Smalltalk with James Robertson

I had Peter's location in "Fringe" nailed - the future of the main reality (i.e., not Walternate's). What I didn't see coming was the last minute or two - when Peter disappeared and the Observers note that "of course they don't remember him, he never existed".

So.... if Peter never existed, how did the two realities interesect in the first place? Walter only crossed over to save Peter. No Peter, no cross over. No cross over, no reality collision. Next season has a lot of gap filling to do, I think :)

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Fringe is one of the few shows that keeps holding my interest. Last night's penultimate (for the season) episode ended with a really curious thing:

• Peter stepped into the machine that has dominated this season
• Next thing we see, he's older, and there seems to be street fighting going on in NYC

So we aren't really sure where he ended up - the show's "home" reality in the future, the "Walternate" reality in the future, or perhaps a universe we haven't seen yet. All we know for sure is that Peter is older, and that the people where he landed know him as a long time member of "Fringe Division". That hints at it being the Walternate reality, but it could be the home reality, and they could have created a "Fringe Division" between now and when he landed.

I guess we'll find out next week.

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I was a pretty big fan of the show "Primeval", so I'm pretty happy that it's returning on January 1st - and the producers have released 5 webisodes to bridge the gap from the end of the last run to the present.

The rise of various streaming TV options - from DVRs to Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, (etc) - has done a fair amount of damage to the traditional "appointment tv" model. Now there's some real evidence of what the future of that model looks like: sports:

Of the 20 highest-rated telecasts of any kind so far this television season, 18 have been N.F.L. games on CBS, NBC or Fox. In terms of the best of 2010, nothing else comes close. Of the 50 highest-rated programs during the calendar year, 27 have been N.F.L. games, including 8 of the top 10.

This makes perfect sense to me - watching recorded games is hard, because it's just too easy to hear about the results elsewhere. Beyond that though? Most shows now have a niche audience, which means that it's pretty easy to avoid spoilers.

Beyond mass audience things like NFL games though, it makes the standard ad supported model harder and harder to justify.

Technorati Tags: broadcast, sports

Spotted in Blastr

Syfy announced today it will end its original action-adventure series Stargate Universe once the show returns to finish its second season in the spring of 2011. The upcoming 10 episodes will be the series' last.

I find it depressing that well written shows like this just don't find a place.

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At this point it might be simpler to list the handful of network content that you can get via GoogleTV:

Are we beginning to see a pattern yet? Just when we thought (or at least we were hoping) that Fox was going to be the last major network to block Google TV, Viacom has arrived just in time to rain on our parade. That’s right folks, Viacom is now blocking Google TV devices from streaming full episodes across their entire line of properties.

Fighting the future is what the content owners do best...

Technorati Tags: copyright, googletv

I'm curious as to how this plays out: will Google reach content deals with the networks, or will they start playing games with the way Google TV identifies itself in order to bypass the problem? The former would involve long (and probably stupid) negotiations; the latter would involve a small change to the way Google TV identifies itself. I'm not sure which way things will go :)

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Mark Cuban last May:

I just don’t understand why media pundits think that people are going to want to turn those BRAND SPANKING NEW HDTVs into PC monitors watching internet quality video. It’s a hassle. There is nothing that works out of the box. You have to be your own personal systems integrator and get the right box, figure out how to get content to that box over your in home internet, and then eat up your internet bandwidth in order to watch video that is dumbed down because it takes so much bandwidth. Why ?

Mark Cuban now:

Back to the Netflix using 20pct of bandwidth. Now that they have gotten there, it is going to be easier for Netflix than anyone else to grow their bandwidth usage. They can add streaming subscribers at a controlled level and it could work. Growing their usage as a percentage of total bandwidth consumption quickly becomes a trojan horse in the streaming wars. They are consuming so much bandwidth, they literally are blocking out the ability of anyone to compete with them.

Well, he's evolving. Before it was "it can't work, ever". Now it's "it can only work for Netflix". Apparently, 2 months ago when I downloaded a 17gb digital edition of DragonAge: Origins for my Mac (in under an hour) while my wife and daughter watched NetFlix, I was doing something unpossible.

Technorati Tags: streaming, internet tv

Via Engadget, Sandvine reports:

The bandwidth manufacturer has released a report that concludes that over twenty percent of stateside peak time downstream Internet traffic is gobbled up by Netflix streams, with the heaviest use going down in the primetime hours between 8 to 10 pm.

Doesn't surprise me; we watch a lot of Netflix (my daughter uses it a lot, mostly to catch up on shows she didn't think she'd like at first). More and more content is going to head this way, and the local cable company is going to pull its hair out over it....

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Some TV Execs don't like Apple's new rental model:

"How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?" Bewkes recently asked, joining the now growing chorus of executives to decry the new scheme. Jeff Zucker recently said he thought Apple's 99-cent rentals "devalue" the content, while Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said the rental model was "not good."

You have to consider how people use media though. Consider music, where 99 cents is now the agreed upon standard for purchasing. How many times will I listen to a song I like? Who knows, but it's a lot. People will go back to the same song over and over again over time.

TV shows aren't like that. With rare exceptions, individual episodes are a "one and done" thing. Which means this: to the end consumer of media, the typical tv episode has a lower value than most songs. Since songs have arrived at an agreed upon value of 99 cents, that's providing a ceiling on the value of tv shows.

Now, you can argue about production costs and such, but that doesn't really matter to the end buyer. It matters a lot to the producers, of course - which argues for fewer people in the value extraction chain, I think. Over time, I expect online sales to start whittling away the plethora of middle men who add cost - but no real value - to the creation of tv (and movies). I wouldn't be surprised to see tv shows go the way of video games: you buy a few episodes, and then subscribe to a "feed" for DLC. The entire model for show distribution and production would have to change for that to happen, and I think that's what the execs quoted above fear most. In that world, they have no place at the feeding trough.

Technorati Tags: iTunes