I found this graph fascinating, showing how the median days between US release and first leak is increasing. The studios are getting better at controlling piracy (you can’t totally get rid of it anyway).

More on Andy Baio’s blog: Pirating the 2010 Oscars.

Swiss journalist and entrepreneur Philippe Mottaz comes back to the blogosphere with a review of a book called The curse of the Mogul. The internet has been accelerating the exposition of malpractices and flawed offerings (referred below as “the magic”) that had been doomed for a long time.

[…] back in 2003 [the] Viacom’s CEO is trying to explain to the Google founders how advertising works in television. By and large, it’s fairly simple: backed by the ratings collected twice a year during a couple of weeks called the “sweeps”, you tell your advertiser that his commercial his going to be seen by x number of people in primetime. If he wants the slot, he’ll have to shell out a few millions dollars. Will he ever know precisely how many people have actually seen the commercial? No, admits Karmazin, but this is precisely the name of the game. […]

For Google operates precisely on the very opposite model. When you advertise on Google, […] you will know how many people watch your ad, how many people clicked on it, how many people transacted based on the add. High-tech vs. high-touch, algorithms and hard evidence vs. approximation and spin. As Brin and Page are finishing their explanation, Karmazin blurts out: “You’re fucking with the magic!” […]

“The Curse of the Mogul” might be one of the most illuminating book about the media in years, […] debunking quite a few myths, the biggest one certainly being that it is the rise of the Internet that might be the single most important reason for the downfall of the newspapers. Knee and his colleagues show quite clearly that the U.S media conglomerates were underperforming already before the Internet. Obviously, the case got worse because of the disruptive power of the net, but equally because of the blindness  – if not downright incompetence – of the moguls, so used to deal in “ magic “ that they never quite could understand the perfect storm that was building around them. The authors do not hesitate to convict the mogul of using “sham” attitudes to lure investors as opposed to what ought to be sound economics and good business.

The curse of the Moguel review by Philippe Mottaz: Part 1, Part 2

As the conclusion to this post, let me share a word taken from Philippe Mottaz’s website: “When speaking about traditional media, I do not believe in the death of print, or radio, or TV, I prefer to talk about the death of death”

I’m pretty sure this will turn (really) big and go mainstream very soon. Probably a small window of opportunity for startups to launch now, and be bought by the big TV networks 1-2 years down the road.

Watching TV Together, Miles Apart
For the lonely couch potato, help is on the way.

Simple technology, including video chatting services like Skype, is making it possible for far-flung friends to watch shows together, even if they can’t share the same bowl of popcorn.

Emma McCulloch and Jennifer Cheek, for example, used to meet to watch “Dancing With the Stars” together, but that ritual ended when Ms. Cheek moved to Hawaii.

So the women decided that Ms. McCulloch, who lives in San Mateo, Calif., would save the “Dancing With the Stars” finale on her digital video recorder and wait until the show was seen in Hawaii. Then, they would get on Skype to video chat while they watched the show.

Link

Update: bonus link (in French), La moitié des ados regardent la télé en surfant sur le net (Half of teenagers watch TV surfing the net).

I just discovered Nielsen’s conference and report on teens, interesting findings that debunk a few “exciting but false” notions. Teens can read newspaper, react to traditional advertising,

“The notion that teens are too busy texting and Twittering to be engaged with traditional media is exciting, but false,” […]. Instead of replacing traditional media with new media consumption, teens are simply making time for both […]

Other myths that the report debunks are that teenagers’ preferences differ vastly from adults, that teens’ media and entertainment spending is insulated from the recession (they actually reduce it, with out-of-home entertainment more affected than in-home) and that traditional advertising can’t resonate with teens (once ads break through the clutter, teens like them more).

The leading type of media use among teens is still television, with the average teenager watching 3 hours and 20 minutes per day, debunking the myth of YouTube as the lead medium. Actually, Nielsen says that teens watch more TV than ever, with usage up 6% over the past five years in the U.S. […]

Other key findings of the study include:
* Half of all teenagers use an audio-only MP3 player each day, while one in four watch video on an mp3 player.
* On an average day, one in four teens reads the newspaper.
* While teens multi-task in their media usage, this behavior may actually be lower than among adults.
* South African, Venezuelan and Indonesian teens are the biggest couch potatoes.
* 35% of U.S. teens may have DVRs, but they prefer live TV viewing.

Link

Here is a quote from Paul Virilio discussing the impact of media on society in a recent French TV show:

There is a phenomena of globalization of affects, a sort of “community of emotions” replacing the community of interests. The community of interests is an economical community, social classes, rich and poor. The community of emotions is something completely new and that can not be mastered by political power.

This is one of the topics that intrigues me the most these days. How we tend to forget our long term interests because of emotions, served in daily and easy to consume capsules by mainstream and social media, all fighting for a bit of attention in the chaos we now have learned to live with.

Like the example I was giving in an earlier post: why is it acceptable to have thousands of policemen run after illegal immigrants when they only cost a fraction of what a trader can lose in a few seconds? Because until this particular crisis came up, immigrants were generating more emotions than bankers. Exactly what Virilio is talking about.

A community of emotions means a society built on patches, constantly trying to deal with the short term without considering the big picture. A community of emotions means a society less and less able to make solutions and problems match.

Maybe people will notice this phenomena, understand it, and become more hermetical to information. Or newsrooms might reinvent themselves, and start wondering if it makes sense to put on the front page of the local paper those sordid “fait-divers”. If a grandma has been attacked in a particularly cruel way somewhere on the planet, should all the senior citizens of the world be freaking out tonight? What exactly do we gain as a community from that news being spread all over?

Information comes with responsibilities. The web might have contributed - directly and indirectly - to make us forget this old adage. Are the side effects just around the corner?

The media goes where audience’s interests are right? Doing a research for my previous post here is what I found for “sarkozy”:

As long as this guy’s wife, divorce or drink habits will interest the public more than his work, we will have tabloids and cheap reporting.

One thing struck me while listening to yesterday’s interview at the radio: I am still using the “traditional media” expression to refer to newspapers and TVs, and “new media” to define Youtube and blogs.

It was the last time. This distinction does not make sense anymore. Things are way too embedded now. The BBC is on Youtube, user generated videos on cable TV (current.tv), blogs publish magazines, newspapers write blogs. Media. Not new, not traditional. “The media”.

From a recent presentation at the Seoul Digital Forum by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press:

“As we consider the digital future though, let’s be very clear about one thing: Technology may change how journalists work, but it has never changed what journalists do. […]

The clear imperative today is that we have to go where the users are, and fit our content and interactivity to the screen they happen to be using. Consumers are consuming more content than ever, but we have to provide it in new ways and under different terms from those that drove our business through the 20th century,”

Link

Great to hear the big execs sing that tune. Now is the time for journalists still feeling threatened by new technologies to realize they are their future, opening unprecedented opportunities for those who embrace them.

I found the little quote below very revealing of the strong inertia we tend to have when it comes to handle new technologies. A (brilliant) fifty something sports-writer who started his career in paper writes the following despite the fact his articles are now only published on a dot-com website:

“Do not worry about any hysterical dot-com reports” […] Link

His value system is still built around something that was true a few years ago, when paper was the only source of credible information, and information’s credibility was first and foremost identifiable by the container it was in.

Today it’s not anymore about the way you transport information; it is about who is creating it in the first place. We put the same level of trust in a New York Times article, whether we read in on paper or on an iphone.

Credibility has moved out of supports. It is exclusively in the source now. And reports can be hysterical on any support. Call that progress.

How long can the Wii continue out-selling PS3 six to one?
My bet is “not too long”. PS3 is about to take off with announcements like this upcoming TV tuner.