Of course not more than a week after I praise Hulu on this very blog, the overlords of Hulu at News Corp have forced me to eat my words. According to News Corp’s Chase Carey:

It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.

Greg Sandoval (writer of the original article that intrigued me) has an interview today with Eric Garland, who is an expert in online piracy. According to him:

What you have is a very effective antipiracy tool in Hulu, and I’m specifically drawing on the numbers and not just citing anecdotal evidence. People really do prefer the Hulu experience. So you actually have cannibalization, for once, of a pirate market by a legitimate market. You have a legitimate market stealing share and audience away from a pirate market. Put that behind a subscription wall and they’ll just go back.

Not only does the paywall sound shortsighted and poorly thought out, but charging for content flies in the face of what these companies have done for decades. It’s only recently that they’ve been able to make significant amounts of money on home video sales. For most of their history, they’ve made their money selling advertising on free content – the model that Hulu follows today.

Greg Sandoval of CNET has an interesting blog today about how Hollywood is on the verge of collapse. The reason: digital piracy.

Sigh.

We already went through this with the music industry, do we really need to go through this again? Your sales are slowing… so you have to blame the customer? What business on earth has ever managed to survive on a strategy like that?

Sandoval cites Surfthechannel as an example of one of the sources for pirated content that viewers are flocking to. I heard about the site a few months ago, and managed to get really excited for all of 5 minutes. The breadth of content available is fantastic, but when I tried to watch something, I got redirected to a website that threw up pop-up ads. The video quality was sub-par at best, and the audio not syncing correctly with the video made it damn near unwatchable.

Watching something on Hulu, by comparison, is better and easier than watching the same thing on television. Its success has shown that people will choose legitimate ways of obtaining content if it provides the level of consumer experience that they are expecting.

So instead of blaming your customers, why not just give them what they want?

Photo by el clinto.

There was an interesting project brought up on the most recent episode of This Week in Google (one of the more headier technology podcasts that I listen to) – it’s called Picture the Impossible, an alternate reality game (ARG) developed by students at the Rochester Institute of Technology and run in conjunction with the local newspaper.

I’ve written before about how newspapers really need to innovate in order to survive, so it’s really fascinating to see a project that takes traditional media into a space (interactive gaming) that you absolutely would not expect. In some ways, however, it really isn’t such a bizarre move. Newspapers have traditionally had readers who read mainly for the puzzles inside – my wife occasionally picks up the free paper just for the crossword.

Additionally, the ARG involves games, trivia and scavenger hunts that require knowledge of the local history of Rochester. This takes advantage of the newspaper’s core competencies of both generating local content and maintaining an archive of local content. In a way, it almost mirrors the “locavore” trend, where foodie/environmentalists only eat food grown within a certain distance from where they live.

This goes in direct opposition to what newspapers have been doing, which is to increasingly source content from international agencies like the AP or CNN. I suppose the assumption is that buying news is cheaper than hiring someone to go out and report on it. The new demands on media won’t let local newspapers get away with this anymore. If I want national press coverage, I won’t go to my local paper (or it’s website), I’ll just go to Google News.

In the future, I don’t think I’ll be opening the paper everyday and see an ARG game. It is, however, a worthwhile experiment, and it’s good to see old media trying out something new.

I was up last night at some ungodly hour and managed to catch Nabil Elderkin’s video for the Kanye West song “Welcome to Heartbreak”:

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but I was absolutely stunned. The effect used is called “data moshing,” and generally you see it in video that has been compressed in some weird way.

I’ve never seen it done intentionally before, but apparently it’s quite common. The video was actually released early because the “Evident Utensil” video by Chairlift uses the same effect (though I think Elderkin’s video seems a lot more deliberate and less random).

After doing some digging around on the web, I found some other videos using the same effect, but none quite as good as this one by David O’Reilly:

It’s subtle and short, but works so beautifully with the music. Quite possibly the best music video I’ve ever seen.

O’Reilly has apparently been using the effect since 2005, but has since declared the fad to be over (probably for the same reasons that T-Pain has killed robot vocal effects). Whether it is or not, however, I find the technique to be beautiful in that it plays with the “glitches” in digital media.

Glitches in certain types of analog media (like the hiss and crackle of a record player) actually do a lot to add to the character of a work. With digital, the perception is that everything should be perfect, crystal clear all the time.

(As an aside, print-based Graphic Designers must deal with this misperception all the time, and it has probably given rise to our favorite pastime: complaining about clients who want to take bad digital art taken from a website and place it into print media).

Sure, I want to watch the game in super high 24060pxqur megapixel definition, but does everything else have to be so clear? I’m not perfect, how can I relate to art that’s perfect? In a roundabout way, glitches inject a measure of humanity back into digital media.

A bit of expansion of my comments on a recent post at St8ED.

I’ve been doing a bit of pondering on the value of traditional media, particularly with the recent shutdown of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the release of Amazon’s Kindle 2. I feel bad for the folks who have lost jobs because of the decline, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I haven’t read a newspaper since 2005 (unless you count the tbt, which I don’t).

In my mind, crying for the end of newspapers is kind of like crying for the end of music on CDs: it’s not like there’s anything about the medium that makes them inherently superior to what is replacing them. The music and newspaper industries were simply happy raking in the dough and were unwilling to consider the possibility that their dominance was impermanent.

Inevitably, the critics of new media trot out the “nostalgia” argument: traditional media cannot die because there is something about them that gets us closer to our humanity or some other lofty ideal. Sven Birkerts argues against the Kindle by telling us that by touching books, we touch a system that stands for the “labor and taxonomy of human understanding.”

Great. But are we so devoted to “touching” this “system” that we are still willing to put up with the inconveniences of paper? Are we willing to throw our cash to those who want so desperately for us to prop up their fading industry on the basis of some crazy idea that has nothing to do with how we interact with the medium?

Okay. Rant over.

Traditional media, however, does have a place – maybe their respective industries won’t go on making the same big bucks they have been, but that doesn’t mean they have to go extinct. The one criteria, however, is the medium has to be inherently superior in some respect. Beautifully worded justifications about what the medium represents are just not enough.

Case in point: vinyl records. 8-track and cassette tapes have been relegated to the dustbin of bad sitcom jokes, but vinyl records live on. In fact, in 2007, vinyl sales revenue jumped 46%. For what it lacks in portability, its quality makes vinyl to the music industry what microbrews are to the beer industry: a niche product for connoisseurs.

The USF billboard that I critiqued in a post last month has been changed.

Coincidence? Or evidence of the incredible influence that I have?

This is a bit of a follow up to the paper I wrote last semester that I posted a few weeks ago. I’m going to go off on a bit of a rant (like I didn’t vent enough in the comments of a post on ReadWriteWeb) about a research study by McKinney, Dyck, & Luber at SUNY-Fredonia about the effectiveness of iTunes U in delivering lectures to an introductory Psych course. The title of the paper is provocatively titled: “iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?”

In this study, two groups of students listened to a 25 minute lecture. One group listened in class, the other listened via podcast. When given a test on the subject, the podcast group scored 71% and the in-class group scored 62%. Within the podcast group, those that took notes while listening scored significantly better than those that didn’t (who performed more or less the same as the in-class group). The study generated significant controversy among their colleagues because “the podcast condition was not used to enhance a college lecture (perhaps giving students who attended the actual lecture a chance to listen to it again), but rather was in place of attending the lecture.”

On the one hand, this study engages the issue of podcasting in a serious manner. Lots of investment is being made in this area by universities, which is strange given the lack of research or data regarding its effectiveness. In comparison to some of the other studies I’ve read, it’s incredibly thorough.

On the other hand: Stop it.

Just stop it. For the love of god, it means nothing. Why must we continually have these studies where professors take old ways of teaching, dress it up with technology, and ask if technology is really worth our time? About half the time, the results go towards the technology, half the time they don’t. Does it really matter? You’re still talking at students and seeing how good they are at regurgitating it back to you. All these professors are getting up in arms because students can use the podcasts to avoid going to class. News flash: not having podcasts has never stopped them before.

So who cares? Why must people keep doing the same damn media comparison studies over and over again? Why the same old lame questions asking if technology will replace teachers? All these things ever seem to do is bring out the same comments:

“Technology is crap, you’ll never replace a teacher!” (goodbye, tenure) or

“We have to change the way we work to accommodate digital natives!” (so they can be bored with technology too) or

“Podcasts are great because you can rewind them!” (as if rewinding is the panacea for all our educational woes).

I’m not trying to disrespect the lecture as a way to deliver instruction. I’m not trying the disrespect the podcast as a medium to deliver instruction. In fact, a couple days ago I listened to a podcast lecture by Michael Wesch that blew my mind it was so awesome. The reasons I liked it had nothing to do with my ability to rewind it or listen to it on my commute.

The reasons I did like it were three-fold: the content, the speaker, and the access. The fact that the lecture took place a month ago in a different location, and required attendees to pay some exorbitant registration fee did nothing to prevent me from hearing it.

Technology is a game-changer, but these researchers are still playing the same old game.

That’s a billboard I must pass a dozen or more times a month, but I only recently noticed it. Clearly in these hard economic times, the U is really trying to push distance learning… but this attempt feels more like a feeble shove than a real push.

There’s several other billboards around town, most noticeably the one on I-275 downtown that makes me feel like I’m about to launch into near-Earth orbit. They also had a real big outdoor ad campaign during football season, where they tried to implant the respective images of Matt Grothe and George Selvie into everybody’s brain. During any type of USF game on TV, there’s also a commercial they run made with still photographs (remind you of anything?) and music that sounds like Kraftwerk (unfortunately no one has deemed it interesting enough to post it to YouTube).

I bring this up in order to contrast it with the commercials that Kaplan University have been rolling out:

Really, they’re just breathtaking. Others have reacted similarly, some even go so far as to call it e-learning’s equivalent to Apple’s 1984 ad. It did come with a hefty price tag: the cost for the campaign was supposedly in the millions.

I’m not asking USF to spend that kind of cash. I only ask that they heed some advice from Uncle Phil:

As of late, the local news media has been running a number of “holy crap, it’s a recession! Why is [insert public agency] spending your tax dollars on [insert derogatory adjective] art while they’re facing a [insert random number] million dollar shortfall?!!” Apparently, they assume their viewers cannot grasp the concept of budget allocation that takes place months or years in advance.

10 Connects (the bizarre new name for our local CBS affiliate) ran a story last night (my apologies if their embedded video takes long to load – their player doesn’t seem as efficient as YouTube’s) about the new $27,000 topiary bull sitting in front of the new Marshall Center. The pictures don’t really do it justice – I drove by it last week, and I honestly think it looks pretty dope. It’s a nice touch for our campus, which frankly looks like a giant office park (with the exception of MLK plaza). Based on comments to the 10 Connects story, and on a similar story run by the Oracle, it would seem I am in the minority.

As an aside, I actually have nothing personal against 10 Connects – I interviewed for a job there once, and tend prefer their newscasts over their competitors.

The local ABC affiliate ran a similar story last week about the upcoming Lights On Tampa light show, which projects the work of animators and video artists onto various buildings around downtown. The project cost an incredible amount of money, though the majority comes from private donors. The rest comes from the state (money that can’t be spent on anything else), and about $70,000 comes from the city. Seems a small price to pay to spruce up a city that is about to host a very small game of American football called the Super Bowl (perhaps you’ve heard of it?).

My wife and I had a debate yesterday about tweens and their use of technology. The crux of her argument was that kids constantly being on Facebook, MySpace, etc. did something to take away their humanity. My perspective was that such technologies have just the opposite effect, in that they invite their users to create and interact with others, instead of just passively consuming. I think it’s a normal response to be wary of new things taken up by the next generation, especially if it seems radically new. If you consider just what these technologies do, however, I don’t think they’re so different from what already exists. YouTube isn’t much different from television, Facebook is the new party line, and Blogs are the new books.

In fact, even though we don’t consider them to be “technology” simply because they’re not new, books are really just an example of some of the most successful technology ever developed by humans. There’s an interesting post yesterday by Michael Wesch about how print media changed society (the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution) and the potential that participatory media could have. He also notes a potentially creepy idea brought up by Howard Rheingold – that such media records “a great deal of public behavior… in a way that makes it suitable for systematic study,” creating a digital panopticon.

Jeremy Bentham proposed such a design for prisons, so prisoners could easily be observed without their knowledge. All of which sounds an awful lot like Facebook, which takes the information from your profile (unbeknownst to you) to deliver targeted advertising messages. In China, there are supposedly “five-cent commentators” – people who are paid to post comments supporting government viewpoints.

This is not to discount the potential for change that participatory media has, but just something to keep in mind. Books, certainly had their own problems at the beginning (“So if I want a copy of this book I have to copy it by hand?”).

On a completely unrelated Jeremy Bentham note (how many times a day does one get to write that?), Lost is starting in a little over 2 weeks, and I am super stoked.

Prison photo by Friman, from Wikipedia.