Bring Your Parents To Work Day

There will be times as you raise your child you’ll be thinking homicide… justifiable homicide. Daughters can do that to you. And you’ll wonder, will there be a payoff to these years of blood, sweat and tears?

You’re waiting for days like today! We went to visit Stef at work. Yes, we’re proud… and relieved.

Dear Fathers of Daughters,

IMG_2523_4432There will be times as you raise your child you’ll be thinking homicide… justifiable homicide. Daughters can do that to you. And you’ll wonder, will there be a payoff to these years of blood, sweat and tears?

You’re waiting for days like today! We went to visit Stef at work. Yes, we’re proud… and relieved.

Stef is an associate producer on Family Game Night. It’s a kid oriented game show that runs on Hub, the cable network owned by Hasbro.

IMG_2381_4290FGN is produced at Delfino Studios in Sylmar.

“You go past the Adult Superstore,” Stef included, more to describe the neighborhood than provide landmarks for navigating.

Delfino is one of dozens of small studio complexes in the LA area. An impressive control room truck was parked alongside the sound stage. The studio itself was huge and fully staffed in the Hollywood tradition!

I have never been in a studio which looked bigger in person than on-air… until today. Big studio. Big set. Very impressive.

IMG_2657_4566Delfino may be off the-beaten-path but it’s a pro operation with a large pro crew. The show went smoothly&#185.

The host is Todd Newton who’s won national Emmys for this show. Deserved. He was effortless. More importantly, he exuded empathy for the contestants. There are hosts who don’t get that part of the job.

The games themselves are larger-than-life for-camera adaptions of classic kids games, like Monopoly, Connect4 and Jenga. We saw plenty of cash dispensed and (after we left) a few cars!

IMG_2592_4501We watched Stef carry her clipboard and walkie across the studio, checking on games and staff. She was in her element.

After we left Helaine and I discussed our 140 mile roundtrip journey.

“She’s like an adult,” Helaine said, “when did that happen?”

&#185 – People who work on shows see a more ‘backstage view.’ They know what’s supposed to happen. No show is ever 100% clean to them.

Here’s What Oprah Should Have Announced

Only Oprah could make this choice and produced an immediate impact. Only Oprah could immediately make the Internet a viable platform for modern day broadcasting.

oprah.jpgLater today Oprah Winfrey plans to make public the announcement she made to her staff Thursday: “Oprah” will end its broadcast TV run in 2011 and she will concentrate her efforts on OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), a new cable network. Oprah is making a mistake! She should have gone direct-to-net.

First, a few givens. The local stations that currently run her show will be the biggest losers. Oprah has delivered killer lead-ins to local news for years. Oprah’s influence has been so strong it’s rumored many stations run the show as a loss leader knowing they’ll make it up during the news.

Second, Oprah will move to a new cable channel with no track record and currently no clearances. She will be on a channel t-b-a, but certainly not with the dial position and complementary programming (and promotion) she currently has.

As much as is possible when you’re the world’s best known TV host, Oprah will start from zero.

Establishing a new cable channel, even for someone of Oprah’s stature and means will not be easy. If anyone can make this a success she can, but there’s much more room for success if Oprah had blazed the path to direct Internet distribution.

To more and more people the Internet is a perfectly acceptable substitute for TV. With the ubiquity of high speed Internet picture quality is no longer a real concern. Hulu and Netflix have shown that. Even Youtube is getting ready to deliver HD quality videos.

Bandwidth costs, the deciding factor on video quality, continue to drop.

Going on the Internet gives Oprah a boatload of options.

  • The show could be served both live and on-demand to multiple platforms at multiple bandwidths.
  • Live events could be covered live without any worry about interfering with other scheduled programming. Imagine Oprah at the Oscars or at any compatible event.
  • Recorded shows could be served full and as smaller mini-episodes.
  • No need to share revenue with a cable channel or cable operators (by way of local spot breaks).
  • The total control that the Internet affords would allow more creative viewer interaction and sponsor opportunities. Spots don’t have to be the end all be all anymore.
  • The audience could be expanded to reach more working women via office computers and smartphone apps

My friend Brian Lapis points out Howard Stern’s diminution of reach and power since leaving terrestrial radio for Sirius. Stern went to a technology with a small installed base and then hid behind a paywall. Oprah doesn’t need to do that. I believe she can reach more people over the long run via the Internet than she could on TV simply by making herself available at more times and on more platforms.

Only Oprah could make this choice and produced an immediate impact. Only Oprah could immediately make the Internet a viable platform for modern day broadcasting.

Opportunity lost.

Make The World Go Away

I was working at WGAR, Cleveland and living in an apartment in North Olmsted, OH. The era was pre-Internet, pre-VCR, pre-cellphone.

It was 1973 or ’74. I was working at WGAR, Cleveland and living in an apartment in North Olmsted, OH. The era was pre-Internet, pre-VCR, pre-cellphone.

I used to turn on the TV when I’d get home from work. Then as now, the hours after midnight were a wasteland of programs with lower production values and cheaper commercial time.

Late night Cleveland television provided my my introduction to Eddy Arnold. We hardly played him on the radio, and I wasn’t watching any on-screen concerts. Eddy Arnold is my first remembrance of a two minute ‘per inquiry’ record ad.

You see them all the time now. They have mainly moved from single artists to genre compilations, but the concept’s the same. Music by artists who no longer sell albums is sold to consumers who no longer buys albums.

Often, the TV station or cable network is paid a commission for each item sold. There’s no guarantee the station will get anything. So, these ads are only seen in time periods where conventional ads can’t be sold.

“Make the world (long pause) go away,” Eddy would sing as the ad began. Then for the next 115 seconds, the pitch would proceed.

How deeply is this ad burned in my pschye? Indelibly! I still remember where you sent your money: Eddy, 1030 Terminal Tower, Cleveland… that’s Eddy, 1030 Terminal Tower, Cleveland.

Eddy Arnold died today, and with him a piece of TV history. He probably didn’t even know.

I wonder if the album was any good?

More Television Future Shock

Do you need a TV station to have a TV show? Yes and no. The advantage of a TV station is, it is a known commodity, usually with a well visited address.

If our newscasts on Channel 8 were to move tomorrow to the SciFi Channel, ratings would plummet. That’s not to say bad things about SciFi, we just have better channel position with more traffic.

The disadvantage of a television station is it usually has high fixed costs. Smart operators are trying to work those costs down through automation and other technical advances. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t – but it’s obviously the wave of the future.

This leads to a question. Is it possible to have a successful TV show without having a TV channel (or cable network) behind you?

I’m wondering if the answer is yes after having seen a show produced by systm.org. It features Kevin Rose who was on Tech TV’s The Screen Savers.

The show I saw last night was well produced, but on a topic so technically dense that few except the chronically nerdy would have watched. There were no commercials – how can it be economically sustained? Using the bittorrent protocol it took around 10 minutes to download.

Of course, it was free.

What I watched looked as good as anything produced for over-the-air or cable TV. If it had been something more attractive to a wide audience, with some way to pay the freight, I think it might be successful!

Bittorrent is an interesting distribution method, because it uses the collective bandwidth of the users, not a central server paid for by the program’s distributor. That’s a major cost saving when each viewer needs to receive hundreds of megabytes of data.

For attractive media (defined as something a specific group of viewers would seek out, because it scratches a specific itch) this might be a godsend.

Think of subject matter like photography, knitting, ham radio and kayaking. Each of these has a dedicated base of fans who want to see more on their hobby or avocation, but there’s not enough audience tonnage to make this work on an established channel. Because the audience would be sharply targeted, each set of eyeballs would be worth more to advertisers or underwriters (this is non traditional media – why not a non traditional economic model).

It could be commercially viable – though more on the retail level than the mass marketing we’re used to on TV. In other words, it makes sense for a person or small group of persons to do this. It doesn’t make as much sense for a larger, high cost basis organization to get involved.

The big question is, will people do all the things necessary to download these files? Is there a way to preserve the cost structure as it is and make it seamless for the end user?

This could be very exciting.

My MTV Prediction

This is going to be very brief, because this site is not about political commentary. In fact, I avoid it on purpose.

However, after the Super Bowl, I did make a prediction that the whole Janet Jackson debacle would impact MTV and they would be forced to make some programming changes. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly.

From the LA Times

By Jeff Leeds

Times Staff Writer

February 9, 2004

Under intense scrutiny following Janet Jackson’s breast-baring performance during last week’s Super Bowl, MTV has quietly plucked a number of its edgiest music videos out of its daytime rotation.

The Viacom Inc.-owned cable network, which produced the Super Bowl halftime extravaganza, notified several major record companies last week that at least eight of their videos would now be played only during overnight programming, generally between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., sources said.

MTV shifted most of the videos