[Tim Wilson]

It’s a shame that there’s nothing even VAGUELY comprehensive. The NAB Show website is a mess, with more broken links than working links…but nothing that even pretends to be comprehensive. You can almost find your way around by going to every category (Keynotes, Conferences, etc.) – again, far from comprehensive, but you can at least get started.

Worth noting that each of the individual conferences is quite good about a comprehensive schedule. Most of them are oriented around classes that you have to pay for, but many of them also include public keynotes.

(Not to be too much of a shill, but the “All Access” passes are a great deal, and allow you to sample all kinds of great stuff. Even something as specific as “digital cinema” or “digital intermediate workflow” will take you through two or three conferences, if not more.)

re: After hours events, good luck, dude. 🙂 When I worked at Avid, there were 30 events Avid SPONSORED (Avid paid for, invited attendees, etc.), plus many more that attended (say, a demo at a user group). One reason why there was nothing posted on the website is that many of these were member-only events (ACE, AISC, etc.), so no need to muddy the waters with a general notice that might be misconstrued an an open invitation.

That said, I see something to suggest to NAB for next year. This is a great idea, and I never noticed how seriously they fall short of the basics.

Good for you for trying to go beyond just aimlessly walking the floor. My next suggestion is to identify key topics or vendors, and look for events related to them. For example, we just got the announcement yesterday of the Sony Media Software user event – dude, it’s got Dweezil Zappa AND Douglas Spotted Eagle.

Another example: our own Bob Zelin hosts the Maxx Digital reception in the horseshoe bar at the Hard Rock – free drinks in exchange for a business card, and plenty of “cows” to chat with.

Anyway, does any of this spur any specific thoughts? We may be able to help.

[Tim Wilson]

There have been Cows in the White House for a couple of administrations now. No kidding. The first time we saw whitehouse.gov domains sign up, with addresses in the West Wing, we thought it was awesome. Still do.

Bessie herself is in the GREENS Party (All You Can Eat). Bessie, she all about the All You Can Eat, and puts her vote where her mouth is.

When I was a producer doing video for gubmint clients, I had my work publicly, and loudly, attacked as “slick propaganda.” I’m sorry I didn’t save the clippings, and I’m still not sure which adjective I was prouder of.

[Tim Wilson]

You can get free EXHIBIT passes by entering the promotional code CC01 – as in Creative Cow zero one.

Be sure to look at the bundled conference passes. No need to register for one when, for just a little more, you can register for all of ’em. Nobody could (or would) go to every session of every conference, but there are other great sessions in the Broader-casting conference, for example. You can also go to all of the roundtables, some of which are truly amazing.

Bring clean socks, at least a pair of new socks for each day. When I was working booths, I always went for 2 pairs a day. HUGE difference.

Note that I mention new socks. You probably know this, but under no circumstances wear new shoes unless you’ve bought another pair of the same kind in the past, and know what to expect. It’s not as bad for sneakers as it is for boots or dress shoes, but nothing will shut your trip down faster than a blister.

Drink more water than you can possibly imagine. You’ll find many booth folks passing out little bottles with their logos on it. Never pass one up.

There’s a great Indian food restaurant on the second floor of the South Hall. As you go up the escalator at the front of the building to enter the Hall, it’s about halfway down on your right. Always a MUCH smaller line than the lunch line in the main downstairs area. Otherwise, consider bringing your lunch…or skip it in favor of a good breakfast and dinner. I generally find it more trouble than it’s worth.

[Tim Wilson]

I think it’s broader than “organizations got big because bosses are clueless.” Which is true. But it’s not the ONLY thing that’s true. There was a time when journalists on the ground actually gathered news. They sifted through events and, for better or worse, tried to pull the pieces together to make a coherent story.

In other words, pretty much what WE do.

Not to make a political point, but I sensed it changing in the early 90s around the first Gulf War, when spreading the official word almost became a patriotic duty. There’s always an element of that in war journalism from every nation, for obvious reasons…but my lack of political point is that this seemed to spread across entire organizations, for every area of news, including entertainment and sports, which have largely blurred into each other and wind up being treated as news. It’s a mess.

To put it another way, again, sans politics, there was a time when journalism seemed a high calling. For individual reporters this can still be true, but I think organizations as a whole are largely cynical. Their business models are just now catching up with the changing realities of ownership – ideals are ideals, but people watch screaming.

A general manager’s ONLY reasonable response is to protect the value of the BUSINESS. People watch screaming. End of story. Bring the reporters home. Fire ’em.

PS. TJA, when you’re talking about micro-sized printing, are you talking about a magazine done by 2 guys in their pajamas?

[Tim Wilson]

Regardless of the after-hours-ness or your own gear-ness, I can see the employers position. “Pimp” is one word, but so is “agent.” Your agent finds you jobs, and your agent gets a slice.

It’s unfortunate that they didn’t establish this arrangement with you first. It would have been better for them to have done that. But here’s what you need to ask yourself:

1) How much is it worth to you to piss them off? Or worse, to make them sorry that they made you the offer?

Worse still, to make them feel like you’re not grateful? That you’re not a team player?

You can decide for yourself whether this is fair, but they have already told you that this is the way it is.

2) Would you like them to find you more jobs?

3) Can you honestly take the money from the outside gig KNOWING that your employer wants a commission, and you stiffed them?

My guess is that it’s not worth 10 or 15% of the outside gig to go through all the negative energy – for what? A couple of hundred bucks?

I’ll end with a tale from my dear old grandpa. I’m not a gambler, but he was. He taught me that if somebody lends you $2 to place a bet — ie, not a shared bet, and not “place this bet for ME, just a straight up loan — and the horse YOU chose comes in, you owe them more than the $2. He always split it 50-50, because that’s what the guys in his generation did. And they did! As far as they were concerned, it was just the right thing to do.

I assume that your employer is not asking 50%, but it kind of doesn’t matter. You can tell my opinion. Suck it up. Take the money. Think of them as your agent, and give them a taste because of what they did for you. Incentivize them to do it again.

Did I mention the part about taking the money? That’s the bottom line. And if you can do it without pissing off the people who found it for you, all the better.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Stutts] “For more crazy stuff, take an hour and break down 42 Entertainment’s Alternate Reality Game that they did for the Dark Knight.”

I was just watching a special that recounted the viral marketing that Sanchez and Myrick came up with for Blair Witch Project. It’s easy to forget just how overwhelmingly effective it was, building on the work of just two guys with no money. That’s a great example of what you’re talking about Simon – getting it to thought leaders, and letting them take it from there.

As Simon also notes, Twitter is especially effective when used to message within a specific network of people who are genuinely known to each other, far moreso, and more quickly than, email alone.

I’m going to slightly differ re: the big E on the eye chart, though – the source of the video doesn’t matter. That’s simply the virus itself. The video goes viral comes when people choose to pass it along…which they still mostly do via email.

That said, I echo the folks above that less is more. You can do the work you need to do, without trying to mess with video players embedded in email. Per Chris, it’s darn hard for the player itself to be visible…and what about the format of the video? As more mobile email platforms (esp. iPhone, iTouch, iPad) come online that don’t support Flash, it’s getting harder to figure out what used to be the easy part!

So Roy, if you can come up with ONE video that actually goes viral, you’ve accomplished something truly remarkable. I’m not sure if it should be on this thread or a new one, but it’s an interesting question – how do you make a video that somebody wants to pass along?

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Blair] “As Mike points out, viral video is really a phenomenon and isn’t usually something that’s intricately planned.”

Sometimes not, but actually, it often IS intricately planned.

A recent example was of Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent. Did you see this thing? Here’s a frame, with the full video at the end of this post.

She doesn’t look like much, but this video will give you chills. You can see the audience rolling their eyes when she comes on stage, then see them gasp when they realize that she has the goods. People emailed the link to this clip at an insane pace, such that her album racked up the most pre-release sales in Amazon history. Released at the end of November, it was the second-best selling release of the year in the US. Amazing. And it didn’t hurt the ratings for Britain’s Got Talent, either, which you can easily see is the original source for the video, not some schlub’s VCR.

A similar but contrasting example was the famous D*** in a Box video from Saturday Night Live. NBC let the version as broadcast, that is, bleeped, get onto YouTube…then visibly pulled it, and posted that AND the uncensored version “by popular demand” onto its own website.

Another heavily planned campaign is the singalongs for T-Mobile. They actually created viral *events* – going into public spaces, setting up massive singalong screens, passing out scores of microphones, and turning the thing loose. They originally aired as 60-second spots, but were posted online as full length clips. I’ve posted the 4-minute version of Hey Jude recorded in Trafalgar Square. It gives me chills.

One of my favorite viral videos was co-opted and aired on TV, which is where I first saw it, the “I’m into nuggets, y’all” video that a couple of kids made, in celebration of their love for chicken McNuggets. They didn’t have any plans for it apart from goofing around for YouTube…but McDonalds got wind of it and ran a high-res version of it as a TV commercial for a while. So McDonalds co-opted a virus, and spun it up to where NOW people would start emailing it even more. Which they did. (Presumably, they also paid the boys along the way.)

I worked for a company that was desperate to create viral video, even hired a guy to help pull it off, and when it didn’t work, they of course sent the poor guy packing…but how COULD it have worked? Only one way: come up with a video that people wanted to watch more than once, then pass it along.

The point is that, for all of the genuinely viral videos of cats playing pianos, people can, and do, create very carefully orchestrated viral campaigns – ironically, most often using TV, and often at great expense. Not every attempt works of course, but a great many do. To use the influenza metaphor, they create a bug, and fuel the conditions that contribute to an epidemic. All of the videos I’ve mentioned have many millions, even many hundreds of millions, of views.

It actually goes much, much further than that – companies pay attractive people to go into bars and seduce other patrons into buying the sponsor’s drink. It’s insane. The point is that big companies have learned how to do this, and they do it.

That said, I agree that most business people who talk about viral video have no idea what it actually is.

So here are some clips for you. The Susan Boyle clip has embedding disabled, but it’s TOTALLY worth checking out the whole thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnmbJzH93NU

Here’s the T-mobile, also TOTALLY worth checking out all of.

Only 48 seconds, so no excuses.

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[Tim Wilson]

For anyone interested in optimizing web design, be sure to check out our several forums on this very topic: Dreamweaver (where Fernando is a host and frequent poster), Flash, and Web Design (another place you’ll find Fernando).

Always delighted to see cross pollination for specific applications, like the SEO discussions here, but for a deep dive, these are some of the fastest-growing forums at the Cow…

tw

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

[Mads Nybo Jørgensen] “…which is suggesting that gadgets like the iPad will bring the consumer back to paid subscription…”

This is the hope for the entire publishing industry, including books.

One thing that really struck me about the iPad is that books will be priced HIGHER than on Kindle – generally $14.95 compared to $9.95. That puts iPad books not far off what publishers are already netting for many bestsellers.

I can imagine people saying that Kindle and other e-readers (Sony, Barnes & Noble, etc.) are niche products, but you could have said the same about MP3 players before iPods. I had several of them before iPods were invented, and was actively using one of them up until I left it on a plane recently (oops)…but there was no way that any one of these was going to do ANYTHING to actually affect the music business. That only happened after Apple made the iPod and digital music part of the mainstream.

And it’s not only magazine and book publishers – it’s newspaper folks too. Once Apple has your credit card (and they already have something like 125 million of them on file), it’s one button to buy a newspaper or magazine. Costs for magazines so far are just below newsstand pricing, so there’s theoretically money to be made there.

That said, nobody’s actually making much money with these things via existing apps for iPhone and iTouch. I think they will, though.

Here’s the REAL issue, though. There are too many of magazines and newspapers in virtually every arena. In the new economy, people don’t have the money, and in the case of free magazines, the time, to read magazines that aren’t good enough to engage them. There are too many other ways to find compelling text…which, after all, is what most of the web still is.

Generally speaking, publishing failure is most often a message from the market that it doesn’t need or want your publication.

How did we get to this state? Largely through publishers who sought to capitalize on rising markets – and good for them! That’s when you SHOULD be making money. The problem is that publishers walk around with piles of dead trees, and try to find audiences to throw them at. But people don’t read dead trees! They read compelling stories. THAT part of the equation isn’t that hard.

The internet is not the solution. In fact, the SPEED of the internet can even more quickly expose a publisher’s weakness. Yes, the cost of entry is lower, but the side effect is that people usually start with less money, advertisers spend less, etc. But it’s not like online publishing has no costs! Publishing giants are even finding that creating compelling web *experiences* (ie, well designed sites) costs a fortune, but with the same crap online that nobody wants to read in print, they’re still not going to be able to create a compelling web *business.*

To put it another way, just because their stuff is easier for a global audience to read won’t make anybody want to read it. Quite the contrary – people find it even EASIER to stop reading you, because they have no investment in you. Better reading is a click away.

So even online, successful magazines are a lot harder than they look.

But to answer the question of how much it costs to create a magazine – the answer is, maybe hardly anything. If the goal is to make a magazine, to tell stories that people want to read, you can still create it by hand and print it on your computer or at Kinko’s. There are still plenty of great “mimeo and staple” magazines. You can probably stop by an indie record store for good examples, and see a variety of them on pretty much any college campus. DIY publishing can be alive and well.

If your goal is to make money with dead trees because that’s what you have on hand, well, it kind of doesn’t matter how little you spend. Making more than you spend is still going to be tough, unless people want to read your stuff.

Final observation: since Creative Cow Magazine started, 4 magazines in our industry have gone out of print, and their web presence hasn’t grown a whit. In some cases, publishers have even folded those websites!! The problem was never the print. The problem was their inability to find and keep an audience.

I don’t mean to say that we’re the only ones who know what we’re doing, or are the only ones who contributed to those other magazines/websites folding. All of us will only last until we don’t. Market forces apply to even the smartest people and the best magazines. I’m simply noting how these general observations about how audiences and markets apply to our industry, where the trends might be easier to see.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing wrong with the publishing industry. It’s perfectly sound IF people want to read your stuff. All these magazines and newspapers folding aren’t because of the internet business models or labor costs or printing or mailing. Those costs need addressing, but in the end, can be sustained, if people want to buy, or advertisers want to support, your publication. New platforms won’t change that.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Blair] “I couldn’t find a thing about current televisions that were already capable of viewing the type of 3D that these networks are proposing to broadcast.”

You won’t find much about this on Bing because reporters are overworked (ie, lazy) and are largely recycling the same hype, which they get from the same handful of sources, including themselves. Because hey, if it’s on the internet, it must be true, right?

(I’m not making fun of you for reading the internet. Quite the contrary! I’m a big fan. But I’m less than impressed with current reporting.)

You can start by going to your local Best Buy and looking at any Mitsubishi TV. Says right on the box that it’s 3D-ready, which has been true for years. I bought mine in 2008.

3D decoding is also built into the recent HDMI spec. On the fly, it can decode under-over, side by side, interleaved, and anything else thrown at it via pixel addressing. The device tells it where to put the pixels, and it happens.

Now, THIS is the gating factor: the devices. The biggest one will be set-top boxes, but also Blu-ray players. The displays? Plenty are ready. I’ll continue.

The “Full HD” spec is built around 1080p, which nobody is currently broadcasting. In addition to 1080i, 720p is also working fine. Of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, two are 1080 and two are 720. Can you tell by looking? I can’t. No worries, the box handles it.

I also have a quarter-res upconverting projector I got in 2002. Via HDMI, even at 100″+, I defy you to tell me it’s not native HD.

Now a few words about standards. I wrote a full post about this in the Stereoscopic forum – you can look it up – wherein I pointed out that there are at least 8 standards bodies at work on various aspects of home delivery, down to the use of graphics in set-top boxes. Think about it – where will OSDs live in 3D space? When the depth in the program material changes, the menu could appear to move and scale relative to that! Problem largely solved these days, but it wasn’t automatic.

Once again, the box solves the problem for the display. The display is not an issue.

Also keep in mind that 74% of Gen Y watches more than half of their TV on their computer. I’m twice their age and watch probably a quarter of my TV online. Throw in Roku and Apple TV, and I can think of several people older than me who watch virtually ALL of their TV this way. Those devices are a firmware update away from any of the many 3D standards…all of which will work fine on any device connected to them.

But my point about computers is that my first 1080p 60 display was in 2000. Ready for the highest *current* spec of 3D, and any number of standards below the top.

With varying degrees of satisfaction? Yes. Do-able? Absolutely. Just as set-top boxes can work through these issues now, they will later.

As soon as they’re ready. But tvs and the computer displays that will be watching this stuff? Ready now.

Well, and the glasses too I guess, but you can buy those now. To name one vendor, NVIDIA has been selling their active shutter glasses for quite a while now.

Seriously, think about it. Why would ESPN and others be launching all-3D networks in the next few months if 3D sets are as far in the future as the popular press and some manufacturers would have you believe? It wouldn’t happen…and it’s not going to happen.

So what’s the hype around future 3D displays? More and better. While the *top* of the *current* 3D ladder is 1080p60 – a full 30 for each eye — you can already buy sets at 1080p/240 – 120 for each eye! Which nobody, including the current HDMI spec, currently supports Future “proofing” – which we know doesn’t exist. But still, it’d be cool to be ready for the next few iterations.

But think about it – if nobody is broadcasting 1080p ANYTHING, much less 1080p/60, then all we know about ESPN’s output is that it will be less than 1080p/60! It won’t be 1080p, either. It will be 1080i. Anybody here got a TV that supports that? I’ve got an embarrassing number of them. So does my 72 year-old dad. This isn’t that hard.

And if the display can’t handle 1080i natively, I’ll bet you a box of Randy’s Donuts that set-top boxes will cover a multitude of possibilities — just as they do today!

There’s also the matter of moving some of the computing into the display and out of the set-top box in the future…but again, today, simply not necessary.

Cast your mind back to the notion of cable-ready TVs with tuners that grab lotso channels. Well and good, and these venerable sets from the 80s still work great…as long as you don’t need pay services or digital signals. And if you do? The box solves the problem! The fact is that I don’t know if all my current TVs support hundreds of channels. I doubt it. And I know for a fact that at least one of them (the projector) has no built-in tuner whatsoever. The box takes care of that.

I’m repeating myself, but the short version is, if a display (including a computer display that plays TV) supports HD, it’s ready now.

Last but not least, 3D works great in SD, too. I don’t know about you, but my cable box has a gorgeous downconvert. I watch lots of HD on my one remaining set, one of those flat-screen Trinitron tubes that still looks wonderful. There are hundreds of stereoscopic movies already on YouTube, with anaglyph by no means the majority.

Laster but no lesser, what about boxes? There are hundreds of thousands of cable boxes already in homes that are addressable via firmware to support any current 3D standard. Many have that firmware already in place.

This isn’t going to be hard. The adoption rate is going to blast by the rate for HD because the sets are already there. Many of the boxes are too.

Not that it all won’t get dramatically better in the future. But it doesn’t have to, which is why it will launch in 5 months. Admittedly the future, but still.

Yr pal,
Timmy