drop it from their holiday rotation, I see no issue there.

Second, it's not censorship, the inevitable cry at times like this. Every radio station in American has a list that contains millions of songs, literally millions of songs, that they do not play. Most of them are because they don't fit the format. But there are songs that fit the format, were hits and have an audience that would love to hear them, that they don't play. It's a normal part of the music policy at EVERY STATION IN AMERICA. So let's stop pretending that some great philosophical offense is taking place here.

Finally, the creepiness factor. The fact is that in its original social context, the song is a sly commentary on the morals of the day. At that time, there were no socially acceptable reasons for a woman to stay long into the night with a man who was not family or their spouse. It's clear that there is a social negotiation going on here as the two try to find a way around the societal norms of the time.

And that's the real point in 2018. We no longer live in those times under those norms. In a time when we are trying to make clear that “No means no”, this song is an anachronism. We are trying to create a world where this kinds of coy game playing is not only unnecessary but unwanted. The modern conversation in the song should be that it's cold outside, do you want to stay? Her response is either yes or no, and he accepts the decision.

I find it hard to believe that anyone wants to return to the days represented by the song. So we hardly need to memorialize it with a song that has no other redeeming values as part of a modern radio station playlist. If you like the song, listen to it. If it bothers you, then don’t. But let’s not pretend that this is any kind of big deal.

Self Promotion

Five or six years ago I talked about the lost art of the apology. The modern inclination is to try for the non-apology-apology. Given the dismal track record of this, I am not sure why anyone still does it. Admit your mistake and apologize. It can’t be any worse than what will follow you when you try some other approach.

Year after year, we see public figures trying to find some other way out. And it never works. Two football players and a comedian have all hit the headlines for tweets they made years ago. Some folks argue that it’s not fair to bring up things from the distant past, but I don’t agree. What we did back in the day is part of our history, and it needs to be faced. How we face it makes all the difference.

There is a difference as well between the cases of the football players, the Baltimore Ravens Pat Ricard and the latest Heisman Trophy winner, Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, and comedian Kevin Hart. The two football players have responded to comments they made as teenagers. That doesn’t excuse the tweets, but allowances need to be made for being young and stupid. We were all there once upon a time.

Hart is in a different position. These were comments he made as an adult. To his credit, he has rejected them before. His problem here was that he didn’t want to deal with it again. His response was seen as surly and drew his previous rejection into question. And it cost him the chance to host the next Oscar broadcast. I can sympathize with his frustration when these tweets resurface. But rather than say “I’ve talked about this before”, he should have apologized again.

I still don’t understand why agents and other advisers don’t get out in front of these issues. Hire someone to go back through all the social media of your clients, identify the problematic issues and take care of them NOW. In fact, there could be a whole industry waiting to take off on this subject. Don’t try to hide the issues; that never works and makes you look worse when you get caught. Find it, fix it and own it. Problem resolved.

I still believe the best way to face an event you regret or a statement you no longer support is to come right out, take ownership of what you did and apologize without qualifiers. Stop the media fire by depriving it of oxygen.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Self Promotion!, Crypto Crooks and TV Cancellations

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 22:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of year when the networks settle down for a nice season of Christmas specials and series re-runs. It’s also the time when they start shaking out the series that will be back for another season.

The cancellations list is much longer than it used to be. That has less to do with the quality of the shows than it does that there are more networks that are creating original, series programming. Back in the day, it was ABC, CBS and NBC. Then Fox and the CW. Now you have all the streaming networks that are discovering that no matter how great the concept sounded at the beginning, a lot of television programs never manage to pull it all together.

And, as long as we’re being honest here, most of the programs canceled won’t be familiar to any of us. They didn’t draw an audience and some were yanked after only a few episodes. As I scan down the list, I see plenty of shows I don’t recognize. On ABC there’s - “The Crossing”, “Alex, Inc.”, and “Take Two”. On NBC we say goodbye to “Shades of Blue”, “Champions”, and “The Brave”; while CBS shuts off the lights on “Salvation” and “Zoo”. Some big names get the boot, like the utterly dreadful “Murphy Brown” reboot.

Great bloodlines don’t always help either. Marvel saw several of its series dropped, with “Daredevil”, “Iron Fist”, and “Luke Cage” all being axed by Netflix. For those jonesing for more MCU television, the Disney+ initiative is looking at a whole series of series involving secondary characters from the movies.

And there will always be programs that have run the course and are ready to step out of the spotlight. “Veep” ran through seven seasons before HBO announced the end, “The Big Bang Theory” will depart at the end of its 12^th season, much to some folks delight. Fox’s “Gotham” made it through five seasons before getting the ax.

Some shows even get canceled for reasons that have nothing to do with things like ratings. NBC has dropped Megyn Kelly’s show after it under-performed, and the star kept putting her foot in her mouth; while “House of Cards” collapsed after Kevin Spacey got caught up in charges of inappropriate behavior.

From my personal viewing list here is at least one show that won’t be coming back that I’ll miss. NBC’s “Reverie” was an interesting idea, with a technology that allows people to live out their dreams via a computer link-up.

It will be interesting to see if any of the next round of shows are any better.

Crypto Crooks

Life takes you some strange places. Go back, say, three years. I had no idea what a cryptocurrency was. Last year I heard some stories about something called Bitcoin and the outrageous amount of money a single one of these whatever-they-ares were worth. Then this past year, I ended working on a nine book series (I was the narrator for the audiobook versions) on all kinds of cryptocurrency and the background of the digital currency concept.

Based on my conversations around here, most people are somewhere in the range of “never heard of it” to “Yeah, maybe”. So a quick swing through the background.

Cryptocurrency is a digital kind of money. Not like Paypal, which is based in regular cash and uses a digital system to transfer that money. Cryptocurrency is entirely digital, it’s “virtual”. It is not controlled by a government or an organization. New money is created through solving problems that are in code, that where the “crypto” comes from. Here comes the two most important features that figure into this story. Anyone can create a cryptocurrency, and the values of the currency can be extremely volatile. They are not backed by any “real” assets, like gold, and there is no insurance against loss. The whole system is based on something called “blockchain technology” which is waaaaaay to complicated to explain here.

All of which means, it is a “buyer beware” environment right now. Starting about a year ago you may have seen many celebrities pushing cryptocurrencies. And that brings us around to the story for today. Two celebrities have been tagged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for involvement in fraudulent deals. Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather and music producer DJ Khalid endorsed a cryptocurrency called Centra. Because neither let their followers know that they were paid endorsers, they violated the rules. They had pushed what is called the Initial Coin Offering or ICO for Centra. That’s very similar in concept to an IPO where a company first makes stock available. The two founders of Centra face charge with raising over $32 million by fraudulent means from thousands of investors in 2017.

The lure of cryptocurrency is that if you get in at the right moment with the right currency, you can get rich. Like any investment, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Even the legit cryptocurrencies come with immense risks. This may be the currency of the future. Or it may just be another way to separate the rubes from their money.

Self Promotion

One of the great things about the internet is that just when you think you’ve found all the strange, weirdness that it can possibly possess, it surprises you with something new. This is also one of the worst things about the internet.

One of the criticisms of Twitter from its earliest days is that it tends to make a narcissist out of us all. At its worst, it becomes all about how you feel, what you think, what you’re eating, what you’re doing. Here’s a little clue from all the rest of us to all the rest of us – none of you are that interesting. But it’s possible that I have found the most self involved part of our self involvement on social media. At least the Twitter portion of it.

It all begins with a promoted post. A promoted post is a tweet that you pay Twitter to spread far and wide. Rather than only your followers seeing your brilliance, you can pay for more people to see it. For people promoting businesses, services, products or brands on the social platform this is a perfectly logical concept. And therefore NOT the topic of conversation here today. No, these are people who are paying to have ordinary tweets pushed out to the wider world.

If you want to check this out, there is a Twitter account that specializes in them. Slide on over to @advertisedtwit to see all the mundane, and occasionally insane things people are PAYING to have promoted. I must admit when I first checked out the feed my thought was “Yeah, so? I see this kind of stuff all the time”. Here are some recent tweets featured:

A tweet complaining about customer service and canceling an account.

One that reads (this is going to challenge my professional enunciation):

Real eyes, realize, real lies

Another that asks:

Hey twitter guessssss whaaaaaaat?

And several that appear to be total gibberish.

Again, I see this kind of stuff on Twitter every day. But these are tweets people have paid money to promote. The current average cost for such a promotion is $1.35 per engagement. For gibberish. Who has that kind of money?

My favorite was one by @brendonbigely which reads “hey, i’m brendon. sometimes i buy twitter ads telling people to have a good day, and this is one of those times. hey! have a good day. (or night)

Promoting a tweet about a tweet wishing everyone a good day. THAT is money well spent, in my opinion.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Christmas Commercials, Not Like A Boss, TV is Killing You!

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 22:00:00 +0000

I have confessed here before that when it comes to Christmas media, I am a Scrooge. I don’t do Christmas stuff before Thanksgiving. When I was the music director at the radio station, Christmas music was largely banned until December 1^st. Even at home, the Christmas stuff doesn’t go up for another couple weeks.

I know, some of you think I’m a terrible person. I can live with that.

Like it or not, I am confronted with a growing volume of Christmas media. Stores have been playing the music (in case you’re wondering, I stick my fingers in my ears and go lalalalalalala), and there are more and more holiday commercials showing up on the television. I will admit that there are commercials that I consider part of my Christmas tradition. The chocolate kiss bell choir, the palm tree with christmas lights are things that I look forward to each year. Yeah, I know. Now I’m both a terrible person and weird. Again, I can live with that.

It is possible that we saw holiday related advertising even earlier than ever this year. The folks at Zypmedia, an advertising platform aimed at local businesses, have noted that the best time for online advertising response, known as “click through” begins the first two weeks of November, based on data from 2017. The rate may be as much as 125 percent higher than any other time of the year. This ties in with consumer preparations for the shopping season. According to the National Retail Foundation, 70% of shoppers start planning up to two and a half months in advance. So getting your advertising in front of them while they are still planning would seem to be an excellent plan.

Based on last year’s advertising, you should expect to see lots of car dealers and lawn and garden advertising. Those were the leaders at the end of last year’s advertising season. The first category doesn’t surprise me. In fact, thinking about what I’m seeing so far, it looks to be right on the nose. I’ll admit the second did. Unless furniture and décor are included in that category, then it’s also right on the money.

This is a vital time of year for many businesses, large and small. Expectations are that consumer spending will rise from $717 billion to $720 billion from last year to this one. So getting the advertising programs right is an important part of the any business model.

It doesn’t mean I have to like it, one little bit.

Not Like A Boss

The internet has become a vital and everyday part of life for the majority of us. It is a source of information (and misinformation), entertainment, friendship, annoyance, outrage and mind dulling junk. In its early days, we called it the world wide web, a phrase that sounds antiquated and quaint almost twenty years into the 21^st century. But I still will hear people refer to it as the web on occasion. I will sometimes use the comic term “interwebs” as a nod to that older language.

There is one place where the word web still comes up. That’s in the discussion of either the “deep web” or the “dark web”. If you’ve heard the term, you understand the basic concept, even if you don’t exactly understand it. It’s the “bad neighborhood” of the internet, and a place that most of us steer away from. Before I jump to the story that brought this to mind, I thought we ought to explore the meaning of the terms first.

I always assumed that “deep web” and “dark web” meant the same thing. While similar, they are slightly different. On the light side of the interwebs, everything is indexed, which means that they have been tagged by the major search engines so people can find them. For those of us old enough to remember, they have entries in the internet’s card catalog. But not everything is indexed. That’s not an accident. Some people, for a wide range of reasons, don’t want their sites and information logged into that database. This can include legal documents, medical records, financial records, some subscription based information and more. So all items left un-indexed are what make up the “deep web”. Some estimates put as much as 96% of all information on the Web in the Deep Web. The “dark web” is the part of the Deep Web made up of information and web sites involved in socially unacceptable activity. Everything from illegal substances, to disturbing images to hired assassins. It is the baddest of all the bad digital neighborhoods.

And thus, stories like this shouldn’t come as a surprise. One of the most popular Dark Web hosting services, Daniel’s Hosting, was attacked by hackers earlier this month. Over 6,000 sites were erased. Since this is the Dark Web, there is no backup, because folks from that digital neighborhood don’t want any kind of record kept. As of the moment I write this, no one has any idea who might have done it. Could be black hat hackers, or it could have been law enforcement.

Turns out this neighborhood isn’t safe for anyone.

TV is Killing You!

Black Friday is this week and the holiday shopping season is off and running. In addition to all the media topics, we cover here, once in a while I step over into the tech side as well. And what better time to take a peek at the great toys out there that lets our tech and media come together.

Now holiday shopping should be about dreams. There’s a whole other conversation about the consumption economy and being overcome by “stuff”, but once a year it’s fun to spend a little time dreaming about things that are above and beyond our day to day life.

So I didn’t want to do simple, everyday tech kinds of things. I went looking for some out there ideas. How about high tech yoga pants and mat? These are products from two different companies. The Nadi X Responsive Yoga Pants from Wearable X have built-in “vibrational technology” designed to help you go through your routine. I have no idea what that means. But you could team it up with Backslash Fit’s Smart Mat that can connect to your Amazon Alexa. It can even roll itself up apparently.

I was tempted to pass this one over as too “every day”, but what can you say about a $400 hair dryer? Dyson offers one with a microprocessor to check air temps 20 times a second to avoid heat damage to your hair.

A gift that does nothing for me, since I drink neither coffee nor tea, but how about the coffee and tea alarm clock from Barisieur. It’s just what it sounds like, a high tech brewing machine designed to wake you up with your first cup close at hand. If that’s too functional for your tastes, the wonderful folks at Hammacher Schlemmer have an espresso machine that includes a Swiss made music box that plays 11 different 36-second music pieces (the time needed to brew an espresso). The music ranges from Vivaldi to “Smoke On The Water”.

My personal favorite is the Meural Canvas, which is a smart frame that can display your personal art and photography or images licensed from museums and other places of all kinds of images. Want your own Van Gogh for the living room? This can make that happen.

Oh, those holiday dreams. Here’s hoping you don’t wake up to find socks and underwear waiting under your tree.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Christmas Tech, Not Like A Boss, and Cassettes Are Back!

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 22:00:00 +0000

When I got started in radio, I had already begun what turned out to be a multiple decades-long relationship with audio tape. Magnetized ribbons of plastic tape covered in some kind of metallic powder had been the go-to recording material for decades. In the 1970s, I was one of the millions of teens making mix tapes from radio or vinyl source materials. The audio cassette was at the center of that universe. Then recordable CDs came along and after that simple digital recording, and audio cassettes were ancient technology. My bet is that most people had the cassettes long after they no longer had the machinery to play them on.

Then an amazing thing happened. Old technology started making a comeback. We’ve talked before about the resurgence of vinyl. With the shift to digital, even CD sales had fallen off, but vinyl showed growth. But the folks at Buzzangle, a research company focused on the music industry, released a report last year that says cassette sales have outstripped even vinyl's return. Cassette sales were up 136%.

The “compact cassette” (the original named) debuted in 1962 and by the late ‘70s was one of the top two formats for prerecorded music. It was also a star for home recorded audio of all kind, and every radio announcer of my generation had stacks of them, usually filled with airchecks.

So what is bringing cassette tapes back? It started with a promotion for the 20^th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s “Ten” album. They wanted to include cassette versions with a CD, vinyl album and scrapbook as a special package. Every one of the limited edition packages sold in presale. A few other acts followed suit, then labels realized it was a cheap way to get new artists some exposure. Suddenly, National Audio Company, the last U.S. company still making audio tape was fielding plenty of calls. Enough that they went back to the drawing board to create a better sounding version of the base tape. For the audiophiles out there, that would be Type I tape that the company claims now performs slightly better than the old Type II.

Folks who worry about these things have long argued about whether analog recordings like vinyl and tape offer superior harmonics and frequency response to digital. Without argument, there is a nostalgia aspect to analog that can not be denied.

And for once, here’s a technology blip that the old folks know better than the youngsters do.

Not Like A Boss

One of the things I have told the young people that I’ve worked with over the last several decades is that they should enjoy the time they have BEFORE they become adults. Teenagers have always been in a hurry to “grow up” because they are certain that all the fun begins once you hit adulthood.

Oh, if only that were true.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with being an adult and having grown up privileges. It’s that I also know that being an adult comes with a lot of tiresome, un-fun aspects as well.

I thought of that as I saw that yet another video gaming company was closing its doors. The folks at PC Gamer have been keeping track and say that the last year has seen ten major game studios close. The one most recently in the news is Telltale Games. The award-winning company had several big-name hits, most especially “The Walking Dead”. But it announced in September that it was closing and laid off all but a relative handful of employees. The folks who worked there had no idea it was coming and left with no severance or other benefits.

What brought the lesson about growing up to mind is that so many companies start off with such bright visions, only to stumble but the going gets hard. Being the founder of the “next big thing” can make your star as big, or bigger than the company itself. That sudden influx of big bucks that comes with success in the digital age makes it all seem so easy. But being a grown-up isn’t easy.

The stories coming out of Telltale are echoed in many other gaming studios. Mismanagement, abusive work environments, demands to work longer and longer hours at the same pay with no benefit to the worker at the end. The other image it brings to mind is the worst of the scenarios in the world that Charles Dickens wrote about over a century ago. Like the beginnings of the Industrial Age, the early decades of the Digital Age have been marked with far too much executive egotism and exploitation of the folks who do the actual work of the company.

Being a grown-up means that we have delay personal gratification in the best interests of the larger group. Otherwise, things have a tendency to crash and burn.

Part of the solution to what ails the gaming industry may turn out to be that it still needs to do a little growing up.

Christmas Tech

Oh, those holiday dreams. Here’s hoping you don’t wake up to find socks and underwear waiting under your tree.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

RIP Stan Lee, A New Book?, and Skynet media

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 22:00:00 +0000

There’s a meme out there about the immigration issue that says illegal aliens aren’t taking America’s jobs, robots are. I have absolutely zero intent in wading into that issue here, but it did pop into my mind when I saw the story about the Artificial Intelligence news anchor that made its debut in China last week. Even with computer programming putting a lot of broadcast talent out of work over the last couple decades, it always felt like this was one area that humans would always be required, at least to some degree.

Maybe not so much.

China’s official news agency, Xinhua, teamed up with Chinese search engine company Sogou.com to create a functional AI video news anchor. It’s based on an actual anchor at the Xinhua News Agency by the name of Zhang Zhao, and can deliver the news in English. There’s a different version that does the news in Chinese.

So the bottom line question is – why? Why create an anchor that can work without rest 24/7, that requires no breaks, no benefits, will never ask for a raise or have ego issues? The question almost answers itself, doesn’t it?

On a performance level, it remains obvious that the voice is computer generated. It’s awkward with terrible tempo and rhythm. I can’t imagine anyone listening to it for long periods of time without losing their marbles. The video image is pretty good, although the introductory video seems to suffer from the same problem as old school dubbed movies. The words and the anchor’s mouth seem to be out of synch with one another.

The reaction I’ve seen so far isn’t surprising. Plenty of references to SkyNet and our future domination by our own machines. Several people note that it will be much easier to control the news that goes out when you get rid of those pesky humans.

In reality, It’s not really a full on AI issue yet. The Xinhua robo-anchor is a high tech ventriloquist dummy. Someone has to continue to type in the text for him to say. For the moment that will continue to require a human being, or a whole team of them.

In the end, I’m not concerned, at least not yet. I’ve talked before about the connection that local news anchors have with their communities. That’s something that this anchor will never have. We may have AI overlords in our future, but I don’t think we need to worry about them taking over the media just yet.

The New Book?

As a lifelong reader, lover of books and aspiring author I am always excited about the next big thing when it comes to publishing. The problem has been that there hasn’t been much that would fall into that category. The publishing industry has been a leader in dragging its feet as the new digital age arrived. Eventually, they moved into e-publishing. But what has happened since then? Best-selling author James Patterson is underwhelmed by the state of innovation that he sees in the publishing world. Can’t argue with him one little bit.

But unlike the host of a small radio program, the ideas of one of the most popular authors of the last couple decades can create change. Enter “The Chef”, a novel that focuses on a food truck chef in one of my favorite cities, New Orleans. The chef in question is also a NOPD detective and the suspect in a murder investigation. Sounds like pretty standard Patterson fare. But here’s where the innovation comes. This novel is being delivered via Facebook Messenger.

A moment to consider the app in question. Launched as Facebook Chat in 2008, it was changed into a standalone application and re-launched in 2011. Opinions on the service have always varied. There was a big fuss made when it seemed like the app required a much more sweeping set of permissions than were thought wise in some corners. I know a lot of folks who find the whole thing annoying and have ditched it all together. I will admit that I don’t use it a lot. Mostly when I want to take a conversation “off-line”. It’s usually because the conversation doesn’t require or need any more than a couple of us involved. But I bet I don’t use it more than a couple times a month.

That may be the impetus for Facebook’s involvement. They are moving toward more products available through the service. I pulled the novel up, search for “The Chef by James Patterson” and launched the novel. It’s fed to you in a long series of conversation bubbles with some photos and other items interspersed. The goal is to create a more immersive experience for the novel reader. My initial reaction isn’t positive. But that may be my age demographic as much as anything. I find the format annoying, but who knows it may grow on me. The book will be available in all the traditional forms early next year.

But kudos to Patterson for taking a shot at something new.

Excelsior!

In my lifetime, which takes us back to the late ‘50s, I’m not sure there is anyone who has had a larger impact on popular culture than Stan Lee. That’s a mouthful of praise, I will grant you. But the impact that the former boss man of Marvel Comics is hard to measure. And it would be equally hard to find anyone who enjoyed the spotlight more than he did.

The current generation of Marvel Universe fans know Stan as a legend and for his cameo appearances in all the Marvel movies. But for me, it is the earlier version of Stan the Man that I will always remember. The man who completely changed my superhero world.

Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922, Stan was a high school graduate already when he started at Timely Comics at age 17 and made his debut with his pen name at age 19. Later in life, he would legally change his name to the one we all know.

It’s important to remember that comic books were not always the beloved pop icons that they are today. They were considered a danger to the younger generations morality and intellect in the 1950s, which resulted in a squeaky clean and dull product. It was an industry that Stan Lee was never cut out for.

The Marvel Comics that I read in the mid-60s were anything but dull or squeaky clean. With the artistic genius of people like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and writer Larry Lieber the Marvel superheroes were human, flawed, cranky, sulky, angry. They were amazing. And groundbreaking, which is why they have endured the way they have.

But that’s not why I’m a Stan Lee fan. It was the conversation that he seemed to be having with the readers through sly little comments in the action and his Bullpen Bulletins, which was Lee’s answer to the letters to the editor page. There was nothing formal about that page, it was Stan talking to us and us talking back. He seemed every bit as excited about what was going on as I was, and that made his comics the coolest thing going. It carried over to his monthly column, “Stan’s Soapbox”, which I looked forward to almost as much as the latest Iron Man.

Stan Lee had been in failing health for a while, and passed away just days ago. He was 95 years old.

The world is a lesser place with him gone, but there’s only one possible way to end this tribute to Stan the Man. With his own trademark motto. For you, Stan -

Excelsior!

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Election Advertising, Christmas Controversy and Theater on Demand

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 22:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure how I missed this whole market niche in the streaming video on demand (SVOD) world, but it seems that there are several companies out there trying to bring the stage to your screen. My own roots in stage performance, so I would seem to be part of the demographic these services are trying to attract. There’s a problem, however.

I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea.

What tipped me to the concept was the announcement of a service scheduled to debut sometime in the indefinite future. It’s called “Stage” and is the brain child of Tony and Drama Desk Award nominated producer Rich Affanato. I nosed around and found a couple other similar services, BroadwayHD and Cennarium. Between the three they cover musicals, drama, opera, ballet, dance, plus the usual other type shows (interviews, retrospectives, etc).

Again, I love live performance, but I don’t get to see as much of it as I’d like. So this should be great, right?

No, I’m still in the unconvinced category.

There are a variety of reasons for this. None of which have anything to do with what these services are actually providing. I haven’t seen any of them, so I’m not saying they are doing a bad job. I’m not sure it’s possible to do a good job.

When the A&E cable network first debuted, this was the kind of thing they offered. You will note that it’s not there any more. Problem number the first is that there is a small demographic, relatively speaking, for this material. So your business model better be perfect. The second problem is the complexity of getting all the players on the same page. There are something like 15 unions and other professional organizations involved in shows on Broadway. They all want their rights and profits protected. So, again, your business model better be perfect.

But my biggest objection is how much you will lose from the experience of a live performance when you’re watching it on your TV, computer, or God help us, your smartphone. The impact of the music from a professional pit orchestra is lost, the energy of an entire audience on the edge of their seats can’t be replicated, let alone the technical challenges of visually bringing everything that is live theater to a small screen. Even productions staged for broadcast seem to come up short.

I am all in favor of anything that supports live theater. I’m just not sure this is going to be boffo box office.

Christmas Controversy

I am not at all convinced that we need to be thinking about Christmas yet, but the Christmas stuff seems to be streaming onto shelves and into the media. So I guess I’m stuck with it whether I like it or not. I’ve mentioned in previous years that I am something of a Christmas curmudgeon when it comes to the holiday and the media. If it isn’t December yet, I’m not interested. But I understand that mine is a minority opinion, and I move on.

So here we are at the beginning of November and some folks are tensing for one of the first arguments of the season. This past Friday saw the debut of the 2018 holiday season cups from the folks at Starbucks. Let me note that as a non-drinker of the nasty brown water, I feel that I can offer an objective look at what has been a controversial subject the last several years.

Let me also note that I think the entire subject is absurd. The underlying question boils down to “Is Starbucks properly embracing the season on Christmas with the design of their disposable coffee cups?”. If you still think this is a serious issue after listening to it spelled out that way I don’t know what to tell you.

The coffee mega-store has made holiday themed cups for twenty-plus years. Reindeer, tree ornaments, that kind of stuff. Then in 2015, they decided to make it simple, a plain cup in the traditional Christmas color of red. How could that be controversial? And yet a major hoohaw arose. Last year, a pair of cartoon hands in mittens were the center of the debate. This year, the design looks a lot like the wrapping paper we use in my family. Holly, stars, flames like from a fireplace, lots of red and green. And the world waited with bated breath to see if there was going to be another flapdoodle. So far there has been a fair amount of stories anticipating a possible donnybrook (kind of like this story) but I haven’t heard any big complaints. Starbucks may be benefiting from the media overload caused by the election this week.

Here’s the bottom line – this is a major corporate entity and we’re talking like the design on their paper cups has any kind of impact on the holiday. Let’s not lose track of the fact that it’s a container for coffee.

Enjoy what comes in the cup, then throw it away. Really, it’s just a cup.

Election Advertising

By the time you hear this program, you will be free of the single most irritating part of the media this fall. Because the election will be over and that means that election ads will finally go away. And other than the media outlets raking in the election campaign dollars I do not believe anyone will miss them.

Back when I was working in commercial radio, we had an ambivalent feeling about political ads. At election time, they chewed up all the inventory and usually not at the best possible rates. So yes, they brought in a lot of money but we all knew they were a huge tune out inspiration as well.

If it feels like you’ve heard more of them than ever before, that’s probably correct. The final numbers won’t be in for a while, but as I produce this show just before election day, the total for midterm advertising is expected to be a record breaker. A couple days later, the experts were saying it would land somewhere near three billion dollars. Two days later and the number is now five billion dollars. All for something that none of us want to hear by this time on the calendar.

There have been concerns about political advertising for years. We used to worry about the content. If they were getting too mean spirited. This always amused me because if you’ve studied any political history at all you know that we Americans have a loooooong history of down and dirty, nasty, personal political advertising. For most of my lifetime, which now covers more than a half century, our political ads have been, historically speaking, pretty tame.

The other great concern is about how much money is spent each year. Five billion dollars is real money, and an amount that could be put to much better use, I think. We’ve tried to put some restraints on the money in our political media. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 looked to control how and how much money could be spent. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been hacking away at those protections over the last decade, culminating in the Citizens United decision. The last real impact on our elections from the bill is the required statement “I’m so and so candidate, and I approved this ad”

Sadly, it’s unlikely that we’ll see anything like a bipartisan effort to deal with the issue any time soon. I will be honest, if this is what 2018 political advertising looks like, I fear to even consider what the 2020 campaign will sound like.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

New Movie Legend, Bot News, Shopping Changes

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 21:00:00 +0000

Today’s program isn’t really about the media. It’s about the impact that the digital media has on real world issues. I’ve done a lot of programs like that over the last decade. In most cases, they are mostly about how digital media is affecting old line media like print and broadcast. This is slightly different.

The advent of the internet meant that shopping could now be done from the comfort of our homes. That wasn’t a new concept, we’d been doing that out of the Sears catalog and other similar methods for more than a century. The immediacy of digital shopping turned the market on its head.

What got me thinking about this was a story that some grocery stores are redesigning the front of the store to make room for coolers for customers who shop online then come in to pick up their orders. I wondered if any other brick and mortar type stores were doing anything similar.

The answer was a resounding, YES!

There was one aspect that kept coming up that fascinates me. It’s stores not getting stuck in the digital world. One of the things that is bubbling up is extending the social media aspect of store apps into the stores themselves. At the House of Vans in London, England, they opened a custom BMX and skate park in the store. Give your customers the chance to do something they love that ties into your product line. Victoria’s Secret has an app aimed at a millennial audience called PINK Nation. In addition to all the stuff you would expect from an app, they also have on-campus events designed to bring together customers at colleges in real life for networking and socializing.

Even malls are getting the message. You may have heard that malls are dying like flies. It’s not true if you look at the statistics. The business experts note that we build too many malls over the last 20 years and the shakeout has begun. Some malls are thriving by becoming more like communities. They offer reason beyond buying stuff to pull people away from home. A modern mall is very different from the old style. It may include mass transit hubs, office space, outdoor plaza space and lots and lots of food. These malls aren’t intended to be a place you buzz into buy a few things and buzz back out. They want you to consider spending the day there, and are providing plenty of reasons to do just that.

Digital media changed how we shop once, and it looks like it might be doing it again.

Bot News

So we begin the week with a question. Do you know what a “bot” is? According to the folks at TechTerms.com, “bot” is short for “robot”. In this case, it is an automated internet program. Some of them run automatically while some only do their bot-ty thing when they get the correct input. That could be anything from you visiting the website where they live, to asking them a question. Bots have been in the news most recently because they have been spreading false information about people and events in the news.

The folks at the Pew Research Center did a survey at the end of the summer asking about our understanding of bots. Most of us have at least heard of bots when it comes to social media. About two thirds of the respondents said that were aware of the concept, but only 16% said they knew a lot about them. When it comes to the question of are bots doing good in the digital world, or are they forces of evil, the overwhelming majority are convinced that they are a bad thing. The numbers run 80% bad versus only 17% who think they work for good. The primary field for their nefarious practice, we believe, is in spreading fake news on social media.

There is an interesting note that in a survey two years ago, 84 percent of us felt we could identify bot on our own. In the latest survey, that number drops to only 47% who are at least somewhat confident they could identify one.

So is there a good way to identify these cockroaches of the internet? Here are some easy ways to spot the bad actors out there.

Check the accounts biographical details. If it doesn’t sound like a real person, it probably isn’t. And the profile picture? There are some easy reverse image search programs out there that will tell you if it’s been pulled from somewhere else.

Another quick check is this – do they post constantly? Like every hour for a day or more? Even the most dedicated human takes a break now and then. Bots often won’t.

What do you do if you think you’ve found a bot account on your favorite social media? Do yourself a favor and don’t argue with it. Remember, it’s a robot. It’s got all day. Report it to the platform, then mute or block it. Denying it the air of being shared is the best way to kill the pesky buggers.

Shopping Changes

Recently, an ad keeps popping up in my smartphone. It’s not something that comes with a malware attack, just something that seems to be following me at the moment. It happens periodically.

In this case, I had no idea what it was for. The only reason why it stuck in my head was because it features an attractive young woman with her blouse open, showing off her underwear. Now that’s an indication that the algorithm bots have indeed figured out how to catch this middle aged guy’s eye. But I still had no idea what they were trying to sell me. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be something that Mrs. Phlipside would approve of for my viewing. So I skimmed right by.

There was one other thing in the add. Well, two actually. Two words. “London Fields”. And it turns out that THAT is the name of a movie. So, the bots are really doing well in the whole “What Jay likes to look at” thing.

If you’ve never heard of this movie, it’s not surprising. “London Fields” is one of those legendary movies that has had to fight past all kinds of hurdles to make it to the big screen. It’s based on a book of the same name by Martin Amis, and it stars some pretty big names – Amber Heard, I’m pretty sure she’s the woman in the ad, Billy Bob Thornton, Johnny Depp. That should get some buzz, right?

Well, not so much. Turns out that the movie is entering into legend in another way. It’s one of the biggest flops in recent movie history. On its opening weekend “London Fields” opened on 613 screens in North America. It brought in a total, a total I say again, of $116, 470. That’s $190 worth of tickets at each theater. At 600+ screens this is considered “wide release” in the movie industry. So it got a legitimate shot at making it.

It appears the problem is that the movie is awful. I haven’t seen it, and it’s unlikely that I will, but the critics hated it. To the point that it has a 0% on the ratings aggregating site Rotten Tomatoes. The production team, the director and Heard are now all suing one another over this fiasco.

Ranking behind only 2008’s fiasco “Proud American”, “London Fields” has the dubious distinction of having a failed advertisement be more interesting than the movie itself.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Blockchain and Journalism, Facebook Dumpster Fire, Return of Winamp

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 21:00:00 +0000

One of the great joys of the digital media age is that there are so many more sources of media. The problem is that one of the great problems of the digital media age is that there are so many sources of media! Even worse is that they all seem to require a different piece of technology or software to access. Now you spend all your time juggling between applications and boxes, instead of enjoying the media that is available.

We’re going through that right now as the cord cutting movement takes us into the OTT and streaming video age. Which boxes do you need to get which channels, feeds, stream and services? It’s not new though. We’ve been living with many of those same issues if you’re into music and other forms of audio entertainment. About the time I think I’ve found something that I like, another option shows up that doesn’t play well with what I have. It’s frustrating.

So I read with interest that an old friend may be coming back with the intent to solve this very problem. Back in the day, if you asked your favorite digital audio geek friend for a recommendation of which software application to use, my bet is that in the first three or four suggestions would be Winamp. Originally released in 1997, the media player was very popular because of its customizability. It developed a dedicated fan base. Later owners didn’t manage to maintain the quality when Winamp 2 or 3 was released in the early 2000’s. Apple’s iTunes put a further dent into the popularity of the application.

Well, according to a recent press release, 2019 will see a brand new all-encompassing version launch. Winamp 6 is reaching for the stars. The promise is that it will offer a “...complete listening experience”, covering audio files you have on your home computer, plus podcasts, files in the cloud, streaming radio stations, even customized playlists. ALL your audio, no matter where you get it from. Plus it would be built with both mobile and desktop in mind so that it would be one stop listening, no matter where you are.

There are still questions about how they intend to make all this magic happen. Accessing all the different forms through a single access point is an enormous task.

If they can make sure it’s secure and easy to setup and use, it could be a game changer. It could bring a little order to the jumble of modern media life.

Facebook Dumpster Fire

I swear to you, I keep expecting things to get better for Facebook. With each story about how things continue to burn in the dumpster fire that has been 2018 for the social media monster, I’m sure that it will be the last one. Sadly, the opposite is happening. The bad news is increasing and I’m having to touch on multiple mishaps.

There is a new lawsuit adding fuel to this fire. Advertisers who use the platform are suing Facebook because the company inflated the numbers on how long users pay attention to video. A couple years ago, there was a lot of talk about a “pivot to video”. The idea was that since viewers spent so much time watching videos, that’s where the advertising dollars should go. The average user was watching more videos for longer. Turns out that Facebook had played with the numbers. In simplest terms, they eliminated all the shortest views (those under three seconds). Now they admit they may have “miscalculated” by up to 80%. The lawsuit finds that number laughably low, putting the miss between 150 and 900%.

It’s not just advertisers who may have been played in all this. Publishing platforms like news outlets may have invested a lot of time and money into content that was never going to recoup the costs.

Speaking of ads, it appears that spam advertising may have been the cause of the huge data breach that was also revealed recently. This despite the ongoing assurances by the platform that they are working diligently to cleanse themselves of these unclear spirits.

All of which is certain to a significant part of the foundation of a move by major investors to shove Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the sidelines. Investing groups representing several states, retirement funds and major asset management companies that own some big dollar pieces of Facebook stock, have filed a proposal to create a new, independent chairman for the company. They state that given the size of the presence in our national life filled by Facebook, it can’t be any one man’s vision leading the way. A chairman should be tasked with protecting the best interests of the shareholders, the users and our national interests.

It’s a tough sell since the Big Z is still the majority shareholder and controls the board. As I’ve been saying for awhile, there are serious questions lurking about how this behemoth is being run.

You have to wonder how much bigger the dumpster fire can get before it burns itself to the ground.

Blockchain and Journalism

I am about to bite off way more than I can chew in this short program. So I beg forgiveness in advance for some very simplistic definitions. Feel free to fill in after I’m done.

The future of journalism has been a recurring topic here for years. One exciting new possibility is bring blockchain technology, the foundation of the modern digital money called cryptocurrency, to journalism. OK, simplistic definition of blockchain. Think of it as a public record that is checked and verified by many different people before it is permitted to be made permanent. Anything from monetary values to information can be stored on a blockchain. The advantage is that once the whatever is included, it is virtually hackproof by anyone.

I’m pretty sure I’ve touched on the concept before. A company called “Civil Media” is trying to bring blockchain and cryptocurrency to the journalistic world as a way to raise funds for the support of the reporting and as a way of restoring trust in the journalism being done.

The goal was to sell digital currency. The technical name for that is “cryptocurrency”, which is based, again, on blockchain technology and is protected through the use of cryptographic code, which makes it more secure. The best known cryptocurrency is called Bitcoin, which you have probably at least heard of. Civil Media’s cryptocurrency goes by initials, CVL. When you buy CVL, you are A: Making an investment, just like buying stocks or bonds, B: Investing in journalism startups, and C: Getting the ability to vote on the quality of the work being done by the startups.

That all sounds pretty complicated, and the ICO, or initial coin offering, by Civil Media didn’t live up to projections. The goal was $8 million, and the deadline figure last week only came to $1.4 million. That’s the bad news. Investors will be given several options, including moving their investment to a new, and simpler, offering coming later this year.

The good news is that Civil Media has already made agreements with 14 newsrooms to receive funding under this system. And those newsrooms, along with four new additions, will be getting a second round of funding in advance of the second ICO. Forbes has also agreed to experiment with the system. All of that is very good news indeed.

All of which creates the opportunity for an exciting future for journalism and the vitally important role it serves in our free society.

And that is very good news indeed.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Advertising Icons, Creativity and Statistics, Interesting Advertising

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 21:00:00 +0000

As always, I’m keeping my eyes open for interesting things in the world of advertising. Most people try to ignore commercials, but I find a well written and produced ad is a joy forever. It’s the kind of thing that never gets the attention that the work deserves. So, I’ll spend a couple minutes shining the light when I can.

I have been fascinated for a while now by the TV commercials for the RXBar brand protein bars. They are the definition of minimalist advertising. The spot opens with a visual of the products minimalist wrapper art. The name, the basic nutrition info, the phrase “No B.S.” and very little else. Then a small door opens in the top right corner and actor and rapper Ice-T delivers his patented semi-glare at the world and announces things like “This RXBar commercial will be over in 8 mississippi, 7 mississippi...”, or that “This is an RXBar interruption to your favorite TV show. It’s over now”. Then he closes the door and the spot is, in fact, over. Ice-T’s deadpan delivery is perfect, and the idea of “No B.S.”, which is a core concept to the brand, is delivered dead center. When I see the bars at the store they are instantly identifiable in a market segment filled with look-alikes. Gotta give them a “nicely played” on the campaign.

Meanwhile, there is something new and exciting happening with Burger King. Late last month they launched a series of commercials that they claim were written by artificial intelligence, AI. The resulting copy would get you failed in any media class in America, but the spots are rather memorable. The spot for the flagship Whopper sandwich starts with:

“The Whopper is back. It never left, but it’s back. Flame grilled, just like you.”

All delivered in a classic Windows style male computer voice, meaning that emphasis is either missing or placed in strange positions. The real killer is the distortion of their longtime tagline, which is rendered as “Have it Uruguay”.

Last but not least, is the commercial for Clorox that spends almost no time talking or even showing the product. Instead, they focus on the “why” of cleaning, preparing for real life for the people we know and love. It makes a smelly disinfectant product into something warm, and fuzzy. That’s no small achievement either.

In the end, commercials that make you remember the product are a win. In very different ways, these are all winners.

Creativity and Statistics

One of my favorite science fiction series centers on a concept that says mankind’s future can be determined mathematically. Isaac Asimov created the idea of “psycho-history”, a mathematical discipline that could predict the future for humanity as a group, but not for individuals. It’s a fascinating idea that I’ve never bought into. Beyond my long-standing suspicion of mathematics in general, long story, there is my deep-seated belief in the creativity of people. When we are at our best, when we are “firing on all cylinders”, I believe that people are unpredictable and that that is one of our finest qualities.

The media, along with a wide range of other groups, wants to believe that I am wrong and that mathematics, in the form of statistics, is correct. One of my favorite ways to rile up the stat-heads in the sports world is to tell them that statistics do not predict future performance. Statistics can provide us with probabilities, even Asimov’s psycho-history spoke of probability, they can never offer us an ironclad picture of what is to come.

All of this came to mind when I saw a quote from media superstar Will Smith from the recent Advertising Week gathering. I mentioned elsewhere this week that Advertising Week is this monster gathering of all kinds of media folk. Like any good gathering of a clan, there are lots of times to sit and listen to speakers and experts.

Smith was talking about how the media uses numbers, commonly called “metrics” and how they can limit what is done. He said:

“The metrics are there to help you train your gut because at the end of the day you have to make the call on the extraordinary. The metrics keep you in the ordinary. The metrics keep you from failing more than they help you succeed. The thing that succeeds is going to be way outside from what somebody even thought was possible.”

That blew me away. In a world where we try to reduce everything to a number, this is a great reminder of what those numbers really offer. A metric should be used as a starting point, a reference from which we depart in search of something more, something greater.

I would love to see these words inspire more of us in the media “...make the call on the extraordinary”.

Advertising Icons

In the midst of an endless stream of awards shows, I am all in favor of the latest addition to the category. This fall, nominations were announced for the first ever Madison Avenue Walk of Fame Icon Awards. The announcement of the winners came during Advertising Week, an annual gathering of advertising, marketing, entertainment, creative, tech and media people. They have been honoring the top marketing concepts for the fifteen-year history of the event, but this year they took it a step farther.

As with any good media event, there was a red carpet and the obligatory photo ops for the advertising icons, a gala performance, a surprise appearance (when the Energizer Bunny crashed the stage) and, of course, the awards.

There were a lot of well-known icons nominated, the Burger King, Cap’n Crunch, McGruff the Crime Dog, Morris the Cat, and Captain Obvious to name just a few

So without further ado, here are the categories and their inaugural winners:

The Icon Millenium Award went to the Michelin Man,

Comeback Icon of the Year went to Carvel Ice Cream’s Fudgy the Whale,

Rookie of the year was won by Sprout from Green Giant vegetable fame,

#Throwback Icon award was picked up by the Trix Rabbit,

The Gone Fishin’ - Icon Retirement Award went to Toys R Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe. There’s the interesting note that at the beginning of October, the company that bought Toys R Us announced that Geoffrey was coming back.

McGruff the Crime Dog snagged the Icon For Good: Social Impact Award,

while Smokey Bear got the nod for Most Valuable Icon.

Finally, there was a nod to the international advertising world with QQ Penguin, the mascot of the Chinese Tencent company, the largest social media, and gaming company in the world.

The awards ceremony also recognized the top advertising slogans of the year. A little sentiment probably helped one of the winners there, as Toys R Us scored a second win with “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid!” (which you just sang in your head, admit it!), and Hulu’s “Come TV with us”.

I was a little disappointed to see one of my least favorite campaigns getting a nomination. The IHOP to IHOB thing never clicked for me, it always seemed forced and phony. So was just as happy to see it get passed by.

But if there is one other thing that all awards shows seem to have, it’s a little controversy along the way. Sounds like an award winner all ‘round.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Avocado Laugh, This Is Only A Test, Google Plus Goodbye

phlipsidecreative@gmail.com (J.D. Phillippi) — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 21:00:00 +0000

Well, here’s some news that is so new that you may not have heard it yet. On Monday of this week, Google announced that it was shutting down its social media network, Google Plus. A security flaw had been discovered in March, which Google fixed but didn’t announce. The Wall Street Journal had come into possession of an internal Google memo that discussed what should be done and was preparing to publish it when Google made the announcement.

For those of you who have forgotten about Google Plus (and don’t feel bad, billions of people worldwide have been ignoring the platform for years now), here’s a little refresher.

Following on the heels of the enormous success of Facebook, Google wanted to make sure that it had a foothold there as well. It was attempt number four at this, following Orkut which lasted nine years (mostly in Brazil), Google Friend Connect, which lasted four years; and Google Buzz, which only lasted one year. Launching in 2011, Google Plus never gained much traction. Users signed up, I have an account, but spent very little time there. On average, a Google Plus visit lasts less than five seconds according to a recent study. The service never seemed to develop an identity and people didn’t know what to do with it. There was a redesign in 2015 that seemed to create as many problems as it solved.

The current issue concerns a security flaw that could have opened up the private data of a half a million users. According to Google, there is no evidence that anyone’s data was breached because of the flaw. It was found and fixed in March. At the time, the media giant’s Privacy and Data Protection Office did not believe that it was required to report the issue. And they are probably right. What bothers more people about all of this is that the internal memo discusses not reporting the issue in order to avoid additional regulatory scrutiny. The result will be that Google CEO Sundar Pichai will have to testify before Congress about what has happened and why.

It’s just one more misstep by a Silicon Valley giant when it comes to transparency. Instead of presenting themselves as proactive solvers of problems, they are hiding from public scrutiny. And it makes you wonder why they would do that.

With declining usage and no particular model for success, there is no wonder to the demise of Google Plus.

This Is Only A Test

Last Wednesday, around a quarter after two in the afternoon, a lot of cell phones all across America suddenly blared out a warning tone. I was driving at that moment, trying to figure out where I was supposed to be when it went off. Let me be perfectly honest, it scared the doo-doo out of me. Seems I had forgotten that the audio on my phone was at 100%.

It certainly got my attention.

Which was followed by thousands of Americans seeming to lose their minds about the test of the new Wireless Emergency Alert, and the Emergency Alert System. The test was conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It is the newest technology to alert the nation of major emergencies.

Let’s deal with the dumbest bit of hysteria first. Some people don’t like the current President and were certain that this was some kind of evil plot. This system was approved by President Obama. It’s been under development for years, and the first test just happened to take place last week. The text message aspect is what the Obama administration added. So, stop.

Second, for listeners to this program, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I talked about the system at the time it was proposed. We talked about how the old system relied on radio and television and that wasn’t going to cut it in the modern age, where a growing percentage of us rely primarily on smartphones for our media connections.

Then there’s the whole “old system” question. How many of you remember hearing these words “This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test”. I can’t tell you how many of those I ran in my two decades on the air. Later it became the Emergency Activation System. In other words, you’ve been through this before. It’s not a new, the EBS tests began in 1963.

So, why did some people get it and not others? Easy. We don’t know. FEMA is still investigating it. Everyone should have gotten the signal. That’s why you test systems, to work out the bugs.

Finally, no you cannot opt out of the Presidential message portion of the system. That part of the system is designed so that whoever is sitting in the White House can communicate quickly with the nation in times of disaster.

But this is not one of those times. I promise.

Laugh At Avocados

After several weeks of anger and vitriol on our own national stage, I thought maybe we could all use a laugh. A laugh at someone else’s expense.

For all the debate about the level of governmental regulation and interference with our lives in these United States, we are the minor leagues in comparison to many European countries. England, for example, has significantly higher levels of governmental regulation when it comes to the media. If you watch them for a while, you’ll wonder what the FCC is doing to earn their salaries.

Here’s my example for the week – the ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority. That’s the United Kingdoms regulator of advertising. Using something called the Ad Codes, which were developed by yet another regulatory body called the Committees of Advertising Practice, they are the final word on what commercials air in the U.K. There is no similar, not even vaguely similar, structure on this side of the pond. I have mentioned them before, in a story about an ad for baked beans that may ring a distant bell.

This time the terrible issue centers on the coffee house chain Costa Coffee. In a recent ad, they had some fun with the recent fad for avocados, especially avocado toast. These horrible people dared to suggest that one of their bacon sandwiches or egg muffins were a better choice for breakfast than avocados. And the ASA has banned the ad. Let me read for you the offending passage of the ad as it ran:

"Oh, there's a great deal on ripen at home avocados. Sure, they'll be hard as rock for the first 18 days, three hours and 20 minutes, then they'll be ready to eat, for about 10 minutes, then they'll go off.”

If you’ve ever purchased an avocado, you know the truth of that. And if you are above the age of 7 with any sense of humor, you know that it’s a joke.

The ASA is not amused. The copy “disparaged” the healthy food choice of an avocado.

All of this based on the UK Code of Broadcast Advertising which essentially says that you can’t say bad things about fruits and vegetables.

This from the land that brought us Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Monty Python, P.G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and Benny Hill, for the love of all that’s funny!

So many things to mock and laugh at. Good to know that some things are still sacred.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018

Theme music for "The View From the Phlipside" and "TVFTP - Podcast" is "Hustle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0